FlowRight Plumbing Case Study

Key Results

  • 72%

    Faster emergency response (90 min to 25 min)

  • 40%

    Increase in emergency call volume handled

  • $8,000/mo

    Additional emergency revenue

  • 90%

    Reduction in dispatch coordination time

The Challenge

FlowRight Plumbing built its reputation on one thing: showing up fast when a pipe burst or a water heater failed. For seven years, that reputation held. Then their Google reviews started slipping.

Maria Santos noticed the pattern first. She managed FlowRight’s daily dispatch from a desk surrounded by two monitors, a whiteboard, and a phone that rarely stopped ringing. The scheduled jobs were handled through Housecall Pro, which managed bookings, invoicing, and customer records. But Housecall Pro didn’t optimize routes. Maria exported the day’s jobs each morning and assigned them to technicians based on her knowledge of San Antonio’s geography. It worked, mostly.

The problem was emergencies. On a typical day, FlowRight received 8 to 12 emergency calls mixed in with 30 to 40 scheduled appointments. When an emergency came in, Maria’s process was the same every time: check the whiteboard to see roughly where each tech was, start calling them one by one, and ask who could get to the address fastest. Some techs didn’t pick up. Others were mid-job and couldn’t talk. By the time Maria found someone available and rerouted them, 90 minutes had passed on average.

The consequences were mounting:

  • Emergency response averaging 90 minutes: For a burst pipe or sewer backup, 90 minutes meant significant property damage. Homeowners waiting that long were not leaving five-star reviews.
  • Phone-based dispatch consuming 2+ hours daily: Maria estimated she spent two hours each day just coordinating emergency calls. That was time she couldn’t spend on customer follow-ups, scheduling, or managing the technicians’ workloads.
  • Google rating dropping from 4.6 to 4.2 over 8 months: The reviews told the story. “Called for an emergency and waited over an hour.” “Scheduled for 10am, tech showed up at noon.” “Great plumber, terrible scheduling.” FlowRight’s work quality was never the issue. Their logistics were.
  • No visibility into technician locations: Maria’s whiteboard showed the morning plan, but by 10am it was outdated. She had no way to know if a tech was finishing up a 20-minute faucet install or deep into a 3-hour repipe.

I’d have a homeowner on the phone with water pouring through her ceiling, and I’m calling four technicians trying to find one who can get there. Two don’t answer. One’s an hour away. The fourth can come but not for 45 minutes. Meanwhile the customer is watching her kitchen flood.

Maria Santos
Maria Santos

Dispatcher, FlowRight Plumbing


The scheduled work was suffering too. Without route optimization, Maria assigned jobs by neighborhood familiarity rather than drive-time efficiency. Technicians crisscrossed the city, and the gaps between appointments grew longer as emergency calls pulled them off their planned routes. On-time arrival for scheduled appointments sat at 72%, which generated its own wave of negative reviews.

FlowRight’s owner recognized the Google rating was a business-level threat. In a market where homeowners search “plumber near me” and pick from the top-rated options, dropping from 4.6 to 4.2 meant losing calls to competitors. He asked Maria to find a routing solution that could handle both scheduled jobs and same-day emergencies from a single system.

The Solution

Maria found Upper after testing three other route optimization tools. Two of them required manual CSV uploads that didn’t fit FlowRight’s workflow. Upper accepted the daily job export from Housecall Pro, with columns for address, time window, and estimated service duration, and optimized all 40–60 jobs across 10 technicians in under a minute.

The morning planning routine changed immediately. Instead of spending two hours assigning jobs by hand, Maria imported the day’s schedule, set service time estimates by job type (30 minutes for a faucet repair, 60 for a water heater, 90 for a repipe), and let Upper optimize the routes. The algorithm accounted for drive times, appointment windows, and service durations to produce balanced routes that minimized windshield time.


The first morning I ran the optimization, it rearranged everything I’d been doing by hand. Two techs who were crossing each other’s paths every day suddenly had clean, non-overlapping territories. I realized how much time we’d been wasting.

Maria Santos
Maria Santos

Dispatcher, FlowRight Plumbing


Emergency Dispatch by Map Instead of Phone

The real transformation came when the first emergency call arrived at 9:47am on Upper’s second day in use. Maria opened the live tracking dashboard and saw all 10 technicians on the map with their current positions, remaining stops, and estimated completion times. One tech was finishing a garbage disposal install six minutes from the emergency address. Maria added the emergency stop to his route directly from the dashboard.

The technician’s app updated with the new stop at the top of his sequence. He arrived at the emergency address in 22 minutes. No phone calls. No waiting for callbacks. No guessing who was closest.

Maria stopped using the phone for emergency dispatch entirely within the first week. Every emergency now follows the same process: check the live map, identify the nearest available technician, insert the stop, dispatch. The average emergency response time dropped from 90 minutes to 25 minutes.

The volume of emergencies FlowRight could handle increased by 40% as a direct result. Faster response meant shorter job queues, which meant more capacity for the next emergency call. FlowRight added $8,000 per month in emergency revenue without hiring additional technicians.

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Keeping Scheduled Customers in the Loop

Emergency dispatch was the primary win, but the scheduled work improved just as significantly. With optimized routes, technicians followed logical geographic sequences instead of zigzagging across San Antonio. Drive time between jobs decreased, and the buffer Maria had been building into schedules to account for transit became unnecessary.

Upper’s customer notification system addressed the on-time issue from the customer’s perspective. Each homeowner received an automated message with their technician’s estimated arrival window. If an emergency call pulled a tech off schedule, Upper recalculated the remaining route and sent updated ETAs automatically. Customers knew what to expect without calling the office.

On-time arrival for scheduled appointments jumped from 72% to 94%. The improvement showed up in reviews almost immediately. Customers who previously wrote “showed up two hours late” were now writing “got a text 30 minutes before arrival, tech was right on time.”

Rebuilding the Google Reputation

The Google rating recovery took three months of consistent performance. FlowRight’s response to every new negative review had been the same: apologize, explain, offer a discount. But no amount of review management could offset the volume of complaints generated by 90-minute emergency response times and missed appointment windows.

Once those root causes were fixed, the review trajectory reversed. New five-star reviews citing fast response, accurate timing, and good communication started outnumbering the complaints. Within three months, FlowRight climbed from 4.2 to 4.5 stars. Six months in, they were consistently receiving 15 to 20 new five-star reviews per month.


Our Google rating isn’t just a vanity metric. It’s how we get calls. When we dropped to 4.2, our phone volume fell by about 20%. Getting back to 4.5 brought those calls back, and the emergency revenue increase on top of that made this the best operational change we’ve ever made.

Maria Santos
Maria Santos

Dispatcher, FlowRight Plumbing


The Impact

FlowRight Plumbing’s turnaround was driven by a single operational shift: replacing phone-based, manual dispatch with a system that showed Maria where every technician was and let her assign work in seconds. The scheduled route optimization added efficiency, but the emergency dispatch capability changed the business.

The $8,000 monthly increase in emergency revenue was the most immediate financial impact. Emergency plumbing work carries higher margins than scheduled maintenance, and FlowRight had been leaving that money on the table by responding too slowly. Faster response times meant fewer homeowners hanging up and calling a competitor.

Maria’s workday changed completely. The two hours she spent on phone-based dispatch shifted to customer follow-ups, next-day scheduling, and technician support. She described the change as going from reactive firefighting to proactive operations management.

Performance Metrics

MetricsBefore UpperAfter Upper
Emergency response time90 min average25 min average
On-time scheduled arrivals72%94%
Google rating4.2 stars4.5 stars
Daily dispatch coordination2+ hours (phone/WhatsApp)20 minutes (dashboard)
Emergency volume handledBaseline40% increase
Emergency revenueBaseline+$8,000/month
Technician idle time between jobs25–40 min average10–15 min average

The technicians noticed the difference too. Instead of getting phone calls mid-job asking them to squeeze in an emergency, they received clean, sequenced routes on their app with emergency stops already inserted in the optimal position. They spent less time driving between jobs and more time doing the work they were trained for.

FlowRight’s owner approved the expansion Maria had been advocating for: adding two more technicians and extending service coverage to the northeast suburbs. The decision was based on confidence that the dispatch system could handle the increased volume without recreating the coordination chaos they had just eliminated.


I used to dread the phone ringing because it meant another emergency I’d spend 20 minutes trying to assign. Now when the phone rings, I check the map, tap a driver, and the job’s dispatched before the customer finishes explaining the problem. That’s the difference.

Maria Santos
Maria Santos

Dispatcher, FlowRight Plumbing