Booking a service call without a person typing it
Capturing the customer and the address, then the equipment and the complaint from a phone call or a web form, checking the board for a real slot, and confirming an arrival window. The hard part is the arrival window, because promising one the board cannot keep is worse than not promising.
The technician photographs the nameplate, then types the model and serial from that photo, usually somewhere with bad light and worse signal.
A field services business is judged on the gap between a customer calling and a technician arriving with the right part. Most of the repeated office work exists to close that gap: booking, dispatching, looking up whether a unit is still under warranty, and finding out what the last technician did.
- ServiceTitan
- Housecall Pro
- Twilio
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if your dispatch board is already unreliable by mid-morning. Automating the booking end just fills a schedule that was going to slip anyway.
The constraint that shapes it
Licensing is issued by state and often by municipality, per trade, which means not every technician can legally perform every job in every jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.
Something arrives from anywhere. It becomes one record with one owner. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Turning portal leads into one shape a person can work
- Turning an after hours maintenance call into one work order
- Entering a new client once instead of four times
- Filing client email to the matter instead of the inbox
- Turning a tax notice into a dated response record
- Sorting rejections that need a person from ones that do not
- How do I book a service call from a web form without typing it?
- Can an answering service book into my dispatch board directly?
- How do I promise an arrival window the board can actually keep?
- Why do after hours calls turn into next day callbacks?
Back to field services, or see how this is priced and scoped.