5 Smart KPIs for Your Field Service Operation

Do your KPIs really measure your field service operation’s success? If KPIs are to make a useful contribution to business progression, they must be straightforward enough for managers to interpret and based on the overall goals of your company (or department if field service is part of a broader business).

In case you are wondering if your own KPIs have the right ingredients to highlight progress effectively, here are five examples of smart KPIs for the field service industry.

#1: First Time Fix Rate

Getting a job done right first time should always be a focus for improvement. A KPI which shows you the percentage of jobs correctly completed the first time around gives you a genuine insight into your operational success. If you can see what your first time fix rate is, you can work on raising it to improve customer retention and technician productivity.

#2: Extra Quotes/Orders by Field Agent

The objective of this KPI is to monitor the number of extra orders taken or quotations provided by field staff when they are on location with customers. With a KPI that shows you how many orders or leads your agents are obtaining, you can identify steps to raise your field agents’ selling abilities.

#3: Percentage of Billable Hours

The only time your field technicians are productive is when they are doing jobs which customers pay for. Therefore you should really include a KPI in your suite which tells you what percentage of your field employees’ hours is billable to customers. The data which feeds this KPI should also be detailed enough to drill down and identify how the non-billable hours are being used. This will enable you to focus on reducing the non-billable activities which burn the most time.

#4: Number of Work Requests

This KPI is useful in so many ways. For example, if you are in the business of maintenance and repair, breaking down this measurement by request type will show you where a more proactive approach might be taken to servicing customer equipment. By working more proactively with your customers you can provide greater satisfaction and improve retention. You are also more in control of how you schedule work, when it’s performed on a proactive basis.

#5: Number of Overtime Hours

While increasing billable time is a big plus, paying extra for field operatives working overtime is a cost any operation should be happy to reduce. That’s why it’s a good idea to have a KPI that shows which employees are racking up the most overtime. This can then be compared with billable and non-billable hours worked to focus on how to get more productive work done during standard (non-overtime) hours.

If any of these KPIs are missing from your suite of reports, it might be worth implementing them to add transparency into your operation. Remember too, that a good field service management solution, complete with mobile capability will provide a fast and effective way to capture data, store it and extract it for use in your KPI reports.

Written by Jim Hare