A complaint is a job nobody priced

A customer rings on a Thursday. The heat pump installed in the spring is making a noise it did not make in the spring. He is not angry yet. He would like somebody to come and look.

The owner says yes, of course, and looks at the week. There is no gap, so the gap is made: the Friday afternoon job gets pushed to Monday, the customer for that one gets a text, and the technician who did the original install drives back across town with a van full of parts for a different job. He finds a loose bracket, tightens it, spends forty minutes there and an hour on the road, and comes back. Nobody writes anything down, because there is nothing to write it on. It was not a job. It was a complaint.

A month later the owner looks at the quarter and sees that the spring was busy and the margin was thin, and cannot say why.

A job with no number

The install had a quote, a date, a materials list and an invoice. The visit to fix it had none of those. It was not priced, because nobody prices a complaint. It was not scheduled, because it was squeezed in. It was not costed, because the hours went nowhere. It was not linked to the original job, because there was no record to link it to. The firm did real work, with a real cost, in a real afternoon, and from the point of view of every record it keeps, nothing happened.

How a complaint disappears

It never gets a record. A quote starts a job. A phone call starting with “I have a problem” starts nothing. It gets a note on a pad or a line in a chat, and once the visit is done the note is gone and the chat has moved on.

It is scheduled by displacement. A complaint does not take a slot; it takes somebody else’s slot. The cost is not only the hours on the callback but the job that moved, the customer who was told, and the Monday that is now full before it starts.

Its cost lands on the wrong job. The technician’s afternoon is paid out of the firm’s wages like any other afternoon. The parts come off the shelf. None of it is booked against the install that caused it, so the install still looks profitable, and the quarter looks thinner than it should for no reason anybody can point to.

The cause is never written down. Was it the bracket, the fitter, the supplier’s batch, the customer running it wrong, or the quote that left no time for the last check? Each of those has a different fix. Nobody knows which it was, because the only record of the visit is in the memory of the person who made it.

It cannot be counted. How many callbacks did the firm do last quarter? On which kind of job? From which supplier’s parts? A firm that cannot answer these cannot tell whether a problem is a bad week or a pattern, and it certainly cannot tell whether a product line should be priced higher or dropped.

It gets priced into nothing. A firm that does not know its callback rate cannot build it into its quotes. So the warranty work is funded out of margin that the owner thought was there, which is exactly the thin spring that nobody could explain.

Treating the complaint as a job

Give it a record. The moment the call comes in, a job exists: customer, address, what they report, who is going. It is a job of a different kind, with a different price, usually zero, but it is a job, and it sits in the same list as every other one.

Link it to the original. The callback points at the install it comes from. That is what makes the install’s true cost visible: the quote, the first visit, and every visit after. It also means that when the customer rings the third time, whoever answers can see the whole history rather than asking him to tell it again.

Record the cause, in one line. Not a report. One field: what was wrong and whose it was. Over twenty callbacks that one field becomes the most useful information the firm has about its own work.

Cost it like any other job. Hours and parts booked against the callback, which is booked against the original. A margin figure that includes warranty work is lower and true. One that excludes it is higher and a story.

Schedule it, do not squeeze it. A callback placed into the plan as a job can be put where it fits, grouped with other work nearby, given to the right person, and the customer whose slot would have moved does not have to move at all.

A system of action can draft most of this. It can open the job from the customer’s email or message, link it to the install at that address, propose a slot and prepare the note. It cannot decide whether the callback is free, or whether the supplier should be charged, or whether the customer is right. Those are the owner’s calls, and they stay that way.

The test

Go back over the last three months and list every visit that did not have a quote or an invoice of its own. Callbacks, warranty, “while you are here”, the second trip for a part.

Next to each one, write which original job it belonged to and how many hours it took. The total of the hours is the cost of work the firm did for nothing and did not know about. The number of lines where you cannot name the original job is how much of that cost is now impossible to explain.

BiznesIQ treats a complaint the way it treats any other work: a job with a record, a cause, a cost and a link to the job it came from, drafted from the customer’s message and approved by a person. It follows from the customer asking when you are coming and from the argument that in a small firm the archive is an inbox with attachments. How BiznesIQ runs a job from quote to complaint, and what it deliberately does not do, is on the homepage.