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What would it take to make our ticket triage rules actually work?
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What would it take to make our ticket triage rules actually work?
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After thousands of repairs, I've accumulated tech repair tips that save time and improve outcomes. Some favorites: always backup before major changes, document everything, test components individually, and don't assume the obvious cause is the real one.
For example, what looks like a failing hard drive might be a bad SATA cable ($5 part vs $100+ drive). What seems like a software crash might be overheating from dust buildup (free cleaning vs $149 software repair).
These insights affect pricing too. Accurate diagnosis means fair pricing: $89 for a cable replacement vs $299 for a drive replacement plus data recovery. What tech repair tips have saved you the most time/money, and how do they influence your service pricing?
Test before assuming" is my biggest tech repair tip. That graphics card that "died" might just need the power connectors reseated. That "failing hard drive" might be a $5 SATA cable.
Documentation tip: take photos before disassembling anything. Phone cameras make this easy. Helps with reassembly and proves you didn't cause any damage.
Pricing tip: be transparent about diagnostic fees. We charge $99 diagnostics, but if you proceed with repair, $50 applies to the repair cost. If you choose not to repair after diagnostics, you pay the $99 for our time.
Another tip: keep common failure parts in stock. We keep popular power supplies, RAM, SSDs, and laptop batteries in stock. Lets us offer same-day repairs for common issues at competitive prices.
Good tech repair tips save everyone time and money.
Start with the free/cheap fixes" is crucial. Before replacing a $300 motherboard, try resetting CMOS ($0), updating BIOS (free), or checking for bulging capacitors (visual inspection).
"Don't force anything" - if a connector, screw, or component won't go in easily, something's wrong. Forcing it usually makes things worse and more expensive.
Business tip: offer maintenance plans. Our $29/month plan includes: monthly system scan, driver updates, security check, and 10% discount on repairs. Builds recurring revenue and keeps clients' systems healthy.
Pricing tip: bundle services. Our "Performance Package" $399 includes: SSD upgrade, RAM upgrade, thermal paste replacement, deep cleaning, and software optimization. Sells better than individual services totaling $450.
The best tech repair tips often come from expensive mistakes - learn from them and don't repeat.
We’ve been manually routing customer support tickets to different teams based on the email subject line, but the volume is getting unmanageable. I’m wondering if a simple rules-based system for ticket triage would actually work, or if our categories are too fuzzy for that to be reliable.
Went live with a simple rules-based router last quarter. If subject had billing keywords it went to Billing, if it had tech keywords it went to Tech, otherwise it hit General. It did shave some misroutes—roughly a 20% drop—but we spent more time updating rules than the savings justified as product terms and wording changed weekly.
The categories felt fuzzy. People describe the same issue in different words; some tickets labelled as refunds were actually login problems, others with invoice" were more about failed payments. Synonyms and typos made it brittle, and the fallback bucket got crowded.
We did a quick test with a keyword list and a catch‑all rule that sent anything unclear to humans. It caught about 60% of the obvious cases, but the rest wandered; when a product release changed messaging, the rules quickly became stale.
Is the real bottleneck the routing, or is the volume and team capacity the bigger drag?
If we try again, I’d run a lean pilot: one simple rule set, one catch‑all to human triage, and track SLA breach rate and ticket aging for a month.
Sometimes I wonder if the problem isn’t triage at all but the taxonomy. When accounts, billing, and software issues bleed into each other, the rules crumble. Without a stable taxonomy it’s easy to drift.
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