Emergency calls came at 2am to a phone the owner kept by the bed, and he then rang round to find who was nearest and awake. Daytime calls went to voicemail while engineers were on jobs. Payment was taken when someone remembered to send the invoice, days later. The firm wanted every call answered in seconds, the right engineer dispatched immediately, and payment taken on the doorstep.
Three things kept going wrong, and each cost the business time, money or a customer.
Three agents built on the firm's job app and live engineer locations, with identity checks the firm insisted on and a person always reachable for anything the agent is unsure of.
The job app tracked engineers' locations and jobs already; the firm's rules for verifying a caller, which they take seriously, were written down and became the reception agent's script, with anything ambiguous handed to the on-call engineer. For the first four nights the owner listened to the emergency calls live; on the fifth he slept and read the morning summary. Dispatch ran with the on-call engineer confirming each assignment for a week, then on its own.
Every call is answered within seconds, at 2am or 2pm, and the caller is verified and told who is coming and when before the engineer has left the drive. Engineers are dispatched by proximity rather than by who picked up, so arrival times fell and fuel did too. Payment is taken on the doorstep and the firm has stopped chasing. The owner sleeps.
'For eleven years the phone lived on my bedside table. It's in the kitchen now, and I read what happened over breakfast.'
Owner
Quotes were written up by the owner in the evenings, so they went out four days after a site visit and jobs were lost to faster competitors. Invoices went out late for the same reason.
Every job ended with paperwork: the EICR or minor works certificate typed up that evening, the quote for the next job written at the weekend, and landlords chasing for documents their agents needed by Friday. The firm wanted the paperwork done when the job was done.
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