Business facts

Business facts are the question-and-answer list you write in your DispatchLine portal that tells the agent what it may say about your company: the service fee, the service area, hours, a Sunday surcharge, warranties, payment methods, whether you do water heaters, and what you do not do. The agent answers only from this list and says “I’ll have the office confirm that” for anything else.

Why it matters for a service company

Callers ask questions before they book. “What’s your service call fee?” “Do you come out to Mesa?” “Do you do tankless?” A receptionist who guesses creates a problem for the tech: a fee quoted at $79 on the phone and $129 in the driveway turns into an argument nobody wins. An answering service that reads from a card answers everything with “someone will call you back”, and a caller with a leak does not wait for that call; they dial the next shop.

The fix is a written list the owner controls, with one honest fallback for anything not on it. The mechanism is simple: the list is the only source. Nothing is inferred from a website, a competitor, or a previous call. If a fact is missing, the caller hears that the office will confirm, the question sits in the transcript, and you add the fact that evening. After a few weeks the list has grown from the questions real callers asked, not the ones you guessed at.

How DispatchLine handles it

The agent answers only from the questions and answers you wrote in the portal. Anything outside them gets “I’ll have the office confirm that.” It will not quote a price it was not given, will not diagnose or promise a fix, will not promise a time that is not booked on the board, and will not take a payment or a card number, whatever the caller asks.

You edit the list yourself in the portal, without a ticket, and the change applies to the next call. Write each entry the way you would answer on the phone: one question, one answer, with the number and the condition together. “$129 service fee, waived if you approve the repair” is a usable fact. “Fees vary” is not, and the agent will hand that question to the office. The same goes for hours, holiday rules, and the neighborhoods you do not cover. When recording is on, every call where the agent could not answer shows up in the transcript and summary in the portal, so the gaps find you.

Related terms

• Service area, usually the first fact a caller tests
• Triage questions, what the agent asks before the caller asks back
• Intent, how the agent tells a question from a booking
• Guide: Writing good business facts, and the call answering feature