Right Party Contact (RPC)

What it means

Right party contact is the point at which an intake call reaches the specific person who can make a decision about the roof: the owner, the named policyholder, whoever will actually sign. Everything up to that point is dialling, however many conversations it contained.

The distinction exists because a phone being answered proves very little. A number connects, somebody speaks, the call is pleasant and sounds productive, and at the end of it nobody who can authorise anything has been spoken to. That is a connection. It is not a right party contact, and the two get counted as though they were one event.

Any human is not the right person

On storm work the wrong party is almost always a reasonable person being helpful.

A tenant who has noticed water coming through a bedroom ceiling. An adult child managing things for a parent. A spouse who is not on the policy and does not know what the policy says. A neighbour with a key while the owners are away. Each of them will talk, will give an address, will often accept a time, and none of them can commit the household to a contractor being on the roof.

The same gap shows up inside a single household. One owner agrees to a Thursday morning on behalf of another who has not been asked, and the appointment is real to exactly one of them.

Why counting a connection as a contact inflates everything after it

Because a contact figure is the denominator under nearly every other number an intake operation reports.

Count every answered call as a contact and the contact rate rises immediately, which reads as a dialling improvement that did not happen. Bookings are then divided by that inflated figure, so the booking rate per contact falls, and the team that produced no extra bookings looks worse at converting than it did the week before. Meanwhile the appointments that did come out of those conversations were agreed with people who could not agree to them, so they show up later as slots nobody kept.

One measurement error, three symptoms, and none of them points at the cause. The intake team gets a conversion problem it did not create, the field crew gets journeys to houses where nothing was arranged, and the only number that was ever wrong is the one everything else was measured against.

Separating the two figures fixes the diagnosis without changing a single call. Connections describe whether the dialling is reaching anybody. Right party contacts describe whether it is reaching anybody who matters, and only the second one belongs underneath a booking rate.

Establishing it on the call

Early, and as part of the appointment rather than as a challenge.

Confirm ownership before offering a time. Ask whether anyone else has to agree to somebody coming out to look at the roof, which surfaces a co-owner without interrogating the caller about their standing. If the person on the line is not the right party, the call has still been useful: capture the decision-maker’s name, the best number, and the hours they are reachable, then say plainly that the time will be arranged with them.

That is a completed call rather than a failed one, and recording it as such is what keeps the contact figure honest.

Common mistakes

Booking a time with whoever answered, because the conversation was going well and asking felt awkward.

Recording a connection as a contact, which corrupts the rate that everything downstream is divided by.

Treating a wrong-party call as nothing at all. It carries the name and the hours of the person actually needed, and thrown away it becomes a redial to the same number and the same tenant tomorrow.