enx magazine

Who in your organization takes service calls and dispatches them to the service personnel? For many years, I would hire a person with a pleasant voice and put them on my service dispatch desk. Then one of my technicians came down with a back problem and could no longer do outside service. I then had this person take the service calls and dispatch them. He also handled the parts inventory maintenance and purchasing. What a difference. The number of calls dropped, the callbacks were virtually cut in half and the technicians were much happier. Why?

Having a knowledgeable person on the service desk was a blessing because he could walk people through some call saving procedures. For example, he could direct them in resetting error codes and clearing simple paper jams. He would do this without upsetting them. He would do that by asking them, “I will be happy to send one of our service technicians out to take care of this problem, but would you like to try to get yourself up and running right now?” The question was asked to show that we were ready and willing to send someone out to take care of the call, but they could probably be up and running without having to wait for a service technician to come. If the customer said “yes”, he would walk them through getting the machine back up and running. We had about eighty percent of our machines under service contract at the time and the saving in service calls was considerable.

Another factor was the fact that the technicians got a clearer understanding of the problem. The call information was much more detailed. Codes were correct and if a part was indicated, he wouldn’t send the technician on the call if he didn’t have the indicated part with him. The callbacks were cut down to almost nothing, because the technician would be sure to have the correct part with him.

My service manager at the time withdrew a request to hire a replacement technician to take the place of the person that went to the dispatch desk and of course I wanted to know why the change. He explained to me that the new dispatcher was actually saving the same number of calls each month that he was making in the field before this back problem. He didn’t need a replacement.

He then took over the job of selling the service contracts. He was in a perfect position to sell the contract to the customer and to get a report on the condition of the machine before we committed that machine to a service contract. We had been issuing service contracts to new customers without even checking the machine out to see if we wanted to cover the machine for a year. I have often wondered why we did that. You are not able to get insurance without getting a checkup and yet we were spending a lot of money bringing machines up to standard after we had committed to a contract. Now we were requiring the customer to pay for bringing the machine up to standard before we put it on contract.

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