Cedar Run Heating & Air: get every service request booked the same hour, without adding office staff.
Prepared for: Tom Reilly, Owner, Cedar Run Heating & Air (a fictional company) · Burlington County, NJ
Based on: two working sessions with Tom, the office manager, and two technicians, plus a week of measured intake activity.
1. How a request moves today
We mapped one workflow end to end: a service request, from the moment it arrives to a paid invoice. Red boxes are where the measured friction is.
2. Where the time goes
Measured over one typical week in the assessment, plus Dana’s and Tom’s estimates where we could not observe directly.
| Activity | Who | Time / week | What we observed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Re-typing web-form and email requests into the scheduler | Dana | ~4 h | Every field copied by hand. Two requests were entered twice. |
| Calling customers back for missing details | Dana | ~3.5 h | 48% of requests lacked the address, system type, or symptoms. Phone tag added hours of delay. |
| Answering tech questions mid-job | Dana, techs | ~2 h office, plus tech waiting time | Gate codes, prior visit notes and photos were not on the job. |
| Assembling invoices from job notes | Dana, bookkeeper | ~5 h | Notes arrive by phone, paper and photo. Parts are sometimes missed and not billed. |
| Maintenance-plan renewal follow-up | Nobody | ~0 | 180 plans; 41% lapsed last year without a reminder. |
3. Opportunities, ranked
We scored each candidate on value to the business, effort to build, and readiness (access, data quality, and how clear the rules are). Rank reflects all three, not just value.
| # | Opportunity | Value | Effort | Readiness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Service request intake & triage | High | Medium | High: web form and email are structured enough to start |
| 2 | Job-to-invoice handoff | High | Medium | Medium: techs need a simple checkout step first |
| 3 | Maintenance-plan renewal reminders | Medium | Low | High: the sheet is current |
| — | AI phone answering | Medium | High | Low: most calls are urgent and customers expect a person. Revisit after #1. |
Service request intake & triage
Today: four channels feed one person. Half the requests are incomplete, so booking waits on a callback, and urgent “no heat” calls sit in the same pile as a thermostat question.
How it would work:
- Web-form and email requests land in one intake queue automatically. Phone and text requests are added by Dana with a two-field form.
- Each request is read and turned into the booking fields: customer, address, system, symptoms, urgency, preferred window.
- If anything is missing, a short reply goes to the customer asking for exactly that, from Dana’s address, after she approves it.
- Complete requests become a draft job in Housecall Pro, flagged urgent when symptoms match the no-heat / no-cool list.
- Dana approves each draft job with one click. Nothing is booked, and no customer is promised a time, without her.
Connects to: website form, Gmail, Housecall Pro. You stay in control: every booking and every customer email is approved by Dana; the urgent list is yours to define.
Job-to-invoice handoff
Today: job notes arrive three ways and the office rebuilds each invoice by hand, sometimes missing parts.
How it would work: techs finish each job with a 60-second structured checkout on their phone (work done, parts used, time, photos). A draft invoice is assembled in Housecall Pro with the parts matched to your price list. Dana reviews and sends. Missing or unusual items are flagged rather than guessed.
Connects to: Housecall Pro, QuickBooks Online. First step: agree the checkout fields with two techs and run it on paper for a week.
Maintenance-plan renewal reminders
Today: 180 plans in a sheet, no reminders, 41% lapse.
How it would work: each week, plans due in the next 30 days get a drafted reminder email or text. Dana reviews the batch in one sitting and sends. Replies are logged against the sheet so you can see who renewed, who declined and who went quiet.
Connects to: Google Sheet, Gmail, texting line. First step: clean the sheet’s expiry dates, then run one weekly batch by hand to settle the wording.
Process fixes before any build
- Make address, system type and symptoms required fields on the website form. This alone removes a share of the callbacks.
- Give the texting line its own inbox label so texts stop getting lost among emails.
- Define the urgent-symptom list in writing. The automation will use it, and so will Dana.
4. Pilot plan
Scope: Opportunity 1 for the web-form and email channels only. Phone intake stays as it is for now. Six weeks.
Baseline (measured in this assessment)
- Median time from first contact to confirmed booking: 5 h 40 m
- Requests needing a callback: 48%
- Dana’s weekly hours on intake and callbacks: ~7.5
Success criteria (agreed with Tom and Dana)
- Median time to confirmed booking under 2 hours for web and email requests
- Callbacks under 20%
- Dana’s intake hours under 3 per week
- Zero bookings or customer emails sent without Dana’s approval
- Dana would choose to keep it (the one that matters most)
The system reads real requests and prepares drafts, but Dana keeps working as today. We compare its drafts with hers and fix the gaps.
Dana works from the drafts: approve, edit or reject. Exceptions and anything unclear go to a review list, never to the customer.
We measure against the baseline, document how it works, train the backup person, and decide together what, if anything, comes next.
Safeguards
- One switch turns the automation off; the fallback is today’s process, unchanged.
- Every automated action is logged with what it read and what it produced.
- Unclear requests, duplicates and anything outside the rules go to a person.
- Accounts and connections are created in Cedar Run’s name and can be revoked at any time.
What we still need to confirm
- Housecall Pro’s API access on the current plan, and which job fields it accepts.
- Whether the website form can send submissions to an inbox or endpoint (most can).
- How Dana wants to handle customers who reply to the automated question by phone.
Investment
A real assessment states the fixed pilot price here, with the $500 assessment credit applied, plus an at-cost estimate of software and AI usage for the pilot. Ongoing support after the pilot is a separate, optional agreement.
5. Ninety days, if the pilot works
- Weeks 1–6: the intake pilot above.
- Weeks 7–9: add phone intake using Dana’s two-field form so every channel flows through the same queue.
- Weeks 10–13: job-to-invoice handoff, starting with the two techs who helped design the checkout.
- Ongoing: renewal reminders as a weekly batch, owned by Dana.
This is a sample assessment for a fictional company, written in the format INSTEP uses. All names, tools and figures are illustrative. A real assessment is built from your workflow, your measurements and your team’s input, and you keep it whether or not we build anything together.