How to Manage Repairs You Send to a Distributor

Your customers bought from you, so when something goes wrong, they come to you. It doesn’t matter that the repair is with a distributor, or that you have repairs with many different distributors and suppliers, each working in its own way. To the customer, it’s your repair, and how it goes reflects on you.

So you need your own way of handling repairs, one that works across all your distributors and suppliers, instead of relying on each one’s process. None of them has to change how they work for you to do that.

RepairStep gives a store one place for the repairs and returns it deals with, and that includes both sides of the job: the conversations with your customers and the back-and-forth with your distributors. It works even if your distributor runs its own repairs somewhere else.

Your membership covers your distributor’s side of your repairs.

They can use RepairStep to see and answer every repair you send them, with nothing to sign up for or pay. They’d only need their own account if they wanted to use RepairStep for their other repairs.

What you do on your side

You create the repair in RepairStep with the customer, the product, the fault and any photos, and choose the distributor it’s going to. Then you share it with them, which sends them an email with a secure link.

From then on, you have one record for that repair. It holds the details, every email, and everything the distributor sends back. You can keep the customer updated from the same place.

What the distributor sees

The link opens a page for that repair. There’s no account to create and no password to remember. The distributor can see:

• The customer and product details
• Your fault notes, photos and attachments
• Any emails and notes you’ve shared with them
• How far the hand-over has got

They can also see every repair you’ve shared with them in one list, so they don’t have to go back through old emails to find one.

How the distributor answers

The distributor picks what’s happening from a list, adds a message or a document if they need to, and sends it.

It takes them less effort than writing an email, and it means you get a clear answer rather than a thread you have to interpret.

What you get back

Their reply lands on the repair. You don’t have to look for it in someone’s inbox, and anyone on your team can see it.

So when a customer asks how their repair is going, you can open it and see that the distributor has received the product, or that it’s on its way back. If the distributor needs more information, the question is there on the repair, so it’s less likely to be forgotten.

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