# After-hours HVAC call to a booked job — build checklist

Turn a missed 9pm call into a booked morning slot without anyone waking up.

Roughly about a week for a first working version, most of it spent on the reply wording.

## Before you start, read this

Do NOT build this if any of the following is true of you:

- [ ] 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.

If none of those apply, carry on.

## 1. Prove you can hear the trigger

- [ ] Phone system: A call ends with no answer outside business hours
      Find what your vendor actually calls this event before you write any code.
      We have not verified the name, and guessing it wastes an afternoon.
- [ ] Twilio status callback: CallStatus=no-answer
- [ ] Log one real event end to end before building anything on top of it.

## 2. Build the steps, in this order

- [ ] 1. Missed call
      The phone system reports a call that ended without a person picking up, outside the hours you set.
- [ ] 2. Text back in 60s
      An SMS goes out naming your company and offering the first two open slots tomorrow.
- [ ] 3. Reply captured
      The homeowner picks a slot or types a question. Anything that is not a slot choice is flagged, not guessed at.
- [ ] 4. Hold the slot
      The chosen slot is written into dispatch as an unconfirmed job with the caller number attached.
- [ ] 5. Dispatcher confirms at 7am  (A PERSON DOES THIS — build the queue, not the decision)
      A person reads the overnight list, confirms or moves each job, and calls anything flagged.

## 3. Keep these jobs with a person

If your build quietly takes any of these over, you have built 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.

## 4. Before you turn it on

- [ ] Run it in report-only mode for a week and read every message it WOULD have sent.
- [ ] Decide who gets paged when it stops firing, and prove the page works.
- [ ] Write down what "it is working" means as a number you can check next month.
- [ ] Confirm you have consent for any message this sends to a customer.

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Generated from the recipe at https://ustechautomations.com/recipes/hvac-after-hours-call-to-booked-job
by seo/scripts/v1-gen-recipe-checklists.js — do not edit this file by hand.