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Every call gets one answer, one owner and one next step, whether it rings at 10 a.m. or 2 a.m. This is the standard, written down so it holds when the usual person is off.
A RocketLevel SOP for restoration owners and their front office, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About an 8-minute read.
Other pages in this library cover the first call from different angles. The CSR Playbook: Winning the First Call and Every Call After covers how the person answering should sound. Template: Commercial First-Call Intake Script (When a Manager Reports a Loss) gives the exact questions for a commercial caller. The Callback Clock: Why the First Answer Gets the Work explains why minutes decide who gets the work.
This page is the operating standard that ties them together, for residential and commercial calls alike: what every call has to produce, which fields get captured, who takes what when it goes sideways, and what happens to a lead that does not book on the first call. Print it, fill in the blanks, and hold the front office to it. If you want each step written as a procedure your staff can follow cold, put it on Template: The One-Page SOP. On the residential side, this standard is Section 2 of The Residential Growth Playbook, and Part 3 of The Residential Growth Sprint Board checks that it is running.
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The one-call promise. Every call gets a live answer from a person, around the clock. Anything that misses a live answer gets a human callback within 15 minutes, and never later than 30. Every caller gets a named owner, the right level of urgency, a written next step, and a handoff that somebody confirmed receiving.
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Set this before you use the SOP:
- Who owns the phones during business hours:
- Who owns the phones after hours, and how the rotation works:
- Our first-contact standard: every inbound call is answered live by a person, day or night.
- Our callback limit: anything that does not get a live answer (a missed call, a voicemail, a web form, a text) gets a human callback within 15 minutes, and never later than 30, timed from the moment it hit your line or inbox, not from when someone noticed it. That 15 minutes is RocketLevel's working standard, and 30 is the outer limit, the same line as on Template: The 10-Line Leadership Scorecard. The research that sets its direction is on The Callback Clock: Why the First Answer Gets the Work. Treat every missed contact as a possible active loss until a person has spoken to the caller. A lead with no active loss behind it, like a guide download or a trade-show card, runs on the relationship clock in The Seam instead.
- Who takes escalations, by name:
- When and where the lost-lead review happens, and who runs it:
- 📑 Jump to a section
The intake sequence
- 📊 See the whole sequence on one graphic
- Answer live, or start recovery. A missed call, voicemail, web form or text starts the 15-minute callback clock right away. Measure from the moment the call reached your line, not from when someone noticed it.
- Safety first. If there is fire, smoke, a gas smell, a downed line, or water near anything electrical, tell the caller to get people out and call 911 or the utility, and stay on the line. Never send a caller into standing water, to an electrical panel, or to a gas valve.
- Capture the fields below. For a commercial caller, run the Commercial First-Call Intake Script. For a homeowner, run the four beats in the CSR Playbook.