A practical guide to field service dispatch

What dispatch is really deciding

Every dispatch decision is a trade between three costs: drive time, the promise you made the customer, and the skill fit of the technician. Optimizing only for distance produces days where your best technician spends the afternoon on filter changes. Optimizing only for skill produces a map that looks like a plate of spaghetti.

The workable rule is to lock the constraints first — time windows and required certifications — and only then let the routing engine minimize drive time inside what's left.

Structure intake so dispatch is fast

Most dispatch delay is really intake delay. If the call taker has to ask for the address, the equipment and the history, the job reaches the board incomplete and someone calls back.

• Search by address, not by customer name — the property carries the history.
• Capture the problem in the customer's words plus one structured service type.
• Set the time window at intake, not later. It is the promise everything else respects.
• Flag access constraints (gate codes, pets, dogs, commercial hours) at the same moment.

Handling the same-day emergency

An emergency call is an insertion problem. The question is not who is free — nobody is free — but whose day absorbs the disruption at the lowest total cost. That means comparing the added drive time plus the risk of breaking a time window for each candidate technician.

Doing this by intuition works with four trucks and fails at twelve. A dispatch board that scores candidate technicians for you keeps the answer consistent regardless of who is at the desk.

The metrics that matter

Track first-time fix rate, on-time arrival percentage, average drive minutes per job and jobs per technician per day. Those four move together: a route that adds a fifth job per tech but drops on-time arrivals below 85% is usually a net loss once callbacks are counted.