What to Look for in Service Scheduling Software

Most customers dread scheduling service calls. The stereotypical timeline for a repair person is an eight hour time window for which the technician is still either late or comically early. And this is in spite of the fact that deliveries have become more and more predictable over the course of the past several—thanks in part to both changing customer needs and improved technological capabilities. For businesses that deal with both of these use cases—say, plumbing and HVAC suppliers who also do on-site services, or appliance retailers who offer installations to some customers—the difference is probably that much more stark. Anyone who’s received a delivery in the past few years knows that it’s possible to ensure that the driver keeps to the schedule and shows up within the promised time window, and for service businesses, it’s increasingly crucial to have service call scheduling software that enables them to do the same. 

Service-Scheduling Software Must-Haves

The best scheduling software for field service businesses will do more than meet the expectations of your customers—it also helps you control costs and improve predictability. How? By giving you control over the entire last mile scheduling, routing, and execution process from end to end. 

When you remove the silos that keep these different parts of the customer service fulfillment process separate, you can find new efficiencies, uncover potential disruptions before they happen, and ultimately get more out of your existing team and resources. 

Here’s how: 

Smart Service Route Optimization

The biggest part of the scheduling equation is figuring out exactly when a given technician will be able to make it to the next job site. This starts out easy—how long does it take to drive from the distribution center to stop number 1?—and becomes gradually more difficult and uncertain as you go along. If you’re late to stop number 2, you’ll probably be at least that late to stop 3, and it’ll only get worse from there. 

To solve this issue and make sure your service technicians show up at the right time, you can build a lot of buffer into your ETAs so there’s no real risk of being late. But this comes with a tradeoff: technicians wind up sitting idle for part of the day, and you simply can’t maximize the number of stops they make. The result is that your cost per route and cost per stop are higher. 

Route optimization is the best way out of this conundrum, but not just any old route optimization will do. You need a solution that can successfully account for not just drive time but service time—specifically, differences in service time between different types of service calls. 

Obviously, this isn’t an exact science, but when you’re able to account for time spent on site in your route optimization, you can work backwards to figure out your actual capacity and make the most of it. More importantly (at least from the end customer’s perspective), you can ensure that your service technicians arrive on time. 

Customer Experience Integration

Leveraging service call scheduling software that can optimize your routes effectively can go a long way towards improving your bottom line. It can also help significantly when it comes to customer experience—but to get the most out of the customer experience benefits, you need to integrate your scheduling and customer communications. 

Sure, you could leverage two different solutions for these processes, but it’s easier to manage customer experience when your customer communication tools live in the same place as your routing and scheduling. 

Why? Here are a few reasons:

• Customers want live ETA estimates. When your routing software is integrated with your customer communications and driver/technician tracking, you can automatically update ETAs to ensure easy visibility across the board. 
• Customers can be automatically notified when their services are scheduled. This saves your team multiple steps and ensures that everyone is kept up to date. 
• Customers can more easily self-schedule deliveries. We’ll discuss this in more depth below, but suffice it to say for now that scheduling and communications need to go hand in hand to make this possible. 

In a nutshell, these two functions go hand in hand when it comes to ensuring a great customer experience. Housing them within a single solution ensures that there are fewer opportunities for disconnect, outdated information, or other drivers or poor customer experience. 

Customer Self-Scheduling

Customer self-scheduling can be a powerful part of providing a great experience to customers—but only if your field service scheduling app can actually handle it. 

This can be easier said than done. Since different services will take different amounts of time, you need a routing engine to dynamically generate potential time slots for customers. Otherwise, you may be offering them options that aren’t workable for your service technicians.

You also need to be able to make it easy for customers to choose a time slot from the comfort of their own devices without the risk that they’re choosing from unworkable or out-of-date options. This means your scheduling software needs to dynamically generate time slots based on your codified capacity rules and offer those time slots to customers based on existing capacity levels and schedules. 

When your service planning software can overcome those hurdles, the impact can be tremendous. Customers obviously love it, because it gives them greater control over how and when they get their services. 

But it also has operational benefits: Typically, it takes two and half attempts to reach a customer to nail down a schedule that works for them via phone. That simply doesn’t scale when you’re administering a large operation. By cutting out the phone calls, you save time and money, simplify customer experience, and use your capacity more efficiently. 

Total Visibility Across the Entire Process

The best scheduling software for service businesses is the one that ensures visibility across the entire last mile. Planning is crucial, but it’s only as powerful as your technicians’ ability to execute. 

Visibility is a crucial bridge between the best laid plans and actually getting the job done. 

What do we mean by visibility? It comes down to a few elements:

• The right information at the right time: whether you’re a dispatcher, a router, a salesperson, a technician, or anyone in between, you should be able to work with confidence that you have the most up-to-date information at your fingertips. 
• The left hand knows what the right is doing: it’s crucial for each segment of the last mile team to know what each other segment is up to, and the right service tech scheduling software makes that possible via live updates and configurable alerts
• Customer visibility into services: when you have this level of visibility internally, you can turn around and provide the same level of visibility to your customers boosting trust and decreasing inbound calls in the process. 

Easy Integration with Other Software Solutions

Your customer service scheduling software is only one piece of the larger puzzle when it comes to getting the right services to your customers at the right time. You need to integrate your service scheduling with other processes across your company, from warehouse management to fleet management and beyond. 

That’s why it’s so crucial to find a solution that can integrate effectively with your ERP, WMS, PoS or any other crucial elements of your technology stack. 

Once you’ve checked this critical box, you’re well on your way to more efficient service scheduling, lower costs, and happier customers. 

Learn more about DispatchTrack’s field service scheduling software and see how it can save you time and money here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/industries/field-services