In the forty-eight hours after a storm, a slow page is the same as a business that never opened.
Nobody in this situation is browsing
Hail took the roof off in twenty minutes. A limb came through the ceiling in the ice. The power has been out two days and the freezer is going.
They are not assessing your workmanship. Three things, fast: you handle hail-stripped roofs, you come to the Plaza District, this is the number.
The whole metro searches at the same moment
When a system crosses, every household decides inside about two days. That is more traffic in forty-eight hours than the previous quarter.
Say what you can still do and by when, in plain words at the top. Honesty about being booked out earns more goodwill than silence, and people remember it afterwards.
Assume the network is loaded and the power is off
Everybody is on their phone at once, the towers are saturated, and a lot of people are running on battery because the lines are down.
Build for the customer out on a metal shop building and the calm one takes care of itself. Words first, images after, nothing standing between the caller and your number.
Buttons a hurried thumb can hit
Standing in a yard full of debris with the wind still up, one hand on the phone. Small links crowded together simply do not get pressed.
Make the call button genuinely large, keep it on screen as the page scrolls, and leave empty space around it so nothing else takes the tap from a hand that has been dealing with a hail-stripped roof for an hour.
Put a stopwatch on it
Next job out past the turnpike with weak signal, try to book yourself through your own form and time it.
The number usually lands badly. What you approved in an office is not what a customer meets standing in a wrecked yard.
