Warranty, AMC or chargeable: settle it before the van leaves

Where the money actually goes

Ask a dealer where they lose margin on service and you will hear about labour rates and spare prices. Both matter less than this: visits that nobody decided how to bill.

It happens in an ordinary way. A customer calls, the coordinator books the visit, the engineer goes, the unit is fixed. Somewhere in that chain everybody assumed somebody else knew whether the machine was under warranty. At billing, the safest answer is to not bill, and the visit becomes free.

Decide at the call, not at the invoice

The decision is cheapest at the moment the call is logged, because that is when you have the customer on the phone and can ask for the serial number.

At the invoice, the decision is expensive — the work is done, the engineer has gone, and asking the customer to pay for something they assumed was covered is a conversation that costs goodwill whichever way it ends.

What has to be recorded, and why

• ▸The machine, by serial number. Warranty belongs to a unit, not a customer. Without the serial you are guessing about the one thing that determines cover.
• ▸The cover decision, at that moment. Warranty, AMC or chargeable — recorded when the job is created, not inferred later from memory.
• ▸A snapshot, not a link. If cover is worked out fresh each time it is displayed, then a contract renewed or lapsed since will change what last quarter's job appears to have been. The decision must be frozen as it was on the day.
• ▸The spares. Parts fitted on the visit, issued off stock against that job, so a chargeable job bills the parts and a comprehensive one accounts for them.

The snapshot point is subtle and it is where most home-made systems go wrong. Six months on, an argument about a bill is settled by what was decided that day — which only works if the record cannot quietly change underneath you.

Train the answer, not the judgement

Coordinators should not be deciding cover from first principles on every call. They should be answering three questions in order, and the system should show them what it knows.

• ▸Is there a live AMC on this machine today? If yes, is it comprehensive?
• ▸If no AMC, is the unit inside its warranty period, and is the fault the kind warranty covers?
• ▸Otherwise it is chargeable — and the customer is told the visit charge before the engineer is dispatched, not after.

The conversation that gets easier

Two of them, actually.

The customer who says "but it is under warranty" gets a date and a serial number rather than a debate. And the engineer who is asked on site whether a part is covered has an answer already attached to the job, instead of making a commercial decision alone, standing in someone's plant room, wanting to be helpful.