The first properly cold morning of the year, the phone starts before you’ve scraped the van. Combi showing a fault code. No hot water in a rented flat. Somebody’s mum with no heating since last night. A letting agency with three tenants on one email. By ten you’ve got more jobs than daylight, and every caller thinks theirs is first. It can’t be. So the only question is whether you choose the order or the loudest caller does.
Decide the order before the phone rings
Triage at 10pm with a customer on the line goes to whoever sounds most upset. Triage decided in October goes to whoever needs it most. Write your order down now, on one card, and make sure anyone who answers your phone has the same card. Here’s a sensible starting point. Adjust it to your work and your area.
On the top line: in Great Britain the National Gas Emergency Service number is 0800 111 999, free and open all day and night. Whoever answers your phone should give that number straight away rather than try to talk anyone through anything. That’s not you passing the buck. It’s the right first call.
“Vulnerable” needs a definition, or every caller qualifies. Ofgem’s list for the energy suppliers’ Priority Services Register is a decent one to borrow: people over state pension age, pregnancy or young children, disability or long-term illness, people who rely on powered medical equipment, and people recovering from a hospital stay. Ask one plain question on every call: “Is there anyone in the house who’ll really struggle without heating tonight?”
For tenants, remember the repair duty is the landlord’s. Under section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, landlords on most residential tenancies must keep the installations for space heating and heating water in repair and proper working order. That’s why the agency will push hard. It doesn’t mean you go before you know who’s paying. Get the job authorised in writing, with a spend limit and a tenant contact number, before the van moves.
Every winter, someone decides the order of your queue. It should be you, in October, not the loudest caller at ten at night.
Honest wait times and the call-out fee
The temptation in a rush is to say yes to everyone and sort it out later. Don’t. A customer told “Thursday morning” can borrow a heater and plan. A customer told “we’ll try to squeeze you in today” waits in all day and rings back four times.
There’s a legal angle as well. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, what you say to a homeowner about the service can become part of the contract if they rely on it. If no time is agreed, the work must be done within a reasonable time. If no price is agreed, they pay a reasonable price, and what’s reasonable is a question of fact, which is a polite way of saying an argument. So agree both up front. A script that works:
“I can’t get to you today, I’m being straight with you. The earliest I can do is Thursday morning, between eight and twelve. The call-out is £[your fee], which includes the first hour, and I’ll give you a price for anything else before I do it. If something frees up sooner, I’ll ring you. Do you want me to book that?”
Then a few rules to keep you honest when you’re tired:
If you’re genuinely full, saying so quickly is a kindness. “I’m booked solid until next week, so you’ll be quicker with someone else” costs you nothing and is remembered when the boiler’s due a service. A call left to ring out is remembered too, in a different way. See why the missed call is the expensive one.
Don’t let the service book die
The quickest way to make next winter worse is to cancel every service this winter. Services are the steady money, and the customers you see every year are the ones who ring you first when it goes wrong.
Rule of thumb: protect a fixed number of service slots each week, say two mornings, and move breakdowns around them rather than through them. If you do have to move a service, rebook it on the same call with a firm date. “We’ll be in touch” is how a service turns into next year.
Landlord checks deserve their own rule. HSE guidance lets a landlord have the annual gas safety check done up to two months before it’s due and keep the original deadline date. That’s worth telling your landlords about in September, so their January and February checks are done before the rush instead of landing in the middle of it. It’s the landlord’s duty and their deadline, but it’s your diary. See landlord gas safety records and service reminders that get booked.
Parts, the van and your own hours
A breakdown you can’t fix on the first visit is a second visit you didn’t have space for. In the run-up to winter, look back at what you fitted on breakdowns last year and stock the van with the parts you used more than once for the boilers you see most. Which parts those are depends on your patch, so use your own invoices, not anyone’s list.
When a part does have to be ordered, get the boiler make, model and serial number from the customer before you go, by photo of the data plate if they can. Ring the merchant before you leave the house, not from their kitchen, and tell the customer the honest timescale for the part, not the hopeful one.
Then protect yourself. Pick a time the phone goes to voicemail, and keep to it. An engineer working fourteen hours a day for three weeks is a tired engineer doing gas work, and nobody wants that. If you offer out-of-hours callouts, price them as out-of-hours and say so. If you don’t, put that in your voicemail and your Google profile so people stop expecting it.
Datify can help here, within limits. It can answer your calls, take the address, the problem and how urgent it is, and send you an alert straight away when a call matches what you’ve said counts as an emergency. It doesn’t give safety advice or diagnose over the phone; it follows the escalation you set up. It only books a visit when it fits the rules and diary you’ve given it, and asks you otherwise. Call handling is set up with each business and tested with a real call first. See how the receptionist works.
Write your triage order down before the cold snap and give it to whoever answers the phone: gas smells to the emergency line, vulnerable households and damaging leaks first, then everyone else in order. Give every caller a day, a window and the call-out fee, in writing. Protect a few service slots each week, nudge landlords to book early, stock the van from last winter’s invoices, and decide when the phone goes off.
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