Charlotte Research — Q2 2026
State of Home-Services Calls
Charlotte’s quarterly research report on inbound HVAC, plumbing, and electrical phone calls in the United States. Sixteen stats covering after-hours share, recovered revenue, language split, hour-of-day density, and the deliberate AI miss-rate baseline that Charlotte publishes alongside the 100% miss-rate at the no-human-on-duty comparison.
Charlotte Research — Cross-Tenant Telemetry Aggregation, Charlotte AI, Inc.
Published: 2026-05-14 · Last reviewed: 2026-05-14
Average Dollar Value of a Recovered After-Hours Job
Recovered revenue measures the dollar value of after-hours jobs Charlotte books that would otherwise go to voicemail. The methodology multiplies booked after-hours jobs by the trade's average job value, hybridized with US Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational pay data so the denominator is sector-anchored rather than tenant-anchored. The figure isolates the marginal revenue Charlotte recovers, not the operator's gross.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Share of Inbound Calls in Spanish
Charlotte's bilingual capability — English plus Spanish — is load-bearing for trades operators in many United States metros. The language-detection telemetry surfaces what share of inbound calls Charlotte handles in Spanish across the cohort. The figure has broader press relevance to small-business policy and bilingual customer-service coverage in HVAC, plumbing, and electrical service work.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Share of Emergency Calls Arriving Outside Business Hours
Emergency-flagged calls — those matching the allowlisted emergency-keyword set for HVAC, plumbing, or electrical work — are time-stamped at receipt. The after-hours emergency share counts what fraction of those emergency calls land outside posted business hours. The number quantifies the overlap between two structural problems trades operators face: emergencies and after-hours.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Average Call Duration by Trade
Average call duration is reported per trade — HVAC, plumbing, electrical — with median and 95th-percentile bands. Duration matters as a unit-economics lever: Charlotte's per-minute inference cost scales linearly with call length, and longer calls correlate with more complex booking intent. The percentile breakdown surfaces the long tail that drives infrastructure-cost variance.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Hour-of-Day x Day-of-Week Call Distribution
The hour-of-day heatmap renders a 24-hour by 7-day grid of inbound call density. Each cell holds a non-negative call count anonymized to the cohort level. Two patterns the heatmap surfaces: the weekday business-hours peak shared across HVAC, plumbing, and electrical trades, and the after-hours emergency bump that is the single strongest argument for 24/7 AI receptionist coverage.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Day-of-Week Call Distribution
Day-of-week distribution counts inbound calls per weekday in the Charlotte cohort. Monday volume typically reflects accumulated weekend demand for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical service. Weekend volume is structurally lower but skews more emergency-flagged than weekday volume — the credibility wedge for after-hours coverage.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Warm-Transfer Rate by Trade
Warm-transfer rate measures the share of inbound calls Charlotte routes to a live human operator rather than booking the appointment fully autonomously. The figure is reported per trade — HVAC, plumbing, electrical — since transfer patterns differ by emergency frequency, dispatch complexity, and the operator's preference for human triage on uncertain calls.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Share of Calls That Book Versus Only Inform
Charlotte distinguishes booking calls — those resulting in a scheduled appointment — from informational calls that end without a calendar entry. Booking share per trade isolates Charlotte's revenue-driving share of inbound volume from informational calls (price quotes, follow-up questions, service-area checks) that are still answered but do not generate immediate revenue.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Top Emergency Keywords by Frequency
The emergency-keyword frequency table reports the most-frequent allowlisted emergency keywords across HVAC, plumbing, and electrical calls. No verbatim caller transcripts are surfaced — only the allowlisted short phrases that match a per-trade emergency category. Keywords like no-heat, burst-pipe, and burning-smell drive Charlotte's after-hours pager logic.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
AI Miss-Rate (Adverse Stat)(adverse, by design)
Charlotte does not handle every call perfectly. The AI miss-rate counts calls Charlotte dropped or abandoned, expressed as a fraction of total inbound. The figure is published deliberately as an adverse stat: the relevant benchmark for a solo HVAC, plumbing, or electrical operator after hours is a 100% miss-rate at the human baseline, since no human is on duty to answer the phone.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Human-vs-AI Bridge Time on Emergency Calls
Bridge time is the median seconds between an emergency call arriving and a human being on the line — Charlotte's AI bridge time versus the manual-receptionist baseline. The AI cohort measures Charlotte's autonomous bridge time on flagged emergency calls; the human-baseline cohort measures comparable manual-dispatch bridge time. The gap is the operational case for AI-first emergency triage.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Share of Calls Outside the Operator's Stated Service Area
Out-of-service-area share counts inbound calls from phone-number area codes outside the operator's stated service radius. For HVAC, plumbing, and electrical operators serving a specific metro, the figure quantifies the share of inbound demand Charlotte must triage as out-of-area — referring callers to neighboring operators rather than booking the appointment.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Share of Calls From Prior-Customer Numbers
Repeat-customer share measures the fraction of inbound calls whose phone number matches a prior caller for the same operator. For HVAC, plumbing, and electrical operators, repeat-customer share is the most direct signal of operator retention quality and the long-term unit economics of trades service work.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Average Customer Satisfaction on Completed Jobs
Customer satisfaction is reported per trade where the operator collects post-job CSAT scores. The figure is only emitted for trades whose sample count clears the cohort floor — many operators do not collect CSAT systematically, so this stat carries explicit sample-count framing. CSAT is included to balance the operational stats with a customer-outcome anchor.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Cohort Disclosure
The Charlotte cohort underlying this report comprises HVAC, plumbing, and electrical operators using Charlotte during the Q2 2026 window. Each downstream stat is reported only when the underlying cell clears the k-anonymity floor of ten distinct tenants. The cohort disclosure is the methodology anchor for every other stat on this page.
[Sample: N tenants pending publication]
Outside-Expert Perspective
Charlotte solicits perspective from named outside editors and analysts on each quarterly report. The slots below are placeholders pending confirmed quotes from the cited publications. Fabricated quotes would compromise the journalist relationships this report exists to build, so we render placeholder cards rather than invent attribution.