The problem with a trade phone isn’t only that calls get missed. It’s that the good ones and the time-wasters arrive down the same wire sounding much the same, and by the time you work out which was which you’ve rung four people back for nothing.
Triage is the fix, and it’s not complicated. It’s four questions in the right order.
Question one: is anything still happening right now?
This is the one that sorts everything else, and almost nobody asks it first.
“My hot water’s gone” and “there’s water coming through the kitchen ceiling” are both plumbing calls. One is Thursday. The other is now, and the difference isn’t in how upset the caller sounds — the calm ones are often the worse job. It’s in whether something is actively getting worse while you’re on the phone.
Water still running. Power still out. Gas still smelt. Sewage still rising. If the answer is yes to any of those, nothing else on this list matters until it’s dealt with.
Question two: where is it, exactly?
Not the suburb. The address, said back to the caller to confirm, and whether it’s a house, a unit or a business. A unit means access, a building manager, possibly a body corporate and possibly a problem that isn’t in this unit at all. A business means someone’s trading, and trading businesses pay for speed.
Suburb alone is how you end up on the wrong side of the city at four o’clock.
Question three: who are we talking to?
Owner, tenant, real estate agent, strata manager, or a builder. Four different jobs with four different people paying, and the single most common cause of a job going bad is finding out on site that the person who booked it can’t authorise it.
If it’s an agent, you want the agency, the property manager’s name, the work order number and the tenant’s mobile for access. If it’s a tenant, you want to know who the agent is before anyone turns up. Thirty seconds on the phone, and it saves a wasted trip.
Question four: what do they think they want?
Last, not first. Most people open with their own diagnosis — “I need a new hot water system” — and if you take that at face value you’ve skipped the three questions that actually determine whether this is a job worth having.
Take it as information, not instruction. What they think is wrong tells you what they’ve already decided and what they’ll expect on the invoice. It doesn’t tell you what’s wrong.
What triage is not
It’s not an interrogation. Six questions is a conversation; twelve is a form, and people hang up on forms. If someone won’t give you something, take what they will and move on. A half-filled job with a working mobile number is worth infinitely more than a complete record of a caller who gave up.
And it’s not diagnosis. Nobody on a phone should be working out why the hot water stopped. The questions establish urgency, location, authority and expectation. The diagnosis happens when someone qualified is standing in front of it.
Write it down once
The reason triage doesn’t happen in most trade businesses isn’t that it’s hard. It’s that it lives in the owner’s head and the owner is under a house. The moment anyone else answers — a partner, an apprentice, an answering service, a machine — the questions stop getting asked in the right order, or at all.
So write the four questions down, and the list of what counts as urgent in your trade. Once it’s on paper it can be handed to whoever or whatever is answering, and it stops being something only you can do.
If you want to hear what that sounds like when it’s set up properly, the demo will take a call from you and you can throw a hard one at it.