Most automated triage fails for one reason: the crew stops trusting it. If “emergency” keeps turning out to mean “can wait until Tuesday,” your team quietly goes back to eyeballing every call themselves — and the system becomes expensive shelfware.
Triage that holds up reads two things at once: what the job is and how the customer is acting. “No heat, house with a newborn, 9 PM” is not the same as “thinking about a tune-up sometime.” Weight the signals too lightly and everything looks urgent; too heavily and you'll roll a truck for a question a text could have answered.
Just as important is closing the loop. The system's calls should be checked against what your techs actually find on site, then tuned — a rule set once and never revisited drifts out of step with reality within a season. Your crew's feedback is the training data.
Get it right and triage stops being something your team overrides. It becomes the reason the right truck rolls to the right job first — and the reason nobody's arguing about the schedule at 7 AM.