Do Your HVAC Dispatchers Know They Matter?
Grasping the value of an exceptional dispatch strategy
So many dispatchers leave work every day not knowing that they’ve made a difference in their company’s day-to-day financial success. Are your dispatchers among this group of unknown influencers? If so, let’s figure out a way to change that!
Often, contractors have a laser focus on the service technicians, plumbers, electricians, and salespeople in their businesses. They’re so focused that they forget to recognize the massive impact that their call center and dispatch teams can have on their businesses. In fact, the dispatch team will have an influence on as much revenue as all the other departments combined — literally! Dispatch speaks with or handles every customer a business has.
Your best technician may perform twice as well as your #2 tech, but even on their best day, your #1 tech doesn’t have a hand on more revenue than your dispatcher. Depending on the size of your field team, your dispatcher can produce 10x the revenue than that of any single technician. It’s a good idea to keep that in mind when determining who to praise at the next company outing.
Running an effective dispatch team means bringing in more revenue for the company as a whole. Let’s talk about what that looks like.
It Starts With The Leader
When you find an exceptional dispatch team, you will usually find a superb leader standing behind them. This is no different than having a strong service manager, operations manager, owner, president, or CEO. If the leader knows and is committed to the direction that they are heading in, their employees will usually follow suit.
A great dispatch leader will be able to provide their team with the key performance indicators (KPIs), such as daily revenue targets or daily average tickets, that show the team how they measure up. In addition, the leader will need to confirm that the dispatch team has access to the call priority matrix, technician rankings, and other tools needed to accomplish the assigned daily goals.
A Dispatcher Unicorn
Let’s imagine an ideal dispatcher – a person who knows that every decision they make impacts the revenue, gross margins, and even net profit of the company. Now, some people aren’t cut out for that kind of company-wide impact. The people that are, however, can take real ownership of their position and their department. They are the souls who know their mission every day. They are the individuals who can cite their exact daily revenue target, down to the penny. An ideal dispatcher may even be able to predict the daily revenue by 9:00 AM, because they are so familiar with their team of technicians, conversion rates on specific job types, tech turnover opportunities (and the average sales that follow), and the other opportunities that await.
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You’re probably saying, “That type of dispatcher is a unicorn! They don’t exist!”
They do exist, and I shall show you the way to dispatching success.
What’s Next?
If you’re on board with the idea that your dispatch team can have more of an impact on your company than your best technician ever could, that’s great! What are you going to do about it?
First, you’ll need to acknowledge that a dispatcher cannot be a customer service representative (CSR) who dabbles in dispatch. The dispatch position is such an impactful position that it can, and should, stand on its own two feet. In fact, when you find yourself using an individual as a CSR/Dispatch in combination, you need to ask yourself which of the two responsibilities are being compromised. Which of the two positions are you going to have to accept under-performance from? Which of these two positions is losing ground for your company? These two positions can be in direct conflict with each other. Asking someone to do both will compromise the effectiveness of either one, or both, responsibilities. Period.
Let me explain.
A CSR’s main job is to book the calls. That’s what we coach at Nexstar Network. A dispatcher’s main job is to maximize the opportunities.
Now, if a CSR has booked a bunch of calls, and the dispatcher has to reschedule some of them, due to the whole “maximizing opportunity” concept, how do you think that CSR is going to feel, knowing that when they book a call that it might get rescheduled?
Conversely, if a dispatcher is suddenly plunged into the CSR world and is expected to book the call, how successful do you think this individual will be when their logical brain doesn’t create the same customer experience that a CSR would?
See, they are two different jobs, and they require two different personalities. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you’ll start to see the call center positively impacting your business. Calls will get great customer experience from your CSRs, followed up directly by the dispatcher maximizing the opportunity.
Before you do anything else today, go out to your dispatchers and tell them what a big deal they are.
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