HVAC companies schedule technicians to fulfill customer requests. For instance, an organization can use dispatchers to schedule its workers daily or weekly to respond to customer calls. These schedules are created for each technician depending on various criteria, such as travel distance and time, a technician’s experience level, customer availability, and seasonality. For the majority of HVAC businesses, scheduling and dispatching field service technicians is a challenge due to the numerous variables and considerations involved. Here are some key challenges they face and how to solve them:
Manual scheduling
Many HVAC companies waste hundreds of hours each month creating schedules because they rely on manual scheduling and refuse to invest in digital transformation. It is also not saleable because more work orders necessitate more technicians to handle them, which in turn necessitates more dispatchers to set up appointments and oversee routes. Thankfully, HVAC software facilitates automatic scheduling based on the available data and enables quick dispatch of technicians to different jobs.
Unreliable route optimization
Your dispatchers will need to alter technician schedules outside the system if your scheduling system doesn’t consider crucial factors like preferred service days and time slots. This impacts your dispatcher’s ability to do their job well. Additionally, it comes with additional costs that affect your bottom line:
- Decreased service capacity: Your technicians’ travel time between service visits will increase if your routes are not optimized. This time can quickly pile up and diminish the total number of service calls each of your experts can handle daily, further lowering your ability to provide overall service.
- High fuel costs: Your fuel costs for each technician increase as more time is spent driving between service calls.
- Low customer satisfaction: Customers’ satisfaction and loyalty to your service provider will be impacted if you have a lesser service capacity because you won’t respond to their calls as quickly as you should.
HVAC software has GPS tracking and route optimization features to help overcome these challenges. Knowing a technician’s location is crucial when allocating tasks and planning driving routes to reduce travel expenses.
Challenges with route alteration
Not many field service management tools make it simple to change technician routes after they have been planned and the technicians are on the job. HVAC software gives dispatchers access to technician location and availability, making it easy to alter routes to improve service delivery.
Challenges in obtaining reliable information
You may improve your scheduling tasks over time by gathering, analyzing, and acting on data about field service scheduling. Although spreadsheets are simple to use, they have difficulty because they were not designed for job scheduling. The use of spreadsheets as a data source can be constrained if the individual changes or you modify how you arrange jobs. Luckily, HVAC software provides real-time data, including the location of employees, their accessibility, and the inventory that is available for use hence informed decision-making.
The bottom line
HVAC software automates every aspect of technician scheduling, boosting turnaround time and service delivery.