Intake Questions That Qualify Without Giving Advice
There is a version of intake that finds out whether a caller is worth a consultation, and a version that accidentally tells them the answer. The line between them is thinner than it looks, and it sits inside the wording of individual questions.
The difference in one pair
"When did the accident happen?" is intake. It establishes a fact.
"When did the accident happen? Because there is a deadline on these." is advice. It tells the caller something about their position, from someone not qualified to tell them.
The information gathered is identical. What changed is that the second version interpreted it.
The rule that generates the rest
Ask for facts. Do not supply the significance of the facts.
A question that ends in a reason is usually a question that has crossed over, because the reason is where the judgment lives.
Questions that qualify without interpreting
What happened, in your words. Open, captures the thing whoever reads it actually needs.
When did it happen. A date is a fact. Whether the date matters is not your caller's answer to receive on the phone.
Has anyone else looked at this. Establishes whether they are shopping, already represented, or partway through something, without asking any of those things directly.
What are you hoping happens next. Tells you more about fit than any qualifying criterion, because it surfaces the mismatched expectation before the consultation rather than during it.
How should we reach you, and when is bad. Trivial, routinely skipped, and the single most common reason a qualified caller is never reached again.
Questions to avoid
Anything beginning "do you think you have". It invites the caller to ask you.
Anything with a number in it that you supplied. Thresholds, timeframes, ranges. The moment you name one, you have told them where they stand.
Anything that sorts them out loud. A caller who hears themselves being screened usually stops answering honestly.
The sentence that protects the whole script
Somewhere near the top, say what this call is and is not. "I am going to take some details so the right person can call you back" is enough. It sets the expectation that the answers are coming from someone else, later.
That one sentence does more than any prohibition further down, because it changes what the caller is asking for.
The boundary, by field
Whatever the trade, the same shape applies. The regulated judgment stays with your licensed people. Intake collects the facts they will need to make it, and stops.
For a law firm, legal advice stays with your attorneys. For a practice, clinical questions stay with your own team. For an agency, coverage, eligibility, claims and quotes stay with your licensed agents.
Why we care about the wording
A Kepply digital employee asks exactly the questions you wrote, in the order you wrote them, on every call. That is the advantage and the reason the wording gets this much attention: a script that drifts over the line drifts on every call rather than on a bad day.
If you want to see how an intake script is built, start at kepply.com.