No heat at 9pm, and you are third on the list

A furnace does not fail during business hours as a courtesy. It fails on the first cold night, at nine in the evening, in a house with a baby in it — and the person standing in front of it is working down a search results page, calling until someone picks up.

Every minute of silence is a minute they spend on the next company. This is the clearest version of a pattern that holds across every trade:

The audit behind that figure found 23% of companies never responded at all, and an average response time of 42 hours among those that eventually did. In a trade where the customer has an active emergency, 42 hours is not a slow reply. It is a decline.

“My system is making a noise” and “what does a maintenance plan cost” arrive on the same channel and deserve completely different treatment. So the first thing that happens to an inbound message is classification, not drafting.

• Emergency — no heat, no cooling in a heat advisory, water where water should not be, anything involving a gas smell. Routed to you immediately, with the intake already gathered.
• Service request — something is wrong but it can wait until morning. Acknowledged with a real window, not “we’ll be in touch.”
• Quote or replacement — a considered purchase. Answered with what your price list supports and handed on for a site visit.
• Maintenance and plans — the recurring revenue that pays for slow months. Answered fully, since the information rarely changes.

This is the part worth reading twice. The agent does not diagnose equipment.

Telling a homeowner over text what is wrong with their furnace — or what they might try — is advice given under your license, by something that cannot see the unit. Get that wrong and the exposure is not a bad review. So troubleshooting beyond documented safety instructions is a category the system is not permitted to enter, and it fails closed: when the grounding for an answer is missing, it escalates rather than producing something plausible.

What it does instead is what a good dispatcher does. Symptom in the customer’s own words, system age and type if they know it, address and access, whether anyone is home, and how urgent it really is. By the time you read it, the intake is done.

Texting a customer who just contacted you is generally treated as a response to their inquiry. Texting your service list about a spring tune-up special is marketing, and the line between them is where contractors get into trouble.

• TCPA. Automated texts to mobile numbers carry statutory damages per message. Per message is what turns a list-wide mistake into a real number.
• A2P 10DLC. Carriers require your brand and campaign to be registered. Unregistered traffic gets filtered silently — you will think the customer ignored you.
• Opt-outs. Permanent, immediate, and across every future campaign, not just the one running.

Consent and suppression are enforced in the database on the send path, below the layer that writes the message, so an opted-out contact cannot be reached by any workflow. Every send is logged with what it drew on and why it was allowed. The split of responsibility is written down in Acceptable Use & Messaging.

This describes how the product behaves and is not legal advice. Consent rules vary by state and channel, and recording a service call is two-party-consent territory in roughly a dozen states.

Workflows start in Shadow — drafted, never sent — then move to Approval, and only later to limited autonomy on categories you name. In practice contractors turn autonomy on for plan pricing and hours long before they turn it on for anything touching a dispatch, and that is the right order. The mode is per workflow, and stepping back down is one click.