Are your field services operating successfully? Do you have data to substantiate your answer to that question?
Data has always been crucial to business success, but until recently digging into the details of your organization was either time consuming, costly or both. Fortunately, modern solutions allow business leaders easy access to metrics and analytics that provide unparalleled insights into their business.
If you are not using metrics and analytics to improve your business, you may be unaware of things that are happening (or not happening) in the field. To discover your company's real potential and use it fully, you need to constantly measure performance. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are metrics that allow business leaders to track performance and assess progress. Once you're able to track your field operations efficiently, you’ll be better positioned to understand how to make the necessary improvements to meet your strategic goals.
KPIs help you:
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Identify areas for improvement
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Enhance the productivity of employees
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Understand customer behaviours
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Provide better service
KPIs cover everything from scheduling to service quality. But measuring KPIs is a balancing act. Measuring too many will leave you drowning in data whereas measuring too few (or focusing on the wrong ones) may cause you to miss important issues.
Although each company's requirements are slightly different, there are specific KPIs for field service organisations that have proven to be consistently valuable. This article will give you an insight into the most commonly measured metrics and how to get maximum benefit from them.
Jobs completed in a day/week/month
KPIs are crucial not only for managers but also field workers. Easily monitoring reliable data creates transparency and helps individuals receive the recognition they deserve.
Knowing the number of tasks completed by a team or individual in a given range may seem like a simple metric, but it is of great importance. Jobs that take longer than average to complete can indicate workflow disruptions, lack of technology or low productivity.
Closure at the first time rate
Another important metric to measure is how many jobs are completed at the first time of asking. It might be an error that was fixed, a lead converted to a customer at first contact or an audit completed on a first visit. The importance of this measurement is to understand the barriers to completing tasks in the shortest possible time. Low first-time completion rate of tasks can negatively affect customer relationships and might indicate ineffective use of the workforce.
Utilization
Utilization provides essential insights into the productivity of your field technicians.This metric shows you what proportion of the day field service workers are engaged in active service work.
Activities that have the most impact on the percentage of productive utilization are:
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Travelling between jobs
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Returning to the warehouse to restock
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Paperwork
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Trying to understand unclear information
You can often increase active work time by making simple changes. These might include improving your scheduling and dispatching or ensuring field workers have all the equipment they need.
You may also consider using field service management software to shorten manual and time-consuming internal processes. Digitizing all your field service processes, avoids the need to deal with papers and eradicates the associated misunderstandings that brings.
Customer satisfaction
Customer metrics are most closely related to measuring the service quality, but can also be used to take a customers’ eye view of your business. This can give you a new perspective and fresh insights into your organisation as a whole.
Measuring customer satisfaction with short surveys or other methods helps you understand how effective customer interactions are.
Thus, you can determine what the customers value most when they contact your company, or perhaps an individual employee, and focus your development on this area.
Satisfied customers are more likely to use your service again and are easier to convert into loyal customers.
If your customer satisfaction is low, the reason may be that field workers are late for visits or that it takes too long to resolve the problem. When you combine this with other metrics, it will be easier to find the source of the issue.
Customer retention
Acquiring new customers is always more expensive than retaining existing customers due to the resources, time, and effort involved. Building a solid customer base will benefit you financially and help you build a strong reputation. You can form a loyal customer base by ensuring excellent quality of service and effective communication at all times.
If you are a large-scale business consisting of many units, you can use different metrics such as service scoring and risk distribution to track each aspect. You can increase and customize your KPIs by industry and service type.
Once you've decided the field service KPIs that are most important to your organization, you will begin to see what your organization's strengths are and which areas are opportunities for improvement.
Field service management software will help you keep track of all this data and view the measurements will make your work much more manageable.
Contact us to find out how you can improve your business, retain more customers and boost ROI by digitizing field service management with Lena Field.
