Short answer: A fully loaded truck roll typically costs $150–$300 once labor, vehicle, fuel, dispatch overhead, and opportunity cost are counted. Diagnostic, verification, and no-fault-found visits are the ones remote video can remove, and in most field organizations those are 20–40% of all dispatches.
Build your own number
| Component | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Technician labor (loaded, incl. drive time) | $60–$140 |
| Vehicle: fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance | $25–$60 |
| Dispatch, scheduling, and admin overhead | $15–$40 |
| Parts carried and returned unused | $0–$40 |
| Opportunity cost of the slot not sold | $50–$150 |
| Total | $150–$300+ |
The formula: (loaded hourly rate × total hours including drive) + mileage cost + allocated overhead + opportunity cost. Run it once with your real numbers and stop quoting industry averages.
Which visits are removable
- Diagnostic-only. The tech drives out, looks, identifies the part, orders it, and leaves. A ten-minute video call does the same thing.
- No fault found. The unit works when the tech arrives, or the issue was a setting, breaker, filter, or user error.
- Verification and warranty checks. Confirming a model, serial, install date, or that damage matches the claim.
- Post-repair confirmation. Verifying the fix held.
- Quoting and scoping. Sizing a job before committing a crew.
What is not removable: anything requiring hands, tools, or instruments. Remote triage makes those visits better by ensuring the right tech arrives with the right part.
The second-order savings
Removing the visit is the obvious win. The larger one is first-time fix rate: when a video triage identifies the failed component and confirms the model number before dispatch, the truck that does roll arrives with the correct part. Every avoided return visit is a second full truck roll saved.
A simple model
Say you run 400 dispatches a month at $200 loaded cost. If 25% are diagnostic or no-fault-found and you resolve 60% of those remotely, that is 60 avoided visits, or $12,000 a month. Against a $499/month Growth plan, the platform pays for itself in the first three avoided visits.
Getting the adoption
The failure mode is optional usage. Teams that get results make the video triage a required step in the dispatch workflow for eligible job types, send the session link automatically from the scheduling system through an integration, and measure remote-resolution rate per dispatcher.
Build the number from six inputs
Most organisations quote a truck-roll cost they inherited from a slide deck. Build your own instead; the inputs are all in systems you already have.
| Input | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| Fully loaded technician hourly cost | Payroll plus burden — wages, tax, benefits, insurance |
| Average door-to-door time per job | Dispatch timestamps, including travel both ways |
| Vehicle cost per mile | Fuel, maintenance, depreciation, insurance, telematics |
| Average miles per dispatch | Telematics or route history |
| Dispatch and scheduling overhead | Coordinator time per job created |
| Parts and consumables carried per visit | Inventory issued per work order |
Worked example
Take a technician at a fully loaded $65 per hour, an average door-to-door job of 2.5 hours, 28 miles per dispatch at $0.70 per mile, 15 minutes of coordinator time at $35 per hour, and $18 of consumables:
- Labour: 2.5 × $65 = $162.50
- Vehicle: 28 × $0.70 = $19.60
- Dispatch overhead: 0.25 × $35 = $8.75
- Consumables: $18.00
- Direct cost per dispatch: about $209
Substitute your own figures — the structure matters more than the numbers. Note what is excluded: the opportunity cost of the job that technician could not do, which in a capacity-constrained business is often larger than every line above combined.
The costs that never make the spreadsheet
- Opportunity cost. A fully booked team turning away work loses the margin of the displaced job, not just the cost of this one.
- Repeat visits. A wrong part means the whole calculation runs twice, plus a second customer appointment.
- Customer time. Appointment windows cost the customer a half-day, and that shows up in retention and reviews.
- Emissions. Increasingly reported, and every avoided mile counts.
- Safety exposure. Driving is the highest-risk activity most field staff perform.
What a remote session has to cost to be worth it
Compare cost per resolved issue, not per session. If a remote triage session resolves outright or converts to a correctly-parted first-time fix in a meaningful share of cases, the arithmetic is dominated by the avoided dispatch. At around $200 per dispatch, a session costing a few dollars — see real 2026 pricing and our session tiers — pays for itself even at a modest deflection rate. Model three scenarios (conservative, expected, optimistic) rather than a single number, and track the deflection rate you actually achieve after ninety days.
Turning the model into a decision
The output should be a triage rule, not a slide: which job types get a remote session first, who runs it, and what happens when it fails. Virtual Support Pro sessions open from a texted browser link, so a customer can be looked at during the booking call rather than in a window three days out — which is where most of the deflection actually comes from.
FAQ
Do customers accept a video call instead of a visit?
Usually enthusiastically, because it happens today instead of in four days. See field service.
What if the video call does not resolve it?
You dispatch — with better information than you had before. The call is never wasted.
How long does a triage call take?
Most run 6–12 minutes, versus 60–120 minutes of loaded time for a dispatch.
How much does a truck roll cost?
It depends entirely on labour rates, travel distance, and job length. Build it from your own payroll, telematics, and dispatch data — the worked example above shows the structure, and many field organisations land somewhere in the low hundreds of dollars per dispatch.
What is included in truck roll cost?
Fully loaded technician time door to door, vehicle cost per mile, dispatch and scheduling overhead, and consumables — plus the opportunity cost of the work not done.
How do you reduce truck rolls?
Triage remotely before dispatch, resolve what can be resolved on video, and use the session to confirm the correct part and access before sending anyone.
What deflection rate is realistic?
It varies by trade and call mix. Measure it on your own first ninety days rather than adopting a vendor''s figure.
Does remote triage work for emergency calls?
Often yes — a two-minute look frequently changes the priority, the parts, or the skill level dispatched.
Keep reading
- How virtual inspections reduce truck rolls — the full argument.
- Remote video support ROI — modelling the return.
- First-visit resolution — the benchmark that moves.
- Reduce support calls and misdiagnosis.
- Virtual inspection software cost.
Presenting the number internally
A truck-roll figure lands very differently depending on how it is framed. Operations leaders respond to capacity — how many additional jobs the same crew could complete. Finance responds to cost per resolved issue and to a range with stated assumptions. Customer-experience owners respond to appointment windows removed from the customer''s week. Build one model and present three views of it rather than arguing a single headline number.
Then commit to re-running it after ninety days with real data: actual triage volume, actual deflection, actual repeat-visit change. A model that gets revised in public earns far more credibility than one that was optimistic and quietly forgotten — and it gives you the evidence to expand the programme rather than defend it.