Give Customers a Repair Status Page

The phone rings, and it’s a customer asking about their repair. Before you’ve said much more than hello, you already have that slight feeling of unease.

You’re not sure which repair it is yet. You don’t know whether you’ll have an answer, or where you’d find one. It might be in an email, on a spreadsheet, on a note someone left on a desk, or with a supplier who hasn’t replied. The customer expects you to know, and right now you don’t.

Nothing has gone wrong, and the repair may be perfectly on track. You just can’t tell from where you’re standing.

Why these calls are so uncomfortable

Repair details tend to live in a few different places, so every call turns into a scramble to find out what’s happening. You put the customer on hold, ask around, or promise to call back. Then you chase the supplier, so that you can call the customer, so that they can stop calling you.

One repair can turn into several calls like this. None of them moves the repair forward, and all of them happen while you’re trying to do something else.

Most of these customers just want to know what’s happening. They’ve handed over something they paid for and haven’t heard anything since. It’s a fair question, and one you could answer before they have to ask.

Let the customer see it for themselves

With a repair status page, each customer gets their own link to their repair. They can open it whenever they like, with no account or password to set up, and see where things stand: the status, the progress and your latest notes.

They don’t have to remember to check, either. When you move the repair forward, RepairStep sends them an update with the link, already written and ready to go. So the customer hears that the product has arrived, that it’s been assessed or that it’s ready to collect, without anyone at your end picking up the phone.

If the customer has a question, they can reply, and the reply lands on the same repair instead of in somebody’s inbox.

You can keep your own notes private. The customer only sees what you choose to share.

Fewer calls, and easier ones

A customer who already knows where their repair is has much less reason to phone. Your team saves hours of update calls, and the customer stops feeling as though they have to chase you.

Some people will still phone, because some people prefer to, and some questions need a conversation. Those calls are different now, because you’re no longer starting from nothing.

Whoever picks up can open the repair and see the whole picture: who brought it in, what they brought, which supplier has it and every email along the way. There’s no scramble and no “let me find out and call you back”. It doesn’t need to be the one person who has been dealing with it, because the information is in one place.

That’s what takes the unease out of the call. You may not have good news, but you’ll know what’s going on.

If you’re a distributor

You get the same calls, from two directions. When a store sends you a product, the store wants to know what’s happening, and so does its customer.

RepairStep can keep both of them updated. Each gets their own tracking page and updates, and you decide what each one sees at every stage.

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