Phone-call triage that applies trade-specific rules rather than treating every call the same.
Trade-aware triage is the practice of routing and escalating inbound service calls using trade-specific decision rules — HVAC rules for HVAC calls, plumbing rules for plumbing calls, and so on — rather than a single horizontal “is this urgent yes/no” flowchart.
A horizontal answering service treats every call with the same script: get the name, the address, the nature of the problem, and the urgency. Trade-aware triage adds a second layer on top: it knows the difference between a commercial walk-in freezer at 41 degrees (emergency, $10k+ inventory at risk) and a warm residential fridge (Monday), between a sparking electrical panel (right now) and a flickering light (this week), between a slab leak (now) and a slow drip under a sink (tomorrow).
The rules can be encoded as a small decision tree or built into the agent’s prompt and tool calls. Either way, the output is the same: a triage classification that downstream dispatch can act on.
Most contractors lose money in two ways: they roll a truck on a non-emergency that could have waited, and they fail to roll a truck on something that should have been treated as urgent. Both failures come from misclassification. A horizontal script asks the customer “is this an emergency?” and the customer is not a tradesperson; they cannot accurately answer that question. Trade-aware triage asks technical questions a tradesperson would ask — “is the breaker tripping or is the panel sparking?” — and arrives at the right classification regardless.
Night Watch ships triage rules for HVAC and refrigeration, plumbing, electrical, and roofing out of the box. Each trade has commercial vs. residential differentiation, equipment-type awareness, and a set of clarifying questions the agent asks when the initial description is ambiguous. The rules feed directly into the 3x3 dispatch loop: an emergency classification triggers Bulldog; a routine classification books an appointment via live calendar availability; a non-actionable call gets a friendly message and a callback time.
Related: emergency call triage, weather-aware triage, Bulldog dispatch.