A caller who smells gas is not a booking. The agent's job on that call is to get them out of the house and on the phone to 911, then to get the shop on the phone to them. This guide is the exact behaviour, so you can tell a customer what will happen and check it on your own line.
The 911 line comes first, in fixed words
When a caller names a hazard — a gas smell, rotten eggs, a carbon monoxide alarm going off, smoke, flames, sparking, a burning smell — the system, not the model, says this, once, before anything else:
Pickwick · EnglishPlease hang up now, get everyone outside, and call 911. Do not touch any light switches on your way out. Someone from the shop will call you right back.
Pickwick · SpanishPor favor cuelgue ahora, salgan todos de la casa y llame al 911. No toque ningún interruptor de luz al salir. Alguien de la oficina le llamará enseguida.
It is said by the system because a model that phrases this well ninety-nine times in a hundred is not good enough. The matcher runs on the raw words the moment the turn is heard, ahead of the model, in English and Spanish ("huele a gas", "olor a gas", "huevos podridos", "monóxido", "hay humo", "chispas"). It only ever raises urgency; it never lowers it and never overrides a person.
What counts as a named hazard, and what does not
- Named: gas leak, smell of gas, rotten eggs or sulfur, carbon monoxide or a CO alarm going off, smoke, flames, sparking, a burning smell, something smoking.
- Pointed at 911, then triaged: a strange or chemical smell, fumes, a detector going off without saying which, dizziness or headaches since the heat came on, or a caller who says "it's an emergency" without describing one. They hear: "If anyone is in danger, or you smell gas or smoke, hang up now and call 911. Otherwise, tell me what is happening and I will get this to the team."
- Not a hazard: a detector chirping once a minute for a new battery (with nothing else wrong), an igniter sparking as a furnace lights, "the furnace is unresponsive", a gas furnace that will not light with no smell. These are routine calls.
- Never: repair instructions. It does not tell anyone to find the valve, open a window or reset anything. Out, and 911.
How the shop is paged
The call is flagged as an emergency to your approvers the moment the hazard is named, before the caller has given a name or address, using the caller's number from caller ID. If an address or a better number comes in before they hang up, the flag is updated once. The caller was told someone from the shop will call right back; the flag on your phone is that promise, so treat it as first in the queue. The call is marked as an emergency on the dashboard with the recording and transcript.
Set the on-call number
Whether the agent may promise a callback time depends on whether anyone is on call. In the dashboard's shop settings, After-hours number is the phone that answers emergencies outside hours, and Transfer calls to is who gets a caller who asks for a person. With an after-hours number set, a caller who describes an emergency that is not a named hazard hears: "Because this is an emergency, a technician will call you back within fifteen minutes." With neither set, the promise is softer, and honest: "Because this is an emergency, I'm flagging it to the shop right now so someone can call you back as soon as possible." A time promise with nobody behind it is a promise the shop breaks at 2 am, so the platform will not make one.
What to do after
Call back as soon as it is safe to, day or night. Do not rely on the transcript for the technical picture; the caller was frightened and brief. If there is ever a dispute about what was said, the recording holds the notice, the 911 line and the times. The office-side steps are on the emergency calls guide.
Pickwick is not an emergency service and does not handle 911 calls. It uses fixed wording to prompt the caller, and cannot guarantee it detects every hazard. Make a hazard test call on your own line before you go live, and again whenever we tell you the safety rules changed.