Playbook, plumbing and heating firm
The message that arrives at midnight, and the sort it has to get right
Overnight traffic on a heating site is not a quieter version of the daytime traffic. It is a different mix, weighted towards things that have just happened, arriving at the one hour when nobody will read it for another eight. The assistant is the only thing in the building, and the only decision it has to get right is which messages cannot wait for the building to fill up again.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for out of hours holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The cost of getting the sort wrong runs one way. A routine enquiry treated as urgent costs a phone call, while an emergency treated as routine means somebody sits until morning with water coming through a light fitting.
- Your evening, weekend and bank holiday rates are usually three different numbers, and the person asking at half past eleven is asking precisely because they are about to pay one of them.
- A good deal of the overnight volume is not urgent at all, it is people with a free ten minutes after the house went quiet, and they convert well if they get a real answer rather than a form.
- The gas and carbon monoxide wording has to appear at night whether or not anything in the material matched, because at that hour there is nobody else to say it.
How it arrives
- is anyone available tonight
- my boiler has gone off and there is a baby in the house
- water is coming through the kitchen light
- what do you charge on a sunday
- can someone come out now
- i want a quote for a new bathroom, when can you call me
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The out of hours rate card, as its own document | Evening, weekend and bank holiday figures set out separately, with whatever minimum applies to a night call. Publishing this is what lets somebody decide at midnight instead of ringing to find out and then declining. |
|---|---|
| A triage list written as symptoms rather than as job types | Water escaping, no heat with a vulnerable person in the house, a gas smell, an alarm sounding. Written the way a frightened person types it, because a list written in trade language matches nothing at that hour. |
| How to turn the water off | Where a stop tap usually is, and the isolating valve under a sink. This is water rather than gas, it is safe to describe, and it is the one useful thing a page can do while somebody waits. |
| When a message left overnight is actually read | The honest hour, published. Somebody told the office opens at eight will wait until eight. Somebody told shortly will send four more messages before then. |
The reply
If water is running through a ceiling or a light fitting, turn the supply off at the stop tap, which is usually under the kitchen sink or where the pipe comes into the house, and leave the lights on that circuit switched off. Then call the number at the top of this page, which is answered overnight, because this chat is not. If it can wait until morning, leave your name and a number and it will be the first thing the office picks up.
It gives one physical action that stops the damage getting worse, then admits its own limits and points at the thing that is actually staffed. Splitting the reply into now and morning lets the reader place themselves without being asked a triage question.
Where it stops
The trigger. Water escaping now, loss of heating where somebody in the house is elderly, unwell or very young, and anything mentioning gas or an alarm.
This should not wait for the office to open. The out of hours number on this page is answered tonight. If you would rather we rang you, leave your name and a number and it goes to the top of the morning list.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- That an engineer is available tonight, or how soon one could get there.
- An out of hours figure that is not on the published rate card.
- Any instruction involving a gas appliance, including switching one back on.
- That a loss of heating can safely wait, because that depends on who is in the house.
Questions
- Is there any point answering at night if we cannot attend at night?
- Yes, and the value is mostly in the routine half. The enquiries that arrive after nine are from people who could not phone during the day, and an answer that gives them the rate and takes a number is a booking in the morning rather than a message they never send.
- Should the out of hours rates really be published?
- They are the reason people ring at night and the reason some of them are annoyed on the doorstep. A firm that publishes them takes fewer calls and loses fewer arguments, and the calls it loses were never going to book at that price.
- How do we stop it sounding calm about something serious?
- Put the emergency wording in the fallback message rather than leaving it to be composed. Below the match threshold the assistant does not reach the model at all, and what it says instead is the sentence you wrote, which at two in the morning is the sentence that matters.
Keep reading
- Everything for a plumbing and heating firmSorting an emergency from a routine job, quoting call out rates, and never suggesting a fix on gas work that only a registered engineer may touch.
- Handling out of hours in generalThe difference between an emergency route and a message form, and why an honest wait time beats a promise you cannot keep.
- The four numbers a caller is adding up before they ringThe call out charge, the first hour, the rate after it and the weekend uplift are four numbers, and most plumbing sites publish none.
- The guarantee length everybody remembers and the condition nobody doesA long manufacturer guarantee normally depends on a service being done and recorded each year. Give the condition whenever you give the length.
- What a customer should know before an engineer sets offA plumbing appointment is a time window, an access requirement and a charge on arrival. All three can be explained without seeing a diary.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.