12 Field Service Metrics You Must Measure
Metrics paves the way for investigations. For any service manager, the race to complete the investigation and resolve the issue is against the customers’ tolerance levels to a number of service resolution imperatives, mainly time and quality.
Quicker they are in completing the investigation, the higher is their chance to make the customers happy, reduce operational cost, and maximize team productivity.
The findings of the investigations are also relevant in the context to improve the existing processes and to make a strong case for the company, product, or service. Since metrics lead the investigations, it is important to use the right metrics to guide through the crucial discoveries and breakthroughs.
Enlisted below are 12 field service metrics that are useful in such contexts, enabling the service managers to get actionable insight into team and business performance.
- Service Request Volume
Service request (SR) volume is the sum of customer support conversations you have with your customers. Tracking SR volume provides a 360 degree view of the workload for your service team. You can track SR volume trends on a regular basis, spot patterns to manage workload for the team, and identify and act on early warning signs in the process.
Any unusual increase or decrease in service request volume should raise your concern. If the patterns are identified on time, you would have the opportunity to take the right action in the right time and thus mitigate the risks of a large backlog and in turn unhappy customers.
- Service Request By Time Period
You can break down the service request volume by time period. It will help you assess the number of cases you usually receive in a week or month.
You can determine a number that your field service team can use as a baseline. This baseline number would serve as a metric for them. A sudden spike in numbers could reflect an inconsistency in the processes, which you must find and fix.
The metric is also useful in understanding when most of your customers submit a service request. Based on the insight, you could plan your recruitments or restructure your processes.
- Service Request Backlog
Backlog in the service desk tickets could be easily determined by the number of open service requests in any given time frame. It reflects the overall size of your backlog. Tracking this field service metric could help you identify the efficiency levels of your service team in resolving the issue within a certain response time.
There are several dependencies in the operations to complete a service request. An increase in the backlog indicates an underlying problem, which you can identify by correlating the data with other metrics and performing a series of what-if and root cause analysis.
- Inflow and Outflow of Cases
Keeping a track of inflow and outflow of cases gives you a profound idea of work done by your service team in a specific period of time. You can set daily or weekly targets or plan the day of an individual or team with more accuracy.
Tracking inflow and outflow cases as a part of your daily activity will prevent creating a large backlog of the cases. You could actually see when the cases have reached at an alarming level, and take immediate action, be it hiring a new rep or improving the efficiency levels of the team through effective planning of the day.
- Service Request and Activity Type
If your support team receives a certain type of service request more often, then it clearly indicates an underlying issue either in the service delivery process or in the product/service itself.
Tracking the service request type and tasks associated with it performed by the service team can help you uncover areas where your business needs most attention.
This metric becomes more critical to your business if your business is field-service focused. As based on the type of service request, you can plan on increasing the mobile workforce with relevant skills so that you can effectively resolve the issues.
- Average First Response Time (FRT)
First response time could be treated as an assurance to customers that their complaints have reached the right ears and the issues will be resolved. A Statista report reveals that 20% of customers expect instant response to a service request on social media.
Tracking average first response time individually and of the team is helpful in analyzing areas of improvements to maximize customer satisfaction levels.
Your first response message should clearly indicate the team’s capability to resolve the issue, as inaccurate estimates to service resolution could create false hope, which could negatively impact the customer satisfaction levels. Besides, it should not create undue pressure on the team.
- Average Reply Time
Reducing average reply time for a service request is a goal of every service-focused company. As decreased response time impacts the overall customer experience, companies make great efforts to ensure speedy response and create a positive perception of their service.
Tracking average reply time will help you identify the obstacles in the ticket lifecycle. Any spike in average reply time, whether in an individual employee’s record or of overall’s team could be an indicator of a possible strain on the customer relationship.
- First Contact Resolution
The metric is an indicator of the complexity of the issues faced by the customers. See, if the first contact is able to resolve most of the issues then not only does it save a lot of time and is less expensive, but it also improves customer experience.
Secondly, if most of your cases require second or third contact (depending on your industry type, the first contact is the person who is accountable to resolve the issue), then you need to focus on providing training and development activities of the first contact.
- Average Travel Time
Average travel time indicates how much time a field service technician spends on traveling. Too much time in travel is expensive for business. Field service managers can track the data to check whether it is an individual problem or the issue with the entire team. If the whole field service team’s average travel time is high, companies need to take adequate measures to reduce the time, as it can burn a large hole in the pocket.
- Average Time to Resolution
Average resolution time unveils two aspects of the service process; the first is customer wait times and the second is the efficiency of the customer service team. Average time to resolution is usually measured by days or business hours taken to resolve the customer issues.
Time to resolution is directly related to your service workflow. Every company wants to have a shorter service cycle for maximum client satisfaction. In any given cycle time, if the service team is not able resolve the issue within a given time frame, it indicates poor efficiency.
While average time to resolution is a clear indicator of individual performance, it can be used along with other metrics to understand the time consumed in the service delivery process in an attempt to reduce overall service resolution time.
- First Time Fix Rate
High first time fix rate is the goal of every field service management company. Not only does it indicate the quality of service delivery, high first time fix rate also indicates scheduling accuracy levels within the organization. Overall, it indicates that field teams work in a well-coordinated manner and they have relevant information in hand to resolve the customers’ issue in the first attempt.
- Customer Satisfaction Score
This metric helps you assess customer experience (CX) after the service is provided. It is important to ask the right questions from customers to measure the satisfaction level correctly.
A question that is commonly framed to track the customer satisfaction level post service delivery is: how satisfied you are with the services? You can objective options on a 5-point scale from “very satisfied” to “very unsatisfied.”
Frame questions that provide the aspect of the service quality or customer experience you want to look into while simultaneously ensuring that it is easy to understand and answer.
The Next Step
For any metric to lead you to the right direction should have a clear objective. Secondly, it must be time bound. Before you begin setting the metric, make a list of information you need to grow your business, enhance employee productivity, and increase customer satisfaction levels. And then, based on those requirements, set time-bound, measurable metrics which every member of your customer-service team could follow.
About Author
Avee Mittal is the Product Manager at FieldCircle. He manages all aspects of FieldCircle to bring a unique and all-in-one technology solution for field service organizations. Avee is also extremely active in the blogging community, writing articles and blogs to promote next-generation technology in the service sector.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avee/