BPO
Keeping bookings and engineer dispatch moving through seasonal surge
A national home services group could not staff for winter demand without carrying idle cost in summer. An outsourced booking and dispatch team absorbed the surge and kept first-time fix rates steady.
Results at a glance
- -64%
- Booking abandonment
- +6 pts
- First-time fix rate
- -38%
- Overtime spend
- -47%
- Speed to answer
22% to 8%
held through peak
peak weeks
The challenge
Demand for boiler and heating call-outs triples in the coldest weeks, and the in-house team could either staff for the peak and sit idle the rest of the year or staff for the average and drown in winter.
Missed bookings meant missed revenue, and engineers were being sent to jobs with the wrong parts because dispatch notes were rushed. The group needed to flex capacity without eroding service quality or safety.
Pain points
- Booking abandonment near 22 percent at winter peak
- Engineers dispatched without full job context
- No way to flex headcount around cold snaps
- Rising overtime cost with falling morale
Our approach
- Stood up a dedicated booking and dispatch team trained on the group's scheduling system and safety scripts
- Built a triage flow so urgent no-heat jobs jump the queue and carry full parts notes
- Introduced a surge roster that scales up within days of a cold-weather forecast
- Handled all customer and property data under UK GDPR with a signed Data Processing Agreement
Results at a glance
The results
- Booking abandonment fell from around 22 percent to under 8 percent through the winter peak.
- First-time fix held steady because dispatch notes carried the right parts and access details.
- The group covered two cold snaps without a single week of permanent over-staffing.
We stopped choosing between paying for idle staff in July and turning customers away in January. The team scales when the cold comes and settles back when it goes.
Common questions
The roster expands within a few days of a cold-weather forecast, so capacity is in place before the call volume arrives rather than after.
These are representative engagements. Client identities are anonymised and the metrics are illustrative of the type of results this work delivers, not audited figures for a named client.
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