Intake script templates
AI intake scripts a service tech would actually read on a Sunday night.
Two trade-specific intake templates — one HVAC emergency (no-cool, strange-smell, no-heat), one plumbing slab-leak diagnostic. Each one ships the AI greeting the homeowner hears, the four pre-qualification questions asked every time (issue, address, urgency, decision-maker), the branch checklist, the ordered questions with example homeowner replies, and the dispatch-ready handoff that lands in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber.
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Why generic AI intake scripts fail a trades shop
Three failure modes that show up the first week after install.
The templates below are written for the calls your techs actually take on a Sunday night — the ones where triage must happen in under a minute and the ticket must already be on the truck before the homeowner hangs up.
A generalist chatbot greets every caller the same way. It has no gas-smell stop-state, no breaker-spark dispatch path, no CO-detector chirp protocol — so the after-hours HVAC emergency that should book a tech in 90 seconds escalates to "we’ll call you back tomorrow."
A horizontal AI intake is built for any SMB. It doesn’t know that a slab-leak diagnostic needs the water-meter spin with fixtures closed, or that emergency HVAC intake hinges on thermostat-setpoint-versus-room-temperature before any other question. Generic questions mean generic answers, and generic answers mean a tech walks onto the job under-prepared.
A horizontal CRM logs a contact. It does not paste clean, structured fields into ServiceTitan / Housecall Pro / Jobber — priority, trade, call_type, symptom summary, access notes, dispatch window. The office manager transcribes the recovery lead back into the calendar by hand, and half of it gets lost in the copy-paste.
Want these scripts running on your after-hours line?
Walk us through your last missed Sunday-night call.
Bring the transcript — or just the symptom and the ticket size. We will run it through the same intake logic the templates above describe and tell you, in plain numbers, whether the AI would have caught it on the first ring.
What you leave the call with
- A written recovery estimate — your shop, your call volume, your dollars.
- A trade-specific intake demo — HVAC and plumbing scripts running against your scenario.
- A 60-second SLA in writing — credited back if we miss.