- 1 in 60
- Insured homes with a water or freezing claim each year
- Every 96 sec
- A home structure fire is reported somewhere in the US
The plumber called at 2:40am.
The next company answered.
Contractor Connection's published window for accepting a mitigation assignment. Its network contractors are graded on a monthly scorecard.
Contractor Connection (Crawford & Company), program performance metricsEPA: "It is important to dry water-damaged areas and items within 24-48 hours to prevent mold growth." The clock starts at the loss.
EPA, A Brief Guide to Mold, Moisture and Your HomeAverage fire and lightning homeowners claim, 2018–2022. Water and freezing averages $13,954. Both start with a phone call.
Insurance Information Institute, citing ISO (Verisk), 2018–2022Share of the average restorer's workload that is TPA program work, down from 23% in 2018. The other 80% has no SLA protecting it.
Clear Seas Research / Restoration & RemediationThis is the whole
product, out loud.
A call is a form being filled in out loud. Watch the intake sheet complete itself as the conversation runs.
2:40 a.m. A braided supply line under a second-floor bathroom sink failed about an hour ago. The plumber is on site with the homeowner.
- Cloverly
Cascade Restoration. Para español, oprima dos. Is this an active loss?
- Caller
Yeah. Dave Ruiz, Ruiz Plumbing. I'm at a house in Orem — supply line let go under an upstairs bathroom sink, been running maybe an hour.
- Cloverly
Dave, first thing — is the water shut off? And is it clean supply, or is any of this coming off a drain or a sewer?
Shut-off decides what happens in the next hour, and voicemail never asks it. The source gets recorded; the category stays the technician's call on site under S500.
- Caller
Killed it at the main five minutes ago. Clean — cold supply, braided line failed at the nut. It's through the kitchen ceiling and down the basement stairwell, though. Two floors plus the crawl.
- Cloverly
Roughly how much area and what's on the floors — and is the power on, building safe to walk?
- Caller
Carpet, drywall, LVP. Call it twelve hundred feet. Power's on, panel's dry. Owner's right here — Michelle.
- Cloverly
Michelle, sorry about the hour. Do you know your carrier and policy number, and has a claim been opened? I'm not going to tell you what's covered — that's between you and your adjuster. And Dave, you're on the file as the referral: Ruiz Plumbing.
It captures claim data and refuses coverage questions in the same breath — and records who sent the call, which is how the owner knows which plumber to keep feeding.
- Caller
State Farm. Policy's on the app — H O four four seven one nine six. No claim yet.
- Cloverly
Then this goes to the on-call tech now as an emergency water loss: clean supply line, source shut off, two floors plus a crawl, about twelve hundred feet, State Farm with no claim opened. He calls you back to confirm when he's rolling. He won't need to ask any of this again.
The callback is to confirm arrival, not to re-run the intake. That is the difference between a message and a file.
The on-call tech has the first page of the claim file: cause of loss, source shut off, clean supply line with the category left for the tech, affected floors and square footage, materials, power and safety, carrier, policy number, no claim opened, and the plumber who sent it. Nobody was told what the claim is worth, and Dave got a person instead of a mailbox.
- Loss type
- Cause of loss, and the date and time of loss
- Whether water is still running, and whether the source is shut off
- Where the water came from
- What's wet: floors affected, approximate square footage, materials
- Property type and occupancy
- Power on, and whether the building is safe to enter
- Carrier, policy number, claim number, adjuster
- Who the caller is, and who can authorize work
- Who referred the call, and a callback number read back
The judgment is yours.
It just applies it every time.
Water, fire, smoke, mold, or sewage. It routes the call, the crew, and the equipment, and everything after it depends on getting it right.
Supply line, drain line, appliance, roof, storm, sprinkler, sewer backup, cooking, electrical. Date of loss is a separate field from date of discovery, and carriers care about the gap.
The most operationally important answer on the call. A live source changes what the tech brings and how fast he leaves.
Supply, drain, sewer, or outside groundwater — the inputs your tech needs to assign a category on arrival. Cloverly records them and assigns nothing.
Carpet, hardwood, drywall, LVP, cabinetry, and how many floors it has migrated through. It sizes the equipment load before anyone drives out.
Single family, multi-family, or commercial, and occupied, vacant, or tenant-occupied. A vacant property that ran for two days is a different job than one caught in an hour.
Standing water with a live panel, structural damage, or a fire the department has not released is an escalation, not an appointment.
Without it somebody has to call back to start the claim — which is exactly the moment the homeowner shops around.
Homeowner, tenant, plumber, property manager, adjuster, or TPA. No documented authorization means a payment fight on a job that already has equipment on the floor.
Referral source is how you know which plumber to keep feeding, and most answering services never capture it. Every other field is worthless if the number is wrong.
InsteadRecords the source, how long it has been standing, and what it has traveled through. Your technician assigns Cat 1, 2, or 3 on site under S500.
InsteadTakes the intake and holds an inspection window. The estimate gets written against the carrier's price list, not over the phone at 2am.
InsteadCaptures carrier, policy, claim number and adjuster, and sends coverage questions to the adjuster where they belong.
InsteadRecords what the caller already knows and leaves the advice to their carrier and to you.
InsteadRecords who has authority to sign. The authorization gets signed on site by the person who can sign it.
InsteadEscalates. Live power in standing water, structural damage, or a fire scene the department has not released goes to a human, not onto the board.
InsteadTakes the details and hands the call to you rather than committing you to it.
A generic receptionist
doesn’t know your year.
You write these once. Every call after that follows them the same way, at 2am as at 2pm.
- Water still running with the source not shut off
- Warm transfer. Everything about the next hour changes depending on whether it stops, and that conversation belongs to your tech.
- Sewage backup, toilet overflow past the trap, or floodwater from outside
- Warm transfer. Category 3 indicators change PPE, containment, and scope before anybody rolls a truck.
- Standing water with power on, water at an electrical panel, or arcing
- Tells the caller to stay out of it and warm transfers. Visible fire: 911 first, always.
- Fire or smoke loss, structure just released by the fire department
- Warm transfer. Board-up and securing the structure is same-night work, not a morning callback.
- A TPA or carrier call center on the line with an assignment
- Warm transfer, no exceptions. Contractor Connection publishes a 15-minute mitigation acceptance window and a three-way call within an hour on emergencies. That clock runs while your phone rings.
- A plumber, adjuster, or property manager calling from a job site
- Warm transfer. That is a referral source standing in front of a customer, deciding right now who to call next.
- Commercial property, multi-unit, or tenants displaced
- Warm transfer. Different rate, different crew, and often a lease or a contract with a response clock on it.
- Mold inspections, contents cleaning, odor complaints, reconstruction estimates, past-loss follow-up
- Booked on the schedule. Nobody gets woken up.
Restoration has no off-season. It has a rotation. About one in 60 insured homes files a water damage or freezing claim each year, and the largest of those events land in a handful of overnight hours — Winter Storm Uri, February 12–20, 2021, produced $14.9 billion in insured losses across 21 states, the costliest US winter event on record. Fire doesn't rotate at all: NFPA counted a home structure fire reported every 96 seconds in 2024.
Burst supply lines and split hose bibs. Temperatures bottom out overnight, so the losses start overnight, and vacant holiday properties run for hours before anyone finds them.
Groundwater intrusion, sump failures, roof leaks — and the mold calls from January losses that nobody dried inside the window.
Water heaters, washer hoses, ice makers, and second-floor bathrooms. Steady volume, less clustering, and the season your crews have capacity to take reconstruction.
The first cold snap finds every neglected system. Furnace and heating-appliance losses start, and holiday travel leaves houses empty when the first hard freeze arrives.
329,500 home structure fires in 2024, $11.4 billion in damage, an average of $32,500 per structure fire. Fire losses have no season and arrive at every hour of the clock.
A caller can tell within one sentence whether the person on the line has done this before. The script is written in restoration language.
The job. Operators say "we got a loss," "water loss," "fire job" — never "water damage incident."
Extraction, demo, and drying. Small revenue on its own, and the reason you're standing in the building when the reconstruction gets scoped.
Reconstruction. Drywall, flooring, cabinetry, paint. Where the dollars actually are.
Water contamination level under S500 — sanitary, significantly contaminated, grossly contaminated. Assigned by a technician on site, never over the phone.
Drying difficulty, based on how much of the assembly is wet and how porous it is.
The IICRC standards for water damage restoration and for mold remediation. The procedural spine of the trade.
Verisk's estimating platform and the regional price list you're billing against. You're a price-taker on line items and compete on scope, documentation, and cycle time.
Third-party administrator. Volume at a rate cut, with compliance metrics and scorecards attached. About 20% of the average restorer's workload.
One never sees the property and works from your documentation. The other stands in it. You write for both.
LGR dehumidifier. Every one sitting on a floor is capital not earning somewhere else.
The fan. Placement and count come out of the drying plan, not out of the truck inventory.
Daily moisture readings and psychrometrics. It's the evidence the job was done, and the thing an adjuster cuts you on when it's thin.
Cutting drywall a set height above the water line. Two feet is the reflex; the meter decides.
Removing contents for cleaning and storage, then pack-back when the structure is finished.
First notice of loss. Which is what your phone call at 2:40am actually is.
Everything above,
with its receipts.
Program work is graded in minutes
Contractor Connection states on its own site that mitigation assignments are accepted within 15 minutes of the consumer call, that emergency crews are on-site within four hours, and that network contractors receive a monthly electronic scorecard grading their performance. Its call center runs a three-way call with the homeowner and the assigned contractor within one hour on emergencies. One program, publishing its own numbers — Alacrity, Accuserve and Sedgwick publish no time windows at all. None of it works if the phone rings out.
The drying window starts at the loss, not at the callback
EPA's guidance is to dry water-damaged areas and materials within 24 to 48 hours to prevent mold growth. That window opens when the supply line lets go, not when someone returns the call at eight. Every hour spent waiting on a callback is spent inside it. Cloverly answers on the first ring, gets the address, the cause of loss, and whether the water has been shut off, and reaches your on-call tech.
A missed call costs more than a job
A plumber pulls a failed braided line at 2am. The homeowner needs water out tonight. He calls his restoration company and gets voicemail, so he calls the next one on the list — and that company is his restoration company now. Not for one job. For every job after it. The loss is not one mitigation ticket, it is the referral channel behind it. This is a mechanism you can check against your own book, not a statistic.
Somebody in the trade already described the fix
Jeff Diem, who owns Elkmont Estimates, wrote in Restoration & Remediation: "If your on-call tech fails to make a first contact late at night, be sure there's a backup." Elsewhere he describes program work requiring him "to make contact with a homeowner in less than two hours." He is not a Cloverly customer and has no connection to us. He is describing the problem this product exists to cover.
Jeff Diem, Elkmont Estimates, in Restoration & Remediation, May 2024
Losses do not arrive one at a time
NFPA counted 329,500 home structure fires in 2024, one reported every 96 seconds, and $11.4 billion in direct property damage — an average of $32,500 per structure fire. Freeze events put every burst pipe in your market on the phone in the same six overnight hours; Winter Storm Uri alone produced $14.9 billion in insured losses across 21 states. Cloverly answers every caller at once. A storm night produces a triage list instead of a full mailbox.
Then the question isn't the rotation, it's the fallback. What happens on the calls the on-call tech misses because he's already on a job, driving, or asleep? Jeff Diem — an insurance restoration operator with no connection to us — put it in Restoration & Remediation: if your on-call tech fails to make a first contact late at night, be sure there's a backup. Cloverly doesn't replace the rotation. It answers so the rotation never produces a voicemail.
Fair, and we're not going to argue it beats a good human on that call. What it does reliably is pick up on the first ring, get the address, ask whether the water is shut off, take the carrier and policy information, record who referred the call, and reach your on-call tech. If the caller wants a person, it hands the call over. The comparison isn't AI versus your best estimator. It's AI versus a mailbox at 2:40am.
Then compare on what they actually capture. Pull last month's message logs and count how many contain where the water came from, whether the source was shut off, the square footage affected, the carrier, and who referred the call. A message service takes a name and a number. The intake is the first page of the claim file, and an incomplete one costs you downstream, at the adjuster's desk.
That's the argument for answering, not against it. A homeowner might leave a voicemail. A plumber with a customer standing in front of him at 2am does not — he calls the next name on the list, and that name is his restoration company from then on. You're not risking one mitigation ticket. You're risking the channel.
Because the things that hurt a claim are the things it's built not to do. It doesn't assign a category, doesn't scope, doesn't estimate, doesn't tell a homeowner what's covered, and doesn't advise on a policy or a deductible. It takes intake and holds an inspection window. Every judgment call stays yours, on site.
Straight answers.
It knows what the categories are and it knows it is not the one who assigns them. It asks the questions that let your tech make the call on arrival — where the water came from, supply line or drain line or sewer, how long it has been standing, what it has traveled through, whether anything organic is in it. It records the answers verbatim. Assigning the category is your technician's job under S500, on site. A generic AI receptionist does not know the question exists.
Yes, and it is the reason the intake is worth anything. Carrier, policy number, claim number if one has been opened, adjuster name and contact if one is assigned, whether the homeowner has contacted their carrier yet, and who has authority to sign a work authorization. It also records who referred the call, which is the field most answering services never capture at all. A missing carrier means someone calls back in the morning to start the claim, and that is the phone call where the homeowner starts shopping.
The same thing that happens at 2pm. It answers on the first ring, gets the property address, the loss type, whether the water is shut off, how far it has traveled, and the plumber's callback number, and it records that the plumber referred it. Then it reaches your on-call tech per the rules you set. The plumber gets a person. If he gets a mailbox instead, he dials the next company on his list, and that company becomes his restoration company.
It answers all of them. That is the one thing a phone system and an on-call tech cannot do — it is not single-threaded, so caller nineteen gets the same live answer as caller one instead of a queue. What you get in the morning is a triage list with the category inputs, the square footage, and the carrier on each one, so you can sort by severity and proximity instead of by who left the longest voicemail.
Contractor Connection publishes a 15-minute mitigation acceptance window, four-hour emergency on-site arrival, a monthly electronic scorecard grading network contractors, and a three-way call with the homeowner within one hour on emergencies. That is one program's published numbers — Alacrity, Accuserve and Sedgwick publish no time windows, so we are not going to tell you the whole industry works that way. What Cloverly does is answer, so a human being asleep is never the reason a first contact was late. It does not accept assignments in a TPA portal and it does not manage your scorecard.
No, on both. It captures carrier, policy and claim information and it stops there. It does not estimate the loss, does not quote mitigation, does not tell anyone what their carrier will pay, and does not advise on a deductible or on whether to file. Those conversations belong to the adjuster and to you, at the property, with eyes on the damage.
It will not. If a caller asks, it repeats EPA's guidance — dry water-damaged areas and items within 24 to 48 hours to prevent mold growth — and says your technician assesses the actual conditions on arrival. EPA presents that as guidance, not a guarantee, and growth depends on temperature, humidity, and material. Nobody makes a promise about mold over the phone.
It matters because it is measurable. Clear Seas found TPA program work is about 20% of the average restorer's workload, down from 23% in 2018. That means roughly 80% of your work has no contract obliging anyone to route it to you — it arrives by unscheduled phone call from a plumber, an adjuster, a property manager, or a homeowner who found you. The TPA numbers just prove that speed is something the industry already measures in minutes. On the other 80%, answering first is purely competitive.
Call it
yourself.
Leave your cell and it calls you — so the first thing you hear is the product taking a restoration call. Or book 30 minutes with the team and we'll write your script on the call.
Call the AI that would answer your phone.
Pick your trade, leave your cell. The AI calls you back and takes the call the way it would take one for your shop.
We’re taking our first
restoration shops now.
You’d be early, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Month to month, setup waived, and thirty days to decide — if it hasn’t booked you a job in that window, we refund the month in full.