A job without an address is not a job

A heating engineer, a plumber and an electrician have the same phone problem, and it is not that they are bad on the phone. It is that they are under a sink, on a roof, or driving — while the caller with water coming through a ceiling works down a list and stops at the first number that answers.

The half of this that gets talked about is answering. The half that quietly costs more is what gets collected once the call is answered, because “Dave rang about a boiler, call him back” is not a job. It is homework.

The dispatcher's minimum

Four things. A message is missing at least one of them more often than most owners would guess, and each omission has its own failure.

• The full address of the property — not the caller's address, the property's. A job without one cannot be dispatched, so it is asked for plainly and with the reason attached: “I'll need the address so we can get someone to the right place.”
• A working phone number, read back and confirmed. A transposed digit is a lost job you never find out you lost: the callback fails silently, and the caller concludes you did not care enough to ring.
• The problem in the caller's own words — what is happening, since when, and anything they have already tried. “Since Tuesday, and he's already reset it twice” changes what goes in the van.
• Anything about access, if they volunteer it. Keys, a tenant, parking, a gate code, a dog in the garden. This is the one that turns a two-visit job into a one-visit job.

There is one case where the address rule has to bend. Some callers will not give an address on a first call — a landlord who is not at the property, a tenant unsure whether they are allowed to arrange it, somebody who has had a bad experience with cold callers. Pressing them turns a warm enquiry into a hang-up. The right behaviour is to take everything else and let the team get the address on the ring-back. Nobody who was ready to book should end a call with nothing recorded.

The vocabulary that changes the answer

Trades callers describe symptoms rather than faults, and a few of those descriptions split into things that need completely different responses.

• “No heat” and “no hot water” are different faults on the same boiler. Which one it is belongs in the message, because it changes what gets carried to the job.
• “A leak” spans a drip under a sink and water coming through a ceiling. The question that separates them is whether they can catch it in a bowl or cannot stop it. The second one is not a booking.
• “The electrics tripped” is routine. “A burning smell from a socket” is not — and the two arrive in the same sentence often enough that the phone has to be listening for the second half.
• “Just a ballpark?” is the one that has to be politely refused every single time, no matter how reasonable the caller is being.

The five calls where a safety line comes first

On a trades line there is a small set of calls where the first thing said is not about appointments at all, and the order genuinely matters — the instruction comes before the address, before the diary, before anything.

• A smell of gas. Stop using switches and flames, get everyone out, and call 911 from outside, then the gas company's emergency number. That comes before any booking talk.
• A carbon monoxide alarm going off. Out of the property, fresh air, the same two calls, same priority.
• Water they cannot stop. Turn it off at the main shut-off valve, if they can reach it safely.
• Sparks, scorching, or a burning smell from wiring or a socket. Switch that circuit off at the breaker panel, if that is safe to get to.
• No heating in freezing weather with a baby, an elderly person, or somebody unwell in the house. Not an emergency in the same sense as the others, and not a routine slot either.

Each of those is one line, and one line is the entire allowance. Beyond them, nobody on a phone should be talking a caller through work on gas, water or electrics. The distance between “turn it off at the main shut-off” and “try bleeding the radiator” is the distance between making a situation safe and giving instructions to somebody who has now gone to find a spanner.

Describe, do not diagnose

The most expensive habit on a trades phone is the friendly guess. “Sounds like the pump.” “Probably just the thermostat.” The caller hears a diagnosis, then attaches a price to that diagnosis, and by the time an engineer is standing in the kitchen explaining that it is the heat exchanger, you are having an argument you started yourself, on a call you thought went well.

The same goes for prices. Repair prices depend on what the engineer finds, and that is not a dodge — it is the reason the trade works the way it does. If you have a call-out or diagnostic fee, that is a real number and it should be quoted confidently and without apology. Everything past it waits for eyes on the job.

And arrival times: never promised unless the diary actually offers it. “Someone will be with you this afternoon” is the most reliable way to turn a satisfied customer into an angry one, and it is almost always said by somebody trying to be kind.

A job is not a slot

Most of the businesses we write about run a diary: named slots, a fixed length, one customer per slot. Plenty of trades do not. They run a list, and the list is sorted every morning by who is nearest, who is worst off, and what is in the van.

That difference is worth being explicit about when you set a phone line up, because the failure it prevents is a specific one. A phone that has been built to fill slots will try to fill slots — it will offer Thursday at two because Thursday at two is empty, and the caller will hear a commitment nobody in the business made. A phone that understands it is taking a job says the team will confirm when they can get there, and hands over an enquiry with an address, a number and a description on it.

Both are correct behaviour. They are just correct for different businesses, and it is worth knowing which one you have bought before a customer is waiting in.

The arithmetic, on stated assumptions

Assume five calls a week go unanswered, at a $340 job: that is about $32,640 a year, if 60% of those callers wanted to book and 60% of them never ring back. Those are our assumptions rather than a claim about the trade — put your own into the missed-call calculator, including the jobs you would have turned down anyway.

What makes trades different from every other business we write about is structural: the busier you are, the less able you are to answer. The revenue you lose is highest at exactly the moment you have no capacity to do anything about it, which is why the fix has to be something other than trying harder.