Top 21 Field Service Metrics and KPIs to Elevate Your Field Service Excellence
It might sound super cheesy but won’t be wrong to say that behind every successful company, there are the right metrics and right KPIs they measure.
That being said, setting metrics and KPIs that dive deep and don’t provide just superficial information for service operations is not easy. Many times, apart from the general resistance, you might also face backlash—an intellectual backlash on the premise that you cannot quantify hard work and dedication.
Even for any field service business, metrics and KPIs have a tremendous role to play. You can gauge the efficiency of the field service management function only when you are measuring the right metrics and KPIs.
Here metrics are operational measurements that help track the day-to-day efficiency and activities of field service operations. On the other hand, KPIs are strategic measures used to evaluate the success and performance of field service operations in relation to areas such as customer satisfaction, service quality, and business outcomes.
In this blog we discuss 21 field service metrics and KPIs that you must be tracking. These are:
Important Field Service KPIs:
- First-Time Fix Rate (FTFR)
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Churn Rate
- Average Resolution Time
- First Response Time (FRT)
- Customer Effort Score
- Escalation Rate
Important Field Service Metrics:
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- Technician Utilization
- Number of Jobs Done
- Service Request Volume
- Service Request Backlog
- Inflow and Outflow
- Inventory Turnover Ratio
- Repeat Visit Rate
- Average Travel Time
- Average Response Time
- Service Request Categorization
- Customer Profile Summary
- Account Activity Status
Alright, now let’s dive in to discuss these KPIs and metrics in detail, starting with the important KPIs for field service technicians.
1. First-Time Fix Rate (FTFR)
This is one of the most important field service performance KPIs tracked across the industries and has a far bigger impact on businesses from a topline as well as bottom-line perspective. And it is an important KPI for service engineers as it reveals the competency and capability of an individual technician while handling a service call on the first attempt.
Your strategic objective to track this KPI would be:
- Increase customer experience: It is literally a no-brainer that a good first-time fix rate leads to improved customer confidence in the company; it saves their time as well.
- Reduce cost: less repetition of the same task ensures effective utilization of rep time and reduces their travel time. It reduces field service operations cost and improves technician utilization levels.
While the first increases customer satisfaction and overall customer lifetime value, the second one allows you to manage operations cost-effectively and improve profitability.
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
While this is one of the most common KPIs, most businesses fail to receive customer feedback on a regular basis. If an HVAC business has served a customer five times in the last year and you ask them for customer feedback for all five services, they probably won’t have it.
One of the reasons for this is customer reluctance to provide feedback but another, and very important, reason is not planning the feedback collection meticulously and not having a proper reward mechanism in place.
So, plan feedback that’s insightful enough to evaluate service quality and customer satisfaction. Further, devise the feedback collection process to compel customers to provide feedback, which will prove to be a great foundation for getting the right customer satisfaction score. With these insights at your disposal, you will improve the satisfaction level and CLTV.
Finally, understand that customer satisfaction relies as much on a technician’s soft skills as on their technical abilities. Technicians who can clearly explain the issue and walk the customer through the solution earn higher ratings than those who are taciturn technicians who simply complete the job and leave.
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS score, one of the most used amongst other field service software features, enables you to track the following aspects of the service delivered:
- Customer satisfaction
- Brand loyalty
- Customer review and recommendations
The usual NPS question is: How likely are you to recommend our product/service to other people? The customers are asked to rate the likeability on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being very likeable and 0-2 being unlikeable. The ratings allow you to segment your customers in the following:
- 9-10: They are promoters. They love your company and can be a great brand advocate.
- 7-8: They are called passives. They like your company but are not loyal.
- 0-6: They are detractors. These clients are at the risk of churning.
Based on the segmentation, and especially where the ratings are low, you could focus on those customers who need immediate attention to prevent churn and increase customer satisfaction level throughout.
4. Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn rate not only indicates over-the-board customer satisfaction level and CX but also the quality of the services delivered across the board.
While customer churn could be tracked at many levels, getting the right data and using it to produce the right insights may help you track issues at the micro level. Eg. check out how many customers didn’t renew or churned when the response time was more than the average or CES was high or when the first-time fix rate dropped below a certain level.
While this KPI is sufficient to evaluate business health and service quality on a superficial level, a bit of deep dive into the data and mixing it with other stats can provide meaningful business insights.
5. Average Resolution Time
One of the important field service KPIs, average resolution time is another important KPI for field service engineers. It directly impacts customer experience. Higher the time, the poorer the customer experience, as it indicates hassles and complexity in providing awesome service, and vice versa.
You can use the average time to resolution to understand:
- What tasks consume the most time of your technicians? Based on the insight, you may either create training programs for skill development or allocate resources for the task in a manner that would not affect the KPI negatively.
- Which field service engineer is taking more time to complete the task. This could be for reasons like lack of job details, inventory and spare problems, efficiency issues or lack of skill set.
High average time to resolution indicates that field technicians are not skilled or properly trained or they are poorly allocated, or as in some cases, there are certain tasks that are complex and consume more time than others and need better planning.
The bottom line here is that to improve service level, you must keep the resolution time as low as possible. For that you need to use the right field service management solution to remain abreast of the time being consumed and then you can keep these KPI within thresholds.
6. First Response Time (FRT)
You can also call this an assurance KPI. Quick first response can provide your customers with the assurance that their complaints have been heard and the right team is working on them. Along with
However, be sure to set a proper mechanism in place to let your team understand the type of complaint.
See if you would set it as a KPI that must be achieved by your service or scheduling teams, chances are service teams reach out to customers without properly assessing the requirements and complexity of the task. It could raise false hope in customers.
As already discussed earlier in the article, like most service leaders, make strategies and use this KPI for investigation and milestone purposes instead of using them to measure accomplishments.
7. Customer Effort Score
Think of how AVR of various telecom and other service providers, and the time one needs to be on the phone to connect with a relevant support rep. Most of the time it’s very frustrating. Right?
How much effort a customer has to put in to reach out to you in order to resolve their issue is a good way to measure customer experience.
If you are motivated to improve the customer experience, evaluate how many touchpoints the customer needs to be through to raise a service request. Too many touchpoints and long work order cycles are an indicator of a high customer effort score.
8. Escalation Rate
Last but not the least, escalation rate – another field service management KPIs that you must track. No field service organizations would ever want this rate to be high.
Now, what happens is that when most of your cases are escalated to senior-level professionals, it indicates a problem in the service quality, lack of authority at the first interaction point and sometimes the SLA structure.
Addressing it means your customers are happier, you have lower service costs, and their higher chances of repeat business.
After these key performance indicators for service technicians, we now continue ahead by discussing the important metrics.
9. Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
This maintenance metric provides you with crucial information to understand how much time your field service technicians spend to complete a task. You can use this metric for field service team capacity planning and optimizing scheduling and dispatch processes.
By enabling your field service technician to mark the check-in time when they reach the client location and mark the check-out time once they complete the task, you could easily track the total time to complete the task.
10. Technician Utilization
To measure field service efficiency without tracking the cost factor is a classic attempt to fail. Cost is always a determining factor in the quality of services delivered. And therefore it is necessary for the operations managers to track technician utilization for billable hours. While the cost might be an easy-to-track aspect, the role of the field service scheduling system can not be undermined here.
The Field Technician Utilization Rate (FTUR) is calculated by the number of hours spent on service requests by the total hours worked. Higher FTUR is a result of factors such as growth mindset amongst technicians, your training quality, problem solving ability, and tool accessibility.
Depending on the strategic requirement of your field service process, you can track time spent on billable projects i.e. on revenue-generating activities and productive utilization of the technician to track the time spent on maintaining the continuity of operations.
11. Number of Jobs Done
Tracking the no. of jobs done i.e. work order completion count by each field service technician helps identify the strengths and shortcomings of the techs. This is a crucial metric to keep track of your field rep efficiency levels, individual contributions to the operational success, and training and skill development requirements.
12. Service Request Volume
Service request volume or ticket volume refers to the sum of customer service requests in your system. Anyone managing the field service operations would vouch for the importance of having service request volume figures at their fingertips.
Total service request volume is valuable information that lets you know the bulk of your operations. Tracking this information unfolds how your requirements for field service changes over time. The insight is useful to understand your operations and their priorities in context with the range of services and the team.
13. Service Request Backlog
Backlog Volume is a metric that points out overall operational efficiency levels. A massive backlog indicates that your team strength is too low to handle the cases efficiently or the product has some problems that need to be addressed.
But if you correlate the service request backlog data with individual field service technician performance data, you might find out core issues related to field service team efficiency. Chances are your team is not working to its full potential or the field service technician capacity planning needs to be done more effectively.
The usual course of action in such cases, especially when the product/service is great, is either hiring or empowering the technicians to drive productivity and quality.
14. Inflow and Outflow
Daily inflow and outflow of cases or case flow rate gives ideas about the business continuity and effective operations management. Suppose you are planning to hire contractors. The inflow and outflow of the cases would help you analyze how many contractors you may require.
Although you can track the inflow and outflow of cases on a daily basis to identify the patterns and spot anomalies, it is recommended not to use it as a standard for the field service team performance. Using it as a standard for team performance might deter the field service technicians to focus on the quality of services rather than getting the right figures.
For instance, if a certain type of task consumes more time than usual, then the field service engineers might show reluctance to handle those cases. It can further create discontent in the team, which could later impact field service delivery quality and customer satisfaction.
15. Inventory Turnover Ratio
Most times it has been observed that operations managers treat inventory management as a disparate group.
Inventory is integral to field service operations. A lack of access to inventory and insufficient visibility into real-time inventory status can make things chaotic for field service technicians.
Tracking the inventory turnover rate, which signifies the number of times a company replaces its stock, could help you assess how your field service team uses the inventory items, what they use the most, and the significant efforts required to prevent pilferages and reduce expenses.
You can correlate the data with other employee productivity and performance metrics to understand overall inventory usage. It could help you plan your purchases and control your spendings.
16. Repeat Visit Rate
What causes repeat visits?
Is it the scheduling manager’s incapability to match the right person for the right job, lack of thorough knowledge about the job or something on the part of the field service technician like missing the right parts?
Not a big problem if it’s occasional. But if such instances are frequent, then you need to identify the underlying reason and address it.
It could range from adopting a different system/process for matching the techs with jobs to getting thorough knowledge about the job in advance.
You can track this metric if you are on the mission to stop all kinds of profit pilferages and simultaneously improve the efficiency level of the team.
17. Average Travel Time
A high travel time per task is a telltale sign of underlying issues in scheduling and route planning. This metric helps on a couple of fronts ranging from evaluating how effective the route planning and scheduling is, and also to gauge the motivation of techs.
Often, spending too much time on travel could frustrate the reps, waste their time, and reduce their efficiency levels. Besides, traveling is expensive and unnecessary, and unplanned traveling can be really damaging to your bottom line. The solution lies in implementing field service routing software as it directly addresses these challenges by optimizing routes and reducing unnecessary travel.
18. Average Response Time
The average reply time metric can help you if your strategic objective is to improve turnaround time, which again has greater significance in enhancing customer experience.
You can track both the collective data of the field team and individual field service technicians. By analyzing a variety of data together, you could unravel the areas that need improvement, particularly those directly affecting technician efficiency and overall service responsiveness.
19. Service Request Categorization
The activity/type level segregation of service requests provides insights into what kind of service requests are being received most and helps in identifying hiring and product refinement needs. Most field service leaders track this metric to:
- Get insight into hiring. You can determine areas where your team requires the most support.
- Plan training and skill development programs for teams.
- Manage inventory fulfillment effectively. You would know what tools could help your field service technicians to complete the tasks more efficiently.
- And sometimes, help the product team evaluate the areas where the product needs improvement.
20. Customer Profile Summary
Having account level information and its availability to various stakeholders of the process like technicians, scheduling and dispatch teams etc. is important from two perspectives:
- Insight: Thorough account-level information could provide insight into customers’ personal preferences, the basis on which you could improve your customer relations and figure out cross-selling and upselling opportunities. While this may seem more applicable for B2C businesses, B2B businesses can also benefit from it in many ways.
- Access: Historical data and specifics like what your customer disliked last time or the challenges they faced, personal preferences, demographics etc. can equip your team to manage the customers in a more effective way.
Enabling this data to techs apart from the general service logs of the past can help your team build great rapport with the customers, build greater levels of trust in the brand and of course, create new opportunities of upsell/cross-sell and increase customer lifetime value.
21. Account Activity Status
Now, this one may seem a bit obvious. Inactive accounts are likely to have a higher churn rate. Tracking account activity on a regular basis could help you identify the accounts that have high churn risk and using the insight, you can create campaigns to boost customer engagement.
Leverage these Field Service Metrics and KPIs using FieldCircle
These field service management metrics and KPIs enable you to carefully assess the why and how behind your strategies and set milestones which is a prerequisite for great planning and achieving the expected outcome. They become important even during field service engineer performance appraisal.
FieldCircle’s comprehensive and easy-to-use field service management software simplifies the process to track field service metrics and KPIs that we discussed. It helps keep a constant track of the process performance, guaranteeing sustainable productivity, which is important for overall business performance and success.
