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How do you balance route efficiency with technician skill matching?

Deja Washington

Hi everyone! We've been using FieldPulse for about 6 months now and our dispatch team is running into this constant tension — we want to optimize routes to save time and fuel, but we also need to make sure the right tech with the right skills ends up on each job.

Right now we're kind of winging it, honestly. We have a spreadsheet of who is certified for what, and we cross-reference that with the schedule, but it's getting unwieldy as we grow. We went from 8 techs to 17 in just a few months!

How are y'all handling this? Are you using FieldPulse's skills/tags features? Do you prioritize proximity or expertise? And what do you do when your most skilled tech is 45 minutes away and someone closer could probably handle it but might take longer?

Would love to hear what's working for your teams! Thanks so much!

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  • we're struggling with this too. our dispatcher just left and the new person is drowning

    how do you all handle when the closest tech is already at 90% capacity for the day. do you overload them or send someone farther away

    we've been overloading and getting burnout

  • in reply to Teresa Lund

    Teresa — we hit the same burnout issue last year. The team fixed it by capping daily job count regardless of drive time, and building in 15-minute buffers between jobs for the closest techs. Dispatch hated it at first (felt inefficient) but our completion rate went up and callbacks went down.

    The key was getting leadership to accept that "busy" and "productive" aren't the same thing. Worth having that conversation if you can.

    Also — if your new dispatcher is drowning, happy to share our training checklist. It helped us cut onboarding time in half.

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  • in reply to Teresa Lund

    Teresa — we hit the same burnout issue last year. The team fixed it by capping daily job count regardless of drive time, and building in 15-minute buffers between jobs for the closest techs. Dispatch hated it at first (felt inefficient) but our completion rate went up and callbacks went down.

    The key was getting leadership to accept that "busy" and "productive" aren't the same thing. Worth having that conversation if you can.

    Also — if your new dispatcher is drowning, happy to share our training checklist. It helped us cut onboarding time in half.

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