Dispatch Software for Field Service Management

What is a dispatch software?

Field service management is a crucial activity for companies that need agents to travel to a customer’s location in-person to resolve issues. But manually performing a lot of the service dispatch-related tasks such as creating a schedule for field agents, or monitoring a work order’s progress can cause delays and inefficiency. This eventually leaves both the customer and your support team frustrated.

A dispatch software simplifies field service management by greatly reducing the manual effort that goes into handling a service dispatch. You can have a singular platform from where you can schedule, manage and deploy field technicians for service tasks. It also leads to better coordination between field technicians and helpdesk agents and consequently, a faster resolution time.

Why do you need service dispatch software?

A service dispatching software helps you streamline field service management activities and reduces bottlenecks that slow down your service. If you are a business that deals with resolving issues at the customer’s location here are 3 reasons you need a dispatch software:

Simpler task management

The objective of using dispatch management software is to simplify the entire process of scheduling and dispatching field technicians for daily work orders. You no longer need to update sheets manually and struggle to understand which service agent is performing what task. A dispatch software helps you be more organized and in control of your service task assignments. You can easily identify a task’s priority and the type of problem, and assign the right technician for the job.

Optimized schedules

Without a simple way to schedule your service tasks, you might end up with poor response times and delayed work order completions. With dispatch software, you’ll have the schedules of all your field agents in one place, allowing you to send the closest available technician to a customer’s location. You can avoid the stress of having to manually go through each agent’s task sheet just to create a calendar for each day. Field service management becomes like clockwork and you create the best schedule for both your agents and the customer.

Balance workload against demand

A common problem in service dispatch is trying to avoid overloading field technicians with tasks. Without dispatch software, it becomes a cumbersome activity to identify who is free and who isn’t. When there is a spike in service requests, without a clear picture of locations and schedules, some technicians might be stuck with too much to do. Using dispatch software to track and monitor your field agents and their workload means you can distribute work orders and dispatch your technicians more efficiently.

Benefits of using a dispatch software

Using dispatch software brings with it several advantages that make it a lot easier for service teams to do their job. Let’s look at the benefits:

A better way for field and helpdesk agents to work together

With a dispatch software, dispatchers and field teams can collaborate with very little difficulty. It provides an easy way to share information and context between the two teams, thereby making solving customer problems at their location much easier.

Technicians can reach customer locations much faster

Dispatch software allows you to view every field agent’s schedule. This means for every service task you can now assign the technician closest to the customer location based on their availability, reducing the time it takes to start work on the issue.

Updates can be shared in real-time

Since tracking progress on a customer problem is now easy to do, field technicians can share the real time status of their work order to the helpdesk agents so that there is no delay in the relay of information.

Prioritize your service tasks better

With the availability of all schedules and locations in one place, you can make more informed decisions on which tasks have to be attended to first based on the priority of the problem, and assign the right agent for the job.

Why you should choose Freshdesk as your dispatch software

Helpdesk Agents and Field Agents on one platform

With Freshdesk, you can now have both your customer service team and your field service team on a single platform. Customer queries coming in from multiple channels such as social media, email, phone or chat get converted into service tasks on Freshdesk. The service agent can select and assign the task directly to an available field technician. The field agent gets a notification on his portal and can immediately head to the customer’s location. Likewise, any update from the field agent will be available to helpdesk agents in real-time.

Learn more about our integrated FSM software here->

Add field technicians and create service groups

Manage service tasks with scheduling dashboard

The Freshdesk scheduling dashboard is a powerful feature that transforms the way you can manage service tasks. It gives dispatchers a holistic view of all work orders and the schedule of every field technician. You can drag and drop any service task on to the calendar of the field agent, and it gets assigned to them in real-time. Based on the skill set of your technicians you can also create service groups to simplify task assignments. It’s a great way for you to monitor workloads and create the most optimized schedule benefitting both your customers and agents.

Learn more about the scheduling dashboard

Contextual ticketing to simplify collaboration

Freshdesk’s highly mature collaboration functionality makes sharing information really simple. When a customer problem gets registered as a ticket in Freshdesk, you can automatically link it to a service task. This allows the field agents to have all the information of the customer query at their fingertips. If there is any change in the service task, it gets reflected immediately on the field agent’s portal. So, the context of a customer issue is always maintained consistently across dispatchers and field agents. All teams involved will also have a single view of the customer with interaction history, notes, updates, and more., ensuring everyone is on the same page.

Learn more about collaboration in Freshdesk