Dispatching assigns work to people and orders it through the day.
What it is really deciding
How much of a paid day is billable. Two schedules covering the same jobs can differ by hours purely in travel — see tickets per route and improving utilisation.
Grouping by area, not by booking order
The default is dispatching in the order calls arrived, which scatters a technician across the service area.
Grouping by geography is the single largest gain available, and it requires holding some bookings until there is a second job nearby — which trades a little customer flexibility for a lot of capacity.
Matching the person to the job
Skill, certification, and the parts on their van. Sending someone who cannot complete the work converts one visit into two — see reducing callbacks.
Arrival windows
The promise made to the customer. Narrow windows sell better and are harder to keep; wide ones are easier and read as indifference.
What matters more than the width is telling the customer when it will be missed, before it is missed rather than after — see customer service.
Leaving room
A schedule filled to capacity has nowhere to put an emergency, and emergencies are usually the most profitable work of the day — see after-hours and emergency work.
Deliberately holding a slot is generally worth more than filling it with routine work.
The trade-off nobody states
Dispatching optimises either for the customer's convenience or for the route. Most businesses do the first without deciding to, and pay for it in unbilled drive time — sometimes recovered through travel charges and more often absorbed.