Separating true emergencies from routine work and non-actionable calls.
Emergency call triage is the decision process at the front of every inbound call: is this an emergency that needs a tech rolling now, a routine job that can be scheduled, or a non-actionable inquiry that should be answered without dispatching anything? Get it right and you capture the right work without wasting expensive truck rolls. Get it wrong and you lose money in both directions.
A working triage flow asks specific clarifying questions, not vague ones. Instead of “is this an emergency?” (which the customer cannot reliably answer), it asks “is the breaker tripping repeatedly or is the panel itself making noise or smoke?” The answers are mapped to a small set of urgency categories: emergency (roll now), same-day (slot today if possible), scheduled (book for a future date), and informational (answer the question, no dispatch needed).
Good triage also captures the inputs that downstream dispatch needs: callback number, exact address, access notes, and a one-sentence problem summary that a tech can read while driving.
Most after-hours dispatch failures are triage failures. A real emergency gets classified as routine and waits until morning, costing the customer and the contractor. A routine job gets classified as urgent and burns a truck roll on something that could have been scheduled. The Bulldog dispatch loop only works if the triage feeding it is accurate.
Night Watch’s triage layer combines trade-aware rules, weather-aware context, and customer history (via semantic call memory) to produce an urgency classification at the end of the conversation. Emergency classifications trigger the 3x3 dispatch loop immediately; routine classifications book against live calendar availability; informational calls get answered and logged as a call memo.