The technician drives out, rings the bell, and nobody answers. The gate is locked, the code doesn’t work, the tenant was never told, the dog is loose in the yard. It’s the most expensive kind of empty visit: the hour and the truck are spent, there’s nothing to invoice, and the slot is gone.
Almost all of these are predictable. Here’s where they come from, how to head them off, what to do at the door, and what Exoserva does and doesn’t do about it today.
Where no-access visits come from
- The customer forgot. They booked a week ago and life moved on.
- The window was too wide. “Between 8 and 12” — they stepped out at 11:30.
- The wrong person. The owner booked it, a tenant lives there and nobody told them. Or the other way round.
- Nobody asked about access. Gate code, where the key is, where to park, which entrance.
- A wrong or dead phone number. The technician can’t reach anyone ten minutes out.
- Something on site. A dog, a locked garage, the power off at the panel, a building manager who won’t let anyone in without written permission.
Prevention: a checklist for the booking call
- Ask about access while you’re booking. Three questions: who will be home, is there a code or a special entrance, are there animals. Write the answers where the technician will see them.
- Separate the customer from the person at the door. If an owner or a property manager is booking, get the phone number of whoever actually opens it.
- Narrow the window, or promise a call. A two-hour window plus an “on my way” message beats “sometime in the morning”.
- Confirm the day before. A short message or call the day before removes most of the “I forgot” cases.
- Say the rule before the visit, not on the doorstep. If you charge for a trip when nobody’s home, say so when you book.
At the door
- Call and text — twice, a few minutes apart.
- Wait a set time. Many companies use 10–15 minutes. What matters is that it’s the same number for everyone on the team.
- Record the attempt: arrival time, the calls, what you saw. A time-stamped photo of the door or gate ends the argument before it starts.
- Tell the office and offer a new time while the customer is still reachable.
- Close the visit honestly. Don’t mark work complete that didn’t happen.
What Exoserva does about it today
Checked against the release running on 30 September 2026 — including the parts that don’t work yet.
What helps:
- Notes from the online booking form. The form has an Additional Notes field, prompting for “Gate code, special instructions…”. The text lands in the job description as its own
Notes:line, and in the customer’s Inbox thread as part of the booking summary — the office often finds it faster there. - Where the technician sees it. On a job they’re working, it’s the Additional Notes box in the Services & Materials block. On a closed job, it’s the Description row of the Job details card.
- Reaching the customer from the job page. Call, Text and Copy buttons sit next to the phone number. Text opens Exoserva’s own SMS window — it checks SMS consent and logs the message to the conversation, rather than handing off to the phone’s Messages app — and it only appears when the job is linked to a customer record. Call dials through Exoserva, so the call is recorded and transcribed; it falls back to the phone’s dialler only if the voice module isn’t loaded.
- The technician’s status buttons. On My Way moves the job to En Route and sends the customer two texts and an email: an arrival estimate of “approximately 30 minutes”, and “is now on the way”. Arrived records the arrival time and sends one text — unless work was already started, in which case it stays quiet. The 30 minutes is a fixed number in the template, not a GPS calculation: if the technician is further out, call.
- Turning those messages off. Settings → SMS Notifications has four switches: On My Way (which covers both of its messages), Technician arrived, Work started and Job completed. All are on by default.
- A reason on every cancellation. Cancelling asks for a reason and won’t confirm without one. Customer not available is in the list — use it consistently and it becomes a number you can act on.
- Access details on properties (Scale plan and up). Inside a property, Edit Unit → Access & Notes holds Door Code, Lockbox Code, Key Location and Access Instructions.
What doesn’t work yet — plan around it:
- Those access fields never reach the technician. They live only in the Properties section, and the standard Technician role has no access to it. Until that changes, copy the gate code and entry instructions into the job notes — that’s the one place the technician will see them.
- The technician’s status buttons are refused on the standard Technician role. That role may edit only a job’s title, description and notes, so every status change — On My Way, Arrived, Start, Complete — comes back as a permission error. The workaround is to give technicians a role with the full job-update permission, but know what you’re granting: that permission isn’t limited to their own jobs, so they’ll be able to edit any job in the company. Otherwise the office sends the messages.
- Reminders depend on how the appointment was booked. A customer booking online gets reminders 24 hours, 1 hour and 30 minutes before — as both a text and an email — but only if they ticked the SMS box, which is unchecked by default. An appointment booked by the AI assistant over chat or text gets the same three reminders as texts only, with no box involved. An appointment booked by the voice assistant queues reminders that carry no phone or email, so nothing is ever delivered.
- Moving a visit doesn’t move its reminders. They’re queued when the appointment is made and keep the original date, so a rescheduled customer can still be reminded about the old one. Tell them yourself. (Cancelling is safe: reminders for a cancelled job are checked and dropped before sending.)
- Jobs created by your staff send the customer nothing — no confirmation, no reminders. Confirm the day before by phone or from the Inbox, or build it yourself in Workflows on the “Job created” trigger.
- A reply to a reminder confirms nothing. The reminder says “Reply C to confirm”, but nothing processes a C. The reply lands in the Inbox as a normal message, where the AI assistant may answer it. Read it as a conversation, not a confirmation.
- There’s no “nobody home” status. Arrived isn’t a status either — it’s a time stamp on the technician’s own card. Record the attempt in the notes, then either cancel with Customer not available or reschedule.
- No automatic charge for a wasted trip. The invoice has its own Trip charge field, and it fills itself on an invoice raised at job completion when your price book carries a visit price. A cancelled visit raises no invoice at all, so if you charge for it, create that invoice by hand.
What’s your rule: how long do you wait, do you charge for the trip, and how do you tell the customer about it beforehand? Everyone draws this line somewhere different.