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Whether you're a seasoned pool maintenance professional or still a little "wet behind the ears," crafting the perfect pool maintenance route poses a unique challenge. Many factors can impact the pool route's optimal set up, from gas prices to school zones and beyond. The real trick involves building the most cost-effective pool route for your business in an ever-changing environment while maintaining a great level of service for your customers.
We'll take a look at the processes and best practices that pool professionals can follow to develop pool maintenance routes for their area!
Group similar services together.
Grouping similar customers, services, and jobs together will greatly decrease the time spent with any single customer's pool. Many stops require special tools, chemicals, or technician skillsets. Most companies don't have interchangeable trucks/equipment/workers, so it pays to designate specialized technicians to certain customers. This practice will reduce the number of expensive tools you need for specialty work, and helps your best technicians practice more difficult tasks. A pool service software package can help you easily identify and group such jobs together.
Plan ahead to minimize driving delays.
Bad fuel economy stands as a major enemy of profitability. And the best way to combat bad fuel economy? Keep the vehicle turned off as much as possible. Planning your regular route to avoid congestion and rush hours will reduce idle time. Choosing a route that circumvents traffic will also help reduce the time spent in transit from one job to the next. Pool service dispatchers should draw up plans that avoid school zones, rush hour traffic, and other debilitating situations.
Use technology to plan for you.
These days, professionals do not have to rely solely on the old school method of sitting down with a physical map and some pushpins. Now, many technology options will help optimize your route for you. Pool service routing software will rapidly analyze trends in traffic, considering job similarities, weather, and more to recommend the best route for any given day. Many of these programs can also help you view the locations of your field team and their job progress in real time. This allows you to keep customers updated with to-the-minute information, simply by looking at your computer screen.
No matter what, pool service routes take work to create. However, they can definitely pay off. Good pool service routes can play a huge role in reducing the amount of gas each technician uses on a daily basis. Optimizing routes will ultimately save time, letting you add more stops to each tech's workload, thereby increasing revenue. Increased reliability and predictability will also lead to greater customer satisfaction. Routing software can even give you the tools to easily dispatch an emergency job whenever one should arise.
