Skip to content
Pick Calls
Home Services · 12 months

Absorbing a 6x storm surge without dropping a single qualified call

A restoration group operating across the Southeast needed to handle sudden weather-driven demand spikes without either dropping calls or paying for volume its crews could not service.

Results

6xPeak surge handled
99.2%Calls answered
41%Same-day dispatch
The challenge

What was actually broken

Storm events produced demand spikes of five to seven times baseline within hours. The group’s previous setup routed on a static waterfall, so during surges calls stacked up on the first branch while crews in neighbouring markets sat idle.

Client: A multi-market HVAC and restoration group

The approach

What changed, specifically

Listed in the order the changes were made. The sequence mattered as much as the changes.

01Replaced the static waterfall with capacity-aware routing reading live crew availability
02Defined service areas at ZIP level so overflow went to the nearest crew, not the next branch alphabetically
03Separated emergency from scheduled intent in the IVR and prioritised emergency routing
04Added after-hours routing to a contracted answering service with warm transfer back at open
05Set per-branch concurrency caps that lift automatically during declared weather events
The outcome

What it moved

The group absorbed a six-times surge during a single hurricane week with 99.2% of qualified calls answered. Same-day dispatch rate held at 41% through the peak, against 12% during the previous season’s comparable event.

Storm weeks used to be chaos — we would either miss calls or promise work we could not staff. Now the routing knows what the crews can actually take.
Dana WhitfieldChief Operating Officer
Get started

Run the same decomposition on your account

We will take a month of your call data and show you where it fails, before anyone talks about switching anything.