ElectricalBossPro Blog — Running an Electrical Business

Hiring a Dispatcher for Your Electrical Business: When, Who and What They Need

The first office hire in a lot of electrical shops is someone to run the schedule. The owner is tired of booking calls from a ladder, the vans are waiting on directions, and customers are calling to ask where the tech is. A dispatcher fixes all three — if they have what they need to do the job.

Dispatch Is the Center of the Office

The full list of what the office handles is in The Office Side of an Electrical Business: Phones, Schedules, Invoices and Follow-Up. Dispatch sits at the center of that list, because every other task either feeds the schedule or comes out of it.

In a small shop, “dispatcher” and “office manager” are often the same person. This article focuses on the scheduling half of the job. The billing and admin half is covered in the next article.

Signs You're Ready

There is no single right moment, but these are common signs:

• Calls go to voicemail during jobs and some of those callers never call back.
• The owner spends the drive between jobs rearranging the next day.
• Techs call in to ask where to go next, or what is at the next house.
• Yearly inspections and generator visits come due and nobody books them.
• Customers call to ask when the tech is coming more than they call for new work.

If several of these are true, the owner's time is being spent on work someone else could do, and the jobs only the owner can do are waiting.

Who to Look For

A good dispatcher for an electrical shop doesn't need to be an electrician. They need to be calm on the phone, organized, and comfortable saying “let me check and text you back.” Local knowledge helps — knowing that two addresses are on opposite sides of the highway saves a lot of drive time. So does patience with techs who are in the middle of something when the phone rings.

What they shouldn't have to do is make technical calls. Whether a job needs a panel upgrade or a simple repair is the electrician's decision. The dispatcher's job is getting the right tech to the right house at the right time with the right information.

What a Dispatcher Needs on Day One

Most of what makes a dispatcher good or bad comes down to whether the information is in front of them. In ElectricalBossPro that means:

• A login of their own with an office role, so their work is recorded under their name.
• The dispatch board with jobs by day, filtered by van, auto-route from the shop and route order they can change by hand.
• The Waiting List, a live map and list of every plan visit that has come due, colored by status.
• Customer and house records with past jobs, notes and the equipment saved on the address, so they can tell a caller “we were out last spring for the generator.”
• Crew GPS on the office map, so they know which van is closest when something urgent comes in.
• Two-way texting to confirm times and answer customers.

Setting Rules for the Board

A dispatcher works best with a few clear rules from the owner. Write them down and keep them short:

• Which van takes service calls and which takes installs, inspections and generators (the reasoning is in Service Calls vs Install Work: Balancing the Mix in an Electrical Business).
• How many service calls a van can take in a day before the rest move to tomorrow.
• What counts as urgent enough to bump a scheduled job.
• What jobs need an estimate before they go on the board.
• When to call the owner, and when not to.

Saved views on the dispatch board help here. The dispatcher can keep a “service van today” view and an “installs this week” view instead of filtering every time. Printed route sheets are there for a tech who wants paper on the dash.

The First Two Weeks

Start the new dispatcher on the board with the owner looking over their shoulder for a few days. Let them book from the Waiting List first, since those jobs are planned and low pressure. Then hand over new service calls. By the second week they should be running the day while the owner reviews it at night.

Resist the urge to take the board back the first time something goes wrong. A van will end up on the wrong side of town at some point. Talk through what happened, adjust a rule if one was missing, and let the dispatcher fix it the next day. The goal is a person who can run the schedule on their own, and that only happens if they are trusted to.

The demo company in the live demo is a good place to practice before touching real customers. For the rest of the owner's side of the business, return to the electrical business software overview.