If you're not calling or texting customers back, you're leaving hundreds — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of dollars on the table. AI is getting scary good at handling this now. Some tools can actually clone your voice from a sample and carry on a real phone conversation with a potential customer without you ever picking up. But according to the experts talking about this on podcasts right now, SMS is still the real winner, mainly because people can usually tell when they're talking to a robot on the phone, but a text doesn't carry that same red flag.

The setup is simple: when you miss a call, it automatically fires off a text right away, no manual work needed. This isn't cutting-edge — it's basic stuff at this point, and yet plenty of contractors still aren't doing it. If you're not going to go get that money, a competitor will.

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