Service Call Avoidance – Fix or Fiction? Recently while working with one of our customers, the question was asked on how effective “Call Avoidance” was, and should they make the effort to staff for this position. For those of you not familiar with the term “Call Avoidance”, it’s the capability to work with the customer remotely to avoid sending a technician on site. This is normally done by the assigned technician calling the customer and working with them directly over the phone to correct their issues, or a help-desk person trying to avoid the call prior to sending a tech on site. I also recently read somewhere the industry has established a “service call avoidance goal of 50%.” So being the data guy that I am I ran this through “the BEI Services data gauntlet” to prove if this actually could be accomplished based on current factual statistics. The question is how do you address this claim and what data do we need to look at? This is relatively a very simple question: “What types of service calls require human intervention at the customer location besides adding toner?” I have spoken to a number of companies who have “active” Call Avoidance practices established at their dealerships and there are a number of small variances in their practices, but they all have relatively similar rates in failure percentages as shown below. Today BEI Services maintains the largest database in the world when it comes to imaging devices and service performance of those devices. In the last 365 days we processed more than 17.8 million service calls on over 3.9 million devices of nearly 40,000 technicians. I used this data to validate the effectiveness of call avoidance for both studies, and I hope this report helps shed some light on the subject. For this study I used a one-year period and only dealerships that had a helpdesk or phone-fix call type. We had 17,576,147 service calls, and of these calls only 349,573 (1.9%) were marked as phone-fix or help-desk avoids. Then I looked at the actual success of the avoided calls and found 32.4% of the calls that were avoided had another service call created on the same piece of equipment within 7 days, by our standards making them a failure attempt, with the majority (17.1%) failing within first day. In this part of the study, this equates to a 67.8% overall successful for Call Avoidance attempts. But this is only on the 1.9% of the total service calls. The next stage in this study was to determine what percentage of the completed service calls required parts to be installed. Our data excludes consumables, so these types of service calls would normally require a technician to make the trip to the customer locations to install the parts. Using the same data above, we found that 34.6% of the service calls needed parts, leaving a possible 65.4% of the calls to be avoidable. Okay, that makes sense… But I know from all the years I’ve been in this industry that a large percentage of service calls require a technician to just clean the machines. So to figure out a methodology of what a Call Avoid should be, I did two separate studies to validate what could be considered avoidable. First, what were the call lengths of the calls that were avoidable in that 1.9% service calls above? This would allow me to compare all the service calls based on those times and establish a percentage of total calls that could be avoided. The table below shows all the service call length of the avoided calls in 10-minute time bands. Call Avoid Requiring Another Open Call Days to failure Percentage failed Calls 0 (same day) 9.3% 32,579 1 7.8% 27,137 2 3.0% 10,364 3 2.8% 9,942 4 2.4% 8,375 5 2.2% 7,779 6 2.4% 8,281 7 2.5% 8,637 Totals 32.4% 113,114         Avoidable Call Times in Minutes Minutes Service Calls Percentage of avoidable calls Percentage of Total Calls (17,576,147) 0-9 197,863 56.6% 0.00000355% 10- 19 81,250 23.2% 0.00000132% 20 - 29 22,321 6.4% 0.00000036% 30 - 39 13,495 3.9% 0.00000022% 40 -49 7,680 2.2% 0.00000012% 50 + 27,054 7.7% 0.00000044% In the above case, we can assume with relative certainty that the majority of avoidable calls can be completed in less than 30 minutes at a rate of 86.2% (56.6% + 23.2% + 6.5). But to be certain these numbers would hold up, I checked the non-avoidable calls as well, and I even split out the calls with parts so I would not count the calls with parts twice. As you can see from the numbers in the table above, more than 49% (6.8% + 7.1% + 35.2%) of service calls with no parts took longer than 30 minutes to complete. The total calls for both non-part calls greater than 30 minutes and calls that required parts (the 34.6% above) adds up to more than 80% of the total call load, well above the 50% goal of avoidable calls. Non-Avoidable call times in minutes Minutes Service Calls with no Parts % with no Parts Service Calls with Parts % with Parts Total % 0-9 691,427 3.9% 100,945 0.6% 4.5% 10- 19 855,942 4.9% 222,860 1.3% 6.2% 20 - 29 951,350 5.4% 315,933 1.8% 7.2% 30 - 39 1,186,426 6.8% 463,182 2.5% 9.4% 40 -49 1,249,178 7.1% 564,481 3.2% 10.3% 50 + 6,193,150 35.2% 4,427,394 25.2% 60.4% The conclusion of this study is the following. An active Call Avoidance practice in a dealership makes sense if you consistently measure your effectiveness and maintain an effective rate of success of above 60%. I would call that a FIX and worth investing in. As for “service call avoidance goal of 50%,” our study was based using a majority of MFPs and higher end printers. While 50% is an admirable goal, I cannot see how it can be achieved with 34.6% of service calls requiring parts, and 49.1% not requiring parts but taking more than 30 minutes to complete (totaling over 83%). I would call this FICTION by today’s standards. I could see these possibilities if the goal is for printers only since the majority of parts are replaced with the cartridge. Perhaps the claim should have been “the printer industry” rather than ”the industry”. Bud Karakey is Vice President of Operations of BEI Services. Prior to that position, he was with MWAi for 16 years as one of the founding members of ADS Communications, which is now part of MWAi. He can be reached at bud.karakey@beiservices.com.