The order sat in the portal
Jobs from a retailer program land in a system your office checks when it has time. At one installer we measured about two days to the first call, and 62% of orders never got one.
Field service dispatch
Dispatch for crews you don’t employ.
Most dispatch software assumes your techs are on your payroll and your jobs start with a call to your office. Installers get work from retailer portals and builders, then hand it to sub crews with their own calendars. We build the dispatch layer for that version of the job.
What field service dispatch means for an installer
Dispatch is the work of matching a job to a crew, a day and a customer who agrees to that day, then keeping all three in sync when one of them moves.
For a service company with employed techs, a dispatch board covers most of it. For an installer, the job also waits on a delivery, a measure and a program that scores how fast you reached the homeowner. Each of those is a hand-off, and a clean job has about ten of them.
Our dispatch work starts at the hand-offs. The board is the easy part.
What the phone costs your crews
When installers or the office do their own confirming, every job takes a few calls. Put in your volume. The defaults are the figures we use with clients: 2.5 attempts per job and four minutes per attempt.
300
2.5
50
hours a month on the phone
2.4
hours every workday
0.3
full-time people’s worth
Jobs × attempts × 4 minutes. 21 workdays, 173 hours per full-time person.
Where it breaks.
The crew was booked off a guess
The office promised Tuesday without seeing the crew’s calendar. The crew already had Tuesday, and now somebody calls the homeowner back to take it away.
The change reached half the people
The delivery slipped a day. The crew heard about it. The customer and the store didn’t, and the store keeps a scorecard.
What we build.
A dispatch layer built around your demand sources and your crews, wired into what you already run.
- Orders pulled off the retailer or builder portal as they appear, with the booking written back into that portal.
- A Samurai calls the customer within minutes of the order landing and offers days your crews have open, read from their real availability.
- One availability layer across every installer company you use, so the scheduler asks instead of guessing.
- One record per job, so a moved date reaches the crew, the customer and the supplier from the same place.
- A path to a person on your team for anything the Samurai shouldn’t decide.
A dispatcher’s day is a few hundred hand-offs. We build the system that carries them, and your office keeps the judgment calls.
The research
52%
of callers to home-service businesses get to speak with a person.
100×
better odds of reaching a lead called within five minutes than one called at thirty.
30.9%
of construction leaders name unresponsiveness to questions as the top cause of bad communication on a project.
Questions installers ask.
What is the difference between dispatch software and what you build?
Dispatch software gives your office a board to move jobs around on. We build the system that fills the board: it pulls the order in, reaches the customer, checks crew availability, books the day and tells everyone when it moves. Your office handles the exceptions.
Do I have to replace the software I run today?
No. We wire into the portals, calendars and accounting you already use. One installer we work with kept QuickBooks and gets a nightly call log with PO numbers for it.
When is an off-the-shelf field service platform the better fit?
When you own your demand and your techs are on your payroll. A field service platform is a good answer for that business, and we’ll say so on the first call. We build for installers whose work comes through someone else’s system and whose crews are subcontracted.
How fast does a customer hear from you after an order lands?
At one installer, the median time from order to first call went from about two days to two minutes. Orders that land overnight are the first calls the next morning.
Is there a contract?
Twelve months. The system is tailored to how your jobs move, and that build is real work. We quote after the first call, once we’ve walked one of your jobs.
Updated
In their words.
Operators whose systems we rebuilt, in the language they used when they told us how it was going.
Verbatim · Published by title and industry at our clients’ request
“This is one of my favorite things that’s been built. It’s unbelievable.”
Operations Manager
Home-improvement installer
“They get the phone call and by the time they’re off the phone call, they already have the email summary. With the old on-call service it could be 30 minutes or so.”
Technical Services Manager
Commercial pest control
“We don’t have our older guys having paper in their hand or looking for the paper. Everything’s already there. Just click, Google Maps opens up, or the phone recalls.”
Owner & President
Home-improvement installer
“I feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. I feel like you guys are actually attentive to my needs because we are pretty serious on our meeting cadence. A lot of other vendors I deal with, they’ll do this once and then they’re gone. They disappear and all they do is send big invoices.”
Owner
Medical lien resolution
“The email alone is doing better than our current answering service. Here’s what happened, instead of ‘I think they called for this, I’m not sure.’”
Technical Services Manager
Commercial pest control
KEEP YOUR WORD
AS YOU GROW.
Samurai Code builds the coordination system for high-volume installers. Every job moves from sold to done, wired into what you already run.
Tailored to your jobsA few builds at a time