How to Schedule Your Clients as a Mobile PC Repair Technician

Aug.09, 2010 in Technology and Gadgets

Here today I want to show you how I book my computer repair jobs as an On-site Computer Technician. While I’m not telling you that this is how you must do it, its a way which has worked great for me over time.

On a common work day, my clients usually start calling some hours after 9am. I will be able to book the 1st on-site job for the day ; which might have been booked 1 or 2 days ago, about 11am as this allows an hour in office for answering calls, checking e-mails and 1 hour traveling time.

When a customer phones us, I’m going to ask them some extremely straightforward questions. Nothing difficult like “Are you getting a reboot loop?”, but instead base it off things that they are going to see even though they do not know a thing about computers. As an example, I’d say something like “When you press the button, does it show the black screen with white writing, show the Windows XP trademark, then return to the black screen with white writing?” To a computer nerd, we know that this is a “Blue Screen of Death” with automatic restart activated, but we can’t ask the customer if its a BSOD with automatic restart turned on, so I use the above system based off what they see.

Why I ask my home PC repair service clients things like this is because it gives me a rough notion of how much time I will need and allows me to book my day reasonably. A Blue Screen of Death may be anything from a failing hard drive to a simple driver issue, so I will be able to doubtless allow 2-3 hours or so for this to account for the laborious Problems.

If a customer called me and asserted My PC is dead, I would have to ask the query as though it had no power? No noise or lights whatsoever? If they assert yes, then it is most probably going to either be a dead power supply or a dead motherboard, in which particular case I’d only allow 1 hour for this job. If it is the power supply then I will test and swap that out pretty swiftly if its a dead motherboard then I’m going to run various 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 at about 12:30pm to 1pm dependent on driving distance from the first job. When the call for the 3rd job comes in I will be able to usually give the consumer a ballpark time since there is a chance one of the earlier jobs can take longer than anticipated, so I will say something like between three and 4pm. If there is a fourth or fifth on-site job to do, I’m going to do similar with the ballpark time but if there is no more call outs for the day, I’m going to go back to my workshop and do whatever is on my workbench.

This set up allows me to be on time about 95% of the time and if I’m late, its not more than 15 mins. If I’m going to be late and it is more than ten mins or so , I usually call my customer and tell them.

it’s really critical to do this because when anyone is expecting someone to show up at a given time, they are going to stay waiting for you and they may not wish to start another task. If someone stays in this readied state for too long, they start to get concerned staring at the clock and wondering where in the world you are. Nevertheless 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 always say sorry for being late on arrival. It is vital to respect the seriousness of other peoples time.

This is how I book our clients for laptop computer virus removal and as I discussed earlier, this isn’t the conclusive way do it, its simply a way that works superbly for our shop.