How To Reduce Truck Rolls & Lowers Costs

Once upon a time, there was a company (or thousands of them) who had mobile teams or were one person shops.  The company spent a lot of time in the field trying to get from job to job and communicate with their offices as efficiently as possible.  Their business process often looked like this.

• Call and email customers to set up a meeting to visit a location (residential or business)
• Book a time to meet with a homeowner or get access to a business.
• Upon arrival the customer is greeted and the site/situation is assessed.
• After 15-20 minutes, the tech goes out to the truck to look for the parts or tools for the job as he or she had no idea of the job details upon arrival.
• While in the vehicle, he or she places a call to figure out the answers to any questions he or she has.
• Then, he or she realizes there is no way to complete the job today as the correct parts are not in the truck or a tool isn’t with them today. 
• At that point, they have to go back to the customer and say they need to come back another day.
• Then, step #1 starts over again in the hopes this time the job, task, project, initiative, repair, etc. is completed before the customer can be billed.  

Does your company or team experience a similar situation as the one described above?

Last week, we called a garage door company to fix our garage door keypad which is broken and then conduct some basic preventative maintenance while visiting.  After a half hour ride to our house during a defined timeframe, we found out that the proper parts were not on the truck to do the job.  After 10 minutes of trying to find and schedule a time that works for both the provider and us, we settled on a time about a week later.  

Let’s think of four of the many business issues here.

1.  This simple job is now unprofitable, requiring two truck rolls instead of one.
2.  An additional billable hour plus is now lost due to poor communication. 
3.  The customer has to modify his or her schedule to accommodate the provider.
4.  Who knows the potential negative financial impact to the customer or business waiting for the simple fix to happen? 

There is no need for this to happen anymore when technology is available to help drive customer satisfaction.  It commonly costs businesses up to $400 for every unnecessary truck roll.  If this happens 100 times a year, that is $40,000 in lost profits. 

Reduce Truck Rolls Through Digitization

New digital technologies exist now that help this to become a problem of the past.  Imagine opening an app on your phone, checking an address or customer name, and knowing:

1. The detailed history on a site location, business address or residence.
2. The little tiny details that are the ones that turn profitable jobs into costly ones.
3. All the documents are accessible including pictures, notes, instructions, and videos so that every future trip is equally as simple.

As Zig Zigler once said, “You can change everything about your business by changing your thinking about your business”.   Reducing truck rolls can have a positive impact within days and is the difference between highly profitable customer focused businesses and ones will fall behind their competition.