How to Track Your Time as an Onsite Computer Repair Technician

In this article I want to demonstrate how I book my PC repair roles as an On-site Computer Technician. While I am really not letting you know that this is how you should do it, its a way that has worked well for me over the years.

On a typical work day, my clients usually start calling some hours after 9am. I can book the first on-site job for the day ; which might have been booked a few days back, about eleven in the morning as this allows an hour in office for answering calls, checking mails and one hour traveling time.

When a customer calls me, I’ll ask them some extremely easy questions. Nothing too technical like “Are you getting a reboot loop?”, but instead something that they will see although they dont know a thing about PCs. For example, I’d say something like “When you press the button, does it show the black screen with white writing, show the Windows XP trademark, then return to the black screen with white writing?” To a technician, we all know that this is perhaps a “Blue Screen of Death” with automatic restart activated, but we can’t ask the customer if its a BSOD with automatic restart turned on, so I use the above technique based off what they see.

Why I ask my home computer repair clients these questions is usually because it gives me a coarse notion of how much time I will need and allows me to book my day appropriately. A Blue Screen of Death might be anything from a defective drive to an easy driver issue, so I can doubtless permit 2-3 hours or so for this to account for the laborious issues.

If a customer called me and asserted My PC is dead, I would need to ask the query as though it had no power? No noise or lights whatsoever? If they assert yes, then it is most probably going to either be a dead power supply or a dead motherboard, in which case I would only permit 1 hour for this job. If it’s the power supply then I’m able to test and swap that out pretty swiftly if its a dead motherboard then I’ll run assorted tests on-site to approve it is a dead motherboard and take it back to the workshop to replace it.

Now that I have got a rough estimate of how long my 11am job will take, I can book my next job about 12:30pm to 1pm dependent on driving distance from the first job. When the call for the 3rd job comes in I can usually give the buyer a ballpark time since there is a chance one of the earlier roles can take longer than anticipated, so I am going to say something like between three and 4pm. If there is a 4th or 5th on-site job to do, I’ll do similar with the ballpark time but if there isn’t any more call outs for the day, I’ll go back to my workshop and do whatever is on my workbench.

This set up enables me to be on time about 95% of the time and if I’m late, its no more than 15 mins. If I’m going to be late and it is more than ten mins or so , I always call my client and make sure they know.

It is important to try this because when someone is expecting somebody to show up at a certain time, they will stay sitting around for you where they probably won’t want to start doing something else. If somebody stays in this readied state for too long, they begin to get anxious staring at the clock and wondering where in the world you are. Nevertheless if they understand you are going to be late, they at least know how long to wait and can do something else while they wait.
When i am late that 5% of the time, I always say sorry for being late on arrival. It is important to respect the significance of the clients time.

This is how I book our clients for laptop computer virus removal and as I discussed earlier, this is not the conclusive way do it, its just a way that works very well for me.

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