| Electronics > Repair |
| Charging by the hour is unfair! |
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| SteveThackery:
Reading another thread on this topic got me thinking about all the things wrong with charging by the hour. Yes, 99% of repairers charge by the hour. But change your point of view to that of a customer. Firstly, charging by the hour encourages the repairer to work as slowly as possible. If the repairer wants to treat themselves to something nice but expensive, all they need to do is slow down and take longer over each repair. Yes, I know that sometimes you have enough work that you don't need to stretch it out, but the customer doesn't know that. All they know is that it is in your interest to work as slowly as possible. So why should they trust you? Secondly, the more incompetent you are, the longer it takes you to do a repair. In other words, the customer pays an incompetent repairer more than a competent one. How is that OK? Thirdly, charging a customer for your time when you have failed to fix something is profoundly unfair. You see, you might charge the customer for your time, but the customer doesn't want your time; that's not what they are interested in. They want their appliance fixing. They are paying for a repair, not for half a day of you farting about and getting nowhere with it. I once had a really tricky intermittent misfire on a car which I couldn't find, so I took it to a technician who had loads of fancy diagnostic equipment and was considered to be a genuine expert. He had a monthly column in a trade magazine. Anyway, he hooked up the car and messed about for two hours before giving up. He charged me for two hours labour - something like £180, I think. I paid up but felt utterly ripped off. I drove the car there with a misfire. Two hours later I drove the car away, still with a misfire, but £180 poorer. I paid out money and got nothing. I was pretty pissed off. These issues are all due to the broken business model repairers use. There is a disconnect between what the customer wants and what you provide. No customer wants to buy your time. A customer wants to buy a repair. It is irrelevant to the customer whether it takes you ten minutes or ten hours - they just want their widget to work and to pay what feels like a fair price. Maybe every job should start with an up-front firm quote to the customer, and should include a no fix / no fee commitment. If that is too restrictive, then give the customer an estimate and say that you will contact them to ask their agreement to proceed if you find you need to charge more for the repair. But again, NO FIX, NO FEE! What say you? |
| shabaz:
I do very few repairs, only for select people, since I don't make a living off it, but times are hard, and I can understand that people do not wish to work for hours and not get paid even if they cannot fix it. My general philosophy is to always try to leave the customer happy. To me, that means, that if I cannot fix the problem, I at least perform any other quick fixes/tweaks/cleaning-up while I've got the equipment apart, and if I find I have left-over parts that were intended for the repair, then if appropriate, give them to the customer so they know you were not trying to rip them off, plus, give them your expert advice since if you cannot fix it, your expert advice may be 'it's beyond economic repair' or whatever happens to be the case. People understand that the diagnosis is still valuable even if it cannot be fixed. I've never had anyone get upset because something couldn't be fixed, if I give them insight, and if they learn things from it (and feel they have learned from it), e.g. how to recognize the fault or how to avoid the fault in future. As to whether the engineer calls up the customer to warn them that they are getting nowhere and that they still have to charge for an hour or two, that's for sure the right thing to do, and could form part of the contract, although most people will implicitly do that since very few people want to rip others off. Most people would have no problem to include that in a contract I expect, and if they don't want to do that, then that's a warning sign not to use that engineer. |
| CatalinaWOW:
No one knows at the onset what a repair will take. One solution to your issue is a fixed price which will result in a profit for the repairer averaged over all jobs. Would you be happier with this? Would you not complain when the item was returned in a couple of minutes after a reset button was pushed (yes, it sometimes is that easy). |
| JoeyG:
The best way forward for a repair is to provide a free "*estimate" by spending 15min on the repair issue and getting this back to the customer quickly. With the caveat - that an *estimate is the best educated guess and provide some reasoning around the *estimated review of the issue. (If more issues are found) An experienced repairer (familiar with similar products) will have at least some idea. An experienced and honest repairers (not familiar with the product) will say - I need to look at this in detail and there will be a small assessment cost before the repair cost. Then the customer can make an informed financial/emotional decision - either get it repaired, move to another repairer or put the product in the bin as it is beyond economical repair (it's no point flogging a dead horse). |
| DaJMasta:
What's the alternative then? This really just sounds like a moan from a dissatisfied customer to me. If you think your repair tech is going to pad out hours or take forever because they're incompetent, why are you taking your work to them? Their business lives or dies off of recommendations and reputation, so if they have a reputation for taking forever and charging for it, they're not going to last long. They charge by the hour because it is a somewhat representative measure of the needed effort. Often the price of parts is small and the labor involved is most of the work, and they don't pay their bills by making 8 repairs in a day, they pay their bills by repairing things for 8 billable hours a day, so why should they spend time working out prices for every little potential fault in every piece of equipment they service? What about that intermittent fault that takes them 6 hours with specialized equipment to track down to change a $5 part? Are you expected to charge less because it ended up being 'something easy'? What if the customer demands something arbitrary that probably doesn't have to do with repairing the fault? What if the time involved in disassembling, cleaning, troubleshooting, and repairing something really is long enough to be worth more than the cost of the thing being fixed? Is the repairer expected to cap their charge at the price of a new one because the customer didn't realize it may not be worth the effort? I'm not in this business, the only repair work I do is on my own equipment and I only sell it working because I hate how variable the time spent on a repair can be and would be annoyed and probably invest too much time into repairs I thought I could do but ended up not being able to complete, but I understand that they're trying to make a living and need to charge for their work in what seems like a fair way. You don't seem to an alternative pricing structure, let alone one suitable even for a niche repair business where a customer with an outlier won't immediately take advantage of, so why moan? If the repairer you take it to can't give you an idea of what it may cost or what may be wrong from a short initial conversation, or if you don't have confidence that they'll do their job and price you honestly for the hours they actually worked, why are you going to their shop at all? |
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