Maintennace Checkup Sale an Unqualified Success!

Its been almost two weeks since my last post, and it is not for want of post topic ideas.  Despite all of our efforts to spread the PC Maintenance Checkup Sale volume over a three week period, once again we had our rear ends handed to us – in a good way.

We have learned over the past couple years that we need to take steps to keep our turnaround times as low as possible during this sale.  We emailed all of our existing customers a week before the sale launched asking them to come in early to “beat the rush.”  The next day we had a 40-60 computer queue and our turnaround times immediately went to three days (we try to keep it to same day or next day whenever possible).

Mid-week I posted an announcement to this blog, and our rolling queue shot up to over 100 units, pushing our turnaround times to 4 days with all of my staff working 20 hours of overtime a week.

Then on Saturday we had our Grand Opening at the new Lincoln Computer Repair Service Center.  With a live radio remote, free food from Red Robin, door prizes, and the Maintenance Checkup Sale, our rolling queue jumped to an unsustainable 250 computers.  We “activated” 10 more of our dormant bench spots to push our bench capacity to 36 units, but there was nothing more we could do.  We just had to work through the queue.

Lily started suggesting customers schedule a free pickup or drop-off for the week of March 23rd for customers who could not wait 5 days to get their computers back.  That helped stem the tide of incoming units, and allowed us to start catching up.

At this moment we still have more than 180 computers in our Lincoln Service Center from the sale and are still quoting 4-day turnaround.

While it is awesome that we have such a positive response to our Maintenance Checkup sale (probably because it is a crazy good value at $14.99), I still loathe 5 day turn around times for any of our customers.

We only do the MC Sale twice a year, so between now and then I am going to task Schrock’s development team to produce an internal tool for us that will automate as much of the process as possible.  We have to get turn around times down to 3 days at the maximum or we risk damaging our reputation as Lincoln’s computer service leader.