Two years ago, Jessy Karolevitz and her team at Bonfe Plumbing, Heating, Cooling, Electric, Drains saw into the future.
Their Minneapolis-St. Paul residential shop was growing at a rapid pace, thanks in part to ServiceTitan. But there was one pain point they had yet to solve: smart dispatching.
Karolevitz, Bonfe’s call center director, had seen the same story play out too many times. A veteran dispatcher would leave, or they’d hire a new batch, or there’d be an influx of new technicians, and it would result in growing pains.
“It's hard (for a dispatcher) to know (their technicians), all of their ins and outs, their personalities, their skill sets, and know them quick enough to make decisions as fast as a dispatcher needs to make them,” she said. “It takes years. And so when we’d bring in a new dispatcher, we would get the pains.”
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
This led Karolevitz to ask herself a simple question: “How do we take the knowledge of these dispatchers and transition that into the new ones in a way that they can take it in?”
The answer was an AI dispatch tool. Bonfe found one that it could use in conjunction with ServiceTitan, allowing them to place the right call with the right tech and optimize technician routing. It worked well.
But last year, when Karolevitz attended Pantheon, she learned about ServiceTitan’s brand new dispatch tool, Dispatch Pro. She and her colleagues dug into the product, and Bonfe decided it was worth giving it a shot. But first, there would be a test.
Bonfe ran both AI dispatch softwares simultaneously for a month: Dispatch Pro, and the tool they’d been using for a year. They were curious to see what decisions each software would make and which decisions they liked more.
The winner?
“Dispatch Pro, hands down,” Karolevitz said.
From 20 minutes, to seconds
During interviews, Karolevitz used to ask prospective dispatchers the same question:
“You’re putting together a puzzle. And you go to put in the last piece. But the cat knocks it off the table and you have to start all over. So you put it back together again, and as soon as you’re done, the cat knocks it back down. How does that make you feel?”
With Dispatch Pro, Karolevitz is going to have to find a new interview question. Here’s why:
Increase Dispatcher Efficiency: Dispatch Pro runs thousands of scenarios to get the right technician to the right job. This allows dispatchers to invest more time in delivering superior customer experience, taking care of techs, and making quick adjustments.
Maximize Profitability: Powered by Titan Intelligence, Dispatch Pro’s algorithm finds the best technician for every job based on your tech’s skills, recent sales performance, proximity to the job and more—all to maximize profit.
Essentially, Dispatch Pro puts the puzzle back together for you, in seconds, regardless of how many times the cat knocks it down.
As Karolevitz explained, one last-minute phone call could require the shuffling of 20 to 30 puzzle pieces, because the dispatcher needs to take into account the best tech, most optimized route, highest conversion rate, and the ripple effects of how that one call changes the schedules of many other techs.
“One of the biggest game changers was watching Dispatch Pro do it for us,” Karolevitz said. “Watching it make the moves that we were going to make. What would take us 20 minutes to figure out…takes a matter of seconds.”
AI that’s meant to help, not replace
Karolevitz explained that there’s a logical fear when it comes to AI services like Dispatch Pro.
“One of the things that was scariest for my team when I brought in the concept of AI was, ‘Is this going to take our job? Do we need to be worried?’ And I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions around it,” she said.
That’s because Dispatch Pro has enabled Bonfe’s 10 dispatchers to focus on what’s important: Right tech, right call.
“It's taken their time away from placing 300 calls a day, setting today's board and tomorrow's board. It’s allowed our dispatchers to focus on what's important: Right tech, right call. They have the ability (and time) to dig into the calls to make sure that they're set up correctly, and that (the technician) has the right skillset.”
Karolevitz said Dispatch Pro is “at the top” when it comes to her favorite ServiceTitan products. It’s setting up Bonfe, which is on pace for $52 million in revenue this year, for continued growth—without pain.
“Dispatch Pro has allowed us to work on the business, instead of in the business,” she said.
