Dispatch Grid - Prohibit Cancellation of Dispatched Trips
Imagine a scenario where your dispatcher has dispatched a trip—maybe the trip is later for today, or even for tomorrow or some date in the future. The dispatcher knows about it, the chauffeur knows about it, so the trip is going to happen.
Now, the customer calls and cancels the trip—maybe it’s even within your no-penalty cancellation window, so there won’t be a charge for the trip. So your helpful reservation agent cancels the trip in the system. Unfortunately, she or he forgets to tell the dispatcher—and the dispatcher doesn’t notice because the trip just isn’t on the board anymore (assuming cancelled trips are suppressed on the board).
Now you have a problem—the car will show up, you’ve embarrassed yourself in front of your customer, and you have to pay the chauffeur besides. One way to prevent this is to make sure that reservations cannot easily cancel a dispatched trip.
Open Maintenance, and navigate to Maintain…Security. Select a user that you don’t want to have this capability, and simply uncheck the box that says “Allow Cancellation of Dispatched Trips”.
Now, the customer calls and cancels the trip—maybe it’s even within your no-penalty cancellation window, so there won’t be a charge for the trip. So your helpful reservation agent cancels the trip in the system. Unfortunately, she or he forgets to tell the dispatcher—and the dispatcher doesn’t notice because the trip just isn’t on the board anymore (assuming cancelled trips are suppressed on the board).
Now you have a problem—the car will show up, you’ve embarrassed yourself in front of your customer, and you have to pay the chauffeur besides. One way to prevent this is to make sure that reservations cannot easily cancel a dispatched trip.
Open Maintenance, and navigate to Maintain…Security. Select a user that you don’t want to have this capability, and simply uncheck the box that says “Allow Cancellation of Dispatched Trips”.
Now, when the reservation agent tries to cancel the trip, a message will pop up:
Important Note: it is not that hard for an agent to get around this restriction by simply changing the status to “Assigned” and then cancelling the trip. The point of restricting the permission is so the dispatcher knows when a dispatched trip is cancelled. If you have an agent looking for loopholes to get around this, and then not following procedures to make sure dispatch knows—maybe that agent would be better off working somewhere else?