Every service company makes promises about speed, even if nobody wrote them down. “We’ll get someone out this week.” “No-heat calls go first.” Writing your service response times down, per type of job, turns those habits into something the whole office can see and keep.
Why write them down
Unwritten targets live in one person’s head. When that person is out, a no-cooling call in July waits behind a gutter quote, and nobody notices until the customer calls back upset. A written target does three things:
- It tells the office what to do first when the phone won’t stop.
- It gives customers an honest expectation instead of “as soon as we can”.
- It lets you look back and see whether you kept your word.
One target per job type, not one for the company
A single company-wide promise is either too slow for emergencies or impossible for routine work. Group your work by urgency instead:
- Urgent: no heat, no cooling, a leak, a broken storefront window. Hours, not days.
- Soon: a repair that’s annoying but not dangerous. A day or two.
- Planned: estimates, add-on services, one-off cleanings. Several business days.
Then give each job type the target of its group. Start conservative. A target you beat most weeks is better than one you miss most weeks, and you can tighten it later.
Count in business hours
A request that arrives at 5:40 on a Friday evening hasn’t really been waiting all weekend if your office is closed until Monday. Counting in calendar hours makes every weekend look like a failure and hides the real problems. Counting in business hours, with your holidays taken out, measures what your team actually controls.
If you do run an after-hours line for emergencies, keep those job types on calendar time and the rest on business hours. Be explicit about which is which.
Catch slips before the customer does
A target only helps if someone sees a job getting close to it. Decide who gets warned, and when: the team lead when a job passes its target, the owner if it’s still open the next day. The warning should name the job and say how late it is, so the person can act without hunting.
Also decide what “responded” means for you. For most companies it’s the visit being scheduled or the technician on site, not an automatic email.
How Sentra Scheduler handles it
In setup, each job type gets its own response time, in hours or business days, using your business hours and holidays. Routing sends each job type to the right team by service area, and escalation emails go out when a target passes, so a slipping job reaches a person instead of sitting in a list.
On the job board, a tile shows the jobs past their response time, and one click filters the list to them. You can also type it in plain words, such as “AC not cooling, past response time”, and the search turns that into filters you can see and undo. Urgent job types with a higher priority sort ahead of routine ones, on the board and on the map.
Measure, then adjust
After a month, look at the numbers by job type. Reports can measure time to complete in calendar time or in your business hours, so you compare like with like. Three patterns are worth acting on:
- Always late on one job type: the target is unrealistic, or that work needs a different team.
- Late only in certain weeks: a capacity problem, not a process one. See crew capacity planning.
- Never close to the target: you can safely promise customers something faster.
Tell customers what to expect
Internal targets and customer promises don’t have to be identical, but they should agree. Once a visit is on the schedule, the promise gets more specific: an arrival window rather than “this week”. Our guide to arrival windows covers that step. Until then, a job number and a tracking page answer most “did you get my request?” calls.
Common mistakes
A few things trip up almost every company the first time:
- Too many job types with different targets. If the office can’t remember which target belongs to which job, the targets stop guiding anything. Keep the groups few.
- Targets nobody owns. A warning that goes to a shared inbox is read by nobody. Send it to the team lead who can actually move the job.
- Counting the wrong moment. If “done” means the visit was closed, but your team closes visits at the end of the week, your numbers will look worse than the work was. Close visits when the work is done.
- Changing targets every week. Give a target a month before you judge it, so one bad week doesn’t decide it.
When a job really can’t meet its target, say so early. A customer told on day one that a part takes a week is far happier than one who finds out on day five.
A short checklist
- List your job types and sort them into urgent, soon and planned.
- Pick a target for each group, in business hours unless it’s a true emergency line.
- Enter your business hours and holidays once.
- Decide who is warned when a target passes.
- Review service response times by job type after a month and adjust.
None of this needs a big project. A clear target per job type, counted fairly and watched daily, is most of the work.