We were scoping a dispatch agent for a home-services company, and the obvious design was right there: open the call with "Is this an emergency?" Real emergencies get fast-tracked, everything else queues normally. Clean.
The owner killed it in the same breath he heard it.
In home services, everyone says yes. Callers have figured out that "emergency" is the word that gets somebody to call back sooner. A dripping faucet gets reported as a ten out of ten. Not because people are dishonest — because they've learned which answer produces the outcome they want.
So asking the question directly doesn't triage anything. It trains your callers to lie, and it floods the high-priority queue until "high priority" means nothing at all.
Everyone says yes.
What we do instead
The agent asks an open question — "what's going on?" — and lets the caller describe the problem in their own words. Then it infers the rest.
From that description it works out a severity score, a revenue tier, and a job type, and passes all three in the handoff to dispatch. None of it is ever spoken aloud. The caller just explains their problem like a person. The routing happens quietly behind them.
Two things make or break this.
The rubric has to be the owner's, not ours. Nearly every owner already has an internal sense of what's urgent and what's valuable — that a failing water heater outranks a minor repair, that certain jobs are worth dropping everything for. Ask for it. Don't invent one and hope it matches. We ship a default rubric, but we treat it as a placeholder until the owner replaces it with their real one.
Genuine hazards get a safety response, not a ticket. Gas smell: leave the building, call 911 or the gas utility. Active flooding: shut off the main. Sewage: avoid contact. That fires before intake and flags the job critical. An agent that calmly collects an address while someone is standing in a house that smells like gas is worse than no agent.
And the persona leads with reassurance, because someone calling about a flooded kitchen is not in a neutral mood.
The wider principle
Any time you ask a customer to classify themselves — urgency, budget, category, "which department do you need?" — you're asking them to guess at your internal system. They'll guess in whatever direction they believe helps them, and you'll build your routing on top of that guess.
Let them describe. Let the system classify. It's more accurate, and it's a much better call for the person on the other end.
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