Most website assistants on trade sites are set up for one job: turning visitors into leads. That works well for quote requests. It works badly for the message a heating engineer's chat receives late one night: "boiler making a banging noise and I can smell something, is that bad". The assistant asks for a postcode. Then a phone number. Then whether the boiler is under warranty.
That sequence is the problem this post is about. Most after hours emergency enquiries on a small business website are not emergencies at all. A few are. The ones that are need a completely different response from everything else the assistant does, and they need it in the first reply.
The good news is that getting this right is mostly a writing job, done once, in daylight, when nobody is panicking.
Write down what an emergency means for you
"Urgent" is useless as an instruction. A visitor who wants a quote by Friday thinks it is urgent. So does someone with water coming through a ceiling. Your assistant can only tell them apart if you have described the difference in plain terms.
Start with the situations where a person could be hurt or property seriously damaged in the next few hours. Then separate out the ones you personally respond to at night from the ones where someone else must.
| Business type | Genuine emergency | Who handles it at night | Routine but feels urgent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heating and gas | Gas smell, carbon monoxide alarm | National gas emergency line, then you | Boiler not firing, no hot water |
| Plumbing | Burst pipe, water near electrics | Your callout number if you run one | Dripping tap, slow drain |
| Locksmith | Locked out with a child or vulnerable person inside | Emergency services first, then your callout | Lost keys, lock stiff |
| Property management | Fire, flood, break-in | Emergency services, then the out-of-hours contact | Broken appliance, noisy neighbour |
| Vet or animal care | Animal collapsed, poisoning, bleeding | Nearest out-of-hours vet | Appointment request, repeat prescription |
Your own table will be shorter or longer. What matters is that every row ends in a named route, not "we will be in touch".
Why the assistant must not improvise
A website assistant answering from your content is very good at telling someone your opening hours or what a service includes. It is the wrong tool for telling a frightened person whether to turn off the stopcock or open the windows, unless those exact words came from you or an official source you have supplied.
This is information, not advice. For anything involving gas, electricity, fire, medical symptoms or an animal's health, the assistant's job is to hand the person to a qualified human or the emergency services as fast as possible. Where life is at risk, that means 999 in the UK or 911 in the US, stated plainly.
A grounded assistant helps here. SpideyChat answers from the content you give it, and when there is nothing relevant it says so and captures the enquiry instead of inventing an answer. That is the behaviour you want. But the emergency case is too important to leave to "nothing relevant", so give it explicit content.
What a good first reply looks like
The emergency route goes first. Questions come after, if at all.
Visitor: there's water pouring through the kitchen ceiling light what do I do
Assistant: Water near a light fitting can be dangerous. Please do not touch the switch or the fitting. Call our emergency callout line now on the number shown on our contact page, which is answered through the night. If anyone is at risk of harm, call 999. Once you are safe, I can take your address and details so the engineer has them ready.
Notice what it does not do. It does not diagnose the leak. It does not promise an arrival time. It repeats only what the business wrote in its emergency content, and the details request is offered after the route, as a help rather than a gate.
If you do not run a night callout, the reply should say that too: "We do not have an engineer available overnight. For a gas smell, call the national gas emergency number straight away." A clear no is kinder than a lead form.
Building the emergency path, step by step
- List your trigger situations. Use the table above as a starting point and write each one the way a customer would describe it, typos and all: "smell gas", "water everywhere", "sparks from socket".
- Write one short emergency answer per situation. Include the number or service, one safety line you are confident in, and nothing speculative. Add these as Q&A pairs so the wording is exact.
- Put your emergency policy near the top of the business description. Something like: "If a visitor describes a risk to safety, give the emergency route before asking any questions."
- Decide what happens after. If you have the ticket or transfer actions switched on, an emergency conversation can open a numbered ticket or go to whoever is on duty. If nobody is on duty, the assistant should not suggest a person is about to reply.
- Test with nasty examples. Type the ten worst messages you can think of, at speed, badly spelled. Read every reply.
- Retest after changes. A new services page or a re-crawl can shift which content the assistant finds first. Our guide to how assistants handle questions they were not trained for covers why.
For the wider question of sorting urgent from routine during the day as well, see urgent vs routine enquiry triage.
The routine enquiries still matter
Once the emergencies are handled safely, everything else can relax. The 1am message about a boiler service quote does not need a phone number. It needs an honest line about when someone will reply and a way to leave details.
That split is worth making explicit in your content:
- Safety risk: route immediately, no questions first.
- Loss of service but no danger: explain your callout options and charges if you have them, then capture details.
- Planning or quotes: answer from your content, capture the lead, give a realistic reply time.
- Complaints about a previous job: acknowledge, capture, and pass to a person in the morning.
If you want the overnight picture more broadly, what 24/7 coverage really means is a good companion read.
What to do this week
Block out an hour. Write your emergency table, with a named route on every row. Turn each row into a short Q&A answer in your own words, and add one line to the assistant's business description telling it to give the emergency route before anything else.
Then open your assistant, or the demo if you are still evaluating, and type the frightening messages yourself. If any reply asks for a postcode before it gives a number, fix that first. Everything else in your after-hours setup can wait until that one path is right.