We've been wrestling with this one for months and I want to hear how others are solving it.
We run 8 technicians across 3 zones. Our bread and butter is scheduled maintenance, but we get 3-5 emergency calls per week that need same-day response. The problem: every time we shove an emergency into the schedule, we break 2-3 other appointments. Customers get bumped. Technicians run late. Dispatchers spend their whole day replanning.
Here's what we've tried:
- Keeping one "float" slot per day — but that's revenue we're not capturing, and emergencies don't conveniently arrive one per day
- Overbooking the first appointment of each day assuming cancellations — works 60% of the time, creates chaos the other 40%
- Asking technicians to absorb extra jobs — they're burning out, and I'm getting pushback on overtime
I'm curious what your actual operational rules look like. Do you have a written policy customers agree to? How do you decide which scheduled job gets bumped? And has anyone found a way to make this not feel like a daily crisis?
Gwen
