A technician is only as good as his support. We have the experience and they are willing to work but our support staff attitude is crappy and it does not help and creates alot of tension. If I was a paying customer a our place I would honestly never go back just because of the attitude. Technicians need to be treated and supported just as any paying customer that walks thru the front door.

I have always tried to keep the support:Technician ratio as close to 1:6 as possible. The big driver here is the experience and work ethic of the support staff.

That should help others that can give their perspectives. Of course their is a big difference between auto & lift trucks business & that being in the auto industry the customers come to the dealer via drive or tow truck service. In lift trucks the total cost of service vans, on board inventory, pick up & delivery trucks (with daily usage, often low boy types for big units etc. etc. are added costs and typically much larger geography with much less population probably factor in to some of these ratio differences. Auto folks generally are confined to their immediate marking area, say 20 mi radius of the dealer ship for 80% of their business. Auto dealers are more like "drug" store approach to marketing and often easy to get to - "on a freeway" near you or other highly travel road..

I understand that to completely understand the complete make up we must examine all the criteria that you listed above, however I am simply interested in the support staff to technician ratio. I should of been more clear about my expectations from my question. I am trying to understand if there might be an industry standard, I have visited several automotive dealers, they seem to run 3 to 4 technicians to 1 support member in my experiences. Our industry doesn't seem to be willing to allow such a saturated support staff?

Others certainly have more in site than I would.
But I would think before any one can answer that would need more information like current truck population your are servicing and other things like average income currently being produced by service tech - separate road vs shop (shop folks tend to work on new equipment get ready, rental fleet & used reconditioning (ie in house billings) and those units that the road tech don't want to work on in the field - lol), etc. etc. etc etc..