A homeowner calls at 8:15 on a January evening and says the power is out. That sentence covers three completely different situations, and the person answering your phone has about ninety seconds to figure out which one it is.
It might be the utility, in which case there is nothing you can bill for and no reason to send anyone. It might be a tripped breaker behind a space heater, which is a five-minute conversation and a next-day slot if the customer wants one. Or it might be a failing service entrance, a burnt neutral, or water sitting in a panel, and that is the call where somebody needs to be moving in the next hour.
Shops lose money in both directions on this. Roll a truck on a utility outage and you have burned two hours of overtime on a call the customer will fight the invoice on. Push a real fault to the morning and you find out at 6 a.m. what a scorched panel smells like. The fix is a short, ordered script that the person on the phone runs the same way every time, whether that is your on-call tech, your office manager, or an after-hours service.
The first three questions
Ask these in order. The order matters, because the first two questions eliminate the majority of calls before anyone talks about scheduling.
The first is whether the neighbors have power. "Look out the front window. Are your neighbors' lights on? What about the streetlight?" If the whole block is dark, this is the utility, and the customer needs the utility's outage number, not your truck. Keep that number written on the same card as the script, for every utility in your service area. Handing it over in eight seconds is a small thing that customers remember.
The second is whether the outage is the whole house or part of it. "Is it everything, or are some rooms still working?" Partial outage means power is reaching the house, so the problem is on the customer's side of the meter. That is your work. Full outage with neighbors lit up is usually a service or main breaker issue, also your work, and generally a more urgent version of it.
The third is a safety question, and it is asked on every outage call regardless of the first two answers. "Before we go further: do you smell anything burning or hot, do you see or hear any sparking or buzzing, and is there any water near the panel or where the wires come into the house?" One yes on that question moves the call to the top of the queue and changes what you say next.
Add a fourth question when the outage is partial: "Are the lights that still work going bright and then dim?" That surging pattern points at an open neutral on the service, which can push high voltage through half the circuits in the house and cook electronics while the customer waits. Treat it as urgent even though the house is not fully dark.
What to say when the answer is burning, sparks, or water
This is the part of the script that should be memorized rather than paraphrased, because the person on the phone will be talking to someone who is nervous and the instructions need to be unambiguous.
For a burning smell or visible smoke, the instruction is to get everyone out of the house and call 911 from outside. Not to look for the source. Not to open the panel. Out, then 911, then call you back from the sidewalk. A hot-plastic smell around a panel or an outlet is the one situation where the fire department gets there before the electrician does, and no one at your shop should ever be talked out of that by a customer who does not want to make a fuss.
For sparking, arcing, or a buzzing panel, tell the customer to stay away from it and not to touch the main breaker. People reach for the main because it feels like the responsible thing to do. Standing in front of an arcing panel to operate it is exactly the wrong move for someone with no gear and no training.
For water, whether that is a leak above the panel, a flooded basement, or a wet meter base after a storm, the rule is no contact with the panel and no wading in to check. If the customer can kill power from a dry, safe spot, fine. If not, they wait for you or for the utility.
Then there is the customer who has already reset the same breaker three times. Tell them to stop. A breaker that trips again immediately is doing its job and reporting a fault, and resetting into a short is how a nuisance call becomes a fire call. "Leave it off until we're there" is the whole answer.
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Dispatch tonight, or slot it for tomorrow
Once safety is cleared, the routing decision is mostly mechanical. A few conditions justify pulling someone out after hours:
- Any burning smell, scorch mark, arcing, or heat at the panel or the service entrance
- Water in contact with electrical equipment
- Total outage with the neighbors' power on, which points at the service, the meter, or the main
- Lights surging bright and dim on a partial outage, the open-neutral pattern
- Loss of power to medical equipment, well pumps in freezing weather, or heat in a house with an infant or an elderly resident
Everything else can hold until morning, and saying so plainly is better service than a vague maybe. A single tripped branch circuit with no smell and no heat, a GFCI that will not reset, a dead bedroom outlet, a light fixture that stopped working: those are next-day calls. Book the slot on the call, give a two-hour arrival window, and tell the customer what to leave alone in the meantime.
Do not let the customer's urgency set your dispatch. People are frightened of the dark and of the word "electrical," and everyone calling at 8 p.m. believes their situation qualifies. The script decides, and the script was written by someone with a license during business hours.
Say the after-hours number before the truck rolls
Every emergency dispatch gets the rate disclosed out loud, before the tech leaves, in a sentence the customer confirms. Whatever your structure is, name it. The after-hours minimum, the hourly rate once the minimum is used up, the trip charge, and whether parts are separate.
"Our after-hours call is a [amount] minimum, which covers the trip and the first hour on site. After that it's [rate] an hour, and any parts are on top of that. Is that okay for me to send someone now?"
Then get a yes and write down the time you got it. Customers agree to a lot at 8 p.m. and remember it differently on Friday when the invoice arrives, and a note in the record showing the rate was quoted and accepted ends that conversation before it starts. This is also where you avoid two promises that will come back at you. Do not quote a repair price before anyone has seen the panel, and do not put a date on any inspection or utility coordination that a third party controls. You can say what you will do that night. You cannot say when the utility will reconnect or when an inspector will sign off.
The notes the morning crew needs
The after-hours call should produce a record that a dispatcher can read cold at 7 a.m.: the time, the address, whether the neighbors had power, whole house or partial, the answers to the safety question, whether a breaker was tripping and which one, what the customer was told, whether a truck was sent, and whether the rate was quoted and accepted. Six lines. It is the difference between a morning call that starts with "I see you called last night about the kitchen circuit" and one that starts with "can you tell me what happened again?"
The harder problem is having the phone answered at all. Outage calls arrive in clusters, in bad weather, at the hour your office is empty, and a voicemail box collects them for a morning that arrives too late to matter. An answering service or an AI receptionist can run this script and hand the on-call tech a call that is already sorted. Whichever way you cover it, the check is the same: call your own after-hours line tonight, say the power is out, and see what comes back.
More on staffing the phone outside business hours in our electrical resources.