Field service metrics have a special place in the field service industry. They can determine the kind of service you deliver to your customers by tracking first-time fix rates, response times and repair costs. Those are numbers that go directly to the heart of the customer experience and can drastically change your service delivery methods.
Field service management software metrics
What metrics can do for your business will be based entirely on the field service analytics software you are using, if any at all. If you’re still stuck in the manual processing ways and using spreadsheets, you’re not getting the full breakdowns of metrics you need. With many different metrics to apply to your business, that’s plenty of calculation that must be done with large mountains of data. It’s why field service management software with Business Intelligence is key to metrics successfully impacting your business.
Metrics, however, are more than just first-time fix rates and profit margins. For starters, some are the lifeblood of your business, measuring your success over periods of time. Others go directly to the heart of your customer’s experience with your service delivery. There are many critical field service metrics to understand that impact your customers, and in turn, impacts directly to your revenue.
1. Customer Acquisition Cost
One of the most important metrics is the Customer Acquisition Cost, which will be a benchmark for the average cost to bring on a new customer. For field service organizations with steady history, this is important to monitor because you’ll know the costs of taking on installation projects or signing new preventative maintenance contracts. How much are you spending on marketing your services, sending out sales people from quotes and finally, doing the service? If the acquisition costs are high, it’s eating into your revenue.
But it’s also a metric where you can adjust your business to impact revenue. If you know how much it costs to do projects and contracts, you can find ways to reduce costs. Getting new customers is very important to the success and growth of a field service organization. But it can’t eat up your profits or it’s not worth taking them on. Find out what your acquisition costs are, and you’ll find the services you provide that return the largest profits.
2. Customer Attrition
Attrition is especially important in field service metrics when talking about preventative maintenance contracts and service level agreements. Attrition provides insight into your revenue stream and gives you a clear understanding of what your service department is offering your customers. Attrition is often known as churn and considers what reasons your customers stop paying for your service and go somewhere else. Are you delivering amazing service to your customers, or is there a problem in your delivery?
It’s here where you can put things like first-time fix rates, response times and average fix times to work, telling you the story of work for that customer and figure out why they are leaving you. Perhaps it’s as simple as changing the technician they normally have or offering faster response times. It’s a valuable metric to cover in order to ensure you understand the reasons customers leave. You can then set up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor other contracts to ensure your standards don’t slip below levels that would cause customers to leave.
3. Customer Retention
From losing customers, let’s turn to keeping customers. Retention rates are one of the top field service metrics your field service management software can track because these are the customers that are coming back. You can’t impact your revenue without having customers continuously resign contracts or hire you for installation projects. This metric goes to the heart of the customer experience, as satisfied customers with your field service work will obviously continue calling you when they need repairs. It’s the truest opinion of what your brand is doing well.
Retention, from a revenue standpoint, also costs less, as new customers require acquisition costs, where as retention generally comes in the form of resigning a contract with the same information. It’s said that a new customer costs six- to seven-times more than retaining an older customer. Meanwhile, existing customers are already part of your revenue stream. If you’re going to spend the money to get new customers, you want to lock down the ones you already have. A mix of retention is acquisition is how you successfully grow your business. It means you’re providing the right service to your customers and can feel confident about offering that level of service to others.
4. Lifetime Value of Customers & Contracts
Do you know how valuable each customer is to you? Do you know how valuable new customers are to you? How about your preventative maintenance contracts, what is their value? Lifetime value is another field service metric that you should be tracking in your field service management software, as it tells you your monthly revenue. With this metric, you are taking the value of your contracts and projects, taking out expenses, and getting back a clear idea how much your field service is investing in active work.
Lifetime value is how you should be making decisions on whether to perform service, sign contracts or agree to projects. Is it going to be worth your technicians time to take on these jobs where expenses might be higher and other service could be disrupted? It’s a business choice, but your priorities are to offer the best service possible and improve your revenue. Knowing what the lifetime value of your work is will be the difference in agreeing to field service work. Perhaps the installation project doesn’t see high returns, but preventative maintenance contract has plenty of revenue. So you take on the project to get the long-term contract. By knowing what each part of your businesses’ lifetime value is, you can make those types of decisions that will drastically affect your business.
Impact Your Revenue with Field Service Software
Field service metrics are not something to brush aside. They can have a dynamic impact on your business and the revenue you generate. They give you a detailed look at the success and failures of your business, where your revenue is coming from and how much it costs to take on new customers. If you’re looking to grow your field service organization, start tracking these metrics using your field service management software’s business intelligence module. Take the information you are getting from the field and let your field service analytics software turn the data into useful information automatically. Don’t spend time manually processing, get it to your dashboards, or build customized reports, and know more about your business today.