A comeback gets billed as free labor to fix a mistake, which makes it feel like the cost is just "the redo." It's rarely just the redo.
The comeback itself takes a bay-hour that could have been a paying job. The diagnosis has to happen again, sometimes from scratch if the original notes weren't detailed enough. And the customer who's coming back for a second visit on the same problem is measurably more likely to not come back a third time — for anything.
Comebacks cluster in ways that are genuinely diagnosable: a specific type of repair, a specific tech still building experience on a particular system, or jobs that get rushed at the end of a busy day. None of that shows up by looking at one comeback in isolation — it only shows up once someone lines up several of them side by side.
The quiet cost that's easy to miss entirely: a customer who had a comeback and never mentions it, just quietly starts going somewhere else next time.
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