Bumped, Cancelled & Deferred Capacity Recovery
Every hole that appears in the schedule gets offered to the right customer automatically, in order, one at a time, and every maintenance visit that got bumped for an emergency gets a real new date rather than a promise to call.
- Tier
- Growth
- Build order
- 3rd of 7 for HVAC
- Shape of it
- 8 steps, 1 escalation rule
- At launch
- Runs supervised, with you approving what goes out
The problem this solves
Two holes, opposite causes.
A cancellation at 4pm for tomorrow morning is recoverable for about two hours, and recovering it means somebody calling down a list. That person is a dispatcher with a full board, so the slot stays empty and the technician's day is short.
And in the other direction, when the board overfills, preventive maintenance is what gets moved. The customer is told somebody will call. Nobody does, because the person who would have is dispatching. The visit slides into the next season, the technician never inspects the system that was about to fail, and the customer's membership starts to feel like a subscription to nothing.
How it works, step by step
Every wait, threshold and branch below is a value we set with you during the build, against your stages and your language. None of it is a default we impose.
- What starts it
- It escalates to a person
Step 1Trigger
A slot empties, from a cancellation, a reschedule, a job that finished early, or a customer who did not answer the door.
Step 2
The system builds the offer list from customers who fit that slot: nearby, waiting, and appropriate for the job type and the technician's skill.
Step 3
Members and safety-related jobs are offered first, because that is what the membership was sold as.
Step 4
The offer goes to one customer at a time with a real hold, not to everyone at once. A slot offered to nine people creates eight disappointed customers and one who now distrusts the arrival window.
Step 5
The moment somebody takes it, the offer stops and every pending message about that slot is cancelled.
Step 6
Separately, when an emergency displaces a maintenance visit, the customer is not told "we will call you". They are offered two specific replacement dates inside a protected recovery block, before the technician has left the previous job.
Step 7Escalation
Any maintenance visit that has been moved twice escalates to the service manager, because the third time is how a membership gets cancelled.
Step 8
Everything unfilled stays on a list with its value and its age.
How it gets built
Built inside what you already run
- ServiceTitan
- Housecall Pro
- Jobber
- FieldEdge
- or whatever your office already runs on
Nothing to log into and nothing to license. If a system needs a record your platform does not hold, we add the field to your platform rather than starting a second one beside it.
This is the actual build order, in the phases its own steps fall into. It runs in supervised mode first, with you approving what goes out, until you are happy with the tone.
- 1
Agree
Define what makes a customer eligible for a given slot with the service manager: geography, job type, skill, equipment.
The thresholds, the wording and the names are yours. We write them down with you and get the consequential ones signed off.
- 2
Agree
Agree the priority order in writing, and put members at the top of it.
- 3
Agree
Set the hold window per offer. Long enough to be answerable, short enough to still fill the slot.
- 4
Build
Build the stop condition first and test it before anything else goes live. The failure that damages a contractor here is two customers arriving for one slot.
Built inside the software you already run, against your stages and your language.
- 5
Build
Create the protected recovery blocks in the schedule, and get the owner to agree they are not available for new emergency work.
- 6
Build
Build the two-strike escalation on moved maintenance visits.
- 7
Prove
Run the first two weeks with the dispatcher approving each offer, then let it run.
It runs with a person approving what goes out until you are happy with the tone. Nothing sends unreviewed on day one.
What changes after it goes live
How it runs today
Two holes, opposite causes.
After this one is live
A cancellation stops being a lost half-day. The dispatcher stops being the only person capable of filling a hole. And the maintenance backlog stops compounding, which is the part that pays for itself twice: once as the visit that gets done, and once as the failing system somebody actually looked at before August.
How to measure whether it worked
Your arithmeticRun with your numbers, not ours
Count the slots that emptied and stayed empty last season, and value them at the company's average service ticket. Then count the maintenance visits that moved and never happened, and value them at the agreement's own maintenance revenue plus the replacement opportunities a technician never had the chance to find.
We agree the baseline before anything is built, and we do not take credit for things that were going to happen anyway. There is no figure on this page claiming what we have produced for somebody else, because there is no verified figure to publish.
What we will not do
This is from the same delivery document as everything above it. It is on the page because a supplier who has not thought about it will not tell you, and you would find out later.
Every system here sends automated messages to consumers in the United States, which puts all of them inside the TCPA and inside carrier A2P 10DLC registration. These are two different things and both apply. Registration is a carrier trust requirement; it does not create consent and does not make an unlawful message lawful. Unregistered application traffic gets filtered or blocked.
Classify every system before it sends. A service message is narrowly connected to an existing job: appointment confirmation, technician on the way, part arrived, invoice. A marketing message promotes something: a tune-up offer, a replacement promotion, a membership push, an estimate reactivation sequence. The standards of consent are different, and a promotional line inside a service template converts the whole message into marketing.
The minimum a compliant build has to do:
- Consent recorded per number with the date, the source, the exact wording shown, the sending brand, and whether it covers service, marketing, or both. Marketing needs prior express written consent with an unchecked opt-in, and consent cannot be a condition of purchase.
- A2P 10DLC registration of the brand, the numbers, and a campaign use case that matches the traffic actually sent. An appointment-reminder campaign does not quietly become a seasonal promotion campaign.
- Quiet hours of 8am to 9pm in the recipient's local time, not the office's, with queued sends held until the window opens. Apply the same gate to service messages by default and handle genuine emergencies as a named exception.
- Opt-out handling for STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, REVOKE and OPT OUT, and for free text like "stop texting me". Suppress immediately in practice rather than to the outer limit of the rule, cancel messages already queued rather than only future ones, and propagate the suppression to every sending number, system and platform the contractor controls.
- Replies routed to a monitored human queue, always. A reply that says the heat is off is not a marketing response.
- Human review before any sequence that would materially pressure a prospect, which in this playbook means System 4.
- Suppression reconciled across systems, so a customer cannot opt out in the field service platform and keep receiving messages from the marketing tool.
- Purchased or scraped lists are not messaged. Consent has to name the actual sender.
Nothing in this document is legal advice. State mini-TCPA statutes, carrier policy, and the exact dialling or sending technology can each add requirements, and the rules in this area have moved more than once recently. Every template that states a commercial term, a price, or a guarantee requires review by the contractor's own counsel before it goes live.
Nothing here is legal advice. Rules in this area have moved more than once recently, and every template that states a commercial term or a guarantee goes to your own counsel before it goes live.
Seven systems forHVAC.
We build one at a time and prove it moved before starting the next. The tiers are the dependency order, not a price list.
Tier 1Foundational
Nothing arrives late or unowned. These come first because everything above them assumes they are true.
- 1Multi-Channel Capture, Triage & Instant ResponseFastest visible result, and it is the one that survives the first heat wave, which is when the owner decides whether any of this was real.
- 2Dispatch Confirmation, Arrival Protection & Technician BriefProtects the capacity and the truck rolls already paid for.
Tier 2Growth
The recoverable money. These work the pools the foundational systems have made visible for the first time.
- 3Bumped, Cancelled & Deferred Capacity Recoveryyou are hereTurns System 2's cancellations into recovered revenue and stops the maintenance backlog compounding.
- 4Replacement Estimate RecoveryUsually the single largest recoverable pool in the business.
Tier 3Flagship
One connected system end to end, plus what the owner reads on a Monday. Only once the pieces are proven individually.
- 5The Complete Service-to-Install SystemThe flagship, once the pieces are proven individually.
- 6Service Agreement Renewal, Fulfilment & ReactivationCompounds everything above, and depends on the equipment data System 2 started collecting.
- 7The Owner's Morning BriefOnly meaningful once there are systems to report on.
The tiers are the dependency order for HVAC, not a price list. Most firms do not start at the first one, because the order is a default and the call is where it gets changed.
A note on sequencing this trade
Do not build all seven at once.
Each stage is proven against its agreed measure before the next begins.
Season note. Build Tier 1 in the shoulder season and let it run through one peak before starting Tier 2. A contractor who sees System 1 hold on the first hot Saturday will build the rest without being sold again.
Back to the HVAC overview for the stage map and where these fit.
Is this the oneyou need first?
Often it is not. On the call we look at what is actually costing you most right now, which is frequently a different system from the one that brought you to this page. If there is nothing worth building yet, we will say so.