Stop Wasting Time and Money on Repairs That Aren’t Broken

A customer says their blender has stopped working, so you book it in and send it to your distributor. Two weeks later, the answer comes back: no fault found. It works perfectly.

Your customer has gone two weeks without their blender. You’ve paid for a courier, and so has someone else. Several people have spent time on it, and nothing was ever wrong.

It happens to everyone. A setting has changed, something hasn’t been plugged in properly, or the product just works differently from how the customer expected. “It just stopped working” covers a lot of ground, and it isn’t always easy to tell what’s wrong over a counter or on the phone.

What a no-fault repair really costs

None of these is a disaster on its own, but they add up.

Ask a few questions first

Many of these can be sorted out before the product goes anywhere. Have you tried it with a different cable? What does the light do when you switch it on? Can you send a short video?

The trouble is that there’s usually no system for asking. A product comes in and it gets sent back, because that’s how it’s always been done.

So it helps to treat it as a question first, and a repair only if it needs to be one.

Handle it as a query in RepairStep

RepairStep has a separate place for this, called a query. When a customer gets in touch, you only need their name and the problem. It doesn’t matter whether they email, phone, send a text or walk in.

You can then reply with notes, photos or a quick fix, and it all stays together on the query. Anyone on your team can pick it up and see what’s already been said.

If that solves it, you mark it as resolved, and the product doesn’t need to go anywhere. You’ve saved the freight, and your customer has their answer the same day.

If it turns out the product does need to come in, you can convert the query to a repair. Everything you’ve already been told comes with it, so nobody has to ask the customer the same questions again.

See where it keeps happening

Most businesses can’t say how often this happens. There are no figures to check, so nobody knows whether it’s one product or model that keeps coming back with nothing wrong.

Once it’s all on record, you can start to see the pattern. RepairStep shows why queries were resolved without a repair, and you can mark a finished repair as “No fault found”. You can also see your repairs by brand, and your most common fault types.

That can point to a fix that has nothing to do with repairs. If the same question keeps coming up about the same product, the instructions may need work, or the marketing may be setting the wrong expectation. A small change there could stop the question being asked at all.

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