- Real Estate
- AI Agent Development
- AI Consulting
- Custom App Development
The maintenance call that comes in at eleven at night
A large share of maintenance requests arrive outside office hours, and the cost of treating a dripping tap as an emergency is the same call out fee as a burst pipe. An intake and triage agent sorts them at the moment they arrive, and escalates only what should be escalated.
Representative engagement. This describes a pattern we build rather than one named client: the situation that produces it, how we approach it, and the range of outcomes that kind of work lands in. Figures are stated as ranges or targets, never as a measured result for a specific customer. Our named client work is on the work index.
- Industry
- Real Estate
- fewer out of hours escalations (target range)
- 30 to 50%
- anything uncertain goes to a person by default
- Escalates up
The problem
Out of hours, a resident has a phone number and no way to know whether their problem warrants using it. The operator has an answering service that cannot assess anything, so everything either escalates or waits until morning, and both are wrong about half the time. Triage is genuinely hard to write as rules. What matters is not the category of the fault but its severity and its context: no heating in July is different from no heating in January, and water on a floor is different depending on where it is coming from. There is a trust dimension too. A resident whose real emergency is deferred loses confidence permanently, so the cost of a triage system being wrong in one direction is much higher than in the other.
What we built
An intake agent that takes the request in the resident's own words, asks the two or three questions that actually determine severity, and accepts photographs where a photograph settles it. The escalation boundary is set by the operator, in writing, before anything is built. Categories that must always page a person always do so, categories that never should are scheduled, and anything the agent is not confident about escalates by default. Uncertainty resolves upward, always. Everything lands in one queue with the evidence attached, so the person who picks it up in the morning is deciding rather than starting a conversation. The resident gets an acknowledgement and a realistic expectation immediately, which is most of what they wanted from the call.
What changed
Genuine emergencies reach a person faster, because they are no longer queued behind requests that could have waited until Tuesday. The rest are triaged, acknowledged and scheduled without waking anybody. Both ranges below are the targets this pattern is scoped against, and both depend on the portfolio and on where the operator chooses to draw the escalation line.
Built with
- TypeScript
- Anthropic
- PostgreSQL
- Twilio
- Next.js