Vent: watched a shop's callbacks drop after they started photographing every screw, and I'm a convert now
Stopped by a friend's repair shop in Boise last month and he showed me his ticket log from January versus June. In January he had 14 come-backs, and by June he was down to 3. The change was simple, he started taking a phone pic of every screw and cable before he pulled anything apart, then checked the photo before he closed the case. I always thought that was overkill for basic jobs, but watching him pull up a pic to prove a laptop came in with a stripped screw already saved him a $200 argument with a customer. Does anyone else do the photo thing on every ticket, or just the messy ones?
Man, hold on though, is it really the photos doing the work here, or did your buddy just get more careful because he knew he was being watched? That is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. You hand a guy a camera and suddenly he slows down and pays attention, that is just the Hawthorne effect, not some magic trick with the phone. And who pays for all that extra time on every single ticket, the shop eats it or the customer does through higher rates? Plus you are now trusting a photo to tell you if a screw was already stripped, when half the time you cannot even tell from a blurry pic anyway. I get why it helped him, but scaling that to every job feels like a lot of ceremony for small shops that are already pinching pennies.