Maria carried the on-call phone for nine years.
Riverside Plumbing has three trucks, five plumbers, and one owner who used to be the after-hours dispatcher. Maria Vasquez took every emergency call herself — leaks at 11 pm, sewer backups at 4 am, water heater failures on Christmas morning. She and her husband hadn't sat through a Saturday wedding without her phone vibrating in nine years.
The work was good. The phone was the problem. She didn't trust an answering service to know the difference between a slow drain (book it Monday) and a main line backup (truck rolls now). Both calls sounded the same to a dispatcher reading from a script.
Taiso triages the way a plumber would.
Maria's first call with Taiso was a test. She called in pretending to have a kitchen drain that was "draining a little slow." Taiso suggested booking a non-emergency visit Monday morning. She called back as a panicked customer with water "coming up out of the floor in the laundry room." Taiso flagged it as an emergency, asked the address, and dispatched the on-call plumber within four minutes.
Taiso routes by tech specialty too. Gas line work goes to Joe. Sewer mainlines go to Diego. Water heater installs go to whoever has bandwidth. Customers get an ETA text within sixty seconds of dispatch.
What Taiso does for Riverside specifically:
- Triages emergency vs non-emergency by symptom — actively flowing water, sewer backups, gas smell, no hot water in winter
- Routes by plumber specialty (gas, sewer, water heater, fixture install)
- Dispatches after-hours techs and sends ETA texts within 60 seconds
- Quotes after-hours service rates and gets explicit customer approval before dispatch
- Books non-emergencies for the next available slot — never books outside service area
"I haven't answered the phone on a Saturday in six months. My husband says I'm a different person. He's right."
Maria Vasquez · Owner, Riverside Plumbing · Sacramento, CAWhat changed beyond the numbers.
Maria's plumbers say the after-hours dispatch is actually better with Taiso than it was with Maria — Taiso doesn't apologize for waking them up, doesn't soften the urgency, and always sends the address as a clean text instead of a half-asleep voice message. Emergency revenue is up. So is Maria's vacation count: two trips in 2025, which is two more than the prior decade combined.