It’s often a truism of business that managing growth and projects, not the actual work to be done, is the hardest part. After all, with enough expertise, the work takes care of itself. But if you’re swamped under various clients and projects, you may not be able to dispatch an expert to your next client in a timely manner, and that can cost you the job itself.
For HVAC businesses, it’s known as HVAC scheduling, and one of the best tips is that you don’t have to do it alone, trying to manage it all on your phone or with some outdated filing cabinet that provides more questions than answers. Not only will you quickly confuse yourself and your employees, but with all those jobs flying around, you could end up sending the wrong technician to the wrong house at the wrong time — and that’s a surefire way to lose a client forever.
The good news is that with HVAC scheduling and dispatching software, you can stay on top of your scheduling challenges, meeting each job with the proper expertise and resources in a timely manner so that both your employees and your clients know exactly when a job is assigned out and when it is scheduled to be done. That can help get a handle on your business, and all it takes is HVAC scheduling software.
Here are some more HVAC scheduling tips that can help you turn that scheduling nightmare into a problem solved.
You’ll Need a Dispatcher
Whether or not you use HVAC scheduling software to streamline your work, you’ll still need a dispatcher to use the software and to help organize your company’s resources day in and day out. Often, the dispatcher ends up being the business owner — which is hardly ideal — and larger companies will absolutely need a dedicated dispatcher to help stay on top of everything.
Your dispatcher will need to be detail-oriented, organized and a good communicator. They’ll be the one to reach out to technicians and clients, and they’ll also need to have a grasp of the overall goals of each job and the company at large to be effective. They’ll also need to dedicate themselves to the scheduling itself, so tasking a technician or an employee that already has a full slate of duties is not ideal. And don’t forget that they’ll need to know their way around different jobs and concerns so they can estimate correctly, and that means putting a competent and experienced person in the role.
Organize Those Files
After a job is done, it’s tempting to toss those files into a filing cabinet and hope that you can dig them up when they’re needed. But what happens when a long-time customer contacts you for maintenance or other services? If you’re not ready, you may bumble the call or leave your customer wondering why you can’t pull up their history. It’s one of those HVAC scheduling tips that you never know you need until you do, and it’s true that you need organized files so that you can communicate with confidence.
But even if you have an organized filing cabinet of each former job, what happens if your dispatcher is working from home or you have to bring in someone new to take over dispatching duties? With a physical paper system, you’ll have a complicated training period, if the new dispatcher can even figure it out at all. However, with a digital system, all important customer info will be available with a simple search, and the data itself will be well organized and ready for review at a moment’s notice.
Group Similar Jobs
One of the best HVAC scheduling tips is to group similar jobs by location or by job type. Grouping jobs by location is ideal when you want to keep drive times down, but it’s also important to consider the job type. If, for example, some jobs are only possible via certain technicians or they require a completely different approach from your typical jobs, it may make sense to treat them differently in your scheduling.
That said, for most jobs you’ll probably want to organize them by location. Sending one technician out to an area of town where they can complete a handful of jobs is much better than sending all your techs out and having them drive clear across town for each and every job. Not only does that waste gas and time, but it will also be frustrating for your employees to spend so much time driving and not working.
Do More With HVAC Scheduling Software
With the best HVAC scheduling software, you and your business will be able to do more jobs in less time while saving your important resources for work, not driving across town for each job. That can help you finally get a handle on that scheduling nightmare, turning your scheduling into an asset, not a curse. Find out more about how HVAC scheduling tips can help you get a better handle on your workload. Schedule a demo today!
