The 20% Advantage: Scaling Smart with Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro

What if 20% of your home services jobs could be booked and dispatched without a single phone call? 

You can achieve all of that—and more!—by transforming your team’s workflow with Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro.

In the next episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast, Jessy Karolevitz, Call Center Director at Bonfe's Plumbing, Heating & Air Service, Inc., explains how implementing Scheduling Pro slowly led to a more intuitive setup, smarter job mapping, and smoother customer experiences. And after combining Dispatch Pro to do the heavy lifting of assigning calls, her dispatchers can focus on high-value work.

“Roughly 20% to 25% of our jobs that get booked now get booked through Scheduling Pro,” Karolevitz says of Bonfe, a Minneapolis multi-trade company that also provides electrical and drain services. 

She describes ServiceTitan’s Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro as “life-saving!”

“It's really about working smarter and being able to help your business scale, and not necessarily having to add a ton of overhead,” Karolevitz says. “And also being able to meet the customer where they want to be met… to be able to book and schedule online has been a great asset for us.”

Setting up Scheduling Pro? Start small

When setting up Scheduling Pro for your business, Karolevitz advises “starting small.” While the feature allows for much customization, it’s best to hold off on implementing the more advanced stuff until you’re ready.

“What I've learned throughout my five-year journey with ServiceTitan is, if I can set it up very basic in the beginning, learn how it functions and how it's going to work for us, and then advance it from there, that seems to be the best avenue for both us and our customers,” she says.

At Bonfe, Karolevitz began by mapping calls—an HVAC job or a plumbing job, for instance—to Scheduling Pro, and then measured the results. Did Scheduling Pro capture the right information? Did it ask the right questions?

“Then, once we were confident with that, we started mapping them to the specific job types,” Karolevitz explains. “Then, we’d look at those and make sure they were good and accurate. From there, we looked at enabling them in Dispatch Pro. It really helped the progression to go really small with it.”

In the beginning, Bonfe’s CSRs and dispatchers called Scheduling Pro customers to confirm or glean more information, but that process only helped them learn the system better and know what questions to ask when customers book jobs online. The key is to make it as easy as possible with a limited number of choices.

“Make it as easy as possible for the customer because if it's more than five steps, you're going to lose them. If your grandma can't figure it out, it's not going to work,” Karolevitz says.

Enabling Dispatch Pro to assign jobs from Scheduling Pro

By enabling Dispatch Pro to work in conjunction with Scheduling Pro, Bonfe ultimately was able to automate the entire process of booking a customer’s call online and dispatching a technician to do the job, without ever speaking to the customer.

“Now that we know that it’s mapping correctly, we have all the right questions, and we’re not having to call customers back all the time, [those jobs] will show up at the bottom of the board. Then, when Dispatch Pro shuffles in 10 minutes, they'll automatically find their way up to the top,” Karolevitz says.

The automated efficiency is awesome, especially when you consider the time you’re saving.

“Think about that,” Karolevitz says. “That's 20% of your job. So, if you're a bigger company, and you're running 300 calls a day, I mean, to not have to worry about 20% of them is absolutely phenomenal.”

Bonfe got buy-in for Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro from its dispatchers, techs, and CSRs by explaining how the AI-powered tools can help them perform certain aspects of their jobs while allowing them to focus on things that really matter.

“What [Dispatch Pro] allowed my dispatchers to do is not have to make a hundred clicks just to place one call [on the schedule]. They were able to focus on the ones that really mattered, focus on those money-maker calls or those repair calls that came in,” Karolevitz says.

Why you need to trust the math in Dispatch Pro

Experienced dispatchers—and even call center directors like Karolevitz—might think they know who their best technicians are for certain job types, but their gut feelings are not always correct. Dispatch Pro quickly analyzes every tech’s score on specific job types to assign the best technician to the job every time.

“Before, we were very general, and it helped us really understand [technician performance],” Karolevitz says. “Dispatch Pro helps bring to light a lot of numbers.”

You can also set up Dispatch Pro to work the way you want it to. For instance, you decide whether the tech’s daily schedule should be routed in such a way that he ends the day closer to home. Or you can set up the system to weigh more heavily on revenue-making opportunities versus drive time.

“And then, once you get your calculation set, it does math equations for hundreds of technicians in seconds,” Karolevitz says. “It’s awesome!”

Bonfe continues to adjust its Dispatch Pro settings, depending on its business needs. For example, when it snows heavily in Minnesota, the company switches it to weigh more heavily on drive time so they can help more customers with fewer trucks on the road.

“Once [Dispatch Pro is] set, it’s not like it’s set in stone. You get to make the adjustments that make sense for you and your business,” Karolevitz says.

She also advises “going very granular on your job types and very broad on your skills” when setting up Dispatch Pro.

For Bonfe’s HVAC division, they first split up the maintenance jobs versus demand jobs, then grouped them by the HVAC system age. Then Dispatch Pro assigns those jobs based on the technician skill level. 

If a dispatcher decides to override Dispatch Pro, Karolevitz meets with them each week to understand which calls they decided to override and why. She also pulls the Dispatch Pro Tech Score Report in ServiceTitan to see each tech’s conversion rates, average sales, average tickets, etc.

“It’s just being really transparent and falling back on the numbers,” Karolevitz says. “The facts are the facts… It’s math.”

Currently, about 65% to 75% of all Bonfe jobs get assigned to technicians by Dispatch Pro, while the rest are handled directly by their dispatchers. 

“I think you're always going to override. It's never going to be 100% utilization. It's designed to assist you in doing the job, not necessarily do the job for you,” she says.

But with nearly 75% of calls automated through Dispatch Pro, the dispatchers now have time to dig deeper into each call, review the history, and ensure the right tech was assigned.

“Before, it was more just trying to put the puzzle pieces together in the best way possible,” Karolevitz says. “We have 35 HVAC technicians and they're running four to five calls a day. That was a lot for our dispatchers. There was no time to dig in between updating calls, contacting customers, and helping technicians. It was like a free-for-all. This is taking that off our plate.”

To sum it all up, Karolevitz describes the biggest benefits of implementing Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro for your business.

“With Scheduling Pro, you're opening up a brand-new avenue for your customers. And you're probably going to get customers that you wouldn't necessarily have gotten if you didn't have that.

“And when it comes to Dispatch Pro, the biggest benefit for us was being able to scale our technician size without having to scale our dispatch size,” she says.

>>Learn more about Scheduling Pro and Dispatch Pro, or listen to the full podcast on-demand.

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here. 

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