How to reduce no shows for mobile repair visits

The details that have to be agreed before a slot is real

These are the questions that turn a time in a diary into an appointment that can actually happen. Most of them take one sentence and none of them are obvious to the customer, who has usually never had a mechanic come to them before.

Where the vehicle will physically be at that time. Not where the customer lives, and not where they are calling from. Cars are at work, at a partner address, at a garage that gave up on it, or parked three streets away because that is where it stopped.

Whether it is a private driveway, a shared car park, a street or a workplace yard. Each of those has different rules and different amounts of space, and the difference decides whether you can work at all.

Whether the surface is level and hard enough to raise a car on safely. Grass, gravel and a steep slope are all real answers and all of them are better known in advance.

Whether somebody other than the customer has to give permission first. Apartment complexes, property managers, business parks and some homeowner associations have positions on repairs taking place on their land. Discovering that on arrival wastes the entire slot and occasionally embarrasses the customer as well.

Who will be there, and whether they have the keys. A surprising number of wasted visits are a car sitting exactly where it was promised, locked, with the keys at an office twenty minutes away.

Whether the person present can authorise the work and pay for it. If the car belongs to a partner or a parent who is elsewhere, you want to know that while you are still at home.

Whether the car needs to be left alone before you arrive. Some jobs want a cold engine. Say so at the booking, because a customer who has just driven it back from the shops has not done anything unreasonable if nobody told them.

Access, gate codes and parking. Anything you would need to phone about on arrival is worth asking about at booking.

Dogs, children and building work. Not a joke: a loose dog is a genuine reason a job cannot proceed, and it is much better raised in advance than negotiated on a driveway.

And finally, a number that will be answered on the day. The mobile they called from is usually right, but not always, and if the visit is at their workplace the answer is often different.

Ask these once, at the booking, in a couple of sentences. It sounds like a lot written out and it takes about ninety seconds in practice, and it converts a category of failures that reminders cannot touch.

How the way you schedule creates or prevents no shows

Some no shows are manufactured by the schedule itself, which is uncomfortable because it means they were yours rather than theirs.

Distance in time is the biggest one. A booking for next week is a much weaker commitment than a booking for tomorrow, and in between the fault can worsen, another mechanic can answer the phone faster, or the whole thing can lose urgency. Where you have the choice, offer the soonest slot that works rather than the most convenient one.

Vague windows are the second. Telling somebody you will be there in the morning asks them to give up a morning, and people who have given up a morning start making other plans as it slips. A narrower window, honestly given, is a much stronger appointment than a wide one that is technically safer for you.

Silence on the day is the third. If you are running late and say nothing, the customer concludes at some point that you are not coming and leaves. That is recorded as their no show and it was yours. A short message when you set off, with a real arrival time, prevents an entire class of these.

Overbooking is the fourth and it is self inflicted in a specific way: when the earlier job overruns, somebody has to be let down, and the customer who was let down last time is the one who does not wait next time.

Repeated rescheduling by you teaches a customer that your times are provisional, and they behave accordingly. It is worth noticing when you have moved somebody twice, because the third appointment is the one that quietly evaporates.

The general principle underneath all of these is symmetry. A customer treats the appointment roughly as seriously as you appear to. Precise times, said out loud, kept, and communicated about when they slip, produce customers who are standing outside when you arrive.

What one wasted visit actually costs you

No figure is printed here, because what a wasted visit costs is specific to you and depends on numbers only you have. Here is how to work out yours, which takes about five minutes and changes how seriously you take everything else on this page.

Start with the driving. Time out and back, at the rate you use for your own labour. If you have not calculated that rate from your own costs, there is a labour rate calculator in the tools section of this site and a guide in this cluster on the arithmetic behind it.

Add the running cost of the vehicle for that distance. Not just fuel: the vehicle wears out by the mile whether or not the trip earned anything.

Add the slot. This is the part people leave out and it is usually the largest piece. If the appointment was an hour and a half of your working day, and that day had a finite number of hours in it, then the wasted visit cost you what that hour and a half would have earned, not nothing.

Add the customer you turned away, if you turned one away. Some wasted visits are worse than empty because somebody else was told you were busy.

Now multiply your total by the number of wasted visits you had in the last month. That is the real annual scale of the problem, and for most people the result is uncomfortable enough to justify ninety seconds of questions at every booking.

That number also tells you what a prevention is worth. If a deposit, a shorter booking window or a confirmation habit prevents even a couple of these a month, it has paid for whatever inconvenience it caused, and you now have an actual basis for the decision rather than an opinion about whether asking for a deposit is rude.

Keep the count itself, month by month, alongside a one line note of which of the three causes each one was. That log is worth more than any published statistic about the industry, because it is about your customers and your booking habits, and it names the fix.