Short interview video (July 13, 2023) between Cristian (sales consultant/tech support for Copilot) and Mike Andes describing two recent Copilot updates: dispatch/dispatcher notes visible on the dispatch board for individual visits, and indefinite (infinite-end) recurring visits with an efficient two-year rolling generation approach. Both features aim to reduce administrative time for business owners and field staff.
What's up, guys? Cristian here with sales consulting and tech support for Copilot. We got another little short video interview, whatever you want to call it, with me and Mike Andes. We're going to talk about a recent update that we just did. Two features and functions that we really think that could really provide some increase in value to your workflows, maybe even create some new workflows for you guys. One of them is our dispatch board. We've been really trying to have our dispatch board be a one stop place for you to operate from as maybe a business owner in the back end or what have you. We just added the ability to have dispatch notes. Just from Mike Andy's point of view. What's the biggest benefits to this and kind of. What was your thoughts with creating this function?
Yeah, so we've always had visit notes and what we wanted to do though is create visit notes for an individual one visit. So in the past we actually had them named visit notes for today. But visit notes and then visit notes for today are just confusing. So we have visit notes which if you have a recurring series, would be on every single visit in the future. But then dispatcher notes or notes for the dispatcher would be notes that are just for that one visit. And it would show up on the dispatch board so that as the dispatcher or the office person is scrolling through their dispatch board at the end of the day, they can catch things like, okay, we need to remind this customer to unlock their gate, or the customer came out and asked if we could give them a leaf cleanup estimate. So individual things that happened on that specific visit and it's very easy to catch now because it's visible from the dispatch board on attached to that visit.
Yeah, that's nice too. So if someone is operating like, say like the, you know, the crew lead or whatever is operating from a tablet or something like that within the truck, they can just check little quick notes like that and then be able to, you know, make that, make that visit happen. That's cool.
Yeah, now we have it too, where you can see when you, when dispatcher notes have been made on the visit itself, you will see the timestamp and the user of every single one of those notes and they'll just stack on top of each other. So this is helpful. If there's a large project, for example, and you have a bunch of users going back and forth from it, they can make notes based upon like the amount of material they're taking to that property, for example, et cetera. We use It a lot actually for estimators. So we will set up a meeting inside of Copilot and then the the estimator will put their raw notes for that quote in the dispatcher notes. Then the dispatcher will take those notes, format it correctly, do the pricing, and then send out the quote to the customer. So that way the person out in the field doesn't have to worry about that. The estimator, typically your most skilled or experienced person, they can just drop the notes in real quick into the dispatcher notes, mark the job as complete. That fires off an automation to the office. The office picks that up, goes into the dispatcher notes, copies and pastes that into a quote, prepares it, makes a video for the customer, does all the pricing and sends it out to the customer.
Yeah. So a lot of the features, we've been cleaning up a lot of things to make sure that we're saving time for the actual business owners, for actual employees to make things run as smooth as possible. Open up some headspace to maybe look at some other things within your business. Right. And that's kind of going into my next feature that I kind of want to talk about is we've been slowly updating our ability to kind of create custom and more elaborate scheduling. The thing that we just recently added is the ability to have indefinite visits. This is huge. This has been something I've been running into with a lot of users asking for. Maybe they go like bimonthly or what have you and they just don't want to set up a contract, a three year contract, what have you. So this is gonna be a really cool feature for everybody. Kind of talk to us about what that looked like for you in terms of talking to the development team and adding that.
Yeah, if you have a recurring series of events, one of the things that's most annoying is having to set that up every single year and then pause it for the off season. So for example, with mowing, we typically mow eight or nine months out of the year we have an off season. And I don't want to have to pause that every single. Especially when you have hundreds of them. So what we've set up now is where you can set up an indefinite or, you know, infinite end to a job for a recurring series. And then what you can do is just set up an off season while setting up your very first time. So really the goal is, is like on these recurring series is to just set it up one time and never have to touch it again. So for example, for us in our market we set up a job from March to November, mowing on a weekly basis. We have an off season from November to, to the end of February and that will always just continue being that way until that job is canceled or paused. There's no reason to restart the visits or reinitiate the service or copy and paste notes from last year. None of that's required. And so the goal is just to save as much time as possible when setting up the visits, but also when there are pauses or cancellations to not ever have to then go back and restart the visit again. One of the things with the indefinite end to like the. The reason a lot of people ask like how is that possible? Because the reason most CRMs will not do that is because it takes a lot of processing power to go infinitely into the future. So what we've done is we're pretty confident that no one really needs to go two years ahead when it comes to recurring events. So what we do is we book out for two years. At the end of every month, we're going to add in 24 months more visits to that schedule. So essentially we are still doing a two year kind of schedule for our processing power to. Not just to bog down the system, but at the end of every month it gets refreshed at the end of.
That two year period and it answers what you were talking with the developers and how you guys would create this indefinite, you know.
Yes, you just. I don't have to touch it again once I set up the recurring series. Off seasons come and go. I don't have to start it up at the beginning of the next year. It just is the same exact job set up on on their account.
Well, thank you Mike. Appreciate you guys for checking in on our videos. We're gonna make more of these. If you guys have any issues, feel free to reach out to me. I would love to help you guys and Steven as well as at ATC schedule some video calls, what have you. I'll talk to you guys soon.
