30 Service Calls ?

[tech07]

Has anyone experienced this type of situation ??
I have 30 years in this industry and have never seen it before.
I work for a large Copier/IT company in North Carolina..I am the lead technician.
We normally have 6 technicians Locally..covering 9 counties.
Incredibly, we are down to 2 , myself and a newbie technician who is very limited in what he can service.
One technician transfered to another company, two left for other oppertunities and one has a back injury and is on short term disability.
Slowly and surely calls have been stacking up.
The rookie now has about 20 calls pending, qualified to work on just a few.
I now have 38 calls pending. Normal calls per day....5-6
I find this incredibley stressful..
Where to go next ? Response times approaching 1 week. Customers getting ruthless.
Don't know how long I can tolerate this situation..
Anyone else been in this situation before? 38 service calls?? impossible!!

[Yanouch29]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Hello,

I'm a customer and i became a tech because is the same problem in France.

I saw in 7 years, in France, Konica reduce the number of technicians in the area of 3 to 1 people.
I also saw the hotline no longer know what to say to me or even lie when their toner factory burned in Japan!

Times change, in my opinion: you have to do your job just your job, explain the situation to customers and leave the managers their responsibilities ...

[blackcat4866]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

It was like this during the COVID. On a Friday all (8) techs were laid off, managers still coming to work. A week later when the calls had accumulated, (2) of us were brought back.

It stayed that way for about a year. It wasn't uncommon to juggle 30 to 40 calls each. During the COVID less than 1/2 of those customers answered their phones, so that made the decision easy. Which calls do I try to do today? By who answered their phone first, by geography second, by call-age third, by urgency fourth.

Of 35 potential calls maybe 15 answered their phone, and of those 7 or 8 were in a reasonable geographic area that could get service in that day. There were a lot of complaints about response times ... and we addressed as many of those as we could. But my responsibility ends for the next 24 hours if the caller doesn't answer the phone.

At some point you may decide that you don't want to live in this particular hell. You have my sympathy and support if you decide that you don't want to continue to do it. =^..^=

[BillyCarpenter]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

I've always looked at it like this: They can route me to 1 or 100. I'm gonna get to what I can. I can only do what I can do. If they don't like it, they can fire me and hire the next chump. lol

[BillyCarpenter]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

It was like this during the COVID. On a Friday all (8) techs were laid off, managers still coming to work. A week later when the calls had accumulated, (2) of us were brought back.

It stayed that way for about a year. It wasn't uncommon to juggle 30 to 40 calls each. During the COVID less than 1/2 of those customers answered their phones, so that made the decision easy. Which calls do I try to do today? By who answered their phone first, by geography second, by call-age third, by urgency fourth.

Of 35 potential calls maybe 15 answered their phone, and of those 7 or 8 were in a reasonable geographic area that could get service in that day. There were a lot of complaints about response times ... and we addressed as many of those as we could. But my responsibility ends for the next 24 hours if the caller doesn't answer the phone.

At some point you may decide that you don't want to live in this particular hell. You have my sympathy and support if you decide that you don't want to continue to do it. =^..^=

Just curious. Did your company have a dispatcher that routed you to your calls and did all the leg-work to make sure someone would be there or did they leave all of that up to you?

[blackcat4866]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Just curious. Did your company have a dispatcher that routed you to your calls and did all the leg-work to make sure someone would be there or did they leave all of that up to you?

Live dispatchers took the calls, but the final decision of: "where next?" was entirely up to me. =^..^=

[BillyCarpenter]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Live dispatchers took the calls, but the final decision of: "where next?" was entirely up to me. =^..^=

If it were me, I wouldn't let the tech decide where to go next. For starters, it creates unnecessary conflict between the customer and tech. I'd rather place the onus on the dispatcher and take the tech off the hook if/when a customer complains about a tech being slow to respond. I want to unburden the tech of everything but actually repairing the equipment. Just my opinion.

[BillyCarpenter]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Side Note: I understand that in this crazy world of service calls that there's a lot that goes into "where to go next." Sometimes the squeaky wheen has to get the grese and, lets face it, some customers are A-holes and demand service on demand. Even still, sometimes you must draw a line in the sand.

My normal method of routing calls is to route the tech to the first call that's the most miles from the his home and then work his way back. That way at the end of the day he doesn't have to drive 100 miles to get back home. That's in a perfect world. Many other factors to consider, though. You must take care of the big money makers. And those that may have been down for parts or incomplete calls. That's a lot to put on a tech.

[BillyCarpenter]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

One last thing. This is an interesting topic to me. I'd like to hear how everyone's company operates and what you do and don't like about it. Thanks.

[blackcat4866]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

If it were me, I wouldn't let the tech decide where to go next. For starters, it creates unnecessary conflict between the customer and tech. I'd rather place the onus on the dispatcher and take the tech off the hook if/when a customer complains about a tech being slow to respond. I want to unburden the tech of everything but actually repairing the equipment. Just my opinion.

LOL. I certainly appreciate the sentiment ... but remember, for me this was during the COVID. I was issued an office key. Every 3 or 4 days I'd go into the office and tried to scrounge up something resembling "parts", and the office was locked & empty almost every time. Phone calls were directed somewhere else, it rotated around. Except for one other tech, there was nobody else.

Side Note: I understand that in this crazy world of service calls that there's a lot that goes into "where to go next." Sometimes the squeaky wheen has to get the grese and, lets face it, some customers are A-holes and demand service on demand. Even still, sometimes you must draw a line in the sand.

My normal method of routing calls is to route the tech to the first call that's the most miles from the his home and then work his way back. That way at the end of the day he doesn't have to drive 100 miles to get back home. That's in a perfect world. Many other factors to consider, though. You must take care of the big money makers. And those that may have been down for parts or incomplete calls. That's a lot to put on a tech.

I tried to plan it that way myself, when circumstances allowed, but you know how that goes. =^..^=

[Yanouch29]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Ok, but imagine that I am me a very small customer with a machine near you ... and that the client the furthest is the biggest customer of your boss with 10 machines ... I am on Never see yourself repairing my machine and yet seeing your car pass every night!

Without a joke: you must have a schedule and respect the schedule except in cases of force majeure ...
And so that everyone is happy, the manufacturer, customer and work maintenance must be together.

When all is well, nothing to say ... everyone works! But as soon as there is a problem and well it is always small customers or technicians who pay ...

[mloudy]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Horrible situation but getting pretty normal. My opinion is the maximum a customer should wait is 3 hours, even for maintenance. We shoot for under 2 hours.

Customers often think that all copier dealers provide the same response times that we do. When you get a new buyer arrive at a company and they are suckered into getting a quote from a new company all they see is the money they can save, which often isn't the truth. So within a few months or years they see that a tech on site in 90 minutes isn't an industry standard. They had gone decades without a copier being down for more than 2 hours and now they have copiers down for days to weeks. They are told finishers and paper trays can't be fixed so they can't use them anymore. We have a handful of larger accounts that left us and came back. They are a great reference when a customer starts looking. They use terms like "nightmare" and "horrible" to describe the service from another dealer.

[mloudy]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

One last thing. This is an interesting topic to me. I'd like to hear how everyone's company operates and what you do and don't like about it. Thanks.

Techs come to work every morning. The tech that lives the furthest from the building is 7 minutes away. Their company vehicles stay here at night and are fully stocked. They head out for the day anywhere from 8-9am. Most of the time they return for lunch and then head out again. All vehicles are tracked with GPS so anyone here that takes a service call can send it to the closest tech based on where they are or where their others calls will take them. We do not have dedicated dispatchers but everyone in the office taking calls has a seperate monitor with live gps.

We try to limit our service area. We will deline to quote places that we can't properly service based on long distances from our building. Parts and supplies are extremely well stocked and we very rarely need to emergency order anything. Maybe once every 2 years. We have a warehouse full of trade ins that the techs can pick through. We also keep a good number of newer machines in stock that we can pull parts from. We are also able to swap a down machine the same day if we need to.

This type of dealership is fading away. I have personally seen exceptional dealerships sell out and become horrible service providers and a crappy place to work. Most of them cut service staff in half within 2 years and close their physical building in 3 for an office space or even going to a complete remote work enviroment.

[BillyCarpenter]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Techs come to work every morning. The tech that lives the furthest from the building is 7 minutes away. Their company vehicles stay here at night and are fully stocked. They head out for the day anywhere from 8-9am. Most of the time they return for lunch and then head out again. All vehicles are tracked with GPS so anyone here that takes a service call can send it to the closest tech based on where they are or where their others calls will take them. We do not have dedicated dispatchers but everyone in the office taking calls has a seperate monitor with live gps.

We try to limit our service area. We will deline to quote places that we can't properly service based on long distances from our building. Parts and supplies are extremely well stocked and we very rarely need to emergency order anything. Maybe once every 2 years. We have a warehouse full of trade ins that the techs can pick through. We also keep a good number of newer machines in stock that we can pull parts from. We are also able to swap a down machine the same day if we need to.

This type of dealership is fading away. I have personally seen exceptional dealerships sell out and become horrible service providers and a crappy place to work. Most of them cut service staff in half within 2 years and close their physical building in 3 for an office space or even going to a complete remote work enviroment.

When I was a tech working for a large company, they never required the tech to come to the shop other than for meetings or if they needed to restock parts. We left straight from our home and we were allowed to drive the vehicle home. If there's no need to come to the shop, why come? I lived 30-miles from the shop and that's where my normal territory was. It saved a lot of unnecessary mileage on the company vehicle.

Also, how is your vehicle inventory re-stocked? For us, we had a dedicated bin and all normal use vehicle inventory would be pulled and waiting on us in our bin.

[mloudy]

Re: 30 Service Calls ?

Techs restock their own inventory. They have full access to parts and supplies. I have seen other dealerships where all that stuff is locked inside chain link fenced areas. I know our way doesn't work at large dealerships because you could have dishonest techs swipping all sorts of stuff.

There is good things and not so good things about techs coming into work every morning but the good far outweigh any negative. There is a vast amount of knowledge shared between our techs, IT Tech, me and sales reps every day that could never happen with only coming in for meetings a few times a month. Girls have conversations with the techs and line up all kinds of things. Techs do the bulk of the toner deliveries as they do calls. I have conversations all day long that I can't imaging trying to accomplish not being face to face.

I know when employees start the day and never have to wonder what time they are leaving the house in the morning or finishing the day with calls still open. True I could watch the gps every morning but my day starts prior to 7am and I and up and moving about the building, making coffee, filling the dogs food bowl. Very important stuff. Techs can verbally and in person relate copier problems and show me samples if needed. Scheduling installs rarley gets screwed up because everyone can be in the conversation and see the schedule on what we call The Matrix. It is a big display hanging between the service and sales office that refreshes constantly. The lift truck never gets double booked. It can also be viewed at any PC. I can train techs in person as they have time. There is ALWAYS something to do here.

We don't have people dedicated to shipping, receiving, warehouse, set ups, installs etc... Techs are in and out throughout the day and can assist me with these things.