What is a truck roll?
A “truck roll” is the dispatch of a technician (and a vehicle) to a customer’s home, business or site to install, inspect, troubleshoot or repair something. The term is used heavily in telecom, utilities, field service and appliance/consumer-electronics support. It’s shorthand for the most expensive way to resolve an issue — sending a person — as opposed to resolving it remotely.
What does a truck roll cost?
Honest answer first: there is no verified industry benchmark for the cost of a truck roll. The numbers you will see quoted everywhere — roughly $150–$500 at the surface level, and about $1,000 once indirect costs are included — are industry estimates repeated across vendor and trade publications rather than findings from a published primary study. They are useful for order-of-magnitude reasoning and unsafe for a business case.
The best-sourced figure is sector-specific: in utilities, S&C Electric puts a field dispatch at $250–$500 as a conservative estimate.
For anything you plan to defend in a budget meeting, build the number yourself:
Cost per dispatch = (Technician time + Vehicle and fuel + Scheduling and dispatch overhead + Value of the capacity consumed) ÷ Dispatches
The fourth term is the one most often left out and frequently the largest: an hour spent driving is an hour not spent on a job that only a technician can do. The customer’s multi-day wait belongs in the calculation too, even though it lands on their side of the ledger.
Avoidable dispatch rate
Avoidable dispatch rate is the share of on-site visits that did not need to happen. It is the metric that actually tells you how much of your field cost is recoverable.
Avoidable dispatch rate = (Dispatches that did not need to happen ÷ Total dispatches) × 100
| Avoidable dispatch rate | Figure | Source (year) |
|---|---|---|
| Top 20% of organizations | 3% | Aquant, 2025 Field Service Benchmark Report |
| Median across all companies | 14% | Aquant (2025) |
| Bottom 20% of organizations | 24% | Aquant (2025) |
A median of 14% means roughly one in seven truck rolls is unnecessary. The spread is unusually wide for an operational metric — top performers are about eight times more efficient here than the bottom quintile, which suggests this is a capability gap rather than an industry constant. The same dataset found that 33% of service queries are solvable without a service professional’s help at all.
Aquant sells field-service AI, so these are vendor-published benchmarks. They are cited because the methodology is disclosed: 157 service organizations, more than 21 million service events, 6.5 million assets and over 602,000 technicians.
Remote resolution rate
Remote resolution rate is the companion metric — the share of cases closed with no site visit at all.
Remote resolution rate = (Cases resolved without a site visit ÷ Total cases) × 100
Two practical warnings. First, no credible published industry benchmark exists for this figure, despite how often it appears on conference slides; treat any number presented as an industry average with suspicion and track it against your own baseline instead. Second, define up front whether phone-only resolutions count, because including them makes the metric look strong while hiding whether you actually resolved anything or simply deferred it.
Avoidable dispatch rate is the better-benchmarked of the pair. Remote resolution rate is the better target, because it is the number a service organization can move directly.
Why truck rolls happen — and why many are avoidable
Most avoidable truck rolls share one root cause: the team can’t see the problem, so dispatching someone feels safer than diagnosing blind. A large share of completed visits resolve in minutes with nothing replaced — cabling, configuration, setup or customer-education issues that could have been handled remotely.
The cost compounds when the visit happens and fails. Aquant’s 2024 data found that a failed first visit leads to an average of 2.7 total visits and adds roughly 13 days to resolution time — so a weak first time fix rate multiplies truck rolls rather than merely adding one.
How to reduce truck rolls
- Measure avoidable dispatch rate before optimising anything. Without it you cannot tell an efficiency problem from a demand problem.
- Put eyes on the problem before committing a vehicle. Visual remote assistance lets an agent or expert see the issue live through the customer’s phone camera and resolve it remotely.
- When a visit is genuinely needed, dispatch with a diagnosis. An accurate, documented fault and part number converts a speculative visit into a first-time fix.
- Track what came back. Repeat visits to the same asset are the clearest signal of where remote triage would pay.
Where truck-roll reduction matters
- Telecom & contact centers — router/Wi‑Fi fixes without a dispatch.
- Utilities & energy — remote inspection and field support.
- Appliances & electronics — setup and troubleshooting without an in-home visit.
- Insurance — remote claims inspection instead of adjuster visits.
Related Terms
- Field service KPIs: formulas and benchmarks
- What is Remote Visual Inspection
- What is Field Service
- What is First Time Fix Rate (FTFR)
Learn more about VSight
Frequently asked questions
What does truck roll mean? A truck roll is the dispatch of a technician and a vehicle to a customer’s home, business or site to install, inspect, troubleshoot or repair something. The term is used heavily in telecom, utilities, field service and appliance support as shorthand for the most expensive way to resolve an issue.
How much does a truck roll cost? There is no verified industry benchmark for the cost of a truck roll, and it is worth knowing that before quoting one. The figures in circulation — roughly $150 to $500 at the surface level, and about $1,000 once indirect costs are included — are industry estimates repeated across vendor and trade publications rather than findings from a published primary study. In utilities, S&C Electric puts a field dispatch at $250 to $500 as a conservative figure. The reliable approach is to calculate your own from labour, vehicle, scheduling overhead and lost capacity.
What is avoidable dispatch rate? Avoidable dispatch rate is the percentage of on-site visits that did not need to happen, calculated as avoidable dispatches divided by total dispatches, multiplied by 100. Aquant’s 2025 benchmark data across 157 service organizations puts the median at 14% — roughly one in seven truck rolls — with the top 20% of organizations at 3% and the bottom 20% at 24%.
What is remote resolution rate? Remote resolution rate is the share of cases closed without any site visit, calculated as cases resolved remotely divided by total cases, multiplied by 100. No credible published industry benchmark exists for it, so track it against your own baseline and define up front whether phone-only resolutions count. Avoidable dispatch rate is the better-benchmarked companion metric.
Why are so many truck rolls avoidable? Most avoidable truck rolls share one root cause: the team cannot see the problem, so dispatching someone feels safer than diagnosing blind. A large share of completed visits resolve in minutes with nothing replaced — cabling, configuration, setup or customer-education issues that could have been handled remotely.
How does VSight help reduce truck rolls? VSight’s AR remote assistance lets an agent or expert see the issue live through the customer’s phone camera and resolve it remotely, using AR annotation to guide the fix. When a visit is genuinely needed, the technician arrives with an accurate, documented diagnosis instead of being dispatched blind.
Sources
- Aquant — The 2025 Field Service Benchmark Report (vendor-published; 157 service organizations, 21M+ service events)
- Aquant — The 2024 Field Service Benchmark Report (vendor-published)
- S&C Electric — The Real Cost of a Truck Roll