ElectricalBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Fitting Same-Day Service Calls Into an Electrician's Route

Same-day calls are part of the electrical business. Half the outlets in a kitchen go dead. A breaker trips every time the dryer runs. A new freezer will not stay on. The customer does not want to hear about next Tuesday, and a shop that can say “we can have someone there this afternoon” wins the job and, often, the customer for years.

The hard part is not saying yes. It is saying yes without blowing up the rest of the day.

Start With the Route You Have

A same-day call goes into a route that already exists. How that route was built, and how to adjust it, is covered in Setting Route Order by Hand When the Auto-Route Needs a Human Touch. Same-day calls are the most common reason to use it.

Before promising anything, the office needs three answers: which van is nearby, how much of its day is left, and what kind of call this is.

Which Van Is Nearby

Crew GPS on the office map shows where every van is right now. A call on the north side of town while Van 1 is two streets away is an easy yes. The same call while every van is south of the river is a different conversation.

Look at the dispatch board for that van and today. If the tech has finished most of the route, there is room. If they still have eight stops ahead and one of them is a long troubleshooting call, there may not be.

What Kind of Call It Is

Not every same-day call is the same size. A GFCI that will not reset is usually a short stop. “Half the house has no power” could be short or could take the afternoon. The person taking the call can ask a few plain questions to get a rough sense of it, write the answers in the job notes, and leave the diagnosis to the electrician.

A useful habit is to keep same-day calls on the service van. The install van is usually committed to one long job, and pulling it off a panel upgrade halfway through is a bad trade. For more on that split, see One Van on Service, One on Installs: Splitting Electrical Work Between Vans.

Adding the Job

Once you know where it goes:

• Create the job for the client and address, or open the service request if it came in through the customer app or the website request form.
• Assign it to the chosen van for today.
• Place it in the route. Usually right after the stop the tech is on or the next one, depending on where the van is headed.
• Add a note with what the customer described, such as “Breaker trips when dryer runs, started yesterday.”

The tech app on the tech's phone shows the new job in its place. If the property is already on file, the equipment saved on the house shows on the job card too, so the tech can see the main panel, its rating and where it is located before walking in.

The Rest of the Route

A new stop pushes everything after it later. For a route of short service calls, one added stop usually does not matter much. For a route that was already full, something may need to move to tomorrow. It is better to move one non-urgent stop to another day and tell that customer early than to leave them waiting all afternoon for a van that will not make it.

Moving a job is a matter of picking a new day or van on the board. The customer can get a quick text from the office through two-way texting so they hear it from you, not from silence.

Keeping Customers Informed

The same-day customer usually wants to know exactly when the van will arrive. Once the job is on the route, the automatic texts handle most of that. The on-the-way text goes out when the tech heads there, and the arrived text when they pull up. Customers further down the route still get their own texts at the right time, because the texts follow the tech's progress, not the original plan.

Same-Day Is a Habit, Not a Scramble

Shops that do same-day work well tend to plan for it. They leave a little slack on the service van, keep install days off the service route, and check crew GPS before promising a time. For true emergencies that need to jump the whole line, see Emergency Electrical Calls: Moving One Job to the Top Without Wrecking the Day. To see how same-day calls fit with the dispatch board and routing, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrician scheduling software page.