How to Legitimately Increase a Service Ticket by $10 – Without Raising your Rates by $10

How to Legitimately Increase a Service Ticket by $10 – Without Raising your Rates by $10

Ruth King
Contributing Writer
Profitability Revolution Paradigm

Imagine what would happen if you increased the revenues on each service ticket by just $10 per ticket.  You don’t have to raise your rates by $10.  Here’s how you do it:

The technician is already there.  Most of that $10 will fall to the bottom line.  If you generate 1,000 service tickets per year, that is almost $10,000 more in profit. Tickler files will help you do this.

Your service technicians are your eyes and ears.  It is their responsibility to do what is good for the customer.  That means keeping his eyes open to what is going on in the customer’s environment.  Look for things that help the customer be more comfortable in her home.  Look for things that are going to cost the customer money in future repairs.  His responsibility is to write them down (or record them electronically in his tablet) and talk with the customer about the potential repairs.

The customer can say yes or the customer can say no.  If the customer says no, then you have a repair that goes into that tickler file.  Perhaps the customer will say yes at a later date.  Someone just has to call, usually the dispatcher, and remind the customer of the needed repair.

Obviously, the technician shouldn’t change parts even if they don’t need to be changed or charging the customer for things they don’t really need.  The technician’s job is to educate the customer and bring up things that can potentially cause problems in the future.

One of the greatest losses of profit is when a customer only pays a diagnostic charge.  In most cases, there is a problem with the technician.  Either the customer didn’t trust the technician or he didn’t do a thorough diagnostic of the system. For example, if a breaker tripped, find out why the breaker tripped. Fix the disease rather than the symptom of the disease.

Now that fall is coming, many customers at the end of the winter said, I think I will wait until next fall to repair my heating system.  It’s time to call the customer, remind her of the repair that she agreed to take care of this fall, and schedule a time for the repair.  This is work to do in the fringe time of year, before it gets really cold.