Storm Restoration Appointment Setting
You found the swath. Somebody still has to call it.
A hail map tells you where the damage is. It does not tell you which of those roofs will let you on it, and it will not sit on the phone for three minutes with a homeowner who is certain you are a scam. That gap between the swath and the calendar is the entire job, and it is the only thing this page is about.
Below is what actually happens to the dials, in the proportions we measured on our own floor, including the parts that make us look worse. Read them before you decide whether to work this storm with your own crew, with us, or not at all.
Two different people read this page
Which one are you?
I own the house
You want to know whether hail actually hit your address
Then this is the wrong page and we will not waste your afternoon. Call Center Doctors does not repair roofs, inspect roofs, or sell roofs. We run the phones for roofing companies, which means the only thing we could sell you is somebody else's inspection.
What is genuinely useful to you is free and takes about a minute: look your address up against the National Weather Service storm archive and see the dates and hail sizes recorded near it. Take that to any local roofer, including one who has never heard of us.
Check hail history at my addressI run the roofing company
You are looking at a swath and deciding whether to work it
Then keep reading. The rest of this page is the part nobody publishes: what happens to the dials, in what proportion, measured on our own floor rather than asserted in a brochure.
If it is worth working, we build the list inside your target ZIPs, dial it with US-based agents who do roofing every day, and hand you confirmed inspection times. If it is not worth working, the numbers below will tell you that too.
Talk to us about this stormThe storm is not the scarce thing. The phone hours are.
Hail is not rare and it is not a surprise. What is scarce, in the ten days after a storm when the homeowner is still thinking about their roof, is somebody free to have four hundred conversations.
Read the first figure precisely: those are storm reports rather than storms. A report exists because somebody was standing there to file one, so the count follows people and spotters as well as weather, and it measures observed hail rather than hail. Written honestly it is still the shape of the year: the opportunity is real, it repeats, and it concentrates in states you can name.
The second figure is the one that decides what you do about it. Two caveats travel with it and they attach to different halves. The Census counts establishments, not firms, so a roofer with three locations is counted three times -- this is not a company count. And it counts employer establishments only, so sole proprietors with no payroll are excluded, which makes 25,519 a floor and makes the under-five share conservative rather than inflated. Whatever the true population is, the size distribution holds: most roofing companies are a handful of people, and there is nobody in that building whose job is the phone.
Which is why the third figure matters. $55,440 per year (median), across 135,490 jobs against $21.53 per hour / $44,770 per year (median), across 2,595,750 jobs for a customer service representative. When a five-person shop answers its own storm calls, it spends the more expensive hour doing the cheaper job, and gives up the roof that hour was meant for. That is the trade, before anyone has quoted you a price.
Sources: NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ (2025); US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html (2023); US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472181.htm (2025); US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes434051.htm (2025).
What working a storm actually looks like, in dials
This is our own floor, not an industry study. 10,794 outbound roofing appointment-setting calls placed Feb-Mar 2026, every one transcribed and analysed (10,848 transcribed in total; 54 belonged to a non-roofing plumbing list and were removed). Every number in this section comes off that corpus, and there is no inbound in it -- these are cold outbound calls into storm footprints.
| How the call ended | Calls | Share of the 10,794 |
|---|---|---|
| Hang-up | 2,827 | 26.2% |
| Explicit "not interested" | 1,173 | 10.9% |
| Asked to be removed from the list | 439 | 4.1% |
| Did not qualify | 329 | 3.0% |
| Booked an inspection | 212 | 2.0% |
| Asked for a callback | 78 | 0.7% |
These six do not add up to the corpus, on purpose. They account for 5,058 of the 10,794 calls, or 46.9%. The other 53.1% carry dispositions our source documents never enumerate -- answered with no conversation, dead air, wrong number, and the rest -- so this is a ranked list, not a breakdown, and it must never be drawn as a pie.
The load-bearing row is the third one. 4.1% of the homeowners we dialled asked to be taken off the list. That is our own measurement of how a cold call lands, and the FTC measures the same thing from the other end: About 258.5 million active registrations as of 2025-09-30, up roughly 1.9% over FY2024. Overall complaints ROSE in FY2025, while unwanted-call reports remain about 48% below FY2021, when the FTC received approximately five million reports about unwanted calls.
Two independent measurements agreeing is worth more than either alone. A homeowner treating an unknown number as hostile is behaving normally, not badly, and any vendor who tells you their script gets around that is describing a floor that does not exist. What a good floor does instead is get through it faster and hurt fewer people on the way.
Sources: apps/airoofing/files/10k_winning_vs_losing.md (dataset header) and apps/airoofing/roadmap.md ("The Numbers" table); percentages computed against the 10,794 denominator; apps/airoofing/files/10k_agent_scorecards.md (period, per-agent totals), apps/airoofing/files/10k_winning_vs_losing.md (roofing-filtered totals), apps/airoofing/roadmap.md (unfiltered totals); US Federal Trade Commission, National Do Not Call Registry Data Book FY2025 press release (2025-12-11), https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/12/ftc-releases-annual-do-not-call-registry-data-book.
The booking rate, printed with both denominators
3.6% of contacted homeowners booked an inspection (210 of 5,772 contact calls); 2.0% of all dials did (212 of 10,794 calls)
ccdocs appointment-set rate on outbound roofing appointment-setting calls. Measured 2026-Q1. Source: apps/airoofing/files/10k_agent_scorecards.md (per-agent contact and appointment counts, summed over the 11 published scorecards) plus apps/airoofing/files/10k_winning_vs_losing.md and apps/airoofing/roadmap.md (corpus totals: 10,794 roofing calls, 212 booked).
Vendors quote whichever of those two numbers suits the slide. Per contact flatters, because it hides that most dials never reach a person at all. Per dial damns, because it charges the caller for disconnected numbers and empty houses. Neither is dishonest on its own; publishing only one is. Ask every vendor you speak to for both, and for the window they were measured over -- ours is a fixed two months in early 2026, and nothing refreshes it.
One more boundary. "Contact" here means a person was reached, taken from the contact-call column of the agent scorecards. It is not a qualified lead, so the 3.6% denominator is looser than "qualified" and a true qualified rate would be higher, not lower. And there is no inbound anywhere in this corpus, so none of it describes what happens when a homeowner calls you.
What we cannot tell you yet, and will not pretend to. We do not publish a show rate -- the share of booked inspections where the homeowner was actually there. A booked slot is not the unit of value; an inspection that happened is. That number needs contractor-side confirmation rather than a dialler disposition, and until we have it measured properly it stays off this page. Ask us for it anyway. Ask everyone for it.
A call that books and a call that dies are not the same call
Booked roofing calls run a mean of 215 seconds and a median of 192 (n=212, every booked call in the corpus). Calls ending "not interested" run a mean of 34 seconds and a median of 30 (n=60 random sample). Calls ending in a hang-up run a mean of 27 seconds and a median of 20 (n=40 random sample).
Put those side by side and the shape of the work is obvious. The booked calls are a different event, not a better version of the same one. 209 of the 212 booked roofing calls (98.6%) ran past 60 seconds. In a 60-call random sample of calls that ended "not interested", 5 (8.3%) did.
That is a correlation, not a lever. A call runs long because it is going well. Keeping somebody on the phone does not cause a booking, and anyone selling you a "stay past sixty seconds" tactic has inverted the finding. The honest version is the flat one: a call that books is almost always a call that got past the first minute.
What is in those longer calls is unglamorous. Of the 212 booked roofing calls, 80.7% include an address confirmation, 52.8% mention insurance, 52.4% say the word "free", 38.7% name the street the homeowner lives on, 27.8% reference weather damage, 17.9% mention a drone inspection and 9.9% pay the homeowner a compliment about the house. Descriptive, not causal -- a longer successful conversation simply has more room in it to mention more things -- and deliberately printed without a lift or a multiple against the losing calls, because the loss-side shares in our source documents disagree with each other and are not publishable.
On a storm list the insurance thread is where most of the hesitation lives, and it is rational hesitation. 2-3% percentage wind/hail deductibles are standard on Texas homeowner policies (NAIC / Texas Department of Insurance, 2026). The homeowner is working out whether a claim is worth filing against a deductible that scales with the value of their house, and they cannot finish that sum without seeing the damage. Our agents capture the carrier, the date of loss, and the claim status, then hand the homeowner to your estimator. They do not give insurance advice and are trained not to.
Sources: apps/airoofing/files/10k_winning_vs_losing.md, section 6 "Duration Analysis"; apps/airoofing/files/10k_winning_vs_losing.md, section 6 duration-distribution table (buckets 0-15s, 15-30s and 30-60s); apps/airoofing/files/10k_winning_vs_losing.md, section 1 "What Winners Do Differently".
An objection is the sound of a conversation, not of a loss
In a 635-call set of substantive roofing conversations, 82% of the calls that booked and 78% of the calls that were lost contained at least one homeowner objection.
Two selection artifacts travel with that pair and both change what it means. The 635-call set is enriched -- booked calls are 33% of it against 2.0% of the corpus, roughly 17 times over-represented -- so nothing from it is a population rate. And the losing side is only long "not interested" calls; it excludes hang-ups entirely, and 19 of a 40-call hang-up sample ended inside 15 seconds, before an objection could physically be voiced.
What the pair legitimately supports is the four-point gap itself: an objection tells you a conversation is happening, not that it is failing. Across 635 substantive roofing conversations, 950 objections were logged across 20 types, an average of 1.50 per conversation. The five most common were cost or price (234), "not interested" (200), "no damage" (110), "my roof is fine" or a new roof (105), and "not right now" (98). Of the 200 "not interested" objections, 21 occurred in a call that booked anyway.
Those are counts and rank order inside an enriched set. They are not conversion rates, and we are not printing the per-objection booking column from that table for exactly that reason -- its denominator is 17 times too rich, and republishing it would overstate the truth by about an order of magnitude.
Why the dialler is the cheap part
Across the 11 agents with a published scorecard, the appointment rate per contacted homeowner ranges from 1.2% (2 of 168 contacts) to 5.3% (43 of 806), a 4.5x spread; the blended rate is 3.6% (210 of 5,772).
Same campaigns. Same lists. Same hours. The person holding the phone moved the result by more than four times. That is the whole answer to "why not just buy a dialler and run this in-house": you can buy the dialler this afternoon, and it will do nothing about the spread. We are not naming agents, campaigns, or clients here, and no vendor who does should be trusted with your list either.
Sources: apps/airoofing/files/10k_objection_map.md, "Key Finding"; apps/airoofing/files/10k_objection_map.md, "Objection Types Ranked by Frequency"; apps/airoofing/files/10k_agent_scorecards.md, the 11 per-agent scorecards.
The rules you are working inside
When you may call. 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. local time at the called person location. Their clock, not yours -- a floor dialling east is out of window earlier than its own wall clock suggests, and that single detail is the one most in-house storm efforts get wrong.
How long a person may be left hanging. A call is abandoned if a person answers and is not connected to a live representative within 2 seconds of their completed greeting; the safe harbor caps abandonment at 3% of calls answered by a person and requires at least 15 seconds or 4 rings before disconnecting. Note the asymmetry, because it is the interesting part: the rule caps how long an outbound caller may leave a person waiting and says nothing whatsoever about how long an inbound homeowner may sit in your voicemail box. There is no federal answer standard for the call you are missing.
The shared-lead myth. Vacated, and it never took effect. The Eleventh Circuit vacated the rule on 2025-01-24 (Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, No. 24-10277); the mandate issued 2025-04-30; the FCC conformed its rules at 90 FR 42137 effective 2025-08-29, reinstating the prior definition of prior express written consent. So shared leads remain lawful, the homeowner who filled in one form is still being called by several contractors, and speed decides which of you gets the inspection. If someone sold you a "one-to-one consent compliant" storm list on the basis that everyone else is now illegal, they sold you a story about a rule that never operated.
We are describing published federal documents, not advising you. Compliance for your own calling is yours and your counsel's. Sources: FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, 16 CFR 310.4(c), https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C/part-310/section-310.4; Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, No. 24-10277 (11th Cir. Jan. 24, 2025), https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202410277.pdf; FCC conforming final rule 90 FR 42137, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/29/2025-16641/.
Check us before you hire us
We publish 20 recorded storm appointment calls with audio, transcripts, and timestamps at roofing-storm-appointments/live-calls. Read them honestly: every one ends in a booked appointment because those are the calls we chose to publish, and all of them are outbound. They are evidence of how the intake is run, never of a booking rate. The rate is in section five, with its denominators printed.
If you want to see the storm data yourself, the interactive map is free and open at SwathIQ, and you can put the same map on your own website in one line of HTML -- the snippet, the state codes it accepts, and what we ask for in return are on the hail map widget page. A homeowner who wants to check a single address should use the address lookup instead; it answers their question in a minute and costs them nothing.