Locksmith: Total Customer Wait Time

All versions

Customers do not experience your drive time — they experience the whole wait, from the phone call to the door opening. Add the three pieces and you find out whether your thirty-minute promise is real.

Quick formula: Three intervals, one total:

=SUM(B2:D2)

25 minutes to dispatch, 8 minutes driving, 15 minutes on the lock is 48 minutes — not the 30 the ad promises.

Functions used (tap for the full reference guide):

SUM

The example

Three lockout calls from one shift, broken into their three stages.

	A	B	C	D	E
1	Call	Dispatch	Drive	On site	Total (min)
2	Downtown call	25	8	15	48
3	Highway 9	6	22	12	40
4	Northside	4	11	9	24

The formula

SUM across the three stage columns:

=SUM(B2:D2) // dispatch + drive + on-site minutes

How it works

Splitting the wait is the whole point — each stage has a different fix:

B2 is dispatch: the gap between the call landing and a tech actually rolling. This is usually the biggest and the most fixable.
C2 is drive time, which you control through territory and truck placement, not through hustle.
D2 is time on site until the customer's problem is solved.
SUM(B2:D2) totals them into the number the customer would put in a review.

The Downtown call shows the pattern: 8 minutes of driving hidden inside a 48-minute wait. Faster driving would save almost nothing; faster dispatch would save twenty minutes.

Try it: interactive demo

Interactive

Enter the minutes spent in each stage.

Dispatch (min)

Drive (min)

On site (min)

Variations

Flag calls over your promise

Turn the service-level pledge into a column you can filter.

=IF(SUM(B2:D2)>30,"Missed","Met")

Dispatch as a share of the wait

Shows where to spend the improvement effort.

=B2/SUM(B2:D2)

Pitfalls & errors

Measure dispatch from the customer's first call, not from when the ticket reached the tech. Time spent in a queue is still time the customer waited.

Log the three stages separately from day one. A single total-minutes column can tell you that you are slow but never why.

Practice workbook

📊

Download the free Locksmith: Total Customer Wait Time practice workbook

Edit the yellow stage cells; the total wait recalculates.

Frequently asked questions

Is a 30-minute promise realistic?

Only within a tight radius with a truck already staged. Run this calculation over a month of real calls before you print the number on the van.

What counts as on-site time?

From arrival to the customer being able to leave — including paperwork and payment. Stopping the clock at the moment the lock opens understates the wait.

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Function references: SUM