Are you making money taking that camera off the truck?

Today's service professional has to be careful of costs while looking for every opportunity to grow their business.  Diagnostic tools are a great way to offer inspection services that can help a commercial property customer or residential customer understand the issues they face. Lets be honest, over the last several months most people have put off regular maintenance to cut a corner and save a dime. That always catches up and results in a business opportunity for the service professional.

When we talk with contractors we find that on average most charge $250 to bring a diagnostic camera off the truck.  May be higher or lower in your area. Often, to make sure that a quote or recommended work doesn't slip away, a portion of that diagnostic fee is credited - sound practice to make sure that one get's the sale.  But often contractors don't consider the true costs of providing that diagnostic service and allow their competitors to force them into a price.

Lets consider what goes into a typical service call. A customer contacts your company and asks you to do an inspection. A technician ($X / hr rate) is dispatched to the location. Obviously there is windshield time involved that comes at a cost.  Once on the site, there is the inspection itself and the time taken to observe the issue and find all the dependencies while there. (technician's clock is ticking...) Now the technician has additional windshield time to get back to the office. Once there, copies of the media are made, reports are written, and the office manager is informed so that billing can be started. If a quote is required and the technician can't do it themselves, an estimator or manager's time is now applied.  Once the report is approved and the quote, or recommendation, is agreed upon there is usually more windshield time to travel back to the customer and deliver the content.  Don't think the meter stops there! On average, contractors tell us that they average two telephone calls to explain the average job report to their customer.  Unfortunately, it is usually the technician that you have in the field (perhaps this is you!) that has to stop what they are doing or delay work on another job to take the call and try to remember what the issue was on that particular job.

Does this sound efficient and cost-effective to you?

There is a better way. Using the media management tools and job report functionality of RIDGIDConnect(tm) can streamline your reporting and inspection activities. No more making copies or storing DVD's in a drawer or banker's boxes. Insights observed on site can be entered into the report which allows for public (customer) and private (internal, company only) to keep everyone involved properly informed.  Best of all, when the report is complete you click send and the information is made available to your customer, and interested parties, electronically. No more delivery, no more duplicating media, and fewer call backs to ask what it is they are looking at on the other end.

Existing users of RIDGIDConnect report that they have seen a substantial reduction in their overhead costs of facilitating inspections and also a faster response rate from their customers to the reports than they would have using other methods. Users also benefit from the professional presentation the online report provides.  So take some costs out of doing inspections and use RIDGIDConnect today. The time you save will be money in the bank.

If this blog post has you thinking there is a great article on overhead costs and marketing expense in the February issue of Plumbing & Mechanical magazine by Randall Hilton on this topic. (http://www.pmmag.com/Articles/Column/BNP_GUID_9-5-2006_A_10000000000000756333)  From a Ridge Tool perspective though, Mr. Stillson may have invented a wrench for turning pipe but RIDGID perfected the pipe wrench.