Penrod Blog

5 Things to Consider When Launching a Smart Dispatching System

Businesses are becoming more connected—and this extends beyond the office walls. Field service work has graduated from two-way radios to full-on tech with smart dispatch systems. You don’t want to miss out, so we’ve researched five things you’ll want to consider when launching your company’s smart dispatch system.

Smart Dispatch 101

Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) or “smart” dispatch is a savvy way to dispatch field service techs, truck or freight carriers, emergency service personnel, and even taxis with the help of a computer. Dispatchers may still use a two-way radio to announce calls, but smart dispatching is an additional tool that can help teams manage operations more efficiently and effectively.

Businesses plan ahead, but unexpected events can always happen: bad traffic, an accident, or a simple change in business plans. Smart dispatching allows staff in the dispatch center to easily direct, monitor, and communicate with the radio fleet to keep things on track by sending text messages with call-for-service pages and/or other directives.

Ready to launch a smart dispatch system? Here are the five top things the team at Penrod wants you to consider:

Keeping Up with Customer Expectations

Smart dispatching is becoming the gold standard in any industry that relies on field service staff and dispatch systems. You may think your current system of two-way radio and manual texts works fine, and we’re sure it does! But keep in mind that today’s customers expect more. Smart dispatching helps you provide better communication and management within your team, but also better communication with your end customers. It’s an integral part of many industry operations, including health care, law enforcement, public service, emergency, and utility operations. It’s also popular with freight and truck dispatching.

Lowering Costs and Increasing Productivity

Dispatching usually happens in three steps: initial communication, the dispatching process, and, once the team is working on an issue, management. Those three steps can take a lot of time and resources and if information is not clearly communicated, it can increase costs and lower productivity.

Smart dispatching helps the dispatch team communicate more clearly and efficiently with the field team. Employees can be dispatched with a single click. With smart scheduling, dispatchers can assign jobs directly from their computers, monitor performance, and track employee travel time. Smart dispatch helps you efficiently deploy your resources no matter the scenario, which helps you better manage costs.

Work Order Management

Many organizations have disconnected systems, which means employees have to re-enter information, such as customer or job data. Not only is this inefficient, it can lead to data discrepancies.

Smart dispatch systems allow you to quickly create work orders for field service operations and share this information with key systems, such as accounting or ERP. For example, Field Service Lightning work orders are natively related with standard objects such as accounts, contacts, cases, and products, allowing you to pull in data across Salesforce.

Seamless Integration

Conventional CRM software often doesn’t fully address the challenges of field service work, but if you have teams in the field, there’s a good chance you often need to access important data from those disparate systems. That’s the value of having a holistic view of data built in one place, on one single platform.

Investing in a smart dispatch system shouldn’t mean you have to change the systems you already use and love. That’s why we like Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning dispatcher console. It offers best-in-class field service options while still playing nice with your current systems.

Today’s Tech Connection

In today’s tech-connected, rapidly changing world, two-way radios don’t cut it. Dispatch teams need to be able to offer field service workers detailed information, like route changes and job specs. The team needs to have information at their fingertips, in one easy-to-navigate dashboard, instead of toggling between screens. Dispatch teams also need to be responsive, ready to adapt to new events, changes, or whatever that day’s business needs bring.

Smart dispatch consoles offer you the ability to easily keep track of every work order, status update, note, photos, and customer review all in one place. Built on the Salesforce platform, Field Service Lighting will leverage data and processes in your existing Salesforce deployment, or integrate with other applications. This keeps everyone connected, in the know, and ready to respond.

Go beyond the two-way dispatch radio. Computer-aided dispatch can help your business run smoothly by improving your team’s response rate and in-field communication and it can help your business run more efficiently by lowering costs. Get connected with smart dispatch today.

Are you ready to upgrade your dispatch system? You’ve come to the right place! Contact a Penrod Field Service Expert to discuss smart dispatch options today.