Boiler breakdowns and gas safety: how an AI receptionist should handle them

Most calls a heating engineer gets are routine: no hot water, a boiler showing an error code, a service booking. A small number aren't routine at all, and getting those right matters more than almost anything else an answering system does. This is about how AllCalls handles both, and why the gas safety rule specifically is not something we treat as configurable.

The safety rule, stated plainly

If a caller mentions smelling gas, on any call, for any business, AllCalls tells them to leave the property immediately and call the National Gas Emergency number, 0800 111 999, and to dial 999 if anyone is in danger. It then flags the call to you as urgent, so you know straight away.

This is not advice we're giving here for the first time: it's the standard guidance for a suspected gas leak in the UK, and it's built into every AllCalls account, for every trade, whether or not the business does gas work at all. It can't be switched off or reworded by a tenant, because it's the one thing that has to be consistent no matter who's set up the account or how.

To be completely clear about what this is and isn't: AllCalls is not a substitute for the National Gas Emergency service or for 999. It doesn't assess how serious a leak is, it doesn't dispatch anyone, and it doesn't replace an engineer's judgement. All it does is make sure the caller is told, immediately and correctly, who to contact, and that the business is told the same thing has happened so a human being knows too.

Why this can't wait for a human to review it

A gas leak call is exactly the kind of situation where a delay of even a few minutes matters. If a caller phones a heating engineer's number describing a gas smell and the call goes to voicemail, or gets logged for review the next morning, that's a genuinely dangerous gap. Building the instruction into the call itself, rather than relying on a human noticing a message later, is the point.

What a routine boiler breakdown call looks like instead

Most calls to a heating and gas engineer aren't safety emergencies, and treating them like one would be as unhelpful as under-reacting to a real one. A typical no-heat call goes like this:

• The caller explains what's happened: no heating, no hot water, an error code on the display, or a pilot light that's gone out.
• The assistant asks for enough detail to be useful when you call back, including the address, a callback number, and whatever the caller can read off the boiler display, without trying to diagnose the fault itself.
• It checks whether this counts as urgent under your own rules, for example if you've flagged "no heating in cold weather for an elderly or vulnerable customer" as something that should reach you fast.
• It reads the details back to the caller, then tells them someone will be in touch, without promising a specific arrival time it hasn't been given.

If the caller's boiler issue turns out to involve a gas smell too, the safety rule above takes priority over the rest of the conversation, every time.

What it means for your business

If you're a heating or gas engineer setting up AllCalls, there's nothing for you to configure for the gas leak rule itself: it's already there. What you do configure is everything else around it: your working hours, your FAQ, what else counts as urgent for your business, such as a boiler leaking water rather than gas, or a total loss of heating for a customer you know is vulnerable.

It's also worth being upfront with customers and staff that this is how the system behaves. If someone calls your business line and mentions gas, they'll be told to leave the property and call 0800 111 999, and to dial 999 if anyone's in danger, before the conversation goes any further. That's by design, and it happens the same way regardless of what else is going on in the call.

The bigger picture

An AI receptionist that gets the safety-critical calls wrong isn't worth having, no matter how well it handles the routine ones. We'd rather the gas leak rule be rigid and predictable than clever: it does exactly one thing, every time, and lets a human take it from there.

See the full set of call types heating and gas engineers deal with on AllCalls for heating and gas engineers, or read how urgency detection works generally on How it works.