Field Service Metrics: A Moving Target

If you ask a field service business leader to list the most important metrics for his/her business, the list would include the likes of:

• Customer satisfaction
• Service margins – business profitability
• Response time or mean time to repair
• First-time fix

Depending on whom you ask, the order of the metrics tends to change. That said, for the most part, these metrics are consistently near the top of the field service leaders watch-list.  In covering the field service world over the previous 12 years, we’ve made some observations in measurement areas that are becoming more and more relevant. We’ve highlighted a few below:

1. Success at the Customer Level. First came the operational metrics such as time to response and first-time fix. Then came the business success metrics such as revenue and margins. We finally see a greater emphasis from field service organizations on measuring success at the customer level. This doesn't just mean the measurement of customer satisfaction, but also a more rigorous analysis of metrics such as Net Promoter Score (transactional), Retention, Customer Effort Score, and Ease of Doing Business. Leading organizations are beginning to evaluate what a customer sees as a successful field service visit and are then measuring their success on the ability to deliver that to the customer on a consistent basis.