9 HVAC Technicians Dispatching Tips to Grow Your Contracting Business

Explore how the HVAC technicians dispatching platform can help allocate thousands of technicians to different locations — all in one go. That too in a few minutes.

Key Takeaways In the blog, we will unfold: ✅8 great tips ensure the on-time and safe arrival of HVAC professionals. ✅Best platform to assign tasks and monitor activities of field professionals. ✅What more features an HVAC dispatch management software should offer, other than shift scheduling? ✅How you can thrive your HVAC contracting business operational across diverse cities.

Malfunctioning thermostats and faulty compressors aren’t that painful if you have skilled and readily available HVAC technicians to send over and fix the issues.

Do you know — 20% of HVAC contractors across the industry eventually fail, and 70% of new HVAC businesses fail in the first year of operations? But why? There could be three reasons for that:

Reason 1 –  Because the HVAC market is regional and seasonal in nature. Subcontinents are divided into extremely hot or cold regions with a larger stretch than more temperate climates.

Reason 2 – Poor planning of operations, not being able to map customers’ tickets well.

Reason 3 – Poor allocation and dispatching of technicians, leading to delayed arrival time and disappointed customers.

If your business is constantly battling with the third reason, then this guide is for you. Here we have carefully crafted just 9 HVAC dispatching tips — that can be a game changer for your business.

But…What is HVAC Dispatching? HVAC dispatching is the process of allocating, assigning, and timely dispatching technicians to the job site. A field employee dispatch management software helps align the schedule of multiple HVAC professionals and assigns them tasks based on their proximity to the job site, bandwidth, and even technical skills. When you choose field employee scheduling software like TrackoField, it lets you: Manage HVAC service jobs/tasks in a customizable calendar. Assign tasks to the right technicians who are near the job site by auto-fetching their GPS location. Share appointment progress with the service team and arrival time to customers through ETAs and tracking links.

Manually mapping out all service calls and assigning them to tens or hundreds of technicians can complicate the role of HVAC dispatchers. Ensuring your HVAC technicians’ scheduling process is swift, automated, and fast with shift scheduling software is highly recommended.

9 Best HVAC Technicians Dispatching Tips (To Ensure Fast On-Site Arrival and Job Completion)

Here are 9 tried and tested tips to optimize routing and scheduling tasks for the HVAC field crew — all with TrackoField.

1. Plan & Share HVAC Crews’ Shift Schedules (in advance)

Share your technicians’ work and shift schedule way in advance. With TrackoField, you can create shareable work and shift schedules, which your field staff can access from anywhere. You can set the shift timings, locations, and any specific tasks or responsibilities concerned with each shift.

Best part? In case of unavailability of any staff member, the system knows how to reschedule jobs or re-assign them to another available technician – without interrupting the workflow.

Moreover, with our dispatch management system for HVAC technicians’ shift scheduling, you get exclusive time tracking features to monitor when employees start and end their shifts.

2. Organise & Share Tasks Via Calendar View

Clear task assignment is a way to efficient staff dispatching. As a manager, it’s your duty to ensure your team is well-versed with their day’s tasks. TrackoField lets you effortlessly map every task over a self-manageable and easy-to-use tasks scheduler in the calendar format. Our software has the most adaptable work calendar wherein you can seamlessly input tasks or drag and drop tasks to reschedule them (even at the last moment).

When your field team has a clear view of tasks with time details, you can expect them to approach it better. Unlike the times when you would just call the team or circulate a task sheet. (aye, so painful, isn’t it?)

When you choose our employee dispatcher tool, we give you options to personalize your calendar with color coding and filters and smooth toggling to reschedule or re-schedule jobs by clicking, dragging, and dropping.

3. Go for Location-Based HVAC Staff Dispatching

To ensure your staff’s on-time and precise deployment to the task site, we suggest you use location-based HVAC staff dispatching. This means you should assign servicing tasks or jobs related to heating and ventilation based on your field staff’s current location or proximity to the job site.

To establish location-based dispatching for HVAC technicians, we have developed a centralized platform that auto-syncs job requests with technicians’ locations. Our robust algorithms let you assign tasks to the nearest available technician, making on-site arrival fast and on-point. Yuhu, no disappointing customers on the line.

💡We Automated the Employee Dispatching Process for a Premier HVAC Contractor (Who Was Managing its Chain via Diverse City Offices). TrackoField offered them an automated employee dispatching platform that made it easy for the team sitting at the corporate office to assign leads to the right dealer across the city offices. All this made it easy for city managers to sort and assign such leads to technician crews across cities based on their availability, bandwidth, and proximity. 🏆  This helped them streamline their allocation process to ensure fast dispatch. It called for a better technician-customer balance.

The brand understood the importance of HVAC scheduling and dispatching and now has growing offices and staff across regions.

4. Assign Clear Tasks

You must sit and compare team member schedules side by side to see who’s available, closest to the task site; choose an available time slot, and schedule tasks with one tap.

Moreover, ensure you:

1. Clearly define task details and objectives and provide detailed instructions.
2. Assign specific responsibilities (if any) to the most skilled staff.
3. Set priorities and convey deadlines for completion.
4. Communicate any safety precautions with your staff via a quick scrum. Also, implement quality control measures.

5. Plan a Better Transit Time for More Service Calls

In the HVAC industry, faster transit time for service calls is crucial to keep up with customers’ trust. Businesses should employ a dispatching system with inbuilt GPS and route mapping solutions.

As new service requests come in, the dispatching platform will help assign the tasks to the closest team member based on their GPS location. And will even show them the fastest, most fuel-efficient route to reach the task site.

As a silver lining, technicians will be able to attend to more clients promptly, hence, bringing more new revenue.

6. Keep Customers Updated with ETA & Tracking ID

In conventional times, HVAC companies faced the heat from their customers as they would cluelessly wait for their technicians to arrive. Such prolonged waiting even made residential customers miss out on their important chores.

But now, you can sort this out by using employee HVAC dispatching software. The software lets you keep your customers informed about technicians’ arrival with ETA and Tracking ID, shared via real-time notifications. From the backend, you can even notify a customer of any schedule changes.

TrackoField dispatching software lets you send automated notifications with self-updating ETAs. We even let you track your HVAC crews’ task progress. We help you review when your technicians:

• Are driving between sites.
• Are arriving at the assigned task location.
• Have completed a job and are all set to move towards the next service call.

7. Track Your Executives’ Performance (Over a Dashboard)

A field employee dispatching software should not only improve the scheduling process but also streamline customer communications and provide you with avenues to track technician performance in real-time.

With TrackoField, over a single, colorful interface, you can view each technician’s productivity report with important metrics like:

•  Tasks status – like which tasks are pending or completed.
• How much revenue each staff helped generate?

This will help you know which technicians are selling and closing more servicing or maintenance requests. You can use this data to coach the ones who lack efficiency and reward the ones who go beyond expectations.

8. Train Your HVAC Staff (for Uncalled Scenarios)

Make sure to provide effective training that helps your staff stay on top of their service delivery or performance. Train or explain any technical information in layman’s terms and teach approaches to positively and formally engage with clients for their heating or cooling systems maintenance or repair needs.

Expose them to a more proactive approach to addressing a concern, and solving a problem — all promptly and professionally. You can conduct classes where you can create role-playing scenarios and teach them how to respond when clients share problem statements like the following:

• “My facility is not maintaining the temperature the thermostat is set at.
• I can hear strange noises when I turn on the system or whilst it is running.
• Utility bills are much higher than before. For most of August, we were paying $300 per month, but this August, we saw the bill hitting  $700.
• Pathetic air flow, like it doesn’t blow cold.
• I can notice some musty odors and strange smells.”

9. Choose a Dispatching Tool That Does More

There is no debate about whether effective employee scheduling is a key to growing your contracting business. But there are other counterparts too that you must address or balance if you want your business to thrive and not just strive.

TrackoField offers full-packaged field service management software that automates your entire operations—from task assigning to tracking geolocations to compiling payroll data.

When you choose us, we give you:

• Shift scheduling tool to manage invariable shifts.
• GPS tracking and task time tracking.
• Task management tool to assign urgent or bulk tasks.
• Expense management tool to settle staff’s on-the-way expenses.
• Payroll management tool to compile salary data with accurate calculations.
• Quick, data-led reports on important events across your field operations.
• A platform that is easy to integrate with pre-existing CRM, ERP, salesforce, or accounting tools.

Hope the above tips to improve HVAC dispatching are clear. So, what are you waiting for, shall we schedule your free demo?

Final Takeaway on Best HVAC Dispatching Tips!

HVAC technician dispatching software is a godsend platform for optimum scheduling and dispatching of your technicians. It doesn’t matter if you receive service requests at the last minute or have a shortage of technicians—the software knows how to optimise the process without flinching.

The above are the best methods you must go for (if you haven’t yet). These HVAC dispatching tips will help your contracting business allocate resources efficiently, minimize downtime, and enhance customer satisfaction.

As a bonus, you will communicate better with team members and customers. So don’t shy away from experiencing the greatness your business deserves, and onboard TrackoField’s field service management software, including the HVAC dispatching platform, with a free trial.