A homeowner with a drip over the kitchen and a facilities manager with ponding on a 40,000-square-foot flat roof are both "roofing leads." They are not the same call. If your phone line treats them the same way, one of them gets the wrong questions, the wrong person calls back, and somebody waits longer than they should.
Plenty of roofing companies do both kinds of work. Plenty of them also run one intake script for everything. That script was usually written for residential calls, because that's most of the volume. Commercial callers then get asked things that don't apply to them ("Is this your primary residence?") and never get asked the things that matter ("Who signs off on the work, and is there a bid deadline?").
Split those two calls at intake, before anyone books a truck or hands a lead to the wrong estimator.
Why one script breaks
Residential and commercial calls differ in ways that change what intake has to collect:
- **Who is calling vs. who decides.** A homeowner usually decides. A commercial caller is often a property manager, facilities coordinator, or tenant contact who has to route the job up to an owner, an asset manager, or a procurement process. - **How the job gets bought.** Residential work is often a single estimate and a yes or no. Commercial work may go through a formal bid with multiple contractors, a scope document, and a due date. - **What the roof is.** Low-slope systems (TPO, EPDM, modified bitumen, built-up) need different people and different questions than a pitched shingle roof. - **Access and timing.** A commercial site visit may need a building contact, roof hatch or ladder access, and a time that works around tenants or operations.
Commercial calls aren't better leads, just different ones, and your intake should know which one it has within the first minute.
The first question that does the sorting
You don't need a long decision tree. One or two questions near the top of the call do most of the work:
1. "Is this for a home, or for a business or commercial building?" 2. If commercial: "Is the roof mostly flat or low-slope, or pitched?"
Mixed cases exist. A duplex owner, a small church, a restaurant in a strip center. Give intake a simple rule for those, like "anything that isn't an owner-occupied home goes to the commercial path," or whatever matches how your company actually staffs the work. Write the rule down so it isn't decided by whoever picks up.
Once the call is sorted, the two paths ask different things.
What the residential path collects
You probably have this already. Name, callback number, address, what they're seeing (leak, missing shingles, age of roof, wanting a replacement quote), how urgent it is, and a good time for an inspection. Keep it short. A homeowner with water coming in doesn't want twenty questions.
What the commercial path collects
This is where most scripts are thin. A useful commercial intake gets:
- **Caller role.** Owner, property manager, facilities staff, tenant, general contractor, or someone else. - **Decision-maker and approval path.** Who approves the spend, and is a purchase order or formal bid required? - **Building basics.** Address, building type (warehouse, retail, office, multifamily, church, school), rough size if they know it, and roof type if they know it. "I don't know" is a fine answer. Write it down. - **The problem or the request.** Active leak, scheduled maintenance, a bid for replacement, a coating or restoration inquiry, or an inspection for a sale or lease. - **Deadline.** Is there a bid due date, a walk-through date, or a tenant complaint driving urgency? - **Site access.** Who meets the estimator, how they get to the roof, and any rules about hours or safety check-in. - **Documents.** Do they have a scope, prior reports, or drawings they can send?
The AI receptionist doesn't need to understand roofing systems to collect this. It needs to ask, record the answers in plain words, and leave blanks where the caller didn't know.
Route to the right person, not the next free one
Sorting only helps if the two paths end in different places. If you have a commercial estimator or a commercial division, commercial calls go there with the notes attached. If one person does both, the notes should at least make it obvious which kind of visit they're walking into before they call back.
The failure to avoid: a residential estimator calls back a property manager, asks about the "homeowner," doesn't know there's a bid due Friday, and the property manager quietly moves on to the next contractor on the list.
Speed still matters here. When Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 U.S. companies' response to web leads, 37% replied within an hour, 23% never replied at all, and among those that responded within 30 days the average was 42 hours ([HBR](https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads)). That study wasn't about roofing, and it's from 2011. But a commercial bid with a deadline makes slow follow-up more expensive, not less.
What intake should never do on a commercial call
- **Quote a price or a square-foot rate.** That's an estimator's job after a site visit. - **Promise a bid will be submitted.** Your team decides which bids to chase. - **Diagnose the roof system or recommend a coating versus replacement.** Record what the caller says. Leave the judgment to someone who has been on the roof. - **Confirm a site visit time without knowing who will meet the estimator.** A driveway visit to a locked building wastes a morning.
Write these into the receptionist's rules the same way you would for residential calls.
A worked example (illustrative, not a real customer)
*This is a made-up scenario to show the flow.*
A caller says she manages three retail buildings and one of them has water coming through the ceiling of a tenant's space. The receptionist asks whether it's a home or commercial building (commercial), whether the roof is flat or pitched (flat, she thinks), and her role (property manager). It asks who approves repairs (the owner, but she can authorize emergency work up to a limit), the address, whether the leak is active (yes, after last night's rain), and who can let a crew on the roof (the tenant's store manager, during store hours).
The note that lands with the commercial estimator reads something like: "Commercial, retail strip, flat roof (caller unsure of material). Active leak into tenant space. Caller is property manager; can approve emergency repair, owner approves anything bigger. Access via tenant store manager during business hours. Wants a call back today."
Nobody had to guess, and the estimator calling back already knows the right questions to skip.
Where contractors are on this
ServiceTitan's 2026 roofing and exterior report found 21% of surveyed contractors say AI capabilities are increasingly a priority in technology purchasing, while only 4% use AI features built into their CRM ([ServiceTitan](https://www.servicetitan.com/press/2026-roofing-exterior-market-report)). Interest is ahead of use. Splitting commercial from residential calls is a small place to start. You need one sorting question and two short lists, each ending in a different destination.
Start here
1. Write your rule for what counts as commercial. 2. Write the commercial question list above, trimmed to what your team actually uses. 3. Decide who receives commercial notes, and how fast they call back. 4. Test it with a few mock calls: a homeowner, a property manager, a tenant, a general contractor.
If you want help setting up an AI receptionist that sorts roofing calls this way and hands each one to the right person, [book a call with Chosen](https://chosenai.co/book).
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (2011): https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads - ServiceTitan, 2026 Roofing & Exterior Market Report press release: https://www.servicetitan.com/press/2026-roofing-exterior-market-report