6 Tips for Dispatching Field Service Workers

If you run a field service company, a huge chunk of your customer service responsibilities lie with your field workers. Whether they are delivery people or field technicians, they represent your company and are expected to render stellar service to your customers. But how effectively they can do that depends on how you dispatch them and your ability to smoothen their daily workload. Proper dispatching also contributes to customer satisfaction, field worker productivity, and, ultimately, company profitability. The following tips can help improve the process for your field service workers.

1. Hire the Right Dispatchers

This point might sound obvious, but it’s worth mentioning - hire the right dispatchers. Whether you’ve assembled a dedicated team of dispatchers or combined your field service workers and dispatchers into one position, anybody you employ in these roles should possess the relevant skills.

For clarity purposes, dispatch is the process involved in sending your field workers to render service. Some companies allow their field workers to handle the dispatch process, while other businesses have dedicated dispatch staff. There’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to go about it. The most important thing is that your team possesses the relevant skills needed to optimize the dispatch process, especially if it involves using software or tech solutions, which leads to the next point.

2. Optimize dispatch with the right technology

Technology has permeated every part of the business world, including field service dispatch. More efficient tech solutions and software are emergy, offering better alternatives to Google Maps, Outlook, and Excel. Today, you can find software solutions covering different aspects of route planning and field service in general. These solutions allow you to plan and monitor each field worker's assignments, ensuring improved communication, faster response times to live customer queries, and a more efficient dispatching process. You’ll also find tech solutions like electrical contractor software or platforms designed to streamline your dispatch and improve communication between your field technicians and the main office.

3. Identify the pain points in your dispatch process

One of the best ways to optimize and improve the dispatch process is to identify bottlenecks in the system. For example, do your field workers wait too long to get dispatched? Do they stay too long on the field? Do your technicians fail to arrive on time? Are they failing to deliver a high customer service experience? Do your field workers meet customers without enough information about them? Is your field team ill-equipped? Answering questions like the ones above will let you know what issues you have with your dispatch process (if any) and what improvements to make. It will also help you pick the right dispatch strategies best suited for your field workers.

4. Analyze how you assign, schedule, and reschedule field jobs

Start by reexamining how you (or your dispatch team) assign or schedule daily workloads. Is your team collectively assigning daily jobs to the right service technicians or field workers? Are the assignments done according to location, skill level, and estimated service time?

Next, consider how your field workers prioritize tasks when they receive multiple jobs at the same time. For example, are they giving priority to premium customers who pay extra or attending to ones who call first? Also, what if there’s a field job requiring highly experienced workers or technicians, but all experienced ones are already booked? Do you assign the task to the less experienced field worker or wait for the others to return? Analyzing how you assign, schedule, and reschedule field jobs can help you improve your dispatch process to get the best from your field workers. In most cases, dispatching software with excellent scheduling features can help you navigate the situations mentioned above with less effort.

5. Set high expectations

Use every opportunity you get to remind your dispatch team how crucial their role is to the success of your business. Their efforts on the field will have direct repercussions for your company, which is why they should maintain high service standards and work to the best of their abilities. The best way to set high expectations for your workers is to provide them with clearly written goals. These could be daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on the type of service they render, but the goals should tell them what you expect from them. But don’t forget to provide them with everything they need to perform at their best, from logistics to salary.

6. Provide tools for live communication

Live or real-time communication is crucial for effective dispatching while keeping you in touch with your field technicians or workers. Being able to establish integrated communication between the main office and the field workers can reduce work conflicts and misunderstandings, making everyone’s jobs a lot easier. In addition, both the field workers and the dispatch team should have relevant information about customers, the nature of the work, location, estimated work time, and service history.