You finally get around to calling about the sunken sidewalk. The phone rings four times and goes to voicemail. Most people don’t leave a message. They hang up and call the next name on the list.
For years, that happened to us. When the office was on another line and everyone else was out on jobs, unanswered calls went to voicemail, and a lot of those callers hung up without leaving anything. No name, no number, no idea what they needed. We’ll never know how many of them were a driveway we could have fixed.
So we changed how Acme answers the phone, and a few things behind it. Here’s what you’ll run into when you contact us now, and who built it.
When you call, Sara answers
Sara is Acme’s AI assistant, and she answers every call that comes to her — in the middle of a workday, on a Saturday afternoon, or at nine at night. On a typical call, she:
- checks that your address is inside our service area, which covers more than 60 towns across McHenry County and the northwest suburbs
- takes your estimate request: your name, address, phone number, what’s going on with the concrete, and when works best for you
- sends it to our office in writing, so nothing depends on someone remembering a phone call
- takes a message for our staff if you’d rather talk to a person
- texts you a secure link to pay an invoice, if that’s why you called and you say yes to the text
If you have photos, she’ll point you to the estimate form on our website, where you can upload them.
Here’s what surprised us once Sara was running: about nine in ten of the calls she answers come in during business hours, not at night. Missing calls was never really an after-hours problem. It was a Tuesday-morning problem: the office on another line, estimators out looking at slabs, crews on jobs.
We tried an answering service once, too. It cost more than $1,000 a month, mostly took messages we still had to return, and one of its operators told a caller from our own town that we didn’t serve their area. Sara checks your address against our actual service area on every call. She’s an AI voice agent built by Poly Service Pros, trained on how Acme actually works.
What Sara won't do
Some of what makes Sara useful is what she’s been told not to do.
She won’t quote you a price. That’s deliberate. What it costs to raise a slab depends on things nobody can see over the phone, like why it settled and what’s underneath it. Our estimates are free and done on site by someone with hands-on experience raising concrete, for the same reason we don’t send salespeople to guess.
She won’t pretend to be a person, either. Ask her, and she’ll tell you she’s Acme’s AI assistant.
And she doesn’t transfer calls. If you need someone from the office, she takes your message and our staff follow up during business hours. You won’t end up on hold, and you won’t end up in a voicemail box.
Questions at any hour on our website
Not everyone wants to make a phone call. The chat window in the corner of our website is the same idea in text form. You can ask it the things people usually ask us on the phone: how polyurethane concrete raising works, whether we handle a particular kind of job, what happens on the day of service. When you’re ready, it can start your estimate request.
It’s there at eleven at night when you’re looking at the patio and wondering whether it’s worth fixing. Poly Service Pros built that one too. It’s the same website chatbot they build for other contractors, set up with Acme’s own information.
Behind the scenes: daily reports that keep jobs moving
The part you won’t see matters just as much.
Every job gets its own quality control report sheet, every day it’s worked. The work on your property is written down that day, for that job, not pieced together at the end of a long week.
Every day, our managers get an email with the current backlog. Each of them starts the day knowing what’s waiting on them. Your request doesn’t sit in a pile. If it’s waiting on us, it’s on somebody’s list that morning.
None of this is glamorous. It’s the kind of work that used to live in someone’s head or on a clipboard in a truck, and now it gets written down the same way every time.
Who built it, and why we're telling you
We should be upfront about the connection. Poly Service Pros is a company started by our owner, Mike Fetherling. After years of running Acme, he knew exactly where calls and paperwork were falling through, and he built the fixes for this business first. Acme was Poly Service Pros’ first customer.
Today Poly Service Pros builds AI agents and custom software for other concrete raising contractors. If you run a contracting business and recognized your own voicemail in this post, that’s where we’d point you.
The bottom line
None of this changes how we raise concrete. Your slab is still evaluated on site and raised by our crews. What changed is everything around the work: you get an answer when you call, your request reaches our office in writing, and every job is tracked day by day. If you’ve been meaning to call about a sunken slab, call (815) 264-2200. You’ll get an answer.