Keeping a service business on track requires evaluating its performance regularly. Doing this allows for determining success and failure. Tracking how your business is doing also identifies any changes you must make to boost performance. It also allows adjusting goals and creating new ones.
Tracking metrics in your field service business is the most effective way to focus on meeting your goals. These metrics give you a clear picture of your business’s overall performance and profitability. Utilizing the right metrics is key to your business’ growth.
Business owners shouldn’t just use any metrics. The right Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are essential to accurately determine your business’ growth rate and potential. Read on to discover how to track your field business.
Track Your Field Service Metrics Like A Seasoned Pro
Field service management metrics measure technicians’ performance at the customers’ site. The metrics offer quantifiable data about activities in the field and help identify KPIs.
Key performance indicators reveal the performance of the field service operations. They also evaluate the performance of the field service team in meeting the company’s objectives. The KPIs also determine decision-making for management, dispatching, and evaluating field service technicians.
Now let’s look at how to track field service business like a pro using the appropriate KPIs.
Average Repair Time
Determining average response time requires tracking the time between your service calls and your technicians’ arrival time at the client’s premises. The average repair time is how long it takes a technician to complete a task. Various factors affect average response time, such as distance to the client’s location and the job’s complexity.
Tracking average response time allows for determining the average time technicians spend on a job. If unhappy with the results, you can take steps to improve the metric. The technician must be well equipped with whatever they need to complete the job, including supplies, resources, and technology to complete the job in time.
The technician must also have the right skills and experience to do the job. When scheduling repair calls, don’t overwhelm the technician. Dispatching too many tasks to one employee may compromise quality. The rule of thumb is to optimize efficiency and excellent customer service that exceeds their expectations.
Average Job Cycle
This is how long an employee must complete an entire job cycle. A complete job cycle includes dispatching, scheduling, servicing, and invoicing. Sometimes, the job cycle may include other processes, but you must include them when analyzing this metric.
Time is money in the field service business. Lower time to complete a job cycle means your technicians are very efficient. This encourages reaching and fixing customers’ problems faster, contributing to growth in your bottom line.
Evaluating the average job cycle in your field service business to boost efficiency. It also allows
identifying and fixing weak spots before impacting your business further. This metric also allows business owners to pinpoint strengths to build on in the future.
Field service management software allows a manager to adjust and determine the time for completing tasks. Measuring the average job cycle on a single platform makes it easier to see where you need to improve for higher productivity.
Average Response Time
Determining average response time is tracking the time your technicians take to reach the clients’ premises after receiving a service call. It’s calculated by adding time from each job and dividing it by the total number of jobs.
Average response time has a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Inappropriate equipment disturbs customers’ schedules or encourages business downtime. Handling jobs faster encourages customer satisfaction and ultimately leads to more repeat jobs.
Using field management software allows a business manager to streamline scheduling and dispatching, leading to an improvement in the average response time. All service calls must be categorized by order of priority, and working on high-priority ones first allows for accomplishing more in less time.
First-Time Fix Rate
Some jobs are completed after more than one visit by a technician. However, your technicians shouldn’t spend more time on one job and ignore others. The first-time fix rate determines how many jobs the technicians complete in one visit. Some factors can make an employee fail to accomplish a job on their first visit, including:
- Incorrect diagnoses
- Inadequate skills
- Ineffective communication
- Missing parts
- Poor scheduling
The first-time rate affects customer satisfaction and your bottom line. A higher first-time rate means that your technicians work more efficiently and accomplish tasks on their first visit. This encourages customer satisfaction, referrals, and positive reviews. Completing tasks in less time allows for handling more customers daily to earn more revenue.
Improving first-time rates requires dispatching technicians with the right skills and experience to handle customers’ problems. Equally important is to dispatch technicians with the right tools and equipment to handle the job. Effective communication is also essential to avoid misunderstandings that may prevent completing the job on the first visit.
Customer Retention Rate
This metric determines customer loyalty or the ability of your business to keep customers over time. Customer retention also identifies loyal customers and reflects customer satisfaction, engagement, repurchasing power, and emotional ties to your brand. It begins with the customer’s first interaction with your brand and subsequent interactions.
After determining customer retention, you can use the information for data analysis to determine customer success and experience. Customer retention is essential since the cost of acquiring new customers may be higher than retaining old ones. Retained customers are likely to become your brand ambassadors.
Focusing on new customers deprives your business of repeat customers. The metric requires continuous monitoring and other aspects, including:
- Number of customers at the start of a given period
- Customers at the end of the period
- Number of new customers acquired in the period
You can use different strategies to improve customer retention, including offering personalized services, customized support interactions, building trust, using social media, gathering customer feedback, improving customer support, and incentivizing loyalty.
Revenue Per Lead
Every business has marketing channels for generating leads, and each produces different results. Revenue per lead measures how each channel performs. Calculating this metric involves dividing the total revenue from the lead and dividing it by the number of sales-qualified leads.
Cost per lead is an important KPI for determining the cost-effectiveness of each marketing campaign in generating leads. The metric gives field service businesses critical information for determining whether they are acquiring customers cost-effectively.
If you find out that your business only closes a few leads, you have to revise your lead generation strategy. Identifying the cause of the problem and fixing it will ensure that you realize a significant improvement in the future.
Repeat Visits
The repeat visits metric tracks the number of visits a technician has to make to complete a task in a given period. Technicians who make too many repeat visits need additional training to hone their skills to accomplish tasks on time.
Repeat visits limit your business revenue and bog down your technicians. Too many repeat visits cost you money, time, and effort. Extra training to give your team appropriate skills may help reduce repeat visits.
The use of field service tracking software with a tracking and logging feature offers accurate insights into the number of repeat visits. The software also allows for improving scheduling and communication to avoid repeat visits resulting from miscommunication.
Business Growth
Tracking all business service metrics determines whether your business is growing or not. Your revenue, number of successful leads, and repeat visits determine overall growth. Poor management, scheduling, dispatching, reporting, and communication contribute to negative business growth.
Fortunately, you can only solve some of those problems using field management service software such as Field Complete. Understanding the weak spots in your business makes it easier to find an appropriate solution.
Some business growth factors to track include:
- Value of recurring income,
- Number of leads
- Average order value
- Number of quotes
- Value of contracts canceled
- New contracts quoted and sold
Determining business growth must consider customer retention and churn. This proves whether your marketing campaigns are successful or not. The presence of organic growth means that more customers are reaching out. It measures how your business and brand are growing.
Improving growth in your service business requires tracking what’s working and what’s not. This allows for identifying processes that are generating sales and discarding those that are wasting time and resources. Asking for customer feedback also allows getting firsthand knowledge about how customers perceive your business and where you need improvement.
🏁 Result
Finally, now it’s time to sit back and wait for results after evaluating all the above metrics in your business. The service metrics allow discover what is working in your business and what needs improvement. Besides saving time, effort, and money, it eliminates guesswork from seeing your field service business grow.
Field Complete is a wonderful solution to ease tracking all those metrics in your business. The service management software streamlines scheduling, dispatching, reporting, invoicing, and communication, among other features in your service business.
