SERVICE MANAGEMENT
We Saw It In ENX Magazine
MAY 2011
Service Call Avoidance – Fix or Fiction? By Bud Karakey
R
ecently 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.
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 10minute time bands. Call Avoid Requiring Another Open Call Days to failure 0 (same day) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Totals
Minutes
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.
W EST C OAST P LATEN
48
enx magazine
Calls 32,579 27,137 10,364 9,942 8,375 7,779 8,281 8,637 113,114
Avoidable Call Times in Minutes
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.
www.laserprinterparts.com
Percentage failed 9.3% 7.8% 3.0% 2.8% 2.4% 2.2% 2.4% 2.5% 32.4%
Service Calls
Percentage of Percentage of avoidable calls 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. continued on 50