Triage questions
Triage questions are the short, fixed list of questions an AI receptionist asks every caller, in the same order, to decide how urgent the call is and to collect what your technician needs before a truck rolls: the address, whether it is urgent, and what is happening in the caller’s own words.
Why it matters for a service company
A caller at 9 PM says “my water heater is leaking” and stops there. The office needs more than that: where the house is, whether water is spreading, whether the shutoff is reachable, and a number that will pick up when the tech calls back. A worried caller skips those details unless someone asks for them.
The order matters as much as the list. Safety comes first, because a caller who smells gas should be leaving the building, not spelling a street name. Location comes next, because a job outside your service area does not need the rest of the conversation. Then the problem, then the urgency signal, then contact details. When every call runs through the same sequence, every message that reaches your tech has the same fields filled in.
The answers also feed your emergency rules. “No heat” in January or “sewage backing up” is a different call from “the faucet drips”, and the questions are what surface that difference before anyone is woken up.
How DispatchLine handles it
The agent asks the questions in order on every call it answers. If the caller mentions a gas smell, smoke, fire or a CO alarm, it gives one safety instruction first: leave the building and call 911. It checks the address against the service area you set in the portal. It records each answer, and a two-line summary lands in the portal within about a minute with the call’s outcome, plus the recording and transcript while recording is on (the default).
What the caller says decides the path. An answer that matches your emergency rules triggers the action you chose: book the emergency slot and alert the on-call tech, transfer the call live to a number, or take details and promise a callback. A routine answer gets an arrival window on your board. The agent does not diagnose the problem, promise a fix, or quote a price it was not given; it gathers, sorts and books.
The list is editable per account, and you change it in the portal without opening a ticket, the same way you edit your greeting, hours, emergency rules and business facts.
Related terms
- Emergency keyword, the words that move a call onto the emergency path
- Service area, the address check that decides whether the call continues
- Business facts, the answers the agent gives when the caller asks a question back
- Intent, what the agent decides the caller wants
- Guide: Emergency rules, and the emergency triage feature
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