Start Trip. Your next customer's phone lights up.

09:00. Two crews leave the yard.

A delivery driver pulls out with a load of plaster sand for five stops across Centurion. A plumber pulls out in the next bakkie, four geyser callouts queued up for the day. Both open the Crooh mobile app. Both tap Start Trip on the first stop.

In the next ten seconds, five things happen for each of them. Same five things.

The status flips to On the way. The first customer of the day gets an email titled "your delivery is on the way" or "your technician is on the way" with a unique tracking link. Location starts streaming because the crew member toggled GPS sharing on in their settings. The customer's tracking page lights up with "7.3 km away, updated 30 sec ago." The ETAs for every other stop on the route recompute from the crew's actual position, not from the morning plan.

Neither of them WhatsApped the office. Neither of them typed anything to anyone. One button. Five things.

What field service used to look like

The standard way to run a route has three communication threads happening in parallel.

The crew tells the office where they are by WhatsApp, sometimes. The office tells the customer where the crew is by phone, when the customer asks. The dispatcher updates the day's ETAs in a spreadsheet, when she remembers, based on a guess.

All three threads are people typing or talking. All three drift away from the truth as the day goes on. By 14:00 the spreadsheet says the plumber is at job 2 but he's actually at job 4. The homeowner waiting at job 5 phones in because her ETA was wrong by two hours and the geyser is still leaking.

The fix isn't to make people type more often. People won't. The fix is to take the typing out of the loop.

Start Trip is one button

The button is on every jobcard and every delivery's Proof of Delivery tab. It's labelled Start Trip. The crew taps it when they leave.

When they tap, Crooh writes the status as in_transit. That status change is what fires the "on the way" email through Resend. The customer gets a clean, branded email with a tracking link. No copy-paste from the office.

Crooh also bumps the job onto the route's active position, so the dispatcher's route view shows where in the day's run the crew actually is, not where they were supposed to be.

That's it. The crew moves on to driving.

The next-up notification: your customer gets pinged at the right moment, not at 09:00

Here's the part that takes the most pressure off your phone line on a multi-stop day.

When the crew completes a stop (signature captured, photos taken, jobcard marked Done), Crooh checks the route. The next stop on the active route becomes the new active stop. At that moment, that next customer gets their own "you're next" notification with their tracking link.

That's a different trigger from the morning email. The morning email tells everyone on the day's route they're scheduled. The next-up notification fires only when the crew finishes the previous stop and the next customer is actually next.

The customer at stop 4 doesn't get a vague "expected later today" at 09:00. They get a sharp ping at 11:42, when stop 3 is signed off. They open the link, see the crew 6 km away, and stop wondering. The customer at stop 5 doesn't open the link until 13:15, when stop 4 is done.

For you, this means three things stop happening. Customers stop phoning at 09:30 to ask "is he still coming today?" They stop phoning at 14:00 to ask "where is he now?" And your dispatcher stops fielding those calls all morning.

Live GPS is opt-in, per crew member

In the mobile Settings, every driver and technician has a Location toggle. Off by default. When they turn it on, their phone sends location updates to Crooh every 30 seconds or 50 metres of movement, whichever comes first.

This is intentional. Some crew don't want to be tracked. Some labour agreements don't allow it. The toggle is theirs to flip.

When it's on, the customer's tracking page shows real distance to the crew, refreshed live. The office's dispatch view shows every active crew on a single map.

Foreground only today. The app needs to be open during the run. Background tracking, so the phone can sit in the cup holder and still report position, needs iOS and Android permissions we haven't shipped yet. It's on the roadmap.

Adaptive ETA: the part nobody else does

Static ETAs are guesses. Crooh's are not.

When the crew's location changes, Crooh re-asks Mapbox: from this point, in this order of stops, how long to each one? Mapbox returns updated leg durations. Crooh writes the new ETAs onto every remaining stop on the route.

If the plumber gets stuck behind a load-shedding queue at the robot for 20 minutes, the next stop's ETA pushes 20 minutes. Your customer sees the change on the tracking page without phoning you to check.

If the driver clears Joburg traffic faster than expected, the ETAs pull in. The next customer sees the earlier time before the driver hits the gate intercom. No call needed.

Honest line: the stop order isn't re-optimised live, only the ETAs. If the crew skips a stop, the new order still follows the morning's plan. The next route optimisation will tidy it up.

My Route Today, in the crew's pocket

The mobile app has a screen called My Route Today. It shows the crew their auto-dispatched route in optimised order, deliveries and jobcards mixed in one list. Stop, recipient, address, ETA, distance to next, urgent badge in red if it's flagged.

They scroll the list. Tap a stop to open the jobcard or delivery. Hit Start Trip when they leave. Mark Done when they finish. The next stop becomes the active one and the next customer gets their notification.

The whole day is on their phone. Not in their head, not on a clipboard, not in a WhatsApp thread.

What it changes for your business

Customers don't expect the world. They expect to know when someone's actually coming. The companies beating you on Google reviews almost certainly aren't faster than you. They just stopped making the customer phone in.

Transparency on arrival times is no longer a premium feature. It's the floor. Uber set it in 2013. By 2026, every customer waiting for someone to arrive at their gate expects a tracking link. When you make them phone you instead, you're giving up review stars, repeat custom, and dispatcher hours, all for a feature that's one toggle and one button.