In a service company, where the business is all about taking care of customers, dispatchers can get overlooked. After all, it’s the driver or service technician who arrives at the customer’s business or home and makes the delivery or the needed repair.
But making sure the right people arrive at the right place at the right time? That falls to the dispatcher.
There are specific skills that set the best dispatchers apart from the rest, but one of the biggest factors influencing the effectiveness of a dispatcher is the support they are provided to do this demanding job. A telematics platform can give your dispatchers a suite of indispensable tools that makes their jobs easier, more productive, and more efficient, which in turn helps your company better serve your customers.
These tools include the following:
Route creation tools. One of a dispatcher’s most important daily responsibilities is creating routes for drivers. There are multiple variables that go into route creation including target destinations, staff and equipment availability, and fuel efficiency. Factoring in these variables to create a daily schedule for staff is a major undertaking. Plus, once created, these routes are subject to change due to things such as unscheduled customer calls, emergency situations, and calls taking longer than anticipated. With the route planning software built into a telematics data platform, creating, sharing, and altering routes is a relatively easy process.
Location tracking. The reality of a service business is that daily routes are dynamic. Customers will cancel or reschedule. Or they will call needing emergency service or repairs. Or a driver will get stuck in traffic. Or a call will take either less or more time than is estimated on the original schedule.
A dispatcher needs to manage these changes to ensure customers get the services they need and expect. That means sending available staff or equipment to the locations where they are required at any given time. Through telematics location tracking, a dispatcher can always know the location of fleet vehicles and staff and can direct them to where they are needed quickly and efficiently.
Communication. An important part of a dispatcher’s job is communicating with fleet drivers. A telematics platform can make communication easy, especially when drivers can access a telematics app on their mobile device. Direct messaging makes text communication instantaneous. And, with the touch of a button, a driver can communicate back to the dispatcher when they have arrived at their designated location or have finished their work at a location.
Job completion. The communication capability coupled with the form creator feature in a telematics platform enables calls or jobs to be quickly closed out upon completion, as drivers or technicians can capture customer signatures, upload pictures of completed work, and digitally file all the needed paperwork to initiate an invoice. This is a marked improvement over the days when billing would have to wait for paperwork to be manually submitted by a driver or tech, sometimes days after the fact.
Telematics flattens the dispatcher learning curve
Another advantage of the various telematics tools available to dispatchers is that they make the job easier to perform and easier to train and onboard when new people move into the dispatcher role. That means less of a learning curve and less impact on customers when a new dispatcher joins the team.
Plus, a powerful telematics platform that combines all the information a dispatcher needs can further streamline and simplify the job into a single system, making it easier for dispatchers to be indispensable.
Your service business cannot run smoothly or successfully without skilled and effective dispatchers. And access to telematics data-informed tools makes dispatchers your company’s superheroes when it comes to serving your customers.