Truck roll

A truck roll is any dispatched visit to a customer location. The term comes from cable and telecom but applies to every field service business: every time a vehicle leaves the shop or the previous job, that's a truck roll. Truck rolls have a fixed cost — fuel, vehicle wear, driver time, dispatch overhead, opportunity cost of the technician — that's borne whether or not the visit produces revenue.

Field service economics live and die on truck rolls. A diagnostic-only visit that doesn't lead to a quote is a truck roll without revenue. A return visit because the right part wasn't on the truck is a truck roll twice for one job. Software that helps a service business avoid unnecessary truck rolls — better triage, photo-based pre-diagnosis, customer self-service, route optimization — has direct margin impact, often 5-15% of cost of service.