A good dispatcher’s day is mostly checklists and a few fast decisions. This is a practical daily workflow for a dispatcher in a home service company, mapped to the screens in Exoserva that you’d actually use for each step.
Two screens do most of the work:
- Schedule (Jobs → Schedule) — the calendar. Week and Month views, an Unassigned Jobs panel, rescheduling and cancelling. Use it to plan.
- Dispatch (Jobs → Dispatch) — the day’s queue, the job map and your technicians’ status. Use it to run the day.
Before the first truck leaves
- Clear overnight messages. Open Inbox for customer texts and chats that came in after hours, and Tasks for anything the AI receptionist escalated for a callback.
- Plan unassigned work. On Schedule, press U to open the Unassigned Jobs panel (desktop, calendar view) and drag jobs onto the right days. Dropping on a Month cell keeps the job’s time of day; dropping into the Week grid moves it to the slot you drop on. Either way a draft or pending job becomes scheduled and no technician is assigned — that’s the next step.
- Check for overlaps. In the Week grid and the day timeline, overlapping jobs for the same technician get an amber ring. The Month calendar doesn’t show it, and an overdue job keeps its red ring instead — there the overlap is only in the tooltip. Fix these before the day starts, not when two customers are waiting.
- Open Dispatch in Day view. Look at the counts in the header, press 2 to filter to emergencies, and check the banner for jobs whose address couldn’t be placed on the map.
Assigning the day
- On Dispatch, every unassigned job card has a technician dropdown. Pick someone and they’re notified in the app and by push.
- The Technicians panel shows who is Available, On job or Off Duty, how many open jobs each person has, and a workload bar. Balance the day before it starts: a full bar at 8 AM is a missed appointment at 3 PM.
- Assigning someone onto approved time off or a company closure is blocked, so you’ll know right away.
During the day
- Status comes from the field. Technicians tap On My Way, Arrived, Start Job and Complete Job in the app. The Technicians panel updates from those taps, and the customer gets a text at each step.
- Where is everyone? Schedule → Map shows the last known position of technicians who share their location.
- Running late: the “on my way” text gives a standard estimate of about 30 minutes. If a technician is further out than that, call the customer yourself.
Cancellations and reschedules
- On the Schedule, open the job and use Reschedule to set a new date, time and duration, or drag it in Week view.
- Cancel Job asks for a reason. Always fill it in — “customer cancelled” and “we couldn’t make it” are very different numbers at the end of the month.
- On the job page, Change status… lets you choose whether to notify the customer. Useful when you’ve already called them.
Emergencies
- Create the job with priority Emergency — Add Job on Dispatch, or press N on the Schedule. One thing to check first: on the stock role set a Dispatcher has no job-create permission and the save is refused, so creating jobs needs Supervisor and above, or a custom role.
- It jumps to the top of the Dispatch queue and pulses red.
- Assign it from the card. Look for someone Available with a light workload in the same part of town.
- Call the customer to confirm, rather than relying on the automatic text.
End of day
- Filter the Dispatch queue to All: there should be no unassigned open jobs for today.
- Emergencies handled, cancelled jobs cancelled with a reason, notes added where something unusual happened.
- Check tomorrow on the Schedule’s Week view and the Timesheet & Availability page for time-off requests.
A note on Auto-Assign
Exoserva has an Auto-Assign button on Dispatch, but it’s off until an admin enables auto-dispatch, and when you press it, it assigns every unassigned job at once without a review screen. Most offices are better off assigning by hand first, then using the per-job AI Dispatch Suggestions (click a pending job’s pin) as a second opinion. Out of the box, those two tools are available to Owners and Administrators.
For more on the Dispatch board and GPS, see the dispatch and technician tracking guide in this category.
Dispatchers: what’s the one check you never skip in the morning?