Who needs whom ?

Re: Who needs whom ?

A good question, who needs whom.

For arguments sake lets say that a WP costs this service industry £8 for every call they handle.

Remove the WP from the equasion of say 1000 service calls per year passed to one agent, multiply that by the number of WP’s that agent works for, add up what the cost saved would be. Not an unsubstantial figure, which could be used for training, re-investment, keeping engineers at a salary or income level they deserve, all of which are badly needed to sustain this industry at any sort of proffesional level.

Sadly, the monies available cannot support this level of “creaming off the top” for very much longer, in fact it hasn’t been able to support it for a very long time, just juggling the figures, save a bit here, save a bit there has been the norm.

Ask yourself, could I handle the extra admin, can I create the invoices etc ? The answer is yes, in most cases you may already unwittingly be doing it as the level of work the WP’s do has diminished and much of it has been passed back to us, and why is this ? Because even they can’t afford the staff to handle it.

Who needs whom ? The dog starts to wag it’s own tail again 😀

Dave.

Re: Who needs whom ?

kwatt wrote:Chew on that

I’ve just finished swallowing 🙂

I agree 100{e5d1b7155a01ef1f3b9c9968eaba33524ee81600d00d4be2b4d93ac2e58cec2d}. The only way forward as I see it is for us all to communicate on the same level. We all know the problems are there, we all have to address those problems together. My example was merely a hypothetical situation, there is a future for everyone that wants it I believe, there is a place for agent and WP alike, if we all work together and not against each other.

I’ll also endorse what Ken has already said, and something I have been banging on about for ages all over the site, and it’s slowly happening, we are seeing various national companies seeing this site as an excellent oppurtunity for a high level of communication to happen, which has never before been possible, or even discouraged by some.

So, let’s talk, it is human nature after all, even if the accents vary, we all speak the same language, and in the main I believe our aims are the same ultimately. 😀

Dave.

Re: Who needs whom ?

And for my 1000th post, which I think just shows how sad a git i really am 😉 ….

WP’s sprang up in the mid to late eightes (IIRC) simply because there were a few manufacturers that were not big enough to cope with administering their own service operations, even with the use of agents. The idea was mooted that it would be easier and cheaper to use a WP that handled all the admin and call handling. Of course manufacturers like Elecrolux also latched onto this idea and tried to get in on that market as well to shore up their own service networks, the problem for them was decreasing margins and less cash to fund service, the cost of which was rising exponentially in the UK in line with salaries etc.. Like others they also tried direct service in some areas and, as we all told them it would, it failed causing massive damage and fallout in the trade at the time.

Of course when someone like Lux goes down such a path then others follow, but to be fair Whirlpool tried a different approach and made all their engineers (or almost all) “Service Partners”, self-employed but still goverened by Whirlpool thus removing the burdens that they had as employers but retaining a workforce. Nice ploy, but it also failed.

Then we have GIAS/Candy/Hoover which is now a seemingly British run Italian company (in joke 😉 ) which has clawed all the work it can back in-house passing out the cr4p it doesn’t want or can’t do to ISDAL etc., and then we get saddled with it.

So now for all the rest the WP’s come to the fore and become many an independent’s core contract work and it’s trundled on like that for several years. This is also doomed to fail IMHO, just look at what’s happening around us right now.

The only work passed out by any of the major manufacturers is the rubbish they don’t want that has a high price tag attached to it or it’s kept in-house. ANY manufacturer with employed engineers is only passing us the rubbish from their table, crumbs if you like, that they cannot do or justify the cost of gearing up to do. There are of course the odd exceptions that prove the rule but they are few and far between.

As a loyal ex-Candy agent I refused to do any work for them until they eitther get realistic with the cost of passing me their cr4p work or they get back to some form of sensible arrangement. Also one of the reasons I’ve refused to work for two WP’s since they are only pandering to this mentality by taking that work on. But then they don’t have the cost of the double visit, they don’t get a pasting from the customer when you get the call after someone else has attended twice to attempt a repair and they don’t have the hassles of dealing with the spares and total lack of any cohesive technical information. Oh no, that’s our lookout!

And therin lies the great failing of the WP’s.

They cannot offer (as of writing) the same backup as a manufacturer does, nor do they seem to care if they do or not in many cases. They simply cannot compete with the resources that a manufacturer has, even if they purport to in order to secure those jobs. But for them it’s a numbers game, they get paid per job regardless, they have little more costs from one call to the next whereas we do and vastly more than the WP it would appear to me.

I’m sure they too have problems, but they won’t tell us what they are so we have to make assumptions.

But you’re right Martin the WP’s in the middle only drives the cost of service down at our end and up for the client, regardless of what some will tell you. There is simply no other logical conclusion.

K.