You already run your jobs through ServiceM8, and the automations are sitting right there: included on every plan, even the free one, with only the text messages costing anything. The real question is which ones earn their keep, which ones need tuning before you trust them with your customers, and what none of them can tell you about your business.
Here is the short version, then the reasons.
| Automation | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Booking reminders | Turn on today |
| Quote Follow Up | Turn on, but cap it at two or three messages |
| Payment Follow Up | Turn on |
| Customer Feedback | Tune it first, or it will ask your grumpiest customer for a review |
| Smart Assistant message drafts | Use once, then rewrite in your own words |
Which ServiceM8 automations should you turn on first?
Booking reminders and Quote Follow Up, in that order.
Reminders are the closest thing to free money in the whole add-on: a text the day before and another on the morning of the job, and your no-show problem mostly disappears. Nobody has ever been annoyed by a reminder that saved them waiting at home for a tradie who thought the job was Thursday.
Quote Follow Up is the one most owners leave off, and it is the one that pays for the software. Sales research keeps finding that 40 to 50% of new enquiries never get any follow-up at all (IRC Sales Solutions and others). Your quote is sitting in the same pile. ServiceM8 will chase it for you: you set the timing and the channel for each step, and it stops automatically the moment the customer replies, accepts online, or the job status changes. The customer never gets chased after they have said yes.
How many quote follow-ups is too many?
ServiceM8 allows a maximum of five. Use two, maybe three.
A text a few hours after the quote lands, while the job is still fresh in their head. An email 3 days later. If you want a third, a final note at 14 days saying the price holds until the end of the month. That reads as a business that is on top of its work.
Five messages about one bathroom quote reads as desperation, and every one of them costs a text credit. The follow-up wins the jobs that were drifting, not the jobs that were dead.
Which automation can backfire?
Customer Feedback. It fires after the job is done, and it does not know how the job went.
If the job went sideways, that ask lands on exactly the wrong customer at exactly the wrong moment. ServiceM8 gives you the fix itself: push the delay out, and pair it with the Badge Follow Up automation so the ask only follows jobs your team has badged as completed. A review ask should follow your best work, not all of your work.
The Smart Assistant will draft your follow-up messages for you, and the drafts are fine. That is the problem. It writes roughly the same fine message for every other trade business using it. Take its draft once, rewrite it the way you would actually text a customer, save that as the template, and never touch it again.
What do the texts actually cost?
Less than the silence costs you.
On the current Australian plans, Starter at $29 a month includes at least 100 texts, Growing at $79 includes at least 300, and every text over your allowance is 10c. Say you run 40 jobs a month and average 4 texts a job across reminders and follow-ups: that is 160 texts, which on Starter means roughly $6 in overage. One saved no-show pays for a year of that.
The honest catch is elsewhere: the field app is iOS only, so an Android crew is carrying iPhones or missing the point. And while every automation in this article is included in your plan, the paid extras like ServiceM8 Phone are not, so budget on the real bill, not the headline one.
What can the automations not do?
They cannot see across your jobs. Every automation above fires one job at a time, on a trigger you set. None of them can tell you which types of quote go cold, which suburb pays late, whether this month's enquiries are up or down on last month, or what tomorrow actually looks like across the whole book.
That is not a ServiceM8 flaw. It is just not the job the add-on was built for.
It is the job we build systems for. Our systems connect to ServiceM8 through read-only links you create and control, read the whole book, and deliver the answers as a short written report every morning. ServiceM8 keeps running your jobs; the report tells you what all those jobs are saying. On the Sunshine Coast, where construction is the largest business sector, most of your competitors are not doing either.
You can see the same thinking working in our demonstration site for a plumbing business: a quote request with job photos attached, feeding one job board, built to get the quote out the same day. And if same-day quoting is your bottleneck rather than follow-up, start with how tradies are getting every quote out the same day.
Where to start
Turn on booking reminders today. Set up a two-step quote follow-up this week, in your own words. If it is the invoices going unpaid rather than the quotes going cold, we also wrote up why invoice reminders get ignored and what actually gets them paid. Still deciding between job apps in the first place? ServiceM8 and Tradify compared on price, phones and offline use works through the actual numbers. Then, if you want to know what your whole job book is trying to tell you, answer a few short questions and a real person replies within 4 business hours. The 60 minute consult is $295, credited toward a build.