After signing into Sera, you will see your dispatch board.
The dispatch or schedule board displays a single day at a time. The current date will display at the top.
Colors/Icons
Note: The following colors can be changed by a super admin under Company --> Customizations --> Schedule Board. There are defaulted colors in your account for the following:
Check Availability
If you need to quickly see if a spot is available for an appointment, such as having a customer on the phone who needs a specific day/time but doesn't yet want to give you any further contact information beforehand, you can use the Check Availability button to see if there are available spots.
Department Visibility
If you would like to monitor only certain departments on your Dispatch Board, you can use the multi-select tool to identify those. The default is all departments. Using the Department selection dropdown, will give you any technicians assigned to that department as their Primary Department plus will give you any technicians who have services assigned to their profile from that department.
Date Selection
If you need to view the schedule for a different day, you can use the arrows to move the board forwards or backwards. You can also click the date and use the calendar pop-up to select the desired date. Return to the current day by using the Today button.
Non-Customer Events
Creating a New Non-Customer Event
Navigate to your Dispatch Board and select the new button + New Event.
Enter details about this time block including:
Name - how you want the time block to be presented on the Dispatch Board
Technicians - select single, multiples or all techs easily from the multi-select dropdown
Note: Marking a Non-Customer Event as 'Available for Customer Appointments' will still allow the scheduler to book applicable appointments for that technician, but will present this event to you on the Dispatch Board in a different color than normal events.
Setting Up a Recurring Event
Creating a recurring event is simple in Sera. Select the recurring box and select from any of our options along the left to create the schedule according to your plan or use the Custom option to create the schedule independently. Update the repetition schedule duration on the right to decide how long the event will recur.
Deleting a Non-Customer Event
Select the event from the Dispatch Board and delete the event using the button at the bottom.
Dispatch Grid
The top of the Dispatch Board will display one hour time blocks. The blue line indicates the current time of day.
An unassigned section sits just below the hours, where all unassigned appointments will stay until assigned to a technician either by the Scheduler, or by an Admin Portal user.
Your departments and technicians can be found on the left-hand side of the screen, you can select the minimize button to the left of each department to hide the technicians in that department from view.
Smart Scheduler
The scheduler will use the Service Category selected during the appointment request, the technicians assigned to the service category, and their available times to determine the best technician to be assigned to the appointment. If there are multiple available technicians who qualify for the appointment, your Dispatch Strategies will be used to determine which technician is selected. Please see our article on Dispatch Strategies for more information.