Have you considered the accumulating cost of human errors at your repair and service business?

Repair businesses have a complicated logistics chain. From procurement of parts to the end customer, there are insurers, device manufacturers, and logistics companies in between.

So clean information, useful data, and accurate logs are important.

But are you sure every technician, every service manager, and every front-office employee is entering data accurately?

Mistakes usually mean escalating costs. The 1–10–100 rule is a good explanation of the exponential cost of bad data.

You live with incorrect data, or the 100 in the rule

AT&T found that 60 percent of invoicing data contained errors, resulting in them overpaying by tens of millions of dollars.

Errors in ERP systems, which for you would be a service management system, have been found to be a leading source of lost revenue.

Consider this:

The front office employee misses a crucial piece of information while taking in the device.

This delays the repair while the technician emails the customer about it. And promptly forgets about it as life goes on and there are more repairs to be done. The customer replies, but the technician gets to it a couple of days later.

The device is eventually repaired with an additional week added to the turnaround time. You now have a dissatisfied customer, a bad review, and the opportunity cost of an upsell (AppleCare, accessories, repeat business).

One missing piece of information can and does have such impact.

Plus, now you can’t trust the data on turnaround time because it wasn’t the technician’s fault. If you can't trust the data in your ERP, how can you make the right business decisions?

Correcting errors, or the 10 in the rule

You’ve been in business for years. And if you look close enough, you’ll find gaps in what you thought was a complete record of your business. That is, if you were relying on manual data entry.

Now you have to fix it. Maybe because it’s a legal requirement. Or you want to update your tax documents. A business loan application maybe. Worse, Apple is auditing your paperwork.

But it’s expensive to correct years of historical data because the only way to do it is to manually double-check everything.

Preventing bad data, or the 1 in the rule

The least expensive way to deal with errors is to prevent them. Not surprisingly, it’s a problem you can solve with software.

Your technicians need training in repairing devices. But what about copying and pasting information? Entering data? Writing emails? Setting reminders? No. These are all tasks that your repair or service management software should do.

Automating the flow of data between your distributors, an OEM like Apple or a reseller, your repair team, and customers can save your business a lot even if you’re doing a few thousand repairs a month.

Apart from clean data, your technicians are unburdened of these tasks, easing fatigue, and enabling them to focus on the repair.

The rule says that investing a dollar to prevent ‘bad data’ is better than spending $10 on cleaning it up later on. And both of these are better than spending $100 on living with the cost of bad data.

How Fixably helps

Guided Workflows and Easy Access to Information

• Our pre-programmed, guided workflows for important, repeated tasks help even your new staff create and manage a repair order without making a mistake.

• Fixably also autofills information that’s already in the system. For example, known customer contact details, or to generate a pre-filled consumer law claim.

• We ensure that you have to input data like device and customer information just once. This data is attached to each repair order and can even be saved for repeat customers.

• Fixably has integrations with major logistics companies. You can request a shipment, prepare the order, and print format-controlled labels from the same UI without having to copy and paste data.

• Our unified view of all shipments will give you real-time updates on which orders are still waiting to be picked up, ensuring that customers face no delays. 

• Our repair queues are designed to give you a view of important repair order information. Know if a device has been assigned for repair, which technician is on it, how long it’s been in service, and more.

• All information on a repair order is visible in a single, continuous log. Everyone from service managers to technicians and service representatives look up the data they need.