The temperature drops sharply overnight. By seven in the morning a heating company has forty two messages and the telephone is ringing continuously.
They can attend perhaps twelve jobs that day. The forty two are handled in the order they were received, which means an elderly customer with no heating at all is seen after four people whose systems are working badly rather than not at all.
Nobody intended that. There was simply no way to sort forty two simultaneous emergencies at seven in the morning.
The first failure: the surge arrives overnight
Cold nights produce failures at three in the morning, and the enquiries accumulate before anybody is awake to do anything about them.
The second failure: everything is treated as equally urgent
No heating at all, intermittent heating and a noise are all logged the same way, so capacity is allocated by arrival time rather than by need.
The third failure: vulnerability is not identified
Elderly customers, young children and people with health conditions need prioritising, and nothing in a voicemail queue surfaces that.
The fourth failure: nobody is told where they are
Forty two people waiting with no idea whether somebody is coming today, which produces repeat calls that make everything worse.
The fifth failure: the simple fixes are not attempted
A proportion of calls are pressure, a tripped switch or a thermostat, and talking somebody through a check frees a visit for somebody who needs one.
The sixth failure: the telephone absorbs everybody
One person answering calls cannot dispatch, and the dispatching is what determines how many jobs get done.
The seventh failure: the existing service customers are not prioritised
People paying for cover expect it, and a queue that does not distinguish them undermines the entire proposition.
The eighth failure: the parts position is unknown
An engineer attending without the part achieves nothing, and identifying the likely fault beforehand changes the outcome.
The ninth failure: the temporary measures are not suggested
Electric heaters, keeping one room warm, and what to do about pipes, which matters enormously to somebody waiting until tomorrow.
The tenth failure: the honest answer is not given
Somebody who cannot be seen today needs to be told so, since a customer waiting all day for nobody is worse served than one who was told at eight.
The eleventh failure: the surge is treated as unforeseeable
It happens every winter, at the first hard frost, and it is the most predictable event in the trade.
The twelfth failure: the follow up work is lost
Forty two emergency calls contain a substantial amount of replacement and upgrade work that nobody captures.
The thirteenth failure: the following week is not planned
A surge produces days of deferred work and a backlog of repairs booked in haste, and the fortnight after a cold snap is frequently more chaotic than the snap itself because nobody scheduled it.
The fix: triage at three in the morning
An assistant that takes the details overnight, identifies who has no heat and who is vulnerable, walks somebody through the simple checks, tells people honestly when they will be seen and captures the fault detail means twelve visits go to the twelve people who most need them. The seasonal pattern is set out in emergency no heating calls in a cold snap and heating breakdowns that arrive on the coldest nights, and the triage approach in after hours emergency triage. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under hvac.