Imagine your home services company running 100 technicians with just two dispatchers. It’s simply unthinkable, right?
With ServiceTitan’s newest machine-learning tool, Smart Dispatch, it’s not only thinkable, but entirely possible, says Alexa Franco, Senior Project Manager for ServiceTitan.
Franco joined ServiceTitan VP of Customer Experience Tom Howard and Jason Brady, President and Founder of Above and Beyond Service Company, to discuss the machine-learning dispatching tool in a recent webinar.
Read on to learn more about Smart Dispatch and determine whether this feature is right for your business.
What Is Smart Dispatch?
Smart Dispatch optimizes your dispatch board for profitability by prioritizing high-opportunity jobs and pairing them with your top performers. Its algorithm uses settings you apply in your account, and learns from technicians’ historical data (total number of sales, ticket averages, memberships sold) to choose the best tech for each call, while also decreasing drive time.
“It actually rechecks your dispatch board every 10 minutes to find the best possible permutation for the most profit for that day,” Howard says.
It also optimizes schedules up to three days into the future, and re-optimizes those future days every hour.
Smart Dispatch allows users to set up the software to understand their business needs with settings like:
Max Drive Time: Sets a cap on driving distance between jobs.
Autolock: Locks a job, so it can’t be reassigned within your determined amount of time before the job begins.
Drive Time Home: Takes into account how far your techs are from their homes before assigning jobs.
Job Prioritization: Tells the system to book a certain job type before others.
Who Should Use Smart Dispatch?
To qualify for the closed beta trial of the new dispatching feature, your company must employ 15 or more managed technicians. The current algorithm best suits companies providing service for residential HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and drains.
“In the future, we definitely plan on broadening that out to all of our customer base,” Franco says. “But at the moment, that’s who our beta is geared toward.”
ServiceTitan is targeting late next year for a public release.
In addition, it's helpful if your company is already using Adjustable Capacity Planning (ACP), Tags, Skills, and Zones within ServiceTitan.
“We can help with Tags, Skills, and Zones once you start to onboard Smart Dispatch,” Franco says. “But if you come along with those already set up, it can go a long way in making your onboarding go that much quicker.”
» Check out our ACP setup checklist to get started. Want to join the Smart Dispatch closed beta? Contact your CSM to find out more.
What Are the Benefits of Smart Dispatch?
“Smart Dispatch is going to help increase your average ticket, which then increases your total revenue,” Franco says. “It helps decrease drive time. It's going to help with your dispatcher efficiency. You're going to be able to hire more technicians and CSRs without having to increase the number of dispatchers you need in order to accommodate all that growth.”
When Brady started with the Smart Dispatch beta, his multi-trade Above and Beyond service company employed five technicians.
“I just knew if we could decrease drive time, and if we could send the right tech to the right job—without somebody having to figure that out themselves—we would grow,” Brady says. “Revenue would grow, we'd be able to buy more trucks—all those things that happen when you have more people.”
After about a year of using Smart Dispatch, his technician headcount grew to 28.
Smart Dispatch also spotted a red flag for Brady.
“We had a guy who was a rockstar, and we actually noticed Smart Dispatch wasn’t assigning jobs to him,” Brady says. “We realized he wasn’t selling jobs he used to sell. Then I looked him up on our contracting board and learned he had just applied for his contractor’s license. He was starting his own company.”
Seeing which technicians the software does and does not assign jobs to provide owners with valuable insight.
“If your people aren't performing, Smart Dispatch isn't going to give them jobs,” Brady says. “For us, it's not only about who's performing and not performing, but it's also about if this person isn't performing, what do we need to do to help them get better? Do we need to do more ride-alongs? Are they in the wrong spot? Is there something going on in their family?
“It allows us to really connect and figure out what's happening with some of our folks, and get them back on the path of retention, because it costs a lot of money to hire a new person, ” he adds.
When it comes to drive time, Smart Dispatch automatically builds efficient routes to save on time and fuel costs.
How Dispatchers and Smart Dispatch Work Together
“What we realized when we first got Smart Dispatch five years ago and started testing it is people are terrified because it’s a black box. The computer’s making decisions,” Howard says. “The first complaints were ‘My dispatcher would have done it differently.’ That’s the point, because it can make billions of calculations in seconds and figure out who's going to be the right technician. Smart Dispatch doesn't care how much your technicians sweet-talk them; it doesn't matter if they have a relationship with the CSR or the dispatcher. It just cares if you're performing.”
Brady agrees the most challenging part of onboarding with Smart Dispatch was getting his team to let the machine work its magic.
“Once we were able to remove that hurdle and let Smart Dispatch run, we saw average tickets go up, we saw revenue go up, we saw drive time decrease, and we had more replacement opportunities actually turn into replacements,” Brady says. “When you look at that from a business standpoint, I just can't argue with it. If you just trust the machine, you're going to grow.”
By analyzing performance, the system learns to give high-dollar jobs to techs who perform well.
“If your dispatchers start changing the board, it throws off the work Smart Dispatch is doing,” Howard says. “It definitely takes some trust, though.”
Smart Dispatch aims to help businesses scale efficiently and empower dispatchers to achieve more with their freed-up time.
“We just want to make life easy for your dispatchers,” says Smart Dispatch Solutions Engineer Brent Yamamoto, who provided a live demo of the software. “This is not meant to replace them. This is meant to empower them and free up their time to make them more efficient.”
While the software optimizes everyday situations, Yamamoto notes that companies still need a dedicated person overseeing the dispatch board to handle unexpected situations, such as when a tech’s vehicle breaks down.
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Smart Dispatch Q&A
Is Smart Dispatch the same as Adjustable Capacity Planning?
No. ACP tells your CSRs available times to schedule jobs. Smart Dispatch is a machine-learning algorithm, so it does the dispatching work for you. A CSR books the job with ACP, then Smart Dispatch figures out the best technician based on drive time, close rates, and other factors, and assigns that tech to the job automatically.
Does Smart Dispatch take zero-dollar jobs into consideration?
Yes, it knows that zero-dollar jobs, including warranty work and callbacks, don’t generate revenue. It doesn’t look at those calls like it does revenue-generating jobs, such as water leaks or heating repairs.
Will it take arrival windows into account?
Arrival windows are hard constraints. Smart Dispatch won’t move a job outside of your arrival window, which means you don’t need to worry about watching where the jobs are placed and updating your customers. It always abides by the arrival window you choose.
Does Smart Dispatch work for install technicians?
No. Since installation jobs typically take a large amount of time, or even the whole day, this software focuses on service maintenance jobs.
Can dispatchers make changes?
Yes. Although ServiceTitan recommends letting the machine learning system work, dispatchers can make manual changes, and Smart Dispatch never overrides a human decision.
Can you exclude certain techs from being scheduled?
Yes, companies can exclude people and job types.
What if a customer has a preferred tech?
You can set technician-specific jobs, and Smart Dispatch won’t override them.
Can you pick and choose which technicians to schedule this way?
Yes, you can choose the technicians, which is helpful if you want to test it out with just one trade first.
Does it provide an even amount of hours between technicians per week?
Right now, it prioritizes revenue, which can make the distribution of jobs uneven. ServiceTitan plans to roll out more options in the future to address that.
“Smart Dispatch is going to train itself on how to predict which jobs are more valuable than others, based on your data,” Yamamoto says. “So it’s going to constantly retrain itself and get better over time as you book more and more jobs. As your business grows, the program just keeps getting better.”
» Ready to get started with the beta? Go through this checklist to prepare, then reach out to your CSM to be qualified. Want to see the live demo? Watch the on-demand webinar.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
