Field tools

Withrow Electric — Job Intake & Triage

Give the customer a form that actually scopes the job, and give the office a board where every request arrives already sorted.

Concept — cold pitch, unsolicited Job intake Office triage board Placeholder pricing

See it work

The problem

A trades company's website contact form usually asks for a name, a phone number, an email and a message, and nothing else. That tells the office almost nothing about what's actually wrong — so every request gets the same amount of urgency until someone calls back and asks.

That guesswork cuts both ways. A routine job can get treated like an emergency, and a real emergency can sit in the same queue as everything else because the customer, not knowing any better, called it "whenever's fine."

What it does

Customer request form (/)

The customer picks a service and answers a few scoping questions, then gets an instant confirmation with a priority, a ballpark price range and a callback window.

Office triage board (/office)

An internal board sorted New / Quoted / Scheduled / Complete, with emergencies always shown first.

Why this beats the old form (/why)

A straight before-and-after pitch against Withrow's current four-field contact form.

The moment that sells it: choose Electrical Repairs, tick "Burning smell or scorch marks," and leave urgency on Flexible — the customer never said this was urgent. The form overrides them anyway: Emergency, callback within 1 hour, with the reasoning printed right underneath, because safety beats what the customer guessed. Set the town to "Somewhere else" and out-of-area gets caught at submit, instead of after a day of phone tag.

How it's built

The business logic that drives all of it lives in two plain files. lib/catalog.js holds the service lines, price bands, towns served, symptoms and crews. lib/triage.js holds the priority weights, what a photo does to the score, and the response windows. Change a number in either file and the form and the board both follow it — nothing is hard-coded into the screens themselves.

What we'd do next

This stays a concept until a business like Withrow decides to run with it. Next would be tuning the price bands and crew list to someone's real numbers, and wiring the confirmation screen to an actual text or email.