From a text message to a finished work order.
For a First Nation government in British Columbia, we extended the operations platform that runs its back office out into the field — community service requests arriving by web, email, or SMS, an AI agent on the phone line, and crews that are dispatched, report back, and close jobs entirely over text message.
The back office was systematized. The field wasn't.
The same First Nation government whose back office we systematized had a second, harder problem: the field side. Community members reported problems by phone call, drop-in, or paper form. Work orders lived on paper and in memory. Once a report was made there was no reference number to follow up on, no record connecting the job to the crew that did it, and no way for the office to know what was still open — or what any of it cost.
Off-the-shelf field-service software assumes dispatchers at desks and crews running the vendor's app on company phones. This department's crews live in text messages, its requests come from a whole community, and some of its work is done for other departments and has to be billed back. It needed a system shaped around that — and it already had the platform to build it on.
A dispatch loop the whole community can reach.
Four intake channels, one queue, and a crew workflow that runs on the phones people already have.
Four ways in, one queue
A community member can report a problem through a public web form — no login, no app — by email, at the office counter, or with a plain text message. Every channel lands in the same queue as a numbered service request, so nothing lives on a sticky note again.
An AI agent answers the texts
Text the department's number and an AI agent files your request conversationally, hands back its reference number, and can tell you where it stands. Its powers are deliberately narrow — it can file and read, never assign, approve, or close — and every conversation is kept as a transcript the office can review.
Requests become work orders
The office reviews each request and promotes it to a numbered work order — scheduled, assigned to a crew, and tracked through every stage to completion. Categories, crews, rates, and even the AI's instructions are dashboard settings the department controls itself.
Crews run on text messages
An assignment arrives as a text. The crew texts back when the job is done — hours, notes, even photos from the site — and the system completes the work order and automatically tells the person who reported the problem. No app, no logins, no training curve.
Emergencies interrupt, quiet jobs resurface
A request flagged as an emergency pages designated staff the moment it arrives. Jobs that sit idle trigger a nudge, and a Monday-morning digest lists everything still open — so nothing waits quietly in a queue no one is looking at.
Every job knows its cost
Work orders link to invoices and job costs on the same platform that runs the department's back office. Work done for other departments rolls up into a billed-back report, so cost recovery is a printout, not an argument.
From paper forms and phone tag to one live loop.
A request can't get lost
Every report — texted, emailed, or handed over the counter — becomes a tracked record with a reference number, and the requester hears back automatically when the work is done.
The office sees everything
Open requests, work orders, who's assigned, what's stalled, and what got done — one live queue instead of paper forms and memory.
Crews without an app
The whole crew loop runs over ordinary SMS — nothing to install, nothing to learn. A crew member needs a phone that can text, which is every phone.
Billed-back work is recovered
Jobs done for other departments are tracked and reported for billing back — recovered revenue that used to be absorbed, tied to the true cost of each job.
Have an operation worth systematizing?
If your team is running on manual steps and disconnected tools, tell us what the work looks like. We'll come back with a short read on whether it's a good fit and what a first engagement could look like.
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