Technical support by the numbers: what six industries publish about their helplines

One British boiler manufacturer answers more than 2,000 technical calls a day. Another takes around 1,500 on its trade line alone. Almost no other manufacturer, in any industry, has published a number. This is what the public record does say about technical support in six industries, and what it means for the cost of yours.

The helplines that publish their numbers

Heating is the exception. Two boiler manufacturers have published what their helplines handle, and a third manufacturer has published its pre-sales enquiries.

calls a day, answered by 37 advisors

2,000+

Worcester Bosch, November 2010

queries a day on the trade technical line

~1,500

Vaillant, in PHAM News, October 2019

pre-sales technical enquiries a month, to 15 engineers

~4,000

Mitsubishi Electric UK, in Installer Online, February 2025

Worcester Bosch has repeated its figure over a decade. In 2016 it said its 42 advisors respond to “over 500,000 telephone calls and 50,000 emails a year”. In 2019 the trade magazine PHPI reported “around 500,000 calls per year”, more than 40 advisors and an average answer time under 20 seconds.

It is hard to picture 2,000 calls a day. Spread across the 7am to 6pm weekday the company publishes now, it is one call every 20 seconds.

What one advisor handles

Divide the published volumes by the published headcounts and a consistent picture appears. The rows below are not like for like, so each one says what it counts.

The spread is the point. Pre-sales design questions are long and each one is different, so an engineer gets through about a dozen a day. A boiler helpline gets through four times that, which only works if most of the calls are short and familiar.

The same figures put a ceiling on call length. 42 advisors working 1,740 hours a year have 73,080 hours between them. Shared across 500,000 calls, that is 8.8 minutes a call at the very most, with no time left for the 50,000 emails, training or a break. IT service desks, by comparison, average 10.78 minutes of handling time per call.

How much of it is routine

No manufacturer publishes the share of its calls that are routine. The nearest published guide is from IT service desks: an article published by HDI, the IT support industry association, recommends that in a well-run desk “the percent of tickets classified as known should be between 65%–85%”. It is a recommended range for teams that record their answers, not a survey, and a boiler is not a laptop. It is still the nearest outside reference.

Applied to one advisor, the range looks like this. An advisor paid the UK median for an engineering technician costs £51,977 a year to employ, or £30 an hour.

The same benchmark set says IT service desks resolve 78.9% of contacts at the first level, so about one in five is passed to someone more senior. In a manufacturer that person usually sits in engineering.

Now put in your own numbers. This is the calculator from our home page.

Six industries, six pieces of evidence

Outside heating, manufacturers do not publish what reaches their helplines. What each industry does publish explains why the calls come.

HVAC and heat pumps

54,054

calls answered in a year by the Gas Safe Register’s own technical helpline, on top of every manufacturer’s lineGas Safe Register, 2023 to 2024

Heating is the one industry where manufacturers put numbers on their helplines, and it is the industry going through the biggest change in what installers are asked to fit. The Heat Pump Association calculates that more than 41,000 full-time heat pump roles would be needed to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028, the previous government’s target, and reports that around 39% of people who complete a heat pump course do not go on to install one.

The Home Surveys and Install Report of the government’s Electrification of Heat demonstration project put the consequence plainly: “Guidance from manufacturers on installation of heat pump units can be lacking or inconsistent.” Every gap in that guidance becomes a phone call.

Lingo for HVAC and heat pumps

Medical devices

Up to 75%

of customer issues resolved remotely, as published by Siemens Healthineers for laboratory diagnosticsSiemens Healthineers, accessed October 2026

Medical device manufacturers do not publish call volumes, but they publish something more useful: how much they fix without sending anyone. Siemens Healthineers says up to 75% of laboratory diagnostics issues are resolved remotely by a team of 200 technicians, with 900 field engineers behind them. Philips puts it at about 50% of corrective cases for MR scanners. GE HealthCare reports a 40% remote fix rate in the United States and Canada.

Each manufacturer defines the measure its own way, so the three are not a league table. What they share is the direction: the more that is resolved before anyone travels, the fewer visits are needed.

Lingo for medical devices

Access control

4,200

installers trained in the UK in one year by a single manufacturer, from almost 2,000 companiesPaxton, reported by IFSEC Insider, May 2019

That is the size of the audience one access control manufacturer has to keep competent, and it trained 5,000 more across Europe in the same year. Every one of them can ring the technical line.

What they ring about is narrower than the product range. One lock and power supply maker, SDC, says from its own support logs that 75 to 85% of access control operating problems and technical support calls come down to power. It is one company’s logs and it sells power supplies, but the pattern is familiar to anyone who has run a helpline: a few causes account for most of the calls.

Lingo for access control

Industrial doors and shutters

Around 70%

of existing powered gate installations found to be non-compliant, according to the Door & Hardware FederationDHF Powered Gate Group, March 2016

Doors and gates are safety-critical and set up on site: limits, force settings, safety edges and photocells all have to be right before the product is handed over. The federation’s figure shows how often the setup falls short of the standard.

When installers need help, they pick up the phone. Chamberlain Group, which makes LiftMaster operators, says of its technical support centre: “Nearly 85% of all cases that come in are via phone.” A question about a limit setting, asked from the top of a ladder, is still handled as a call, one at a time.

Lingo for industrial doors and shutters

Fire suppression

169,717

false alarms due to apparatus attended by fire and rescue services in England in a yearMinistry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, year ending September 2025

The closest published evidence comes from fire detection and alarm systems, and it shows what is at stake when a fire system is not configured correctly. Fire false alarms were 39% of everything England’s fire and rescue services attended in the year, and about two-thirds of those were put down to the alarm apparatus itself.

Manufacturers’ own descriptions of their helplines show where the difficulty lies. When C-TEC opened a dedicated support line in November 2025, it listed what its specialists help with: system commissioning, complex cause-and-effect programming, and troubleshooting network and configuration issues. All three are documented procedures, as are the commissioning and fault-finding questions an extinguishant control panel raises.

Lingo for fire suppression

Intruder alarms

30,000+

more alarm engineers needed to meet demand, according to the British Security Industry AssociationBSIA, as reported by Security Journal UK, December 2025

The security trade is short of experienced people. Around 3,000 apprentices are now in training across seven centres, so more of the engineers on site are new to the panels they are programming.

A new engineer asks the questions an experienced one stopped asking years ago, and asks them of the manufacturer. The products have not become harder. The average caller has become less experienced, and the helpline absorbs the difference.

Lingo for intruder alarms

What the gaps tell you

Put the six together and three things recur. The products have to be set up correctly on site. The people setting them up are numerous, spread out and increasingly new to the job. And the manufacturer’s answer, when it comes, is usually something already written down.

That is why the two manufacturers who count their calls count them in the thousands, and why Worcester Bosch’s advisors can clear about fifty a day. It is also why most manufacturers have never added it up: the cost is spread across a helpline, an engineering team and a distributor network, and no single budget holds it.

Lingo takes the documented part of that work. Your manuals become step-by-step guides that your own technical team checks and publishes, and installers follow them on WhatsApp at any hour. A question the guides do not cover goes to your team with the conversation attached.

To find your own numbers, tally a week of calls by topic, then put the result into the support cost calculator.