How the number of work requests KPI drives decision-making

Number of work requests refers to how much work your FSO is doing, or at least the number of requests you are receiving.

The important aspect to this KPI is how you break it down. If you do solid analysis on your number of work requests, you can get a good idea of the following:

• Where you are generating the most revenue
• How effective your marketing is relative to each type of service you can perform
• Where you are not getting much revenue
• What types of clients are more receptive to new service areas for their businesses

Number of work requests is a great realism guide for FSOs. Oftentimes, a field service company will spend a lot of money marketing one specific focus -- for example, it can fix a certain type of machine. Then, over the next 12 months, it will get very few work requests for that type of machine. Internally, because the decision-makers want to believe in the power of the marketing and the money they have spent, they might continue to believe that the marketing is working effectively.

However, if you look at this KPI, you can see it is not working effectively -- because despite the marketing efforts, no one seems to really be requesting that work.

We are not necessarily saying that you should always design your business around what customers already want or are requesting. As Henry Ford famously said: if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have said a ‘faster horse.’

What we are saying, though, is that the number of work requests allows you to glean a lot of information about how the market sees you, what clients need at that time, and where your actual revenue is coming from. When you factor in marketing effectiveness or ROI relative to incoming revenue, this is a great KPI for executive decision making. Senior leaders can really see where the business is doing well -- and where it is not -- based predominantly on what types of work the FSO is actually getting.

That is a key point to illustrate about any field service KPI. A KPI is essentially meaningless unless it has an outcome, meaning unless it is tied to decision-making in some way. If you just track KPIs and then do nothing with what you discover, why did you track the KPI in the first place? A KPI needs to lead to action to have real importance to the business. Number of work requests can easily lead to action if you commit to focus on it as important to track and analyze.

We put together an eBook on eight important real-time field service KPIs to track -- and why they are important and relevant to your business. If you’re a younger FSO or generally new to using data and analytics, this is a good eBook for you to check out. It will provide a solid framework of what to consider tracking and why. You can download it now.

Written by Julio Hartstein