Route Assistance

Route Assistance is the page you keep open during the day. It watches every dispatched route's pace in real time, has Viki reach out to drivers falling behind, alerts the admins you choose when a route is in trouble, and records the routes that needed a second driver. Find it under Operations → Route Assistance, with five tabs — Live Monitor, Viki Activity, Rescues, RTS Performance, Settings — and a date picker on the title line for past days.

Nobody has to raise a hand. VoiceERP compares each driver's projected RTS (return to station) against their planned RTS plus a planned RTS buffer for breaks, lunch, and standup — 30 minutes out of the box. Once their projected return runs past that by more than your at-risk threshold (35 minutes by default), the route turns At risk. Anything slipping but under the line reads Behind; the rest are On pace, Returning, Returned, or No signal.

Six stat cards run across the top — On road, On pace, At risk, Behind, Returning, Returned — and clicking one filters everything below it. Under that sits a live fleet map with a pin per route; open a pin for that driver's status, pace, ETA against their scheduled end, and when they were last seen. Panning or zooming narrows the table below.

The Routes table lists Route, Driver, Status, Stops / progress, Pace, Proj RTS, and Battery. Click a row for that driver's detail panel: stops and packages done, pace, ETA, time left, battery, breaks so far today, and a Viki conversation thread of every message or call Viki has sent them.

Pace check-ins go out on a timer (every 60 minutes by default) or at set times of day, as a text or a walkie call that falls back to a text if nobody picks up. You can tell Viki to stay quiet for drivers who are on time, only reach out once someone is behind by a set number of minutes, and set a nightly cutoff. A default behind-pace text reads: "Hi Marcus, it's Viki. Quick heads up — you're 25 min behind on route. If you can safely pick the pace up a bit, that'll help you finish on time. You've got this!"

An at-risk nudge fires once the moment a driver crosses the at-risk line, and a low battery reminder asks them to plug in when their phone drops to your reminder level (30% by default). Viki holds all of these while a driver is on break, before they've left the station, or once they've finished.

Route Assistance texts people at two tiers. Route At Risk is the early heads-up when a route first crosses the threshold. Route Badly Behind is the harder escalation — by default at 70 minutes projected past sign-out — and it says so plainly: "Marcus Ellis is badly behind and may need a rescue — projected 1 hr 15 min past sign-out, returning around 8:45 PM. 130/160 stops done." A Low Phone Battery alert rounds out the set. Recipients come from the Who gets the alerts list on this page, not the general notification settings.

This tab is the day's receipt. Tiles count Total reach-outs, Pace check-ins, At-risk nudges, Battery reminders, and the Texts / calls split, each doubling as a filter. Below them, every reach-out that went out appears newest first with the driver's name, the reason, and the message body; call rows open the transcript.

When a second driver ends up working someone else's route, VoiceERP notices it in the route data and records it here as a Rescue card: the route code, the Rescuee and the Rescuer or rescuers, and each driver's own stops and packages on that route. A helper carrying only a handful of packages counts as a mis-sort, not a rescue. This is a record, not a dispatch tool — you still arrange help the way you do today, and Route Assistance captures it. On a quiet day the tab reads "No rescues so far today."

Drivers have nothing to accept or decline, and neither the driver being helped nor the one sent to help gets a request from VoiceERP about the rescue. They just keep the driver app running; Viki's messages arrive as a text and in their app chat, in Spanish if that's their language. While a rescue is underway Viki goes quiet for both drivers by default — you can switch reach-outs back on for either role under Settings. Admin alerts are never held.

RTS Performance trends returns over a date range: Avg return delta, On plan or early, Best day, and Rescued routes, plus a chart and a per-driver summary. Rescued days are marked, since an early return there is partly the rescuer's work.

Settings holds everything above across five sub-tabs — Rules, Pace check-ins, Battery, Rescues, Messages — with one Save changes button. The Messages tab is where you rewrite Viki's texts and call openers per situation, using tokens like {first_name} and {stops_done}; leave one alone to keep Viki's built-in wording.

The manager mobile app carries its own Route Assistance screen with Routes and Viki's Activity tabs, where tapping a driver lets you Zap them for a walkie call. For who is simply signed in right now, see the Online Drivers page.