For any field service organization to stay competitive and in front of their competition, they must have a solid understanding of how their technicians are performing in the field, and in which areas their service delivery could be improved. Field service is a balance between costs and efficiency, with the end goal of trying to keep customers satisfied.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide the visibility field service administrators need to see if their organization is running as efficiently as possible. And with business intelligence as part of a field service management software, visibility into those KPIs is made much easier, with customizable reports and dashboards to display the information that is the meaningful to the organization.
And the most important part of the business intelligence module is the real-time information populating it, which comes straight from the field. Managers can’t make informed business decisions if they are looking at data that is weeks old, nor can they have an up to date view of their KPIs without the latest information coming from the field on any day. So, having a field service software that allows for real-time data collection and analysis will go a long way to measuring the success of the organization.
What metrics are field service organizations monitoring in their KPIs? Some of the most common KPI reports tied to exceptional customer service and business efficiency include:
How Productive Are Your Technicians?
Analyzing the number of jobs your technicians complete in a day is a great metric when trying to schedule future jobs and optimize the efficiency of your workforce. Field service management software can analyze the time it takes for each technician to complete their service calls, which tasks take them longer to complete, and which technicians are the fastest. That way, when dispatchers are scheduling, they know who the top performing technicians are and who can handle extra calls if needed.
Do You Have High First-Time Fix Rates?
First-time fix rates are important metrics to know from a technician-level all the way through to the entire service department. Improving your organizations’ first-time fix rate will avoid costly downtime and keep customers satisfied with fast resolutions to their problems. It’s one of the main KPIs that field service software tracks and offers visibility into how well your workforce is performing in the field.
Are You Utilizing Your Workforce Properly?
Field service management software can help service managers figure out how to better utilize their service technicians and see where they can make improvements. For this, an important KPI to track is travel time, or how long it takes technicians to get to a job site. You may find the technician is far away from all his jobs and all jobs are spaced far apart, or that technicians need better routing tools to get them to the site faster. This can all be fixed by aligning schedules to geographic locations.
Are You In Compliance With Your Service Agreements?
A KPI can be built in the business intelligence module to monitor the effectiveness and compliance of a contract, whether that be for warranty reasons or preventative maintenance. These KPIs can alert service managers when a warranty is leaking revenue and requiring more repairs than needed. Contracts can be managed to trigger a preventative maintenance call when equipment is being used too often to keep it in line with the agreement signed.
Be More Successful With Field Service Management Software
Measuring KPIs can be an easy way to ensure your organization’s success, but you need the tools offered in a field service management software in order to properly analyze the data and turn it into reports and dashboards that can allow you to make real-time decisions. Without it, your service department is using old data and isn’t making decisions with the most up to date information. Thus, they’re always reacting to problems, as opposed to making changes before they escalate and spoiling a customer’s experience.