Why Do Home Service Businesses Need a Dispatch Planning Software

With a majority of the population working from home, there is little to no time for household tasks like fixing a hole in the roof or light fitting. This created a new business opportunity for home service businesses during this Covid-19 pandemic. As the omicron variant of coronavirus takes over in 2022, home service businesses have a chance to widen their customer base.

What are home service businesses?

Home service businesses are those commercial businesses that work on various aspects of residential homes. They help homeowners comfortably improve their personal lifespace surroundings. Here are the different home service businesses that operate today. Everything from home improvement, pest control to childcare falls under home services.

6 reasons home service businesses need dispatch planning software

As the home-staying population increases, the demand for service fulfillment of home service businesses rises as well. Customers want their service demands fulfilled on the same day or the following day. With the rise in consumer demand and service volumes, the concern to maintain customer satisfaction has increased too.

Home service businesses are hiring more fleets and new drivers to handle this situation from the operational front. But they should become smarter in improving the efficiency of fleets and how they carry out their dispatch planning. The role of dispatch planning software becomes crucial when dispatch operations are planned for home service businesses. Here are the six reasons home service businesses need dispatch planning software.

Confirm the Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) of service

Customers these days have a lower tolerance for foggy delivery dates and demand an exact time window for getting their service fulfilled. Ambiguity frustrates customers and makes them exit a business offering. 

With the help of dispatch planning last-mile delivery software, home service businesses can give the best possible ETA based on customer priority, customer location, service type, availability of field executives etc. It provides them with an open time slot or identifies recommended slot options for their service fulfillment.

Check Out: ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival)

Assigning the suitable and best-fit executives for the task

Operations managers in home service businesses find it difficult to assign field service technicians based on customer requests and priority. As service requests keep flowing in, it is crucial for them to assign them to the best suitable field service professionals from the available workforce. 

A dispatch planning last-mile delivery software helps home service businesses to assign the best-fit executive to the service request based on the availability of the executive’s promised SLAs, and service type. By keeping the operation manager updated on the live status of the service request, it helps them easily learn when a resource would be available for the next task. It factors rider preferences based on their skill set like knowledge of neighborhood areas, experience, driving behavior, technical expertise, etc. thereby improving the quality of service to their customers.

Improves the transparency of last-mile home service logistics

The important challenge that many home service businesses face is that they do not have precise information on the on-ground service fulfillment status. When operations managers deploy their field service workers for fulfilling service requests, they do not have a way of knowing if the jobs assigned to them are completed. 

A dispatch software technology helps home service businesses identify and monitor the respective leads assigned to the executives. It enables them to easily plan, track and optimize the different movements like customer-to-lab, customer-to-store, customer-to-service provider, etc. Its control tower applications help them gain better visibility and track the live status of their service staff with timely notifications. These alerts help them gain better operational control over their service logistics when there are service deviations.

Dynamic optimization of service schedules

Customers may reschedule or cancel any home service appointments when they cannot attend to them.

A dispatch management software updates the operation managers about the spare time resulting from cancellations or rescheduling from customers. It helps them identify other important service requests and utilize their idle time for them. When a field service job takes more or less time than originally anticipated, it helps them easily change the duration of the job and assign another technician to fulfill that service request.

Track last-mile metrics

Beyond improving the efficiency of daily operations, operations managers in home services businesses should always have integrated information on service fulfillment at their fingertips. They should have detailed and comprehensive data on which field service professionals have performed and who did not perform well. 

Dispatch software helps home service businesses to have access to their real-time historical data through virtual dashboards. Its insights on service fulfillment help them find out the errors from their service failures and rectify them. The past data comes in handy when they have to update their service durations while planning dispatch operations the next time. The accessibility of historical data helps businesses improve their serviceability quotient thereby improving their brand reputation.

Elevate customer experience

Imagine that a customer books a service appointment for 4.00 pm and the home service business does not make it in time. What would happen? The customer would call another business to fulfill his/her service request.

Dispatch planning software provides timely alerts and notifications when field service technicians are on the way to customer locations. Through its real-time GPS tracking system, it enables customers to know when exactly their field service professionals would arrive. This would avoid any missed appointments or miscommunication with customers thereby paving the way for an elevated customer experience.

Conclusion

As the pandemic continues to extend, there will be a huge demand for home service businesses from customers. When the demand rises, it will be necessary for them to utilize new technologies like dispatch software to increase their service efficiency.

Locus dispatch planning software generates service schedules for home service businesses based on skills, rating, experience, location, preference, etc. It automates the service scheduling process thereby helping businesses save time and serve more clients. It enables them to generate customized service schedules based on on-ground constraints, goals, resource availability and business needs.

Experience hassle-free dispatch planning in your last-mile with Locus dispatch software!