Emergency Restoration Intake Checklist

1. Caller

· Name
· Phone
· Email when needed
· Relationship to property (owner, tenant, property manager, insurer)
· Preferred callback method when useful

2. Property

· Service address
· Residential or commercial when relevant
· Access information (gate codes, lockbox, keys)
· Site contact when different from caller

3. Loss / Service

· Water, fire/smoke, mold, or other
· Short plain-language description

* Do not force the customer to diagnose the loss or estimate square footage.

4. Urgency

The company defines its own emergency rules. Useful prompts may include:

· Active issue
· Immediate access concern
· Current occupant impact
· Known safety issue
· Business interruption

* Do not automate professional or safety decisions that require human judgment.

5. Service Area

Confirm whether the property falls inside the company's normal service area before committing dispatch.

6. Next Action

The first intake should end with an owned next step:

dispatchinspectionestimatecallbackmanual review

7. Customer Expectation

· What happens next
· Who may contact them
· Expected timing only when the business can support it
· What to do if conditions change

Why over-collecting hurts the first call

There is a temptation to capture everything on the first call — square footage, moisture readings, contents inventories, insurance details. But the first call is not a scoping session. It is a routing decision. Every extra question lengthens the call when the customer wants action, and every extra field the office tries to fill is a field the field team will often have to correct anyway. A homeowner describing water damage cannot diagnose the loss category or estimate the affected area. Asking them to creates a false record and a frustrated caller.

The checklist above is deliberately short. It captures what the caller can reliably report and what the next owner needs to act. The deeper technical information — moisture mapping, affected materials, contents lists, scope details — is gathered on site by the people who can see the loss. The intake is the foundation, not the whole structure. When intake stays short and focused, the first call is faster, the data is more accurate, and the field team starts from a clean record instead of a noisy one.

How intake quality affects the rest of the job

The intake record travels through the entire operating path. The dispatcher reads it to route the job. The technician reads it to prepare for arrival. The estimator reads it to begin scoping. The project manager reads it to communicate with the customer. When the intake is complete and consistent, every downstream stage starts from the same accurate picture. When the intake is incomplete or inconsistent, each stage fills the gaps differently — and the job drifts as each person's version of the truth diverges.

This is why intake quality is not a front-office concern alone. It is an operating-path concern. A restoration company that invests in a clean intake checklist sees the return in faster dispatch, better-prepared field teams, more accurate estimates, and fewer customer callbacks. The intake is the first five minutes of a job that may last two weeks — and those five minutes set the trajectory for everything that follows.

Adapting the checklist to your company

This checklist is a framework, not a script. A company that handles mostly residential water losses may weight the urgency and access fields heavily. A company with a strong commercial book may add stakeholder and account fields. A company that offers mold remediation may add a qualification step for testing and protocols. The structure — caller, property, loss, urgency, service area, next action, customer expectation — stays consistent. The specific fields within each section adapt to what the company actually needs to route and dispatch. The goal is a checklist that the person answering the phone can run through in under two minutes and that produces a record the next owner can act on without a callback.