A regional HVAC and plumbing company had more service calls than its process could handle. Demand was up, but the work ran on spreadsheets, texts and phone calls, and growth suffered for it. A two-week audit found an average 2.5-hour lag from a request to a scheduled job, and 30% of jobs with no follow-up after the work was done.
The fix touched four people: the dispatcher, the technician, the customer and the owner. Here is what changed for each of them.
The dispatcher
Scheduling a job went from 2.5 hours to under 10 minutes.
Schedulers used to juggle spreadsheets, texts and calls to assign each job, and admin work ran about 25 hours a week. Now a request from the phone, the web form or email goes into ServiceTitan, the company’s job system, on its own. An n8n workflow uses Google Maps to find the nearest available technician and assigns the job. The schedule lives on a calendar synced with Google Workspace instead of a spreadsheet. Admin time is now about 10 hours a week.
The technician
Each tech now finishes 3.8 jobs a day instead of 3.1, a 22% lift.
Techs were sometimes sent out of order, which wasted fuel and time. Now each tech gets a text with the job details, the address and the customer’s contact info. They check in and out by text, with no new app to learn. Marking a job complete updates ServiceTitan and starts the follow-up. Better routing cut unneeded driving by 18%.
The customer
5-star reviews went from 12 a month to 17, up 40%.
Customers often heard nothing after a job, and only 1 in 5 got asked for feedback. Now a text confirms the booking. Another text says the technician is on the way, 30 minutes before arrival. After the job, the customer gets a thank-you and a survey by email, plus a request to leave a Google or Yelp review.
The owner
Monthly profit is up $12,000, and the system paid for itself within 45 days.
The owner could not easily see which jobs were in progress or running late. Now a live view shows job progress, where each technician is and customer ratings. Alerts flag delays and reschedules as they happen. A daily summary shows revenue per crew and completed calls. Each week, a report covers reviews and customer satisfaction.
In the operations manager’s words
“Dispatching used to be a nightmare.. now jobs assign themselves, and we always know what’s happening in the field. Our crews stay busy and our customers actually thank us for being so organized.”
- Operations Manager, HVAC & Plumbing Company
How it came together
The project ran 8 weeks: a 2-week audit, a 4-week build, then 2 weeks to train the field staff and move dispatch off spreadsheets. The pieces are n8n for the dispatch logic, Twilio for the texts, Google Maps for distance, ServiceTitan for job data, SendGrid for surveys and review requests, and Google Sheets for the daily numbers.
Since launch, the team added automatic rescheduling when a customer cancels within 12 hours, and workload planning based on the weather. Next on the plan: AI that sorts each job by type to estimate how long it will take and what parts it needs.