In this article I want to demonstrate how I book my PC repair roles as an On-site PC Technician. While I’m not letting you know that this is how you must do it, its a way which has worked for me over the years.
On a typical work day, my clients sometimes start calling some hours after 9am. I can book the 1st on-site job for the day ; which could have been booked a few days back, about 11am as this permits an hour in office for answering calls, checking mails and 1 hour traveling time.
Any time a client calls me, I’ll ask them some extremely straightforward questions. Nothing too technical like “Are you getting a reboot loop?”, but instead something that they are going to see even though they do not know a thing about PCs. For example, I say something similar to “When you press the button, does it show the black screen with white writing, show the Windows XP symbol, then return to the black screen with white writing?” To a computer nerd, we all know that this is probably a “Blue Screen of Death” with automatic restart turned on, but we can’t ask the customer if its a BSOD with automatic restart turned on, so I use the above method based off what they see.
The reason why I ask my home PC repair service clients things like this is usually because it gives me a rough idea of how long the job should take and allows me to book my day appropriately. A Blue Screen of Death may be anything from a failing hard drive to an easy driver issue, so I will potentially allow 2-3 hours or so for this to account for the time consuming issues.
If a customer called me and asserted My computer is dead, I would have to ask the query as if it had no power? No noise or lights whatsoever? If they say yes, then it is most probably going to either be a dead power supply or a dead motherboard, in which particular case I would only allow one hour for this job. If it is the power supply then I can test and swap that out pretty swiftly if its a dead motherboard then I’ll run assorted tests on-site to approve it is a dead motherboard and take it back to the workshop to replace it.
Now that I have a general estimate of how long my 11am job will take, I can book my next job about 12:30pm to 1pm depending on driving distance from the first job. When the call for the 3rd job comes in I will usually give the customer a ballpark time since there is a chance one of the earlier roles can take more time than anticipated, so I will say something similar to between three and 4pm. If there is a fourth or fifth on-site job to do, I’ll do similar with the ballpark time but if there is no more call outs for the day, I’ll go back to my workshop and do whatever is on my workbench.
This setup enables me to be on time about 95% of the time and if i am late, its not more than fifteen mins. If i am going to be late and it is more than 10 mins or thereabouts I mostly call my purchaser and let them know.
it is really important to do this because when someone is expecting somebody to show up at a given hour, they’ll stay sitting around for you and they probably won’t want to start doing something else. If someone stays in this readied state for too much time, they start to get concerned watching the time and wondering where in the world you are. However, if they know you are going to be late, they at least know how long to wait and can do something else while they wait.
When i am late that five pc of the time, I mostly say sorry for being late on arrival. It is vital to respect the importance of the clients time.
This is how I book our clients for laptop virus removal and as I discussed earlier, this isn’t the conclusive way do it, its simply a way that works superbly for me.