Emergency dispatch
For urgent work, a calendar is the wrong tool. When the AI decides a call is an emergency it runs your trade’s safety script first, then gets the job to a human by text rather than booking it.
The whole point is speed: the customer with a burst pipe is calling three numbers, and the first honest answer wins.
Two modes, and you’re on the first one
Section titled “Two modes, and you’re on the first one”StrandCalls has two ways of paging you, and they behave differently enough that it’s worth knowing which one you’re running.
| Alert and acknowledge | The dispatch loop | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | On by default | Off until you turn it on |
| You get | An URGENT text, repeated until you acknowledge | A one-tap job offer with accept / pass / ETA |
| You reply | ACK | 1, 2, an ETA, or DONE |
| The caller is told | The alert repeats until someone responds | The confirmed ETA, the moment you give one |
| Backup contact | Not used | Offered the job if you don’t reply |
| Where it ends | unreachable after two re-alerts | declined or expired |
Turn the loop on in Settings → Emergency Dispatch. It needs texting enabled on the account, and carriers may filter the offers until your A2P registration is approved.
The AI knows which mode it’s in and promises accordingly. In the default mode it says the alert “keeps alerting them until someone responds”; with the loop on it says you’ll get a text with the real ETA the moment the job is confirmed.
Alert and acknowledge (the default)
Section titled “Alert and acknowledge (the default)”The AI collects the emergency and StrandCalls texts your dispatch alert phone:
URGENT from [caller name] [caller phone]: [reason]. Reply ACK when you’re on it. — StrandCalls for [your business]
Reply ACK (or OK, or GOT IT) from that number and the customer is texted that you’ve got it and will call.
If you don’t, StrandCalls re-alerts on your escalation re-alert window
(default 10 minutes, set in Settings → Safety & Escalation), marking the second
alert 2nd ALERT — and the third FINAL ALERT —. After those two re-alerts go
unanswered the dispatch goes terminal at unreachable: you get an email, the
customer is texted honestly that you’re still being reached, and the system
raises an internal alert. An emergency page is never allowed to die quietly.
If your phone can’t be texted at all — texting off, a carrier block — the alert falls back to email immediately rather than waiting for the retries.
The dispatch loop (opt-in)
Section titled “The dispatch loop (opt-in)”With the loop on, the same emergency becomes an offer you can act on in one tap. Each leg is offered to one phone at a time: you first, then your backup contact if you don’t reply. There is no third leg — after the backup, the job goes terminal and both you and the caller are told.
Reading the same thing in words: an offer sits with one person until they accept
it, pass on it, or run out of time. Accepting takes it off the market; a
number in reply sets the ETA and moves the job to en route; DONE closes it.
A pass or a timeout moves the offer to your backup contact, and a pass or
timeout there ends the job as declined or expired — with an honest text
to the caller, an email to you, and an internal alert.
If a job has no backup contact configured, your own pass or timeout is the end of the loop.
Reply keywords
Section titled “Reply keywords”| Reply | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | You accept. The caller is texted that you took the job. You’ll be asked for an ETA. |
| 2 | You pass. The job moves to your backup contact, or ends if there isn’t one. |
| a number, 3–480 | Sets your ETA in minutes. Sent from an open offer, this accepts and sets the ETA in one text. |
| DONE | Closes a job you accepted. |
| ACK / OK / GOT IT | Acknowledges an alert in the default mode. |
Replies work from the phone the offer went to. You can also accept, pass, and close jobs from Dispatches in the dashboard.
Settings, and where each one lives
Section titled “Settings, and where each one lives”Two screens are involved, which is easy to trip over.
Settings → Emergency Dispatch
- Emergency dispatch loop — the on/off switch for everything in the section above.
- Offer timeout (minutes per leg) — how long each person has to reply before the offer moves on. Default 5 minutes, and values outside 1–60 are pulled back into that range.
- Backup contact — chosen from your contacts; “None” means the job expires with you.
- Evening rate starts / Late-night rate starts — the boundaries used to pick a minimum charge. Defaults 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM; the day band starts at 7:00 AM.
- Minimum call-out charges — the table below.
Settings → Safety & Escalation
- Dispatch alert phone — where urgent pages go. Defaults to your business phone.
- Escalation re-alert window — the re-alert cadence in the default mode. Default 10 minutes.
Minimum call-out charges
Section titled “Minimum call-out charges”Emergency work is the one place the AI quotes a price that isn’t in your service catalog — and it still never invents one. You set a floor per job type and per time band:
| Day (from 7:00 AM) | Evening | Late night | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home lockout, vehicle lockout, tow, stuck garage door, water leak, no heat, no cool, or other | your figure | your figure | your figure |
When the caller’s job matches a filled-in cell, the AI reads it back word-for-word — “the minimum call-out charge right now is $149, is that okay?” — and will not dispatch until the caller clearly says yes. Leave a cell blank and the AI quotes nothing for that combination and dispatches without the question.
The figure is frozen onto the job when it’s dispatched, so editing the table never changes a price a caller has already been given, and the offer text you receive carries the amount that was quoted.
Honest ETAs only
Section titled “Honest ETAs only”The AI never promises the customer an arrival time you didn’t give. Before you provide one it tells the caller the truth — that you’re being reached right now — instead of inventing “within the hour”. A fake ETA is the fastest way to lose a customer permanently, so the product refuses to produce one.
The same applies to queueing. Your offer text says which position the job is in (counted across emergencies opened in the last four hours), and if a caller is behind someone else the AI tells them so rather than implying an empty queue. A caller who has raised three or more urgent requests in 24 hours is flagged as a repeat caller in the text you get, so you can judge it before you commit.
Location pins
Section titled “Location pins”For jobs where the address is the hard part — a boat, a dock, a car on the shoulder — the AI can offer to text the caller a link that shares their exact location.
- The link expires 30 minutes after it’s sent.
- The pin lands on the dispatch record and is texted as a map link to whoever currently holds the job — which after acceptance is the person actually driving.
- If the caller’s position moves more than about 100 metres, an updated link is sent; small GPS drift is ignored.
- A caller who declines the link, or whose phone can’t open it, is asked for cross-streets or a landmark instead. The verbal location is always collected first — the pin is an upgrade, not the plan.
For lockouts and tows the AI also asks who the account or registration is in the name of, and tells the caller the technician will ask for ID on arrival.
Availability by plan
Section titled “Availability by plan”Emergency dispatch, urgent_dispatch, and every safety script ship on every
plan. Trust features are never tier-gated. See
Plans and billing.