The Prior-Repair Intake SOP

Purpose

To capture, on the phone, that someone has already worked on the system before your tech arrives, and to convert that fact into a longer block, a different price frame, a preserved piece of evidence, and a safety check on arrival. A prior-repair call booked as an ordinary service call is the most reliable way a shop loses an hour it never billed and walks a tech into a system that was reassembled by someone who did not document it.

Scope

Applies to every inbound service request, on any trade the shop performs, where any part of the system has been opened, adjusted, cleaned, or replaced by anyone other than this shop since it last worked correctly. That includes the customer themselves, a handyman, a relative, a property manager's maintenance staff, another trade working nearby, and another shop in the same trade.

Does not apply to work this shop performed, which is a callback and runs under the callback procedure instead. The distinction matters because a callback is your liability and a prior repair is your inheritance, and they get different scripts, different pricing, and different documentation.

Roles and responsibilities

Procedure

1. Detect the flag

The customer rarely announces it. Listen for the trigger phrases and follow up on any of them:

• "I already changed the ..."
• "My son-in-law had a look at it"
• "The other company was out last month"
• "I watched a video and tried ..."
• "It was fine until somebody was working in there"
• "I cleaned it and now ..."

Any one of these sets the flag. Do not evaluate whether the prior work was relevant. That is a technical judgment made on site, not on the phone.

2. Run the five intake questions, and record the answers in the customer's words

Do not paraphrase and do not summarize. The exact wording carries information a summary destroys.

1. What exactly was done, and by whom? Get the role, not the name: homeowner, handyman, another shop, another trade.
2. What was the system doing before that work? This is the original symptom, and it is the one thing nobody writes down.
3. What was it doing immediately after? Unchanged, better, worse, or different in character.
4. What is it doing now? Compared to immediately after, not compared to before.
5. When was the work done, anchored to something memorable? Before or after a holiday, a storm, a season change, a move. Dates are guesses. Events are not.

Question 3 is the highest-value question in this SOP and the one most often skipped. A symptom that was identical before and after the work tells the tech the replaced component was probably never involved, which is worth an hour on site.

3. Run the safety questions, and act on the answers immediately

The person on the phone does not diagnose. They do give instructions, and the instruction is specific to the hazard.

• "Do you smell gas right now?" If yes: everyone leaves the building immediately, nobody touches a light switch, nobody unplugs anything, nobody uses a phone inside, and they call the gas utility from outside. Then dispatch emergency, not a routine slot.
• "Is anything sparking, buzzing, hot to the touch, or is there a burning smell?" If yes: nobody touches it, they turn the circuit off at the panel only if the panel itself is dry and shows no damage, otherwise they leave it and wait outside the room.
• "Is there any water near the electrical part of it?" If yes: nobody touches either one, and the circuit gets turned off at the panel if that can be reached without going through the water.
• "Is anything left apart, or are there loose wires or open pipes?" If yes: nobody operates it, including switches and thermostats, until the tech arrives.

Record every answer. A "no" on the phone that turns into a "yes" on arrival is worth knowing about.

4. Classify the call

Set one of four classifications, because each carries a different downstream handling:

5. Set the block and the price frame

Flagged prior-repair calls get a 2.0-hour diagnostic block against the shop's standard 1.0-hour block, and the customer is told the block length and the stopping rule on the phone, not on arrival.

The stopping rule, stated to the customer at booking: if the cause is still open when the 2.0 hours are used, the tech stops, reports what has been ruled out, and the customer decides whether to continue. That converts an open-ended job into a bounded one and removes the argument at the end.

Review the block length monthly, per step 10.

6. Make the retain-the-part request

Script it, because an unscripted version gets skipped: "One more thing before I let you go. If you still have the old part, or even just the box the new one came in, set it aside for the tech. It usually tells us why it failed, and it can save you the second visit."

Record whether the customer says they have it, do not have it, or are not sure. "Not sure" is worth a look in the trash on arrival.

7. Write the dispatch note with these fields filled

The dispatch note is not free text. Fixed fields survive a busy morning:

Prior work by / What was done / Symptom before / Symptom right after / Symptom now / Anchored date / Safety answers / Old part retained / Classification / Block.

An empty field is a fact too. Blank means nobody asked, and the tech needs to know that so they ask on arrival.

8. Technician arrival check, before anything is energized or pressurized

Non-negotiable and it happens before diagnosis, not as part of it.

• On any electrical work, open and lock or tag the disconnect before working on a circuit that could become energized, which is the requirement at 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2) for general industry and at 29 CFR 1926.417 where the work falls under construction rules, then prove dead with a meter checked on a known live source immediately before and immediately after the check, per NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5. Discharge stored electrical energy before reaching in.
• Where a spring, accumulator, counterweight, or pressurized vessel may have been left partly released, isolate, block and relieve the stored energy before disassembly under 29 CFR 1910.147, and confirm relief on a gauge or by physical movement rather than by handle position.
• Where a gas train was opened, leak-test every disturbed joint with a listed leak-detection solution or a combustible-gas detector before any attempt to fire the appliance.

Then photograph the reassembled state before touching anything, and confirm or contradict each intake field. Intake is a hypothesis. The tech is the source of truth.

9. Close the record

The closing note carries five things: what the prior work actually was, whether it was related to the fault, what the real cause was, what could not be determined because evidence was destroyed, and what the warranty covers given that.

The fourth item protects the shop. If the failed part was discarded and the surfaces were cleaned, say so, and say that the diagnosis rests on live testing rather than on failure evidence.

10. Monthly review and block adjustment

The service manager pulls the flagged calls monthly and computes the median on-site diagnostic time across them, using a median rather than an average so one runaway job does not move the number.

If the median exceeds the current block by more than 25%, raise the block by 0.5 hour. If the median sits below 60% of the block for two consecutive months, lower it by 0.5 hour. Move in 0.5-hour steps only, one step per review, because a block that jumps around teaches the office to ignore it. Require at least 5 flagged calls in the month before adjusting at all; below that the median is noise.

The filled-in record

This is the artifact this SOP produces. One real call, every field completed.

How to read this record before you drive. Two entries do most of the work. "Exactly the same, no different at all" says the replaced component almost certainly was not the cause, so the tech should not spend the visit re-proving it and should instead treat it as one more item to verify quickly and move past. "Yes, in the garage, with the box" says the strongest piece of evidence on the job is intact, so reading the old part comes early rather than as an afterthought.

What a blank row would have meant. If "Symptom right after" had been empty, the tech would arrive with no way to tell a partial repair from an unrelated one, and would have to rebuild that answer on site from a customer whose memory has now been overwritten by three weeks of the current symptom. That is the specific hour this SOP exists to save, and it is why the field is asked on the phone while the comparison is still fresh.

References

• 29 CFR 1910.333(b)(2), and 29 CFR 1926.417 for the same work under construction rules, on de-energizing and locking or tagging circuits before work
• NFPA 70E-2021, 120.5 for the live-dead-live instrument proving sequence
• 29 CFR 1910.147 on isolating and relieving stored mechanical energy before disassembly
• See related: How to Diagnose After the Customer Already Replaced a Part
• See related: Reading the Prior Work: Good or Bad