Look at the job list in most small maintenance firms and nearly everything is marked urgent. The customer said it was urgent, so that's what went in the box. After a while the word stops meaning anything.
What vague priorities cost you
- Engineers can't tell which job to go to first.
- A genuinely dangerous fault waits behind a cosmetic one.
- Customers get promised things you can't deliver.
- You can't tell whether you're keeping your promises.
Use a few clear levels
Most businesses need three or four levels at most. Something like this:
- Emergency: a risk to people or property. Make it safe as soon as possible.
- Urgent: stopping someone working or living normally. Within one working day.
- Routine: needs fixing but can be planned. Within a week or two.
- Planned: part of scheduled maintenance.
The exact wording matters less than the rule behind it. Every level has a target time, and everybody knows what it is.
Decide who sets priority
If whoever answers the phone picks the priority, you'll get a different answer every time. A short guide with examples helps a lot. Water coming through a ceiling is always an emergency. A dripping tap is always routine.
Measure against the target
Once each level has a target, you can check how often you hit it. If every job records when it was created and when it was started, you get real response times per priority instead of a gut feeling.
Look back once a month
Pick out the jobs that missed their target. Was the priority wrong? Was nobody free? Were you waiting on parts? The answers tell you exactly where to improve.
In OmniSchema jobs carry a priority you define, in your own words, and every job records its created, started and completed times automatically, so a dashboard can show how you're really doing against each target.