Business operations- How long to spend on a free diagnostic?

[lan101]

You cannot make a diagnostic over the phone.

You cannot know the problem until you have the machine in front of you and you do some testing. You can make a few really good educated guesses, but they are guesses none the less.

For example: Customer rings in that his machine won't turn on at all. You tell him, oh that's easy. It's probably the power supply. A new one is X and the install will cost X.

They bring it in and the machine fires up in your shop. Now you have no idea what's wrong. Anything from an intermittent problem with the hardware to a fault with the outlet / wiring where the customer had the machine.

I've had a few in the past where it was an outlet issue/wiring of some sort.
As far as the diagnostic over the phone, I tell them it basically needs to be looked at to know for sure, but I give them a few likely scenarios of what it could be and what I charge for those services.

If you are going to get the job, they usually will book it right then and there, if they say I will call you back, maybe 1 out of 3 or 4 will. That's been my experience anyways on calls that it could be more than 1 scenario.
My success rate of closing the job is probably somewhere between 80 to 90 percent I would say, so that 10 to 15 percent that I lose could very well be a cheap skate or someone that was going to be hard to deal with.

Like you said it's pretty tough to make a "for sure' diagnostic over the phone, but we can usually make a pretty good "guess."

 

[codegreen]

You cannot make a diagnostic over the phone.

Exactly right. You can guess based on a description of the problem. That guess may even turn out to be right in many cases. But that is not a diagnosis. Proper troubleshooting is the most important skill a technician can have, and you have to have the computer in front of you to do it.

 

[ell]

Wouldn't give an estimate, at least not one I'd stand behind.

Too big of a risk for far too little of a reward.



I'd rather know whats wrong and have a solid understanding of what it will cost to fix it. No surprises this way. No customers expecting other free services.

So do the diagnostic and charge them for it if they don't want the machine fixed.

This is my policy too because...starting out I advertised free diagnosis and a fellow brought in two systems, very old, I wasted an hour diagnosing only to have him say thanks and tell me he was going to order the parts on ebay and fix it himself now that he had a diagnosis, shhesh, the only way I'll do a free diagnosis is if its an obvious broken power jack or something like that, its just not worth my time to work for free.

 

[Erik Koelling]

We run a free basic diagnostic which covers problems that are easy to figure out, like a bad HDD or PSU. If the computer passes the basic tests without showing a problem we then call the customer and recommend and advanced diagnostic. We charge $35 for this and apply it to the repair cost if they decide to get it fixed. We also charge this on some systems that need to be completely disassembled to get to the power supply.

 

[callthatgirl]

On occasion I offer a free 15 min "make sure I can help" but I always can help so it ends up being an appt, then I get the credit card and run like hell! (Bernie style).

fixed woo!

 

[CheddarPCsKP]

The rule here is if can be sorted in less than 5 minutes on the counter it's a freebie (and 90% plus of these are wireless/touchpad switches), otherwise we charge.

Our diagnosis charge is failrly minimal, and we deduct it from a repair charge if the customer books the repair with us.

 

[sapphirescales]

0 minutes and 0 seconds.

I've never understood free diagnostics. It makes no sense why you would spend time working on a computer for free just to find out they're a cheapskate and don't want to pay anything to fix it. Having a diagnostic will help weed out at least 70% of the bad clients. Cheap clients are bad clients. If they're not willing to spend $50 bucks for a professional diagnostic, let them look on Craigslist for some idiot with a screwdriver and a copy of Tuneup Utilities.

I know that if you offer free diagnostics, you'll get more people that are willing to drop off their computers and have you look at them. The problem is, if they have a problem paying a few bucks for a diagnostic, they're probably not going to want to pay to have it fixed properly either. Clients like this are a complete and total headache and aren't worth the time of day.

 

[mraikes]

Caught me off guard seeing a post from Tony pop back to the top of the list.

Still good stuff.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Caught me off guard seeing a post from Tony pop back to the top of the list.

Still good stuff.

Indeed, Dead men tell no tales 'cept those preserved by Google.

 

[gadgetfixup]

A customer will never value your service (time), even one penny, higher than you set your price. If you say your time is worth nothing and do a free diagnosis then don't be surprised when you give them a price if they want to negotiate or barter even lower than your quote. After all you're the one that told them your time wasn't worth anything.

 

[Raiok]

Since I'm working on starting up my own repair shop, this is extremely useful information that I've been trying to digest. On one hand, just starting out, you need to sometimes take work when you can get it. On the other, if all you're doing is freebie stuff and they run to someone else, you've only wasted time, and then the resources that you have to actually fix anything. It's a catch-22: If you charge, you get less clients, but if you don't, you're stuck with people thinking there's such a thing as a free lunch.

I think my approach will be two-fold: Offer a First-Time Diagnostics Waiver. Just make the first time they call for a diagnostics a happy one by not charging for the diagnostic. Anything else needed is charged, and any subsequent times, they will need to pay for a diagnostic fee. This would forcibly separate the cheapskates while still producing some sort of revenue. Then, good customers will stay (ones that understand the value of IT service instead of pizza tech services).

I haven't gotten my doors open just yet, but I think I'll carry that bit forward to make sure I'll have some supply of people coming in.

 

[altrenda]

If someone doesn't pay you, they are not a customer.
If you don't get paid, you're not in business.
Anyone can find lots of work to do for free, but very little of it leads to paid work.

Doing a free diagnosis is OK, but getting paid for it is better. It's what you do after that counts.

Telling them that you can fix it, it will cost approximately $X and take Y time is fine. Then you work on showing why it's worth it to them or not.

Telling them in detail what's wrong and how you will fix it is a waste of time. Most customers don't really care and just want it fixed. The others will use it to shop around and try to get you to lower your price.

 

[calldrdave]

Many places in town offer free diagnostics, so we've always avoided it. I've positioned it like this "I'm happy to offer a diagnostic analysis. However, it's just a guess. Until we actually do the repair, I won't know if the diagnosis is accurate. Fortunately I can do this by asking you a few questions." Basically I'll do the diag over the phone, but the minute my hands touch the computer it's billable. It's for the reasons many people say like avoid price-sensitive customers. It's also a situation of liability. We won't take on the risk of a client claiming we messed up the computer without a signed contract and an agreement to pay.

 

[myleso]

Fees are probably dependent on the area you are doing business in. Even Geek Squad gives free estimates and we would never get away with charging for a diagnostic / estimate where we are located. Most diagnostics take less that 15 minutes and we get 99% of the jobs that we quote after doing a diagnostic and giving the customer an estimate. We do not give them a detailed estimate, we just tell them generally whats wrong and how much we will need to fix it. We do charge for onsite diagnostics or if we need to pick up the computer but if they drop it off, we diagnose it for free.

 

[gadgetfixup]

Most diagnostics take less that 15 minutes

It takes us that long to get the customer's information from them, log the computer into our system, assign a tech and hook it up to the bench.

Sometimes it's a 30 minute conversation just to convince them to leave their computer.

A proper evaluation of a computer brought in for repairs will take you more than 15 minutes but I understand so many in this business don't track their time very well. A computer brought in for repairs in our shop cost us a minimum of one hour of time by the time it changes from clerk, to tech and back to clerk, even if the customer declines the repair and the tech does minimal diagnostics.

 

[lcoughey]

In our data recovery world, we can spend up to a few days assessing a drive. There have been a few cases where we will even need to order in a PCB to complete our assessment. Our goal is to determine if we can recover a client's data at our minimum price without changing the heads. Sometimes this can be a very fast analysis, sometimes it can take a lot of time.

Not to sound like a broken record, but, this is why we require our clients to pre-approve our minimum price before we even look at their drive. If they already know that they aren't willing to pay $350CAD for the recovery, there is no point in us looking at it...we already know that any quote we will give would be turned down.

 

[myleso]

It takes us that long to get the customer's information from them, log the computer into our system, assign a tech and hook it up to the bench.

Sometimes it's a 30 minute conversation just to convince them to leave their computer.

A proper evaluation of a computer brought in for repairs will take you more than 15 minutes but I understand so many in this business don't track their time very well. A computer brought in for repairs in our shop cost us a minimum of one hour of time by the time it changes from clerk, to tech and back to clerk, even if the customer declines the repair and the tech does minimal diagnostics.

We get a chatty customer from time to time but we have never had to convince a customer to leave a computer for diagnostics. We have a form we fill out and have the customer sign for every computer and component dropped off but we do not enter them into the system until they agree to the repair quote. Form takes 5 minutes to fill out and most diagnostics take around 15 minutes add another 5 minutes if we have to pull a drive. Not sure why you would assume we don't track time, we track every second of every repair for in shop or onsite work. We get a bad one occasionally that takes more that 15 minutes but we do not get many.

 

[myleso]

In our data recovery world, we can spend up to a few days assessing a drive. There have been a few cases where we will even need to order in a PCB to complete our assessment. Our goal is to determine if we can recover a client's data at our minimum price without changing the heads. Sometimes this can be a very fast analysis, sometimes it can take a lot of time.

Not to sound like a broken record, but, this is why we require our clients to pre-approve our minimum price before we even look at their drive. If they already know that they aren't willing to pay $350CAD for the recovery, there is no point in us looking at it...we already know that any quote we will give would be turned down.

Data recovery is a whole different animal lol, very time consuming and expensive, if the drive spins up we will try to get the data with r-studio and give them a quote, if it doesn't spin up we send it off to Gillware and forward the customer the gillware quote.

 

[lcoughey]

Data recovery is a whole different animal lol, very time consuming and expensive, if the drive spins up we will try to get the data with r-studio and give them a quote, if it doesn't spin up we send it off to Gillware and forward the customer the gillware quote.

You mean, "if the drives spins up, you will get a full clone of the drive, the run R-Studio against the clone," right?

 

[myleso]

You mean, "if the drives spins up, you will get a full clone of the drive, the run R-Studio against the clone," right?

If it spins up we use R-Studio to get a clone