Intent
Intent is what the caller wanted, as classified after the call ends: booking, emergency, quote, info, spam, or other. It answers “why did this person call” in one word, so a log of a hundred calls can be read at a glance instead of by replaying each one.
Why it matters for a service company
Raw call volume tells you almost nothing. Forty calls in a day might be thirty jobs, or it might be twelve robocalls, ten price shoppers, a supplier, nine callbacks about jobs already booked, and eight new bookings. An owner who only sees the count makes the wrong decisions about staffing, ad spend and whether the phone is actually producing work.
Sorting by what the caller wanted changes what you do with the list. A booking is done. A quote request is a lead that needs a callback with a number attached. An info call is often a business-facts gap: if ten people a week ask whether you service water heaters, the answer belongs in the agent’s facts so the next ten get it on the call. Spam is noise to keep out of every report so it stops inflating the numbers. The classification also shows the season arriving: a run of no-heat emergencies on the first freeze, or a jump in quote calls after a storm.
It is distinct from the outcome. The label says what the caller wanted; the outcome says what happened, such as booked, transferred, message taken, or hung up. A quote call with a message-taken outcome is a lead waiting; a booking call with a booked outcome is finished.
How DispatchLine handles it
Every call lands in the portal within about a minute with its outcome, plus its recording, transcript, two-line summary and this classification whenever recording is on. The labels drive the “what callers wanted” chart in Reports and decide whether a call becomes a lead in the lead list, where one tap dials the caller back. Booked calls sit on the appointments board. Calls tagged as spam stay out of the lead list; when spam screening is on, the agent hangs up on robocalls, and a screened robocall counts as one minute.
The weekly Monday email covers the week’s calls, and the full log exports to CSV. You can open any call to check the label against its transcript and recording while recording is on (the default). The call recordings feature page shows the full record for one call, and the spam and robocalls guide explains the screening.
Related terms
New field guides by email
Guides for home-service businesses on answering calls, call triage and after-hours coverage: the title, a short summary and a link for up to six of the newest guides on this site. At most one email every 30 days.