Why locksmith dispatch is uniquely hard
Locksmith dispatch has the highest cancellation rate and the highest fraud rate of any service trade. Three structural reasons:
- The self-resolve rate is high. ~40% of lockouts find a spare key or get rescued before the tech arrives.
- Google ads bid in real-time. Customers in distress call 3+ shops simultaneously. First truck wins, others get cancellations.
- The trade attracts fraud. Competitors prank-calling each other's dispatch boards is genuinely common.
This hub is built around those three realities. The product side lives on our locksmith software page; this hub is for the operational playbooks behind it.
For new locksmith operators
The single highest-leverage workflow change you can make this quarter is implementing prepaid dispatch. Locksmith shops see the largest cancellation-rate reduction of any trade — typically from 30% down to 6% within 30 days.