Working as a dispatcher in the trades requires a certain skill set, high stamina, and a drive to succeed. A dispatcher’s work day is fast-paced and stressful as they coordinate service calls, manage schedules, and ensure the right technician is assigned to each job.
While dispatchers may not directly generate revenue for your business, they play a pivotal role in ensuring the success of your operations, which directly affect your bottom line.
In a recent webinar, Alexa Franco, ServiceTitan Solutions Engineer, and Ashley Leege, Customer Service Manager at Althoff Home Services, walk through the multitude of tasks dispatchers perform daily and share tips for setting up your dispatch team for success in ServiceTitan to maximize efficiency and revenue.
What a dispatcher’s day looks like
“A day in the life of a dispatcher is very busy. It’s very hectic,” says Leege, who oversees the dispatchers at Althoff Home Services, a multi-trade HVAC, plumbing, and electrical company serving customers in the Chicagoland area.
In the morning, dispatchers determine where technicians need to go, the jobs to be performed, and which plans changed from the night before. Then they start updating customers.
In the afternoon, they monitor job progress, reschedule appointments as needed, update customers, schedule new calls, and provide support for the techs while on the job.
“And then toward the end of their day, they're wrapping everything up, getting the invoices together, confirming the next day, getting out the other information to the techs, and then keep going with everything that's changed throughout the day,” Leege says.
As for the specific tasks dispatchers perform on a daily basis, the list is long.
“It's a little bit of everything,” Leege says. “And they impact a little bit of everything in the business—from average tickets to lead turnovers for the salespeople, to efficiency and overall technician happiness, in general.”
How can you make a dispatcher’s job easier?
Dispatching can be a thankless job, Leege says, because they’re trying to help techs and CSRs do their jobs better while also meeting the demands of management to get more jobs on the board and build more revenue.
So, what’s one thing contractors can do to make their dispatcher’s job easier?
“Having clear expectations and goals for the dispatchers is really, really huge and giving them the right tools to be able to do their job successfully, especially in those busy seasons,” Leege says.
While dispatchers face a variety of obstacles throughout the day, Leege and Franco explain some of the main challenges.
Challenge #1: Too much time is spent trying to contact customers to confirm appointments
Do your dispatchers confirm a customer is home before actually sending a technician?
“Most customers never respond to the first call or text, but we know how important it is to make sure they remember they have an appointment,” says Franco, who previously worked as a CSR and dispatcher before joining ServiceTitan.
Leege says Althoff’s dispatchers confirm with the customer before every job.
“We have a very, very large service area, and it's important to be as efficient as possible,” Leege says. “Sending a guy to a customer's house where we don't know if they're going to be there or not is very counterproductive to that.”
Without confirming an appointment with the customer, Leege estimates her team might waste more than half the day on no-shows or last-minute rescheduling.
ServiceTitan offers a solution in the form of Automated Text Confirmations, Franco says. As soon as you book a customer’s job, they receive an automated text or email confirmation. You can send reminders the day before or a few hours before, as well as Auto-Arrival Notifications with the tech’s bio and photo to let the customer know who will be coming to their home.
“From the Automated Text Confirmations to the Auto-Arrival Notifications, it's literally changed the way we do business,” Leege says. “We’ve saved so many hours by doing the text confirmations and not making outbound phone calls every day, and we've given a lot of customers peace of mind with those dispatch notifications.”
In addition, the Automated Text Confirmations change the color of the job on the dispatch board to a dark blue once the customer confirms, providing a quick visual aid to busy dispatchers. And the Auto-Arrival Notifications keep your technician timesheets accurate and up to date.
This back-end automation support helps Althoff’s dispatchers save time by eliminating the need to edit people’s timesheets every morning or track down answers to accountants’ questions.
“It's just made that piece of the job so much more efficient,” Leege adds.
Challenge #2: How do I reschedule multiple jobs at once?
How do you plan for an upcoming heat wave or cold spell to make sure you’re available to handle an onslaught of on-demand calls? Or, in practical dispatch terms, how do you clear the board and reschedule multiple jobs at once?
With ServiceTitan, you can do this with a “Mass Reschedule” feature, accessed via the icon labeled as such, or shown as a little clock at the top of your dispatch board.
With just a couple of clicks, you can “Mass Reschedule” all of your HVAC maintenance appointments for the day, or even narrow down those jobs further to only reschedule homes with equipment less than 5 years old.
“By applying these filters, it'll actually just pull out the jobs on my selected technicians that meet those parameters,” Franco explains. “I can click for all of those to be selected and rescheduled or unassign those jobs from my board altogether. That means I'm not dragging and dropping one job at a time.”
This enables your dispatcher to immediately place high-priority calls on the job board, and reassign the maintenance calls as time permits.
Challenge #3: It’s hard for dispatchers to always know what jobs to prioritize
Do your dispatchers debate over how to prioritize calls? Which job has the highest priority? Who has a more urgent job? Which jobs could bring in more money? Which jobs need specific technicians or equipment? Which jobs make for a better route?
Whether you prefer revenue over routing, or vice versa, a good solution for prioritizing jobs in ServiceTitan can be found via Tagging.
Some examples of using tags to prioritize jobs include:
Defining jobs as Priority Levels I, II, III or IV
Marking jobs as “John only,” or for a specific technician
Labeling jobs as warranty calls versus recalls
Identifying the customer as elderly
Identifying the customer as a home with pets
Identifying the customer with age of equipment
Identifying jobs with highest opportunity
“I’m sure every customer on ServiceTitan is using tags, but you should audit your tags list at least once a year,” Franco says.
Challenge #4: It’s hard to keep the job board full during shoulder season
When business slows after the busy heating and cooling months, some companies struggle to keep their job boards filled and their technicians busy.
Like many businesses in the trades, Althoff strives to solve this problem by scheduling a lot of its HVAC maintenance calls during the shoulder season, Leege says. They also make a game of it.
“We do what's called our ‘move-up list,’” Leege explains. “If we don't have anything available today when a customer wants to book, but we might and they book a few days out, we'll tag those jobs with what we call the ‘move-up list.’
“Our dispatchers run a report to see all the customers that have that tag on them, then they use those customers first to try to move them up into today or tomorrow, and fill up that board when we have a milder day of weather or openings because other customers rescheduled or moved,” she adds.
Challenge #5: Finding customer information like phone numbers and job details takes too much time
Dispatchers often need quick and easy access to customer information, like phone numbers, addresses, and job details when making dispatching decisions. Previously, dispatchers using ServiceTitan had to click off of their dispatch board and directly into the job to find the information they needed, making it a cumbersome process.
Now, ServiceTitan offers a Job Flyout Window on every job, accessible directly from the dispatch board.
“When the Job Flyout happened, it was amazing. Finding that information and being able to click on it right there from the board makes it so easy,” Leege says. “This is going to give you a lot of information, from tags about equipment, addresses, customer information, and job details, and you can do all of that right from here without having to go all the way into a job every time.”
Searching for the information in a more efficient manner helps to reduce the daily stress on your dispatchers. According to a ServiceTitan survey of business owners and dispatchers, dispatchers rank their stress level as 7 out of 10.
“Being a dispatcher is being on call 24/7 for an hourly job that you technically never really clock out of,” Franco says. “There's pressure not to take vacation, let alone book a doctor's appointment, just because it's the busy season.”
Constantly working in a stressful environment can also lead to poor decision-making and inefficient routing.
“Too many priorities—right tech, right call, average ticket, cut down on drive time, send your best closer. Sometimes it feels like you can't win no matter which way you go, but these decisions are actually going to impact your revenue and your billable hours,” Franco says.
High stress and inefficient routing lead to missed revenue, which ultimately results in missing company goals and poor performance for the company overall.
Challenge #6: Match the best tech to the right job to maximize average tickets without adding extra stress to dispatchers
So, how do dispatchers make sure the right technician with the right skills is matched to the right call? If your dispatchers use ServiceTitan, are they taking advantage of the skills feature, Schedule Assistant, or tags to ensure a smooth process?
Challenge #7: Improving routing to save drive time and complete more jobs without overloading dispatchers
By cutting down on drive time with improved routing, you can have your cake and eat it, too, Franco says.
“Improving routing to save drive time and complete more jobs without overloading the dispatchers is something that I don't care if you're at five managed technicians or 500 managed technicians, every shop ends up having this same challenge,” Franco says.
Challenge #8: Scaling dispatching efficiently while keeping it manageable for the team
For the dispatcher-to-tech ratio, the industry-recommended average is about 1:10 or 1:15, Franco says, and this number changes based on the tasks each dispatcher is responsible for.
“That’s not to say if you're managing eight that you can perform the same job with 30. It just means that how each individual team has scaled up has had to ebb and flow with the rules and responsibilities that position holds,” Franco explains.
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The All New Dispatch Pro
Last year, ServiceTitan launched Dispatch Pro, a fully automated data-driven dispatching tool. Customer feedback, however, led to recent enhancements to give dispatchers a little more control.
“Dispatch Pro is the ultimate, all-in-one tool for your dispatchers that's going to bring you the power of data-driven dispatching with task management, all while keeping your dispatcher in control,” Franco explains.
Althoff added Dispatch Pro a little over a year ago. Leege describes what the dispatcher’s day was like before adding this powerful automation tool.
“It was very chaotic and very stressful,” Leege says. “It was anywhere from 30 to 60 calls a day, ‘what's the route, who's the best guy?’ And towards the end of the day, the dispatchers are fatigued, they don't care, and it's like ‘Just dispatch someone, just send them, whatever.’
“So, there would be a lot of these missed opportunities toward the end of the day, just because they're tired,” she adds. “Once we implemented Dispatch Pro, the AI never gets tired.”
Dispatchers no longer waste time debating the priority of a call, who to send to the call, or the best route to take.
“Dispatch Pro's going to do it for them,” Leege says. “It's going to map it out, put it on the right guy, and the dispatchers can worry more about the bigger-picture things—’What's going on with the guys out in the field? What do they need from me?’ And making sure those types of things are handled.”
Dispatch Pro does not replace dispatchers, Franco emphasizes, but it automates some of their workload to make the process more efficient.
Also, dispatchers no longer stress out over the weekend, worrying about the job-scheduling mess that awaits them come Monday morning, Leege says.
“There are things you have to clean up from that weekend and get in touch with the techs, but Dispatch Pro has already made a good plan for you, so you have a lot less to do right away and you can focus a little more on the things that need your attention and less on things that don't,” Leege says.
Dispatch Assist
Understanding that dispatchers prefer to be in control of their dispatch board and they still want to approve changes before they happen, ServiceTitan added Dispatch Assist to allow dispatchers to approve Dispatch Pro’s recommendations.
“It’s like having a calculator on a math test,” Franco says. “We just want to get you to the answer quicker but still allow you to write down the answer at your own choosing.”
With Dispatch Assist, dispatchers can choose partial automation to approve on-demand recommendations, a hybrid version that allows you to automate when you want, or full automation to streamline operations.
And the new Dispatch Pro Console helps you manage a dispatcher’s tasks, such as a technician running late, a job tagged for ordering parts, or even confirming tomorrow's calls and updating customers.
You can also add priority-level tags to tasks in the Dispatch Pro Console to alert dispatchers when an urgent need requires their attention.
The bottom line
“No product, no matter how flashy, means much if it's not driving some results,” Franco says.
To demonstrate, Franco and Leege shared the following growth increases for Althoff Home Services. While drive time decreased, the company’s average ticket size, conversion rates, and membership sales all increased.
“Everything was up that we wanted to be, and that was a direct reflection of Dispatch Pro,” Leege says. “It was amazing, because the dispatchers were able to focus on things they needed to be focusing on while letting this autopilot take control of everything else.
“Dispatch Pro is learning which technicians are good at what things, and it sends those guys to those calls while taking routing into [consideration],” she adds. “I think it's also improved some of the relationships with our dispatchers and the technicians.”
>>To learn more about how Dispatch Pro’s fully automated dispatching makes decisions, download the whitepaper.
>>Bonus: Earn a $100 gift card as thanks for your time when you demo Dispatch Pro.
