Improving first-time fix rate for copier engineers

Define it before you measure it

First-time fix rate is the share of jobs where the fault is resolved on the first visit. That sounds simple until you try to count it. Is an installation a job? A preventive maintenance visit? A call where the customer had simply left a tray open? A fault fixed by talking the customer through it on the phone?

A workable definition for a copier service firm:

The 14-day window is a choice; some firms use 7, some 30. What matters is that you pick one and keep it, so this quarter can be compared with the last.

What a second visit costs

The direct cost is easy to estimate. If a return visit takes 1.5 hours including travel at a loaded engineer cost of £40 an hour, it costs £60. A hundred return visits a quarter is £6,000 a quarter of engineer time, and that time is not available for other jobs, so response times slip across the whole fleet.

The indirect cost is larger and harder to see. The machine is down for longer, the customer has to arrange access twice, and the office manager remembers it at renewal. On all-inclusive contracts you also pay for the second visit yourself; it comes straight out of the click charge margin.

Why first visits fail

Before trying to improve the rate, find out what is driving it. Add a required reason to every job that is not fixed first time, with a short fixed list so the reasons can be counted.

After a quarter you will usually find that two or three reasons account for most failures. Work on those first.

Better information at call logging

Most of the difference between a first-time fix and a return visit is decided before the engineer gets in the van. The person logging the call should capture:

• The exact machine, by serial number or the asset label, not “the copier on the second floor”.
• The error or service code on the display, read out exactly, or a photo of it.
• Where the fault happens: which tray, copy or print, mono or colour, every page or occasionally.
• Whether a test page or counter page prints, and what it looks like.
• When it started, and whether anything changed: a new toner, a moved machine, a paper change.

A short script for the five most common fault types (jams, print quality, error codes, network printing, scanning) improves this a great deal. A QR label on each machine that lets the customer report the fault against the right serial number removes the most common mistake of all.

Better still is information from the machine itself. A monitored copier reports its error code within a minute, with the time and how often it has happened, so the office knows the exact service code before anyone calls. See how remote monitoring works.

Use your own fix history

Your firm has probably fixed the same error code on the same model dozens of times. If that knowledge lives only in the heads of your two most experienced engineers, everyone else rediscovers it on site.

Two habits make fix history usable. First, a short resolution note on every job, written for the next engineer: what was found and what was done. Second, a consistent fix code or category, so jobs can be searched by code, model and fix. Without the fix code, the history is a pile of free text that nobody reads.

When the job has an error code, show the engineer the earlier jobs with the same code and the parts they used before they set off. That is the single cheapest way to get the right part into the van.

Van stock built from the fleet, not from habit

Van stock tends to grow from habit and memory. Build it instead from what your fleet actually uses:

1. List the models each engineer services most, from your machine records.
2. Pull the parts fitted on those models over the last 12 months, from job records.
3. Rank them by how often they were needed, not by value.
4. Stock the parts that cover most of the visits; leave expensive slow movers at the depot.
5. Review every quarter, and whenever a new model enters the fleet.

Record every part used against the job, and every part taken from or returned to the van. Without that, van stock counts drift and the engineer finds the drawer empty on the day it matters.

Skills, allocation and preventive work

Send the right engineer

Where you can, allocate jobs by model familiarity as well as by location. A slightly longer drive for an engineer who knows the model often costs less than a second visit. Track first-time fix by engineer and model together; a low figure on one model points to training, not to the engineer.

Replace what is about to fail

Meter readings tell you how close each unit is to its rated life. If an engineer is on site for one fault and the fuser is at 95% of its life, replacing it now prevents the next call. Planned maintenance timed by meter reading rather than by calendar does the same at fleet scale.

Measuring it in practice

Report first-time fix rate monthly, by engineer, by model and by fault type, alongside the repeat-visit rate and the reasons for failure. Look at trends, not single months; a small firm’s monthly figure moves a lot with a handful of difficult jobs.

Watch for gaming. If the rate becomes a target, jobs get closed as fixed and the follow-up is logged as a new fault. Linking any new job on the same machine within your window to the earlier one, automatically, stops this. In SubClik a return visit for the same fault shortly after the last one is linked to the earlier job as a callback, and is not charged unless the office gives a reason. See the service desk and our buyer’s checklist for what to look for in your own system.