When a tree is on a house: what your phone should say, and what it should not
On a storm-damage call the phone has two jobs: read a fixed safety message and get your on-call person moving. It should never diagnose the tree or the building.
After a storm, some of your calls are not estimate requests. A limb is through a roof. A tree is across a driveway with a wire down beside it. The caller is scared, talking fast, and not sure what to do next.
What the phone says in those first seconds matters. Here is how we think about it, and how our AI receptionist is set up.
The agent does not diagnose
It cannot see the tree, the roof or the wire. It does not guess whether a trunk will hold, whether a wire is live, or whether the house is safe to stay in. Those judgments belong to emergency responders and your trained crew, who can see the scene.
The safety message is fixed
For a tree on a building, the agent reads a message written in advance. In plain terms: if anyone is hurt or the building looks unsafe, get everyone out and call 911. Stay well away from any downed power line and treat it as live. Then it tells the caller the team has been alerted, or, with live routing on, that it is calling the on-call team now.
For a limb or wire that may be live and sparking, the message tells the caller to stay away from the hazard, not to touch anything that is sparking or hot, and to call 911 if there is fire or smoke. Then it says what happens next, the same way.
The agent does not add instructions beyond those scripts. It does not tell a caller how to move debris, whether it is fine to stay inside, or how long a crew will take.
What happens next
After the message, the agent collects a callback number and the address, and sends you an urgent alert (with live routing on, it rings your on-call person first). It does not promise a response time, because only you know where your crews are and what else is happening that night.
Decisions for you, made ahead of time
- Who is on call this week, and who is the backup if they do not answer? Test the alert path.
- Do you take emergency work at night at all? Some tree companies prioritize making a site safe and defer full cleanup. Decide your policy and write it down.
- Do you charge an after-hours rate? If you do, say so in your settings so it is not a surprise at the door.
- How do you handle callers who ask about insurance? A safe default is that the agent does not speak to coverage and passes the question to you.
Test it
Call your own after-hours line and say a tree is on the house. Listen to what is said, check that the alert reaches you (or that your on-call phone rings, if routing is on), and fix the one thing that went wrong. Do it again before the next storm season.
The point of the fixed script is that you can read every word ahead of time. If danger is involved, the answer is 911 first, and your crew second.