^{Tips and Tricks} Priorities: What They Are and How to Use Them 

If you offer delivery or appliance service, there’s a good chance that you are already using EPASS’ built-in Dispatching features.   

Priorities are used to help your Dispatcher organize and schedule your calls for the day. When a service call or delivery is scheduled by one of your customer service reps, they assign it a Priority. The Dispatcher can then see this priority when they are organizing the day’s calls on the Routing Screen or when viewing the delivery path on the Dispatch Mapping Screen.  

So how many Priorities should you have and what’s the best way to use them? These EPASS quick tips will help:

Less is More 

As a good rule of thumb, you want to create a small list of Priorities that your CSR can choose from. You also want each Priority to be as broad in scope as possible and not too granular.   

For example, don’t create a Priority that covers a specific time range (such 9AM-10AM or 2PM-4PM), instead create more generalized priorities (MORNING, AFTERNOON, EVENING).  

This takes a lot of the guesswork out of choosing a Priority for a call and prevents you from overpromising to the customer or putting too much stress on your delivery or service personnel.  

When it comes to creating Priorities, here’s what we recommend that could work for your business: 

• 1^st CALL (Assign this to the call that your tech should complete first. Usually given to the call that is closest to the tech’s starting point.) 
• 2 Man Job (For delivery or installs that require more than one person.) 
• AM 
• PM 
• LAST CALL (Your technician’s final call of the day.) 

Give Them Some Color 

You can assign a unique color to each Priority that you create. Giving them a color can make them stand-out visually to your CSR when selecting them from the EPASS Invoicing screen. It’ll also make it easier for your Dispatcher to view the priorities of each call ‘at-a-glance’ when viewing the Dispatch Mapping Screen.  

As an example, here’s the colors that we use in our EPASS demo:  

• RED – 1^st Call 
• YELLOW – AM 
• BLUE – PM 
• PURPLE – Last Call    

Conclusion 

Priorities are a helpful tool for organizing your service or delivery calls for the day. Just make sure to keep your Priority list small and wide in scope to be effective. A large number of overly specific Priorities puts too much burden on your CSR and Dispatch staff, and could even result in scheduling issues. And don’t forget to assign a unique color to each Priority to help your staff with quick identification when viewing the Invoicing screen or Dispatch Mapping screen.  

We hope these tips help you get more out of using Priorities with your delivery or service calls!