Smart scheduling for field service

What do you need to schedule technicians in stipt?

Scheduling revolves around three things: calendars, members and appointment types. A calendar is one planning, for example Installation crew or Advisors, with its own colour and settings. Members are the employees on that calendar; each member gets a row in the timeline. An appointment type is a kind of appointment, such as a 60-minute intake or an installation, with a default duration and a colour.

You create calendars and appointment types under Settings, in the Agenda section; you connect employees to their calendar through the member settings. Every appointment is attached to a record, the file of a customer or project in the CRM part of stipt. In the CRM settings, switch on the Appointments block for the page type you want to plan; from then on those records are plannable and the appointments also show on the record.

How do technicians set their availability?

Every member has a default week: the fixed working days and hours. Employees set it themselves in their own account, along with blocked time for holidays or absence, multi-day in one go if needed. The reverse works too: with extra open time a member makes a period outside the regular hours available, a Saturday for example.

Outside working hours or during a block you cannot schedule someone; on an extra open day you can. The timeline always matches who is actually available, without you keeping days off in a separate list.

How do you plan a job on the timeline?

The Agenda page shows a timeline per calendar with a row per employee. Records that are ready to plan sit in the Plan sidebar. Drag a job onto a free slot, or click an empty slot and pick the appointment type, the member and the time. On save, the status of the record changes along automatically. For door-to-door or walk-in work there is the New customer wizard, enabled per calendar: one screen creates the customer and the appointment together.

While dragging, stipt helps you choose: employees who do not match the required skills or work area fade out. You can still drop the job on such a member; you get a warning, but you stay in control and can save the appointment anyway. Hover over an employee to see their start address, email address and phone number, and the filter next to the date navigation lets you filter rows by employee, skill or work area.

How do you get the right technician on the right job?

stipt can take into account who can do which work and where someone works. You switch both requirements on per appointment type; they are off by default.

Skills work through product categories that you mark as a skill on the appointment type. Which skill a job requires follows from the products on the record: if it contains a product from such a category, only employees with that skill qualify. The work area uses two-digit postcode areas: only employees whose work area covers the customer's postcode qualify. Per employee you tick the categories they master in the member settings and click their postcode areas on a map of the Netherlands; members can also maintain this themselves in the portal.

If one technician needs more time for a type of work than another, you set a duration in minutes per member. Skills, work area and duration per member apply to manual planning and to automatically computed options alike.

How does automatic scheduling with travel time work?

Besides manual dragging, stipt can compute the best moments itself. With smart planning the customer receives a booking link with the five best options, computed live from availability and real travel times, plus skills and work area if you switched those requirements on. A job naturally lands on a moment when a suitable technician is nearby and the route stays efficient. You send the invite manually from the record, automatically on a status change, or through a rule in Studio.

Per appointment type you set how far ahead the customer can pick (up to 720 days), the minimum notice you want and the width of the arrival window. Optionally you add a travel time preference: a weekly maximum, adjustable per week. It is a ranking preference, not a hard filter: options above the limit sink in the list, and if the limit yields nothing it is dropped.

What the booking page looks like for the customer and what happens after booking is covered in the customer self-scheduling guide.

How do you plan follow-up appointments, like a survey and then the installation?

A lot of field work is a chain: a survey first, the installation after. In stipt you link appointment types for that. On the follow-up type you set which type it follows, the minimum number of days in between and whether it should be the same employee: no preference, a preference with fallback to colleagues, or only that person.

With direct follow-up booking on, the customer picks a moment for the follow-up right after booking the first appointment, in the same screen, up to five appointments in one booking link. With it off, you send the follow-up invite separately, manually or automatically; the rules for the gap and the employee still apply. The installation is never planned too soon after the survey and nobody has to police the chain by hand.

Which emails go out to the customer automatically?

Every appointment has a status: scheduled, completed, not home or cancelled. To each status you can attach an email template, plus an optional reminder at a fixed time before the appointment. You manage this with the email templates in Studio. No template on a status means no email; you decide exactly what the customer receives.

On top of that, per appointment type you map each appointment status to a status change of the record. Schedule an appointment or mark it completed and the record moves through your workflow by itself, so the whole team sees where a job stands without double entry.

How do you reschedule or cancel an appointment?

Rescheduling is dragging the appointment to a new slot on the timeline, or opening it and changing the date or time. From the appointment you can also resend the confirmation to the customer.

Cancelling goes through Cancel appointment. You choose whether the customer gets an email, cancel without an email, for example for a booking the customer never saw, or delete the appointment permanently. Cancelling and the status not home both require a short reason, so you can see later why a visit did not happen.

Frequently asked questions