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How do you handle after-hours emergency calls?

Teresa Lund

We are getting hammered with emergency calls after 6pm lately. Summer heat + old HVAC units = nonstop.

Right now we have rotating on-call but honestly its a mess. Techs don't always pick up. Customers get angry. Sometimes I'm calling three people before someone answers.

How do other dispatchers structure this? Do you pay premium rate for after hours? Bonus for response time? Or is there a better way to set expectations so not everything becomes an emergency

Also does anyone use FieldPulse to track on-call status or is that separate. I need something cleaner than the group text chain we have now

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  • We do something kind of different that might help! We created a separate 'Emergency Service' job type in FieldPulse with its own color code on the dispatch board. Then we have a standing policy: emergencies get assigned to whoever has the lightest schedule tomorrow, not who's on call tonight.

    This sounds weird but hear me out — we do a video triage first. Customer walks us through the problem on their phone. If we can fix it remotely, great. If not, we schedule first thing in the morning with the best tech for that equipment type. Our callback rate is super low because we actually solve the problem instead of just showing up.

    Customers were mad at first but then we started explaining it as 'we want to send the right expert, not just whoever's available.' They actually like that framing!

    Thanks so much for starting this thread — really appreciate all the different perspectives here!

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  • We do something kind of different that might help! We created a separate 'Emergency Service' job type in FieldPulse with its own color code on the dispatch board. Then we have a standing policy: emergencies get assigned to whoever has the lightest schedule tomorrow, not who's on call tonight.

    This sounds weird but hear me out — we do a video triage first. Customer walks us through the problem on their phone. If we can fix it remotely, great. If not, we schedule first thing in the morning with the best tech for that equipment type. Our callback rate is super low because we actually solve the problem instead of just showing up.

    Customers were mad at first but then we started explaining it as 'we want to send the right expert, not just whoever's available.' They actually like that framing!

    Thanks so much for starting this thread — really appreciate all the different perspectives here!

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