Episode Overview
From Chaos to Control: How Schedule Assistant Transforms Dispatching
Are you looking to improve your dispatching operations or boost overall productivity for your service business? If so, ServiceTitan offers solutions.
In a recent episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast—where we get expert advice from power users—we take a deep dive into dispatching efficiency with Vanessa Gonzales, Chief Administrative Officer at Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating & Cooling.
Gonzales reveals how Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating & Cooling completely revamped its call booking and dispatch processes with ServiceTitan’s Schedule Assistant. She explains how their team harnessed the tool to boost operational performance, streamline dispatching, and optimize schedules in real-time.
Read on for the podcast highlights, which include actionable insights and expert advice for maximizing your team’s time.
>>Listen to the full podcast on Schedule Assistant now on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
What is Schedule Assistant?
Schedule Assistant is a core product offering that helps companies improve margins by suggesting a date, time, and technician for a job, optimizing for drive time efficiency. Technician skills, zones, and non-job events with timesheet codes are factored into the recommendations.
You can use Schedule Assistant from the dispatch board, job record, and on recurring service events.
“It’s a game-changer,” Gonzales says. “It goes off of driving efficiency and who has sold the most. It gives you the stats for each tech. There's not really a lot of room for error. I wish we had found this and turned it on sooner.”
How to Set Up Shifts and Skills
To ensure Schedule Assistant selects the right technician for each job, it’s important to assign shifts to technicians and skills to technicians and job types.
“Once you do that, then that's where the magic comes in,” Gonzales says. “It takes a little bit of work, but as long as you get it set up, you’re good.”
For example, if someone calls in for a boiler service, Schedule Assistant can show a CSR the technicians who have the skills for that job, as well as their availability.
When setting up skills, you have the ability to go as granular as you want.
“We decided just to do levels, because we have electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and drains,” Gonzales says. “So we did levels one through five. Five is our highest-performing tech. They know how to do everything. Commercial, bids — they can do it all.”
Keeping the shift list simple makes it easier for CSRs to book jobs.
“You don’t want your CSR looking through a whole Google list of everything that could possibly be done to a business, home, or new construction,” Gonzales says. “For instance, for drains, we did mainline or branch line. So if a customer calls with a toilet, kitchen faucet, or tub clog, that’s all the branch line.”
Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating & Cooling CSRs have a goal to get call booking time under two minutes, so anything to simplify scheduling helps them meet that goal.
For shifts, you can mark technicians as on-call, time-off shift for PTO, regular shift, or overnight shift, and each shift type is color coded.
“Then it books off of a capacity percentage, so we can set it to only book to 80 percent capacity because we want to leave room for those emergency calls. It’s adjustable and it’s easy,” Gonzales says.
Advice for Implementing Schedule Assistant
Schedule Assistant lets you book for drive time efficiency and for profitability.
“We try to do both. If you can maximize your drive time and get the right tech to the right job, it’s going to do amazing things for your numbers,” Gonzales says, “Our dispatch board is fluid. So dispatchers understand it may be set one way when they leave for the day, but when they come back the next morning, it may go all against the wall and they have to put it back together again.”
Maximizing revenue and driving efficiency requires a delicate balancing act. To get it right, Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating & Cooling holds their dispatchers accountable for quickly moving tickets out of the hold queue and keeping the board live and accurate.
“We’re making sure we're routing correctly and watching the callbacks so we know the true cost of a job,” Gonzales says. “Sending the wrong tech out is a nightmare. There might be a tech who’s a little nervous about presenting purchasing options, and they’re like, ‘I sold a repair.’
“We’re like, ‘What did you do? That system needs to be replaced,’” Gonzales adds. “Send the tech out who gives purchasing options, and the customer gets to buy something. Everyone’s happy. There are less callbacks and the tech who was too scared doesn’t have to feel like they failed.”
When implementing Schedule Assistant, Gonzales says the hardest part is deciding how you want to set up your skills and job types. And when setting those up, talk to your CSRs and dispatchers to ensure you use the right terms.
“We made the mistake where we put a lot of the jargon, like a lab sink. Who calls a bathroom sink a lab? Techs, techs are the ones who do that,” Gonzales says. “How many customers know what a French drain is? Or know that there's a difference between low-temp refrigeration and regular refrigeration. That's not their job. That's why they're calling the experts. Talk to your CSRs and dispatchers to make sure they’re in alignment.”
Then, test in the sandbox before going live.
“Before we go live with anything, we practice and play with it in the sandbox,” Gonzales says.
Listen to your team’s feedback during this process.
“Just because it was your idea doesn’t always mean that it’s the final iteration,” Gonzales says. “Let people collaborate, and usually things get better.”
Check out these resources we mentioned during the podcast:
You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.
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About ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help home service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business.
Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
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