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Best way to reduce missed or late appointments?

Brandon Okafor

We're bleeding customers because of late arrivals. My team runs 12 techs across a metro area with 30-45 min travel times, and we're running 15-20 minutes late on roughly 30% of appointments.

Scheduling gives 2-hour windows but customers still complain. We've tried padding drive time but then we're underutilized.

What actually works? Specific FieldPulse features or process changes. Need something we can implement this week.

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  • Two things that actually moved the needle for us...

    First — we stopped giving customers the appointment time and started giving them the departure time. "We'll leave the previous job at 2 PM and text you when we're 15 min out." Shifts the expectation completely.

    Second — we built a simple rule. Any job over 45 min drive time gets a 30-min buffer added automatically. Dispatch can override but they have to justify it. Caught a lot of the surprises that were making us late.

    Not sexy but it works.

  • in reply to Ray DeLuca

    Departure time instead of arrival. That's interesting. We're still doing "between 1-3 PM" which is obviously the problem.

    How did you communicate that change to customers? Pushback?

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  • in reply to Brandon Okafor

    Some pushback at first... mostly people who just wanted a fixed time to plan around. We explained it as "we'd rather be honest about when we can actually get to you than promise something we can't hit."

    Surprisingly most customers preferred the text-when-close approach once they experienced it. The ones who didn't — we weren't a good fit for anyway. Win-win.