Handle same-day emergency without disrupting schedule?

We've been using the unscheduled jobs queue for exactly this. Here's what works for us:

• Create the emergency job as "Unscheduled" first — don't assign immediately
• Use the route optimization tool (the one that came in 3.2) and check "Include unscheduled jobs" — it'll slot it in with minimal disruption
• Pro tip: We set our emergency jobs to a different color code in dispatch so everyone sees what's happening without reading details

The key is not touching existing assignments until you see the optimized suggestion. Half our problems came from dispatchers manually moving things before letting the system do the work.

Also — and this is unsolicited but relevant — we started padding our regular schedule with 15-minute buffers between jobs. Sounds inefficient, but emergency absorption got way smoother and our on-time rate actually improved because techs aren't running late from minor delays.

In my experience working with operations teams across different company sizes, what I typically recommend is a multi-layered approach that depends on your current configuration and how your technicians are distributed geographically.

The first consideration is whether you have technician availability windows configured. Many teams I work with haven't fully set these up, and what happens is the system treats all technicians as equally available for emergency insertion when in reality you might have someone finishing early or geographically positioned better for the emergency location.

What I typically recommend is reviewing your work hour templates first — make sure they reflect actual availability including lunch buffers. Then, when an emergency comes in, you can use the dispatch board's filter to show only technicians who:

1. Are within a reasonable radius of the emergency
2. Have availability later in their day (check the mini timeline in the technician card)
3. Are working on lower-priority jobs that can be rescheduled with less customer impact

From a configuration standpoint, there's also the SLA rule engine which can automatically escalate and reassign if a job sits unscheduled past your defined threshold. This isn't exactly emergency insertion, but it creates a safety net.

One thing I've noticed is that teams often want to solve this purely through software when sometimes the bigger win is establishing a dispatch protocol — who decides what constitutes an emergency, what authorization is needed, and at what point do you offer the customer a next-day option instead. The software supports either approach, but clarity on the business rule side tends to reduce the schedule disruption more than any single feature.

Happy to review your specific setup in a working session if that would help — I can look at your technician distribution and suggest a configuration that might reduce your manual reshuffling.

Great question, Nadia! Happy to help outline the built-in options.

For same-day emergency insertion with minimal disruption, here's the approach I'd recommend:

1. Create the emergency job with priority set to "Urgent" or "Emergency" (your admin can configure these in Settings > Work Orders > Priority Levels)
2. In the dispatch board, use Assign > Suggest Optimal Technician — this runs route optimization against current assignments without changing them until you confirm
3. For customer notifications, enable automatic status updates in Settings > Notifications. When you reschedule an existing job, the affected customer receives an SMS/email with their new window

The unscheduled jobs queue that Gwen mentioned is also excellent — it lets you hold emergencies in a staging area while you evaluate the best insertion point.

See this article for full steps on emergency job handling — it covers the notification templates and how to configure the automatic customer updates.

From a workflow standpoint, many successful teams designate a specific dispatcher for "emergency triage" during peak hours, so one person owns the reshuffle decisions rather than multiple people making conflicting adjustments.

Real talk... the "suggest optimal" button is great until you have a tech who doesn't actually update their status in real time. Then the system thinks they're finishing Job A at 2pm when they're really still there until 3:30.

We ended up requiring status updates at arrival and completion precisely because of this. Emergency insertion got a lot more reliable once we fixed the garbage-in-garbage-out problem.

Also — if you're not using the team assignment feature for your emergency pool, consider it. We have a "float" team of two techs who aren't on the regular schedule. They pick up overflow and emergencies. Keeps the main schedule cleaner.

Ray, the float team concept is interesting — are those technicians dedicated emergency responders, or do they handle other flexible work? I'm wondering how we balance utilization if we set aside capacity that might go unused.

They're doing PMs and small jobs when not on emergency. The trick is those are interruptible — a half-finished PM can wait, a half-finished install cannot.

So we slot them into the gaps deliberately. Dispatch knows those jobs are "soft" and can be bumped. Techs know too — no one's surprised when it happens.

Utilization is lower, yeah. But our emergency response time dropped from 4 hours to 90 minutes and callbacks from rushed emergency work dropped significantly. Your call on whether the math works for you.

Adding a field perspective — when dispatch does need to bump my regular jobs for an emergency, the single best thing they can do is give me the reason in the job notes.

"Customer water heater failed, flooding basement" — I'm fine with that. "Rescheduled per dispatch" with no context — I'm calling the office to find out what happened, which wastes everyone's time.

Pro tip: There's a notification template field called {{reschedule_reason}} that populates automatically if the dispatcher enters it when moving the job. Make sure your team knows it's there.

following this closely we have the same problem. do the automatic notifications work if you reschedule multiple times in one day? had a customer get 3 texts last week and they were not happy

Teresa — yes, that's configurable. In Settings > Notifications > Customer Preferences, you can set a minimum interval between update messages (we recommend 30 minutes) and a maximum updates per day cap.

If a job gets rescheduled multiple times within that window, the customer gets one consolidated message with the final time rather than each individual change.

That said, if you're seeing multiple notifications in a single day, it's worth checking whether someone is manually sending updates in addition to the automatic ones — that would bypass the deduplication logic.