How to Keep Track of Customer Repairs - When Repairs Aren’t Your Main Business

A customer phones about the vacuum cleaner they brought in three weeks ago. You say you’ll check and call them back. You go to the back, and there it is, still on the shelf with the returns note in the box.

Nobody decided to leave it there. Everyone was just busy.

That’s how most repairs go wrong. It’s rarely a big mistake. A repair gets lost when everyone thinks someone else is dealing with it. Whether you’re a store sending products to a distributor or a distributor handling repairs for your stores, it tends to go wrong in the same places.

How most stores track repairs today

Many stores don’t really track repairs at all. They print a returns note from their accounting system, put it in the box with the product and email the distributor. Often, nothing goes on a spreadsheet. From then on, they rely on the distributor to do the work and get back to them.

That leaves someone’s memory and an email inbox to keep track of everything. Most stores only follow up when the customer does.

This works until the person who remembers is away, or until repairs start to pile up. By then, customers are unhappy with the service, and some are threatening never to buy from the store again. It’s worst when a repair has taken a long time because the store forgot to send it to the distributor.

Where repairs go missing

What happens when a customer asks “where’s my repair?”

A customer phones the store to ask how their repair is going. It sounds like a quick question.

First, someone has to work out who’s dealing with it. A repair number doesn’t get them far, so the customer explains the product all over again. Unless they’ve reached the right person, who might be at lunch or helping someone else, they’ll have to wait for a call back or try again later.

When they do get through, that person needs a moment to remember which one this is, because it’s one of several they’re handling. They probably haven’t heard from the distributor, so they can’t answer yet. They’ll have to follow up and get back to the customer.

At the distributor, it goes much the same way, only with more repairs. Whoever picks up can’t remember whether the caller is a store or a customer, and they don’t have the last email or the details in front of them. So it starts again.

That call doesn’t need to happen if the customer can see the answer for themselves.

With RepairStep, each customer gets a link to a page for their repair, with no account or password to set up. It shows what’s happening now and how far along it is, along with the problem they reported. Once the repair has been assessed, they can see what was found, and if there’s a cost, they can see that too.

The customer only sees what you choose to share.

What the store needs to know

A store has different questions. Where is the repair, what stage has it reached, and how will the product get back to the store? Even when the distributor is dealing with the customer directly, the store wants to stay in the loop, because the customer may still expect it to know what’s going on or come to it for help.

When the store and the distributor both use RepairStep, they share one repair instead of keeping two. The store can see the status, along with any emails, calls and notes the distributor shares, so the answer is already there when the customer walks in. A store that isn’t on RepairStep can get a link to follow the repair’s progress.

When it stops working for a distributor

A distributor usually runs its repairs from a spreadsheet and a shared inbox, and some use their accounting system. That holds up for a while, but a distributor handles far more repairs than a store. The calls and emails keep coming, and it gets hard to keep track of them or give anyone a quick answer. Stores and customers start to complain that things aren’t getting done.

Then the accounts team reconciles the returns and finds costs nobody reported. Decisions start to follow whoever shouts the loudest, because the angriest customer gets attention first, and repairs are no longer handled in any consistent way.

Each of these is manageable on its own. The real problem comes when the whole thing becomes unmanageable, and customers notice the poor service.

Stores notice too. A slow repair damages the store’s own business and its relationship with its customers, so it starts to lose interest in selling that distributor’s products.

With RepairStep, whoever picks up the phone opens the repair and sees where it is in the process. If it’s been assessed, they can see what was found. The correspondence with the customer and the store is there too, along with any internal notes about the repair or the customer.

So anyone can help, because the information is in the repair record and not in one person’s head.

Sending things gets quicker too. You can resend an invoice or delivery note from an earlier email, or answer a common question with a saved reply.

You can try it on your first 20 repairs for free, with all the features and no credit card.