Maintenance plans that fill their own schedule
You already sold the work. Dispatch Scout reminds the customer when their plan visit comes due, lets them pick a real arrival window you control, and drops the job on your board — capacity-checked, skill-matched, and ready to dispatch.
Pick a day that works
Your plan covers this visit — nothing due today.
October
Arrival window
We’ll text you the morning of your appointment.
The only revenue you have to sell twice
A maintenance agreement is the best product in home service: the customer already said yes, already paid, and already trusts you. Then the visit comes due — and somebody has to go get it.
The outbound call nobody makes
Plan visits don’t raise their hand. They sit in a spreadsheet or a saved filter until a CSR has a slow afternoon — and a slow afternoon in July never comes.
Phone tag, both directions
You call, they’re at work. They call back, you’re dispatching. Three rounds later somebody books a window that was already full.
Unfulfilled plans churn
A customer who paid for two visits and got one doesn’t renew. The revenue you lose isn’t this year’s visit — it’s every year after it.
The fix isn’t a better call list. It’s letting the customer book the visit at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, straight into a window you can actually cover.
Sold on Monday, on the board by Tuesday night
Service plans in Dispatch Scout are a full lifecycle, not a billing record. Here’s the whole loop — and how little of it lands on your staff.
Sell the plan You
Add a plan to an invoice or estimate in the field, or sell it from the office. Prepaid or subscription, with member pricing and free service calls attached.
Visits materialize on a schedule Automatic
The plan lays out its own visits — two-a-year, quarterly, whatever you sold — each with a target date and a scheduling window that opens ahead of it.
The customer gets reminded Automatic
When a visit’s scheduling window opens, Dispatch Scout texts and/or emails the customer once, with a secure link. No dashboard to log into, no password to remember.
They pick a day and a window Customer
The link opens the booking screen. They see only days and named arrival windows you can genuinely cover, choose one, and confirm.
A real job hits your board Automatic
Not a request in an inbox — an actual job with a windowed appointment, sitting on the schedule board with the technician left open for dispatch to assign.
You dispatch and close it out You
Assign a tech like any other job. Completing it fulfills the plan visit, advances the plan to its next visit, and reports on the whole thing.
Customer self-scheduling, without handing over the schedule
The fear with letting customers book is that they’ll book something you can’t do. So the booking screen never offers a choice you’d have to undo.
No login, no app
The reminder carries a secure single-purpose link tied to that one visit. Tap it on a phone at a stoplight and you’re on the booking screen.
Your windows, your names
They pick from the same named arrival windows your dispatchers use — Morning, Midday, Afternoon — not an open-ended clock.
Only real availability
A full window shows as full. A day you don’t work isn’t offered. What’s on the screen is what you can actually staff.
Booked in seconds
Two taps and a confirm. No form to fill in, no callback to wait for, no chance to get distracted and abandon it.
Five checks before a window is even shown
Every window on that screen has already passed all five. And every one is re-run when the customer hits Confirm — so nothing slips through in the minutes between looking and booking.
You decide how many plan visits a window can absorb. Once it’s at the cap, it stops being offered — no overbooking the 8–12 because it’s the popular one.
Business days, holidays and blackout dates are respected. Nobody books you for Thanksgiving.
Availability is checked against technicians who hold the right skills for that work — not just anyone with an open slot.
Capacity is scoped to the coverage area the property actually falls in, so a full day across town doesn’t block a booking you could easily run — and vice versa.
Set how much lead time you need. A customer opening the link at 7am can’t put themselves on this morning’s board.
Two customers, one last slot
The final booking is taken under a lock, and the capacity check runs again inside it. When two people tap Confirm on the last opening in the same second, exactly one of them gets it — and the other is shown the updated availability rather than a double-booked window.
It’s a booking, not a request
Most “let customers schedule” features collect a preference and email the office. Somebody still has to read it, call back, and build the appointment. That’s a nicer contact form, not a scheduling system.
| When a customer books | A typical request form | Dispatch Scout |
|---|---|---|
| A job record is created | After someone types it in | Immediately |
| It appears on the schedule board | Once a CSR builds it | Immediately, in a real window |
| Availability was checked | No — any date can be asked for | Five ways, twice |
| Draft estimates & member pricing apply | Only if remembered | Automatically |
| The plan’s free service call is consumed | Manual | Automatically |
| The visit counts as fulfilled on close-out | Needs linking by hand | Already linked |
Nothing downstream can tell the difference. A customer-booked plan visit is built the same way a dispatcher-created one is, so every report, automation and close-out rule you already rely on treats it identically. There is no second kind of job to learn.
Start by asking. Switch to booking when you’re ready.
Full self-scheduling ships off. The same reminder link works either way — what changes is how much authority the customer gets.
Request a date Default
The customer says which date they’d prefer and adds a note. Your staff notification recipients get an email with who asked, their phone number, the date they want, the note, and whether that visit is already past due — and it says plainly that nothing has been scheduled yet.
Good for: shops that want the reach of automated outreach while keeping every booking decision with a person.
Book it themselves
The customer picks a day and a real arrival window and it’s done — job created, appointment on the board, technician left unassigned for dispatch. You set the booking horizon (up to 30 days out) and the minimum notice.
Good for: shops with a plan backlog and enough capacity discipline to trust the guardrails. Turn it on per account, whenever.
The Fulfillment Inbox, for everything automation didn’t close
Self-scheduling doesn’t catch everyone. The Fulfillment Inbox is the one screen for plan visits that still need a human — and it’s built to be worked one row at a time.
Due and overdue, ranked
Plans whose next visit falls inside your lead-days window, oldest first. Everything further out stays hidden until it matters.
Send a link on demand
One click sends that customer their booking link right now — early, or again after a bounce, or on an account with automated reminders switched off entirely.
See who’s been contacted
A Link Sent column shows when the booking link went out, and the button reads Re-send once it has. No more guessing who you already texted.
Skip what you owe nothing on
Retire a single visit with a reason. The plan advances to its next visit rather than vanishing — and drops off the list only when nothing is left.
It holds your place. Sending a link updates just that row — you don’t get bounced back to the top of a 500-row list after every click. Working a long overdue backlog by hand is actually possible.
Always know which jobs your customers booked themselves
A self-booked visit is built exactly like a dispatcher-created one — which is great for your workflows and terrible for your reporting, unless it’s labeled. So it is, in five places.
Without this you’d have a job screen crediting an employee who never touched the booking. Now the record says what actually happened.
Where it shows up
- A Booked by customer chip on the job overview, with the exact timestamp on hover
- A self-booked line on the plan’s Visits tab, linking straight to the job it created
- A Booked By Customer column on the jobs list, naming which path booked it — plan visit or online booking
- A Booked By filter covering both self-service paths at once
- The same column on your CSV export, plus an entry in the job’s activity feed
Reminders that sound like you sent them
The reminder is the whole funnel — if it doesn’t land, nothing else on this page matters.
Branded, not generic
Set the reminder email’s colors, header, intro and closing copy, disclaimer, license info and terms from your mailer templates — the same controls as the rest of your customer email.
Text, email, or both
Reach customers on the channel they answer. Each visit is reminded once, and the record shows which channels it went out on.
Quiet by default
Do-not-contact is honored, a plan with an open job never gets a “pick a date” text that contradicts an appointment you already gave, and a double-click can’t send twice.
Turning it on won’t blast your backlog. If you’ve got years of plan visits whose windows opened long ago, the first run is paced and staged rather than handing hundreds of texts to your carrier before breakfast. Your customers get contacted — on a schedule, not all at 5:20 a.m.
Stop chasing the work you already sold
Service plans, automated visit reminders, the Fulfillment Inbox and customer self-scheduling are all included — at one flat price, with no per-booking fee.