During a quiet spell, keeping customers informed is straightforward. Job comes in, driver goes out, customer gets a call if anything changes. Easy.
But during a busy period – a hot summer weekend, a spell of bad weather, a motorway incident that backs everything up – the wheels come off that process fast. Your controllers are juggling more jobs than usual, ETAs are harder to pin down, and customers who were told “about an hour” are now two hours in and calling to find out why.
That’s when customer communication stops being a nice-to-have and starts costing your operation real time.
The ETA problem
The biggest source of inbound calls isn’t that customers are impatient. It’s that they were given an estimate that no longer holds, and nobody has told them.
When a job slips (because a previous job ran over, because traffic changed, because the nearest available driver is now further away), the customer still has the original ETA in their head. From their perspective, something has gone wrong. So they call.
The fix isn’t a more accurate ETA at the point of dispatch – during a busy period, that’s often impossible to give. The fix is giving customers a way to see what’s happening without having to ask.
What actually reduces the calls
Operators who deal with high volumes during peak periods tend to do a few things consistently:
Set expectations early, not precisely. A wider window given upfront (“between one and two hours”) creates less friction than a tight estimate that slips. Customers can plan around a range. They can’t plan around a missed promise.
Give customers visibility rather than updates. Proactive update calls sound good in theory, but they add work to your control room at exactly the moment it’s busiest. Giving customers a way to track progress themselves removes the need for that call entirely, from both sides.
Don’t leave a gap between dispatch and contact. The period between a job being logged and the customer hearing anything is where anxiety builds. The sooner they know someone is coming, the less likely they are to ring.
Where ResQtrac fits in
ResQtrac in RMS handles the visibility piece directly. When a job is assigned in RMS, your customer gets a tracking link sent straight to their phone – no app, no account needed. They watch your driver’s progress on a live map and get updates as the job moves forward.
Over the last 12 months, more than 25,000 stranded customers tracked the arrival of their roadside technician in real time using ResQtrac. For operators running high volumes during summer, that’s a significant reduction in inbound contact at exactly the point when your control room has least capacity to handle it.
It won’t solve every customer communication challenge, but it closes the biggest gap, and it takes five minutes to switch on.
If you have any questions about ResQtrac or anything else in RMS, get in touch with our support team on 0203 195 6757 or support@apex-networks.com.
