How to Dispatch Field Technicians Efficiently

Bad dispatching doesn’t just waste fuel. It wastes your most expensive resource — technician hours. A tech sitting in traffic is a tech not billing. A tech driving past another tech’s job to get to their own is money left on the road.

The good news: you can dramatically improve dispatch efficiency with smart processes before you spend a dollar on software. Let’s start with what works with a whiteboard and a phone, then talk about when you genuinely need a system.

Zone-Based Routing

The simplest dispatch improvement most field service companies can make is dividing their service area into zones and assigning techs to zones rather than to individual jobs.

Here’s how it works in practice. Take your service area and split it into sections — north, south, east, west, or by suburb clusters. Assign each tech a primary zone. When a job comes in, it goes to whoever owns that zone.

This one change typically cuts 20-30% of drive time immediately. Instead of techs crisscrossing the metro area, they’re working in a contained patch. They learn the traffic patterns, they know where to park, they build relationships with local customers who see the same face each time.

The key is keeping zones roughly equal in job density, not geographic size. A dense urban zone might be 10 square kilometres. A rural zone might be 50. What matters is that each tech has a similar workload, not similar territory.

Skill-Based Assignment

Not every tech can do every job. This sounds obvious, but most dispatch decisions ignore it until something goes wrong — like sending a residential resi tech to troubleshoot a commercial chiller, or dispatching a junior to a job that needs a licensed gasfitter.

Build a simple skills matrix. List every tech down one side, every job type across the top, and mark what each person is qualified and confident doing. Keep it visible — pinned to the wall next to the dispatch board, or in a shared spreadsheet.

When a job comes in, your dispatcher checks two things: who’s available, and who’s qualified. In that order. Availability without qualification is useless. Qualification without availability is a scheduling problem, not a dispatch problem.

For trades companies, this also means tracking licence expiry dates and certifications. A tech whose refrigerant handling licence expired last month shouldn’t be dispatched to a gas top-up, and you don’t want to find out about the expiry from the customer’s compliance audit.

Real-Time Availability

Here’s where most manual dispatch systems fall apart. Your dispatcher assigns the morning’s jobs at 7am based on estimated job durations. By 10am, reality has diverged. One job ran long. Another was a quick fix. A tech got called back to yesterday’s job because the part didn’t hold.

Without real-time visibility, your dispatcher is flying blind from mid-morning onwards. They’re calling techs to ask “where are you?” and “how long until you’re done?” — interrupting work to get the information they need to assign more work.

Even without software, you can improve this. Set a simple rule: techs send a text or message when they start a job and when they finish. Three-word messages. “Starting 42 Smith” and “Done 42 Smith.” Your dispatcher now has a live picture of who’s working and who’s between jobs.

It’s not elegant, but it’s better than guessing. And it establishes the habit that makes any future dispatch software actually work — because if techs won’t update their status voluntarily with a text message, they definitely won’t do it in an app.

Emergency Rerouting

Every field service company deals with urgents. The question isn’t whether emergencies will disrupt your schedule — they will. The question is how quickly and cleanly you can absorb them.

The worst approach: pull the nearest available tech off their current job. Now you’ve got one angry customer (the one whose tech disappeared mid-job), one grateful customer (the emergency), and a cascade of delayed appointments for the rest of the day.

A better approach: maintain a buffer. If you have 8 techs, schedule 7 to full capacity and keep one on lighter, flexible work — maintenance checks, follow-ups, quotes. When an emergency drops, the buffer tech takes it. When there’s no emergency, they’re still productive — just on work that can be interrupted without consequence.

Customer Time-Window Management

“We’ll be there between 8 and 12” is a terrible customer experience. But “we’ll be there at 10:15” is a promise you’ll break half the time. The sweet spot is a two-hour window with proactive communication.

Give customers a morning or afternoon window. Then, when the tech is one job away, send an automated message: “Your technician is on their way and should arrive in approximately 30 minutes.” This sets a realistic expectation and gives the customer enough notice to be home.

If you’re managing this manually, have your dispatcher send the text when assigning the next job to that tech. If you’re using software, most field service platforms can trigger this automatically based on job status changes.

The real magic: when you need to reschedule, call before the window starts. A customer who gets a call at 9am saying “we need to move you to this afternoon” is far more understanding than one sitting at home at 11:45 wondering where the tech is.

When You Need Software (And When You Don’t)

If you’re running 3-5 techs, the methods above — zones, a skills list, status texts, a buffer tech — will get you 80% of the way there. Your dispatcher can hold the mental model. The cost of software doesn’t justify itself yet.

At 8-12 techs, you’re hitting the limit of what one person can coordinate manually. This is where a dispatch platform like ServiceTitan, Jobber, or Housecall Pro starts earning its keep. The dispatcher is spending too much time on logistics and not enough time on exceptions and customer issues.

At 15+ techs, manual dispatch is actively costing you money — in drive time, in missed appointments, in the dispatcher’s inability to optimise across that many moving pieces simultaneously. At this scale, you need a system.

The Dispatch Maturity Path

Don’t try to jump from chaos to a fully automated dispatch operation in one move. It won’t stick.

Phase 1: Establish zones and a skills matrix. Get consistent status updates from techs. This costs nothing and builds the foundation.

Phase 2: Introduce a buffer tech for emergencies. Tighten customer time windows and add proactive communication. Still mostly manual, but structured.

Phase 3: Adopt dispatch software that matches your operation’s complexity. Use the processes from Phase 1 and 2 as your requirements — you’ll know exactly what you need the software to do because you’ve been doing it manually.

Phase 4: When the off-the-shelf tool can’t handle your specific rules — your SLA tiers, your certification logic, your multi-depot routing — that’s when custom dispatch software pays for itself. Not before.

The best dispatch system is the one your team actually follows. Start simple, add complexity only when the current system’s limits are costing you real money, and always prioritise consistency over sophistication.