After-hours HVAC call to a booked job
Turn a missed 9pm call into a booked morning slot without anyone waking up.
What goes wrong today
The answering service takes a message, the message reaches dispatch at 7am, and by then the homeowner has called two other companies. The call was not lost to price. It was lost to eleven hours of silence.
What starts it
- Phone system — A call ends with no answer outside business hoursDescribed rather than named: we have not verified what this vendor calls the event, and inventing a name would waste your afternoon.
- Twilio status callback —
CallStatus=no-answer
How it runs
- 1Missed call
The phone system reports a call that ended without a person picking up, outside the hours you set.
- 2Text back in 60s
An SMS goes out naming your company and offering the first two open slots tomorrow.
- 3Reply captured
The homeowner picks a slot or types a question. Anything that is not a slot choice is flagged, not guessed at.
- 4Hold the slot
The chosen slot is written into dispatch as an unconfirmed job with the caller number attached.
- 5Dispatcher confirms at 7am
A person reads the overnight list, confirms or moves each job, and calls anything flagged.
a person does this
What a person still does
None of this runs unattended. If it did, we would be selling you something else.
- Confirms every overnight booking before a truck is committed to it.
- Calls back anyone whose reply was not a simple slot choice — a burst pipe is not a scheduling question.
- Decides the emergency call-out price. The text never quotes one.
Skip this if…
- You take fewer than about five after-hours calls a week. The build costs more than the jobs are worth at that volume.
- You already run a live after-hours desk that answers in under two minutes. This is slower than a person.
- Your dispatch software has no way to create a job from outside it. Without that, step four is a human retyping, which is the thing you were trying to remove.
Build it yourself
Roughly about a week for a first working version, most of it spent on the reply wording.
Download the build checklistWant this one built for your setup?
Tell us what you already run and we will tell you honestly whether this is worth building for you — including when the answer is no, which is what the skip list above is for.