Welcome to the Dispatch Digest! Take a look at some of the great new features we are highlighting this month:

Appointment Types

Some jobs are complex, and require different types of experts to visit a home over the course of several appointments. During these jobs, it’s important to stay organized and make sure everyone knows what they need to do for each appointment.

To address this, Dispatch has added Appointment Types into our field service toolset. This new feature will allow you to designate each appointment with a specific type, helping you quickly identify important appointment details, such as who needs to be there, what inventory or parts they will need, and how long the appointment will likely take.

For project-based work or complex jobs, you can assign multiple appointments of different types (such as “service” vs. “install”) to an individual job in the Dispatch system. When your dispatcher is in the office looking at our schedule page, they will quickly be able to see which appointments have a corresponding type, and can schedule or make assignments at a glance based on that information.

Appointment Types can be unique to your own business, and can be set as templates to use when your providers schedule jobs with your customers. This is a great way for your providers to stay more organized and complete jobs as efficiently as possible.

This useful new feature can be enabled by your account manager, so please reach out directly for more information and to get started.

Scheduling with Suggested Times

One of our most popular features at Dispatch is Scheduling with Suggested Times. We know that working with an independent network of service providers, or across decentralized franchise locations, can present challenges when scheduling jobs with your customers. You don’t always have access to real-time availability, but you still want to give your customers a quick, easy, and accurate scheduling experience.

Enter suggested times – a great way to speed up the scheduling process, even without direct access to your providers’ schedules. Suggested Times allows you to collect one to three ideal appointment times from your customers when they are requesting service, and communicate those times to your provider to speed up scheduling.

These times can be collected at several points in the booking and scheduling process, and can be adapted to fit your specific workflow. 

We have found that providers accept one of the ideal time slots on 80% of jobs, which we’ve seen significantly reduce time to schedule by up to 40%.

To see if Scheduling with Suggested Times can help your booking and scheduling flow, reach out to your account manager.

Engagement Services – In-App Callouts

What good is a feature if your providers are not using it? We understand that getting the most out of Dispatch relies on engaging as many of the service providers in your network as possible. Our dedicated Engagement team works side by side with you to achieve this, and has many tools at their disposal to help drive adoption and engagement, regardless of how your providers prefer to work with you.

One of our most powerful engagement tools is our in-app callout functionality. With this service, we can actually put reminders and other messages directly into our Work (desktop) field service toolset, so your providers attention can be drawn to the features and best practices that will help you get the most value out of the Dispatch ecosystem.

This is a great way to remind providers to collect photos from a job, or to attach specific notes to jobs when appropriate. You could also use it to remind your providers to view the customer’s suggested appointment times before they reach out to schedule. Callouts can even be combined to create walkthroughs that help providers stick to your specific workflow, and collect all the right information. Wherever you see the opportunity to give a reminder, we can help you get the most out of the tools we offer with our custom callouts.

Callouts are available to all customers – we will work with you to figure out how to get the most out of this feature. Please reach out to your account manager, or engagement@dispatch.me to get started.