Monday after the named storm
The phone starts at seven. Tiles off, ridge lifted, water through a bedroom ceiling, a flat roof peeled back at the edge, a neighbour's chimney pot in the garden. Voicemail fills up. The website form sends emails to an inbox nobody is watching because everyone is on the phone. Customers text the owner's mobile directly.
By lunchtime there is a notepad with forty addresses, half of them without a phone number that works, and no clear idea which ones have water coming in and which ones can wait a week.
Why storm days turn into chaos
You cannot add roofers overnight, so the only thing that improves a storm day is sorting the work well. That is hard when information arrives on five channels in five formats, and the one detail that matters most, whether water is getting in now, is buried in a voicemail.
- Calls, texts, voicemails, web forms and social messages all land in different places.
- Details are written on paper and some are never typed up.
- Existing customers and new callers are mixed together.
- Nobody can see the calls on a map, so gangs cross town twice.
- Callers who were told 'we will ring you back' are forgotten.
What a badly sorted storm costs
Genuinely urgent jobs wait behind easy ones that happened to ring first. Callers who hear nothing ring again, which ties up the phone further, or book someone else. Existing customers, whose roofs you are responsible for, feel neglected. And the storm work you do win is often priced and invoiced late because the details were never recorded properly.
The storm intake we build
- One intake list fed by the web form, a text number, email and a short phone menu that offers a callback link by text. Staff taking calls type into the same list.
- Each caller is asked the same few questions: address, roof type if known, what is happening now, whether water is coming in, and photos from the ground or inside.
- An AI step reads free text and voicemail transcripts and fills in those fields, marking anything it is unsure of for a person to check.
- Your own rules mark calls as urgent, for example water entering the property or a vulnerable occupant, and the office confirms the flag.
- Callers are matched against past jobs, so existing customers and anything still under your workmanship terms are shown.
- Calls are shown on a map and grouped by area, so the person planning the day can send a gang to a cluster.
- Every caller gets an acknowledgement message with what happens next, written by you, and a status the office updates as visits are booked.
| Channel | How it reaches the list |
|---|---|
| Phone | Staff entry, or callback link sent by text |
| Voicemail | Transcribed and read into fields |
| Website form | Direct into the list with photos |
| Text or messaging | Read into fields, photos attached |
| Parsed into fields for checking |
Your team decides the order of visits. The system gives them one list with the facts in it.
A storm week with a list
The office works from one screen. Repeat callers are recognised and told where they are in the queue. Gangs get routes that make sense. When things calm down, you have a record of every enquiry, which ones became jobs and which were never called back, and the information needed to quote and invoice the rest.
Is this what storms do to your office?
- Voicemail fills up within hours.
- Leak details are on scraps of paper.
- You cannot tell which callers have water coming in.
- Existing customers wait behind strangers.
- Some callers are never called back.