The Day After the Storm Is When the Work Gets Won or Lost
A major hail event or wind storm leaves a neighbourhood with damaged roofs, broken siding, and shattered windows. Every restoration contractor within two hundred kilometres knows it. The crews that get to the doors first with a credible assessment — not a sales pitch, an assessment — capture the majority of the insurance-adjacent work. The ones who show up third with a business card and a vague offer to "take a look" fight over what's left.
This template is the canvassing database that makes the first crew more organised than the third crew's entire office.
GPS + Front Photo: The Record That Proves You Were There
GPS location and Front Property Pic are the first two fields. The GPS timestamp places the visit geographically and temporally — when the customer calls back two weeks later and asks which company assessed their property, the record is searchable by location. The front property photo documents the property's condition on the day of the visit, which matters if the customer later claims the damage was already there before your crew worked the neighbourhood.
Address Number, Street Name, and City (with a free-text override for cities not in the dropdown) complete the physical address record. These feed the scheduling database when the job moves from lead to contract — the field assessor's canvassing record becomes the job file starting point without re-entry.
Two Ratings That Prioritise the Follow-Up List
Degree of Damage: 0 (none) to 5 (high). Priority: 0 (low) to 5 (high). These two ratings aren't the same question. A property with damage severity 4 owned by a retired homeowner who's never filed an insurance claim and doesn't know how to start is a Priority 5 lead — high service need, high complexity, and high commission potential for a contractor who can guide the process. A property with damage severity 3 owned by a property management company that self-manages insurance claims is a Priority 1 — they'll get three quotes and go with the lowest.
The combination of both ratings lets you sort the canvassing list by priority and sequence your follow-up calls in the right order on the afternoon the storm passes.
Customer Interest: The Field That Tells You When to Stop Calling
How Much Customer Interest? — a choice field with a scale from cold to highly interested. Textable? — yes or no. These two fields together determine the follow-up channel and effort level. A highly interested customer who is textable gets a same-day message with a written estimate. A cold customer who isn't textable goes into a low-priority mail sequence. A customer whose interest field reads "hostile" doesn't get called again.
Without this field, every canvassed address gets the same follow-up cadence and your team burns time on properties that were never going to convert while the high-interest leads go cold.