Our ETA was Wrong

PinPoint Status provides a best effort estimate of the Service Provider's expected arrival time. Due to the complexity of coming up with an ETA, we work with Google Maps to source our estimates. We have found that they have the easiest and most reliable track record for providing ETAs.

When working with Google Maps, we provide them the service providers last known location, the destination address, and Google Maps gives use and ETA along with a confidence rating. We exclude low confidence, or oddly long ETAs (it's going to take 3 days to drive to that appointment, I think something is off).

Overall, that leaves PinPoint doing what it's best at, your customer messaging, and Google Maps doing what it's best at.

This does still leave us with the question of a wrong ETA. Unfortunately this really isn't something we are able to automatically detect. If Google is 99% confident that it's going to take 2 hours to arrive somewhere 15 minutes away, that's what it says. To us, it looks the exact same as a good ETA. Google has spend billions on solving this problem and they haven't perfected things yet. We are working with the best resource available, and thats the best we can do.

The other interesting situation that we run into is that we send an initial ETA in our messaging, but provide updated ETAs in our portal. Since the portal ETAs are live, they can be even more accurate than the initial message we send out!