What are Key Performance Indicators and how can they help your field service business?

KPIs

Let’s jump straight in. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a set of measures, figures or metrics that weigh up and quantify the goals of an individual, department, or organisation. What they are specifically, ultimately that is for you to decide! What measures are important to you? KPIs are a very useful measure of your business outside of its financial performance and can be very insightful for Field Service Businesses.

We’re going to give you five specific examples in this article, but let’s start with some quick ones. In the marketing world – perhaps you want to create a KPI based on your social media performance. So, your number of Facebook “likes” could be a KPI that you might want to track over time, for example. Likewise, you may want to measure performance by looking at customer satisfaction so the results of customer satisfaction could be a useful KPI for you to chart over time. Basically – if you set out with the goal to achieve “X” but you achieve “Y” instead, then you have failed in achieving your original KPI! Watching how these measures perform over time will mean that you get a great sense of how your business is improving or not, by looking at the areas that you are performing or underperforming in.

Key Performance Indicators are how you decide to measure yourself. How are you performing in the areas that matter most?

If you are an organisation that operates in field service management, your KPIs are there to really help you improve the overall field service experience. KPIs can be designed for different aims, depending on the productivity and efficiency they aim to deliver. 


Examples for Field Service Businesses

In the field, your important KPIs should ideally revolve around three things – people, process, and experience. Let’s take a look at 5 examples fit for the field service world, to really get you started:

Example: The “First-Time” Rate

The “first-time” rate refers to the percentage of tasks resolved in the first visit itself. This is a really important measure to track, as it directly affects cost and performance. If a field technician has to make more than one visit to service one task, this means there could be one of many possible things wrong – you’ll need to figure that bit out. Recurring visits could be due to lack of inventory, not knowing the customer history, perhaps even a lack of skill, which could all lead to multiple field visits. This is a good example of a rather broad but very, very important measure. If you can figure out ways to keep your “first-time” rate low – you’re on the right path!

Example: The Service Rate

When Domino’s Pizza say that they will deliver a pizza within 30 minutes of ordering or the customer will get their money back, they are setting a standard of service that they themselves will need to live up to.

Perhaps you have a similar Service Level Agreement with your customers? This could be a really easy place to find your next KPI. These sorts of things can have very big impacts on your customer satisfaction levels so it may very well be worth keeping track of how often you live up to your own standard or indeed fall short of them.

Example: The Customer Satisfaction Score

This is a fairly straight-forward one. You know the drill: if your customers are happy with your service – they’ll stick around. This basic fact reflects the importance of tracking and working to improve your Customer Satisfaction Score.

There are lots of ways to track this. Perhaps you want to look closely at repeat customers. How many repeat customers are you getting per year? Track it! Perhaps you want to be a bit more detailed and look at the degree to which people are satisfied. Are they on the fence about you, or are they fully blown brand ambassadors for your business? We’ll be taking a closer look at this soon – but what you need is the legendary Net Promoter Score.

Example: Travel Efficiency

This might be a really big one for teams that have a fleet of vehicles heading out across a town or city, with engineers travelling to their work sites every day. Optimising travel is a hugely important part of field service businesses. Of course you need drivers that know where they are going and you need to know where they are – this is also about making sure that your scheduling and route management is on point. Apps like Workever can really help with that!

If you get it wrong, you’re wasting fuel, time and money. Get it right and you’ve got happy customers and schedules being stuck to! How could your business track this? Try keeping a log of when any members of your field team arrive late to a job. Do you notice any patterns? An example of an aim for your business might be to get your Travel Efficiency KPI to be as low as possible, as in never late – or as high as possible, as in always on time!

Example: Field Performance Rate

Field teams carry a huge responsibility of actually delivering the service experience that you promise to your customer. The performance of these field team members needs to be constantly improvised for better service. But more to the point – it is absolutely vital to ensure that your field technicians or engineers are being productive in the field.

There are several ways in which you can leverage technology to empower your field force. Real-time information helps to make decisions on the fly, avoiding delays, and back and forth communication. A mobile app provides a one-stop solution for your field force to access all the important customer information and continues working in offline mode as well. With cloud and analytics capabilities in your Field service management app, you can significantly enhance the performance of this critical KPI.


Ready to jump into the world of KPIs?

So there we have it. Hopefully now you have a little more insight into what KPIs are and how they can help you monitor and improve your field service business’ performance over time. Try to think about what your specific business needs are. If you think that you just need more business – then perhaps some marketing based KPIs can help focus your eye on that part of your business. Perhaps you have all the work you need but you feel like you’re wasting time. Well, pick a KPI that fits and zero in on it. Don’t be afraid to get in touch and tell us about how your business has benefitted from KPIs, we’d love to hear it!

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