GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Skipped Garage Door Jobs: Getting Them Back on the Schedule

Sometimes a garage door tech gets to the house and cannot do the job. The door is down, nobody is home, the keypad code does not work. The car is parked right in front of the problem bay. The commercial dock is jammed with trucks. The tech should not sit in the driveway for half an hour, and the job should not quietly disappear either.

Skips Happen on Every Route

Equipment details help avoid some wasted trips, as described in Dispatching With the Door on the Card: Equipment Details That Send the Right Van. Access problems cause the rest, and no amount of planning prevents all of them.

In GarageDoorBossPro, the tech app has three buttons for every job: Start, Skip and Complete. Skip is for the job that cannot be done right now. The tech taps it and notes why, and the office sees the skip and the reason.

Writing a Useful Skip Note

The note is what turns a skip into something the office can fix. A good note says what happened and what is needed:

• “Nobody home, garage door down, keypad code in notes didn't work.”
• “Car parked in front of Bay 2, couldn't reach the door.”
• “Customer home but asked to come back tomorrow afternoon.”
• “Dock busy with deliveries, shift lead says after 2.”

Before tapping Skip, a tech can usually check the access notes on the card once more and send the office a quick heads-up. Sometimes the office reaches the customer within a couple of minutes and the job goes ahead after all.

A photo of the closed door or blocked bay helps too, and saves an argument if the customer later says nobody came.

The Office's Next Step

When a skip comes in, the office has three jobs: find out what went wrong, fix it, and get the job back on the schedule.

• Contact the customer. A text from the office, through two-way texting, usually gets a fast answer: “Sorry, the code changed, it's now…”
• Fix the record. Update the access notes on the address, so the next visit has the right code or instructions.
• Reschedule. Move the job to a new day on the board, or to later today if the customer can be there.

Rescheduling is covered in more detail in Rescheduling Garage Door Jobs Without Losing Track of Them.

Same Day or Another Day

If the problem can be fixed quickly, the job can go back on today's route. The customer replies with the right code, and the tech swings back between later stops. The office moves the job to a later slot on the same van, and the tech sees it in the new place on the phone.

If it cannot happen today, pick a new day. For a repair, put it near the top of a route soon. For a yearly tune-up, putting it on the next route through that area is usually fine. For an install, call the customer and agree on a day, because an install needs a protected block on the install van.

Whatever the new day is, tell the customer. A short text with the new day, followed by the night-before reminder, keeps them from being surprised twice. Customers who were not home the first time are usually apologetic and easy to rebook, as long as someone reaches out quickly.

Skipped Tune-Ups and Recurring Visits

Recurring visits need a little care. A skipped yearly tune-up has not been done, so it should not be treated as done. Get it back on the schedule, either directly on a new day or by making sure it shows on the Waiting List map. Once it is completed, the 365-day count starts from that date, so the next visit is still a full year away.

Commercial maintenance works the same way. If a dock was too busy to work on one round, schedule the visit for a quieter time, and the next round follows from when it actually happened.

Cutting Down on Skips

Skips will never hit zero, but a few habits keep them rare:

• Night-before reminders remind customers to clear the bay, put pets away and make sure someone can provide access.
• On-the-way texts give the customer a few minutes' warning to open up.
• Current access notes. Every skip for a wrong code is a chance to fix the note for good.
• Time windows in the notes, so the route puts the stop at a time the customer can actually be there.

A look at skips over a few weeks often shows patterns, like one neighborhood with gate codes that change, or one commercial account whose dock is always busy in the morning. Fixing the pattern is better than fixing each skip.

For how skips fit with the dispatch board, routing and customer texts, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.