HVACBossPro Blog — Dispatch & Scheduling

Scheduling HVAC Service Calls: From the Ringing Phone to a Spot on a Van's Route

A service call starts as a worried voice on the phone: the house is warm, the furnace is clicking but not lighting, there is water on the closet floor. It ends, if it goes well, as a fixed system and a paid invoice. Everything in between depends on how the call was scheduled. Get the details right at the start and the tech walks in prepared. Get them wrong and the tech walks in blind.

Start With the Board in Front of You

The screen you will be scheduling onto is described in The HVAC Dispatch Board: Every Van, Every Day and Every Call on One Screen. Have it open while you take the call, so you are looking at real availability rather than guessing.

Service calls also come in without the phone. A website request form and the customer app both send service requests to the office, where they wait to be scheduled the same way. A request from the customer app already knows who the customer is and which address, which saves a step.

What to Ask on the Phone

A few questions on the call save a lot of time in the field. A practical list for most HVAC offices:

• What is happening? No cool, no heat, short cycling, water leaking, strange noise, a smell. Write the customer's own words in the job notes.
• Is the system running at all? Blower on but warm air is a different call from nothing happening at the thermostat.
• Where is the unit? Attic, closet, garage, basement, crawlspace, roof. If the address already has an equipment record, confirm it rather than asking from scratch.
• How do we get in? Gate code, dog, attic ladder, who will be home.
• Who is at risk? Elderly residents, infants, someone with a medical condition. Many companies move these calls up the list during extreme weather. That is your policy to set.

If the customer is new, the equipment details can be filled in on the first visit and will show on every visit after that.

Picking the Van

For most small HVAC companies, a repair call goes to the repair van. If you run one van on repairs and one on tune-ups, the repair van is the one with open space built into its day. When the repair van is full, look at the tune-up van next: can a tune-up be moved to make room?

For same-day calls, crew GPS on the office map shows where each van is right now. A van that is two streets away with a quick tune-up in progress may be the better choice than a repair van across town.

Picking the Day and the Spot in the Route

Once the van is chosen, the call needs a day and a position. On the HVACBossPro board you add the job to the van's day, then either re-run auto-routing (Closest First or Furthest First from the shop) or set the order by hand. A no-cool call for an elderly customer might go next regardless of geography. A non-urgent noise complaint can slot into wherever it fits the drive best.

If the call is not urgent, offer the customer a day when the van is already working in their part of town. That keeps drive time down and is usually soon enough for a system that is running but not quite right.

Telling the Customer

Once the call is on the board, the customer should know what to expect. Customers who have alerts on get a reminder the night before, a text when they are next, and a text when the tech arrives. The on-the-way text goes out when the tech taps Start on their job, and the arrived text follows when the tech gets there.

How you describe timing on the phone is up to you. Some offices give a morning or afternoon window, some just give the day and rely on the on-the-way text. Either way, promise what the board can deliver, not what the customer hopes to hear. Arrival windows have their own guide later in this series.

What the Tech Sees

On the tech's phone, the call shows in route order with a navigation button, the equipment details under the address, access notes and past notes from earlier visits. The tech knows before leaving the previous stop that this is a 3-ton system in the attic with a 16x25x1 filter and a pull-down ladder in the hall.

When the job is done, the tech taps Complete. The invoice is created, and if the customer has a card on file it can be charged before the van leaves. If the tech could not finish, Skip with a note sends the job back to the office to reschedule, covered in Rescheduling and Skips: Handling HVAC Calls That Don't Go as Planned.

A Simple Habit That Pays Off

Every service call is a chance to improve the record. If the tech finds the filter is a different size than listed, or the unit is in the garage not the attic, update the equipment details on the address. The next call to that house, whether a repair or a tune-up, starts with better information. Over a season, the records fill out and scheduling gets faster. To see how service calls fit with routing and the rest of dispatch, visit the HVACBossPro HVAC dispatch software page.