A few things that have helped me improve upon my dispatching skills.
Having the 1st call for every tech sorted the day prior(as often as possible). You can work on filling out the rest of your tech's day while they are on the 1st call. Keeps the tech on the road, not in the shop idle.
Task Management. If you take a day off, god forbid you are sick... the office knows what you are working, what is urgent and what is not as pressing - the office can assist. The office will remain as up to date as possible by seeing progress and understand next steps for workflows/pass offs to the correct department.
Tags are your best friend. Use tags on jobs, customers, job types, projects. Really anything you can add a tag to, DO IT! A very simple visual that pops up tells you a lot of information without having to go "look for it". We have tags on customers who have pets, young children. elderly tenants, ladder needed, aging equipment, warranty opportunities, etc. Tags will auto populate every time you start booking a job for that location and or customer.
Knowing your service area like the back of your hand will help tremendously. Memorize the map! Dispatch features definitely help with this ( think ...optimizing routes, ACP, etc.) but if you know the cross streets/ main intersections well, you will be that much more ahead of the game. Knowing traffic patterns for your service area helps also.
Listening to other dispatchers calls within your company (search calls and click on the headset). See what other questions are asked and what is gained from the different style of speech. See if you can implement common phrases or blurbs to help get teh information you want in a more concise way.
Best of luck in your Dispatch journey!
