Service dispatch: assigning the call, telling the customer, and keeping what happened
- Service order total
- $312.25
- Travel
- $12.60
- Labour on site
- $142.50
Every figure on this page is computed from the inputs entered, by the method stated below it. Jobcardo publishes no tax rate, no wage figure and no trade standard: the rate, the markup and the tax on the parts line are yours, and the defaults are a worked example to replace with your own figures.
Service dispatch is the decision taken dozens of times a day in a service business: who goes to this call, next. It sounds administrative and it is where most of the margin in a service week is won or lost, because every avoidable mile, every second visit for a part and every customer phoned twice is paid for out of the same job. The discipline is small and specific: assign from a board that knows where people are, tell the customer without being asked, and write down what happened.
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Assign from the board, not from memory
Who is nearest, who is free, who has the skill and the part. A dispatcher working from memory optimises for the technician they spoke to most recently, which is a reasonable heuristic and an expensive one over a month.
Tell the customer before they chase
An arrival window sent when the assignment is made, and updated when it changes, removes most of the inbound calls a service office takes. It is also the cheapest satisfaction improvement available to a small firm, because the complaint is almost never the delay itself.
Close the call on the record
Arrival and completion times, what was found, what was done, parts used, the signature and the photographs, on the order. The invoice is then built from the call rather than from a technician's recollection at six o'clock, and the query three weeks later has an answer.
Service dispatch: common questions
What is the difference between service dispatch and scheduling? Scheduling books work into days; dispatch decides the order and the person today. The second changes hourly, which is why it needs a board rather than a calendar.
How do you handle a call that needs a part? Close the first visit properly with what is needed, book the second before the technician leaves, and order the part against the job. Most second visits that drift were knowable at the moment the first one ended.
Should the technician or the office close the job? The technician records what happened; the office prices and invoices it. Splitting it the other way means somebody in an office writes a description of work they did not see, which is how invoices get queried.
Jobcardo Pro
Keeping what you raise
The worksheets are free forever. Pro turns them into the record: every order you raise kept against the customer with its status from raised to done to invoiced, every change dated, your company name and logo on the sheet, no watermark, and an export when the bookkeeper asks.
- Download as PDF
- No Jobcardo watermark
- Save every work order and sales order and reopen it later
- Your business name and logo on the sheet
- Export every order and worksheet in one go
- Job-done and balance-due reminders emailed to your customers
- Connect your own Stripe account and get paid online
- Connect your QuickBooks Online or Xero
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