In this article from Aquant, we look at three tips to scale appliance and food repair businesses rapidly with the help of easy-to-use AI tools.

Service businesses are busy in 2021, and all indicators point to steady — or even above-average demand — lasting for the foreseeable future. Typically, high demand is great for business, but nothing has been typical about service in the last year. Many companies, especially owner-operator repair businesses, are turning away customers and additional revenue because they’re at capacity.

 

What Challenges Do Service Companies Face?

“Repair companies are triaging calls, hiring new employees and navigating backlogs from the broken supply chain for parts,” states the Washington Post. That was just one account of many from an in-depth article that details the extent of the gap between service provider availability and customer demand across the country.

New, easy-to-use AI tools are available to help service companies of all sizes upskill a new crop of employees quickly. This ultimately makes it possible for your business to take on extra demand while still providing exceptional customer experiences.

1. Upskill the New Workforce Quickly to Slash the Skills Gap

The workforce shortage is not new. Skilled trade positions, particularly technician and engineer roles, have been the hardest to fill. There are other obstacles compounding the issues, too.

The Baby Boomer retirement wave is in full swing. Your most senior techs are leaving and taking all their repair knowledge with them.

Millennials and Gen Z employees approach work differently. The two youngest generations leave jobs nearly twice as often as their older counterparts. This result is an increasing skills gap, and most in the industry don’t have the resources or budget to spend months or years training employees.

A better solution: Hire motivated employees with minimal appliance repair experience and quickly turn them into seasoned experts in weeks instead of years. That’s possible using technology that provides accurate recommendations with as much ease as a Google search.

How Aquant helps: Our service engine has digested and analyzed every major home appliance and food service equipment repair manual, combining them with real-life best practices from veteran, certified technicians. The intelligent tool is easy enough for any member of the workforce to use. That empowers every member of the workforce to perform as well as your longest-tenured employees.

When knowledge is easier to acquire, employees can work on honing soft skills like customer service and relationship building.

It’s easier said than done. If everyone on the team could make accurate repairs more quickly, you could take on more clients and bill for more services. Bumping up your team’s first time fix rate is challenging in the face of other demands, especially with a more junior workforce — but it’s possible.

A better solution: Make sure that dispatch diagnoses the problem correctly during the initial customer complaint call. Then provide the technician with all the relevant information before they arrive on the job.

How Aquant helps: With a click of a button, your team can access information from all the major appliance and equipment manufacturers and pinpoint the problem and necessary parts needed with a high degree of accuracy. This increases the chances of your technician arriving with the right knowledge and the right parts to fix the issue on the first try.

3. Offer Clients Remote Resolution Options

How many times have technicians been dispatched to a job site, only to arrive and find that the solution was as simple as hitting the restart button or flipping a switch? Customers don’t want to wait days for a solution that they could have fixed themselves in minutes. And your business can’t maintain wasted truck rolls in the face of a demand avalanche.

A better solution: Train customer support to resolve less complex issues during the initial customer call. Instead of having them flip through manuals or consult decision trees (which takes time and can be frustrating), give them options to triage issues in a matter of minutes using an intelligent, digital tool.

How Aquant can help: We’ve created an intelligent — and evolving — database of service information based on millions of service tickets. Using the smart triage system, your support agent walks through two to four service issue scenarios with the customer, and the tool identifies the most likely solution. If it’s a simple fix, you can guide the customer through remote resolution.

Increase the Number of Brands You Support While Scaling Up

In addition to helping your technicians solve problems faster and more accurately, Aquant is like a cheat sheet for repair and maintenance companies. With data from all the top major home appliance and food service equipment brands, you have access to a pre-populated database with the information any technicians need to get the job done, regardless of the brand.