Technician Ranking System for Online Platform

The Client

Online platform for businesses to manage freelancers, contractors, and consultants

The Challenge

Our client has a customer who is in the network maintenance space. The end customer sends technicians “on-site” to respond to tickets based on support and installation contracts.

The technicians had been tested for specific skill sets and their test scores were retained for ranking against other technicians with the same skill sets. A proprietary algorithm was being used that would match the technician’s tested skill competence (score) along with customer reported rankings for each technician.

They would then “rank” the technicians based on the four factors within the test score, customer satisfaction rankings, location and availability.

This process was being performed manually and there would often be a backlog of tickets that were waiting for an assignment because the technician selection process was taking too long. Another problem was that an “inappropriate” technician was being sent out on the job because the data analyzed was not current. This was having an adverse impact on customer satisfaction.

The Solution

To solve these problems, Dispatch built an extension to the systems that contained a cached subset of the technician’s skill test scores, recent customer satisfaction scores and location.

This cache was updated once a day in off-peak hours, “pre-calculate “the bulk of the ranking data, and store the reduced data set in a more efficient format for executing the final algorithm.

Dispatch built the entire ranking system with two main access points.

• A traditional UI to access and enter the specific ticket data and view the list of ranked technicians that could be ordered by sub-component (skill test score, customer satisfaction score, calculated drive time). Technicians could then be manually selected.
• A web service (API) that allowed a fully automated process that would choose the top ten ranked technicians for the ticket based on skills required for the ticket, customer compatibility, and drive time. The system would then offer the ticket to appropriate technicians based on the specified criteria.

The Outcome

The system was deployed and rankings were used from the integrated web service in a manner that was seamless to the end-users. Tickets were now processed and technicians assigned on an automated basis. The backlog was significantly reduced and customer satisfaction with technician performance increased.