TowingBossPro Blog — Tow Dispatch

Storm Days and Call Surges: Keeping Tow Dispatch From Falling Apart

Rush hour is a spike. A storm is a flood. The first ice morning of the winter, a flash flood, a hailstorm or a holiday-weekend snow can put more calls on the board in two hours than you normally see in two days. Cars in ditches, cars stuck on hills, cars stalled in water, fender benders everywhere, and every customer convinced they should be first.

You cannot dispatch your way out of having too few trucks. You can dispatch in a way that keeps the calls you can handle moving and keeps the customers you cannot reach yet from feeling ignored.

Decide the Rules Before the Weather Hits

Everything in Dispatching Tows Through Rush Hour: Accidents, Breakdowns and Backed-Up Calls still applies on a storm day, but the decisions have to be faster and more consistent. The best time to decide storm rules is in October, not during the first ice storm. Who answers the phone when the dispatcher is overwhelmed? Which calls go first? Will you take non-emergency transports that day or push them? What wait time will you quote?

Write those rules down and make sure every person who might answer the phone knows them. Inconsistent answers to customers on a storm day create more callbacks than any other mistake.

Also decide in advance how you will handle commercial accounts. Police and municipal calls, motor club calls and body shop requests may all spike at once, and your agreements with each may set expectations. Check those agreements before the season, not during it.

Triage the Waiting List

On a storm day the Waiting List fills fast. Use the map to see the shape of it. Usually the calls cluster: a stretch of highway, a hill, a low area that floods. Triage by safety first: vehicles in travel lanes, people stranded in danger, police-requested clearances. Then by efficiency: clusters a single truck can work through in sequence.

Calls that are not urgent and not safety-related, such as a car in a driveway that will not start, may need to be honestly scheduled for later in the day or the next day. Give them a date on the board so they leave today's list and stop being re-triaged every ten minutes.

Match Equipment to the Real Calls

Storm calls skew toward winch-outs and recoveries. Cars that slid into ditches often need a winch rather than a tow. Roadside winch-outs can be fast if the right truck goes. Accident & Recovery calls tie up trucks longer than normal tows, and heavy-duty calls such as jackknifed trucks or buses in ditches need the heavy wrecker and an experienced operator.

Use the call categories to keep this straight. When every call is tagged Roadside, Light-Duty Tows, Heavy-Duty Tows or Accident & Recovery, the dispatcher can see at a glance which truck should take which call, and the heavy unit stays available for the heavy work.

Tell Customers the Truth, Early

The worst thing you can do to a storm customer is promise ninety minutes and show up in four hours. They will call back four times and leave an angry review. Quote a realistic window and update it. Two-way texting lets the office send honest updates without spending ten minutes on the phone per customer.

Once a driver is headed their way, the on-the-way text and the live map of the driver in the customer app tell the customer the truck is really coming. That one text calms more people down than anything the dispatcher could say.

Keep the Drivers Safe and Fed

Storm days are long, and tired drivers make mistakes in bad conditions. The time clock gives you a clear picture of how long each driver has been on. Plan breaks into the surge and rotate the hardest recoveries. A driver who has been out for fourteen hours in ice should not be the one sent on a tricky heavy recovery.

Safety rules, hours limits and road-closure procedures vary by state and city. Make sure your storm plan follows the local requirements that apply to your company.

Clean Up the Backlog Afterward

When the weather breaks, there is usually a tail of calls: cars left in ditches overnight, vehicles that need to move from your yard to shops, impounds from abandoned cars. Work the backlog by area on the map, and use auto-routing for the planned moves. Make sure every completed call has its photos, notes and drop-off recorded so invoicing is clean.

Then review. Look at the reports from the storm: how many calls came in, how many were completed, which categories dominated. That tells you what equipment and how many people you will want the next time. The next guide digs into the equipment decision itself: heavy-duty versus light-duty.

For the full set of tools behind storm-day dispatch, visit the TowingBossPro tow dispatch software page.