Response Time
By Jim Intravia 05-Mar-03
If the office machine industry had its own dictionary, response time would be in there. Response time is the quantity of time from when the customer called you, to when you showed up. A general rule of thumb is that the more expensive the machine, the shorter the response time needs to be.
Customers with 50 copy per minute machines are probably doing upwards of 20,000 copies per month. At 20K, that is 1000 copies per working day, or about 125 copies per hour. Of course if the volume is higher, say 100K per month, so are all the other numbers. In effect, you are dealing with a time machine. You, the time traveler, move through the universe (or your territory, if you're one of us puny earthlings) at a certain rate of speed. It probably takes you 30 minutes to drive 15 miles in the average city/suburb. However, during that 30 minutes, the copier would have produced a certain amount of copies and/or prints. If it was a personal copier, doing 100 copies a month, it might have made one copy. The 20K machine would have made about 625 copies. The 100K machine would probably have pumped out about 3,000 pages. Meanwhile, you are stuck in traffic, looking for a parking space, having your 10-minute lunch in your car, or signing in with the security guard at the building. Time is passing at different rates for all these situations, and you are the time traveler.
The Copier Technician and Other Geniuses
Leonardo DaVinci may have known something about copiers (see April RS&R article from several years ago) and so did H.G. Wells. Furthermore we have Einstein's unified field theory, an attempt to figure out how atoms, electricity, electromagnetism, gravity, light energy, and heat energy are all related. Copier technicians deal with all these items all the time in each and every machine that we service. And of course, there is Dali's classic work of art "Persistence of Memory," which is about time. We are in good company. I am sure that DaVinci, Wells, Einstein and Dali would be thrilled to have a cup of coffee with any of us. We could teach them so much.
As time is moving at the technician's rate, the rest of the world has its own rates. If you wish to maintain your business, you must learn to accommodate all customers, as best you can. It is easy to say that the 20K per month customer is more important than the personal copier 100 copy per month customer. From a purely business point of view, that is true, but you don’t want to say that to the personal copier owner. Nevertheless, the 20K machine, in the course of a year, probably provides you and your company with more revenue than dozens of personal copier customers. If you are one of those who services a wide variety of copiers, you may have this dilemma sometimes.
First Come, First Served?
That works at McDonald's, but in business you may have to make decisions that seem unfair by those rules. If you don’t service the 20K or 100K machine promptly, they will be seriously inconvenienced. One day's downtime amounts to thousands of copies. If you want to be purely selfish in the short term, you may be losing the revenue on those copies. You might think they would run the copies after the machine is fixed. Maybe so, but they might use a competitor's machine, or send the work out. More importantly, they will remember the downtime. They may even document it. You could easily find yourself losing a customer if they perceive themselves as having excessive downtime, especially if you're response time is to blame.
When a customer calls for service, they become acutely aware of their machine problem. Even if they are in no hurry, and are reasonable and patient, they expect you quickly, and consider themselves to be inconvenienced by you not arriving immediately. They may not be angry, but this is the way they think. After you arrive, they have faith in your skills, or they wouldn’t use you in the first place. If the machine requires parts, they may understand about ordering, lead-time, etc. They may not. In any case, they know that the machine cannot begin to operate again until you arrive.
How to Decide on Who to Do First?
It depends on the situation, of course. That is how you and I perceive it. The customer may not be so open-minded. They only have one situation; their own broken machine. You may have many waiting for you. They only care about one. In effect, every one of them would like to be first on your list. Most are reasonable, and know that they cannot always be first, but that doesn’t mean they don’t wish to be. So, without being a psychologist, or having access to a real time machine, you have to make decisions. As a businessperson, you have to make cold, hard decisions that benefit your own business. Sometimes a particular customer will suffer more than others, because of your choice of priorities.
Every customer has, presumably, the machine they can afford. Therefore, the personal copier is as important to the one-person home office as any one of the fifteen 60-cpm machines at your biggest customer. But, it is obvious which one is more important to you.
What Is the Appropriate Response Time?
For machines that are doing 20K per month or so, I would say one-half day is approximately right. This may vary with travel conditions and location, but remember, their machine is still down, even if they are 60 miles away. For the average 20cpm machine that is doing 2K-5K per month, I feel that next day service is adequate. Quite frankly, if you service customers like this on the same day, they may actually get spoiled. The result is them (if under contract) calling you for trivial things that they could handle themselves.
As the volume goes up, the response time has to go down. I once worked for a company that rented out machines that averaged 75K per month. Company policy was to instruct customers that they should expect service within two hours. If they did not get service in that amount of time, they were encouraged to call the company's headquarters and complain. I'm not saying that was a good policy, but it was there, and the company apparently felt it gave them a competitive advantage. Two-hour response time on 75K machines is what I think is appropriate. These are machines that are virtually factories of production. When they are down, production comes to a halt.
Personal Copiers
What is rather odd and comical is the reaction to response time by personal copier owners. They often seem to think that they own a heart-lung machine. They will call for service or bring the machine in, and ask for a loaner. They will call back an hour later and sometimes 2-3 times per day. You don't want to tell them to go to a copy shop for their copies, because they may decide that is what they should always do. You have only so many hours in the day, and their machine may not be serviced as quickly as they like. While you should never lie to a customer (or anybody for that matter, just like your mother taught you) you may have to juggle facts a bit. When I have small low priority machines in the shop, and I'm running behind schedule, here is how I might handle it. The customer calls and asks "Is my Canon PC330 ready yet?" My secretary answers, "It will be looked at today." I make sure that I do look at it. If I have very little time, I do so without tools, and probably form some opinion. Then, when the next call comes, we can honestly say "Yes, he looked at it, but it will take a little more time to give you an estimate." In some cases, my shop technician (who is a part timer) is the only one who will work on these machines. Then the answer becomes "Yes, he looked at it, but he decided it has to wait for the technician who specializes in that model. She will be in tomorrow."
It's not dishonest, but it's not something I'm proud of. It is necessary. It keeps them relatively satisfied. The truth is, we cannot get to every machine as quickly as people like. And, there is no way to explain that to every impatient customer. So, by letting them wait a day or so, and then handling the machine professionally, they are satisfied. It is unreasonable for them to expect service that quickly. But if we tell them that, they will be unhappy. By doing it this way, all customers are taken care of. Nobody is too unhappy, and all our work gets done. There are no arguments, no battles, and no false promises. We never lie to anyone. In copy machine repair, as in life, there are choices and compromises.
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