Communication is key when scheduling and dispatching your HVAC/R service techs. While any back-and-forth communication between the office and your field technicians is good, automating these interactions could be even better for productivity and your customers.
However, the best strategy for your business depends on the current systems you have in place to communicate with your technicians. If your office manager is still manually scheduling and dispatching your technicians every day, here’s 3 reasons why you might want some scheduling software instead:
1. Getting Away From Pen and Paper for Scheduling Jobs
If you rely on Google Calendar, a whiteboard, or paper and pencil to schedule your techs jobs every day, you’re more likely to forget something, overlook something and lose work orders than if you had a system to hold and retain all the information in one place.HVAC scheduling software relays information in real-time so you won’t forget anything or miss anything when things get busy. With software, when a service call comes into the office, your office manager would pull up that customer’s information or record in the system. They would then be able to create a new job, mark its priority level and job type, start and end times. They also have the ability to add any notes or instructions for the service technician they’ll assign to the job. Once the job is saved in the system, it can either be assigned or picked up by the tech in the field, who will have access to that customer's record, the current jobs details and directions to the job site on their smartphone or tablet.
2. Utilizing Software For Emergency Calls
Even when you prioritize all your techs jobs for the day, emergency calls still come through and scheduling hiccups still happen. For the office manager of an HVAC business, when things pop up, like an emergency service call, there’s a lot of manual work that goes into reshuffling the schedule and updating techs in the field. When you’re also trying to answer the phones and complete 10 other tasks, it’s easy to misplace the work order you just had in your hand or double book a technician.Color-coded dispatching tools make this process simple and efficient, as HVAC scheduling software will allow you to see your techs jobs per day, for the week or month and be able to sort them according to their status, priority, the job type, any date range, by customer, and more. Jobs that aren’t scheduled on the calendar yet will even show up on the software’s dispatch board so you can add them in when they’re due or where there’s an open slot.
Easy to use drag and drop features make scheduling, rescheduling and shuffling the jobs on the board easy as well. With software, new work orders that are created are stored and attached to the customer’s record. When you go to schedule that new job, all that information moves with it digitally so you’ll never have to worry about losing another work order, invoice or proposal throughout the service and sales process.
3. Using Software To Manage All of Your Service Agreements
Keeping track and staying on top of all your service agreements isn’t easy, especially so if you’re focused on trying to grow your business. When you don’t have a system in place that can alert or remind you of when your customers are due for maintenance, you’re losing money and actually doing your customers more of a disservice than you are providing a good service.Without HVAC scheduling software, by the time your customer realizes they need you, it’s too late; something is broken. Software will help you recognize your customers’ needs before they do. If a recall on a part is sent out, for example, HVAC software would allow you to run a quick report for all the customers who have had that part installed or serviced by your team. With this information at your fingertips, you can be proactive instead of reactive in addressing any issues right away.
Scheduling maintenance agreements can also be done in advance. Scheduling features will allow you to save jobs that you’ve created to repeat on a pre-defined schedule, which then allows you to see and plan for upcoming service appointments before they’re a “no-show” or missed altogether.
The open, transparent communication that’s created from using software, helps HVAC businesses operate more efficiently. It ensures that both office employees and field techs are able to work independently from one another but also be on the same page, which then allows everyone to be more productive and pro-active.
What strategies do you use to improve communication while scheduling your HVAC employees?
