Blog · July 2026

Your tech is 10 minutes away. Why is nobody sure where?

The address was right. The GPS worked. And the tech still spent fifteen minutes circling a farm property saying “I’m at a red gate?” while the customer stood at a different red gate, also on the phone, also describing what they could see.

If you run an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical company — or anything with vans and appointments — you know this call. It happens on rural properties, in apartment complexes where unit 4B’s entrance is around the back, in office parks where the loading dock is the only door that matters. Navigation apps solved “which street” twenty years ago. They never solved the last 200 meters — and the last 200 meters is where service calls quietly bleed time.

What the lost minutes actually cost

Say a tech loses ten minutes finding the door twice a day. That’s 80+ hours a year, per tech — two full working weeks of paid time spent driving in circles and describing gates. On a crew of four, you’re paying roughly two months of salary for confusion.

The subtler cost is the phone calls. Every “where are you?” interrupts either your dispatcher or the person driving. And every customer who has to make that call starts the visit slightly annoyed — before anyone has touched a furnace.

The fix is embarrassingly small

When the tech heads out, they share a temporary location link — one tap, straight into the customer’s SMS thread. The customer opens it in their browser. No app to install, no account — it’s a link, and it works on every phone. They see the live pin, the route, and the ETA.

Here’s the part that actually kills the lost minutes: the guidance flows the other way too. The customer watching the pin sees the van turn into the wrong lane while it’s happening — and texts “gate code 4471, second driveway past it” at the exact moment it’s useful. Nobody describes red gates over the phone. The person who knows the property guides; the person driving drives.

And when the job’s done, the link dies. It expires on a timer and the location data is deleted. That matters more than you’d think: techs hate permanent tracking, and customers are rightly wary of installing anything. A link that self-destructs is the version both sides say yes to.

“We already have dispatch software”

Keep it. This isn’t field-service management — no scheduling, no invoicing, no six-week migration. It’s one link per job, and it works alongside ServiceTitan, Jobber, a Google Calendar, or a whiteboard. If you want it automated, there’s an API: your dispatch flow creates the link and texts it to the customer without the tech touching anything.

What changes in practice

“Where are you?” calls drop to roughly zero on linked jobs. Arrival windows get honest — the customer watches the ETA instead of hearing “twenty minutes out” for the third time. Customers are at the door, dogs are put away, gates are open. The visit starts at the handshake, not at the third phone call.

The last 200 meters have been the unsolved part of dispatch for as long as dispatch has existed. It turns out the solution isn’t better maps — it’s letting the one person who knows the property watch the arrival.

Your trade has its own version of this story: emergency plumbing, HVAC service windows, and last-mile delivery.