How to Find, Generate & Present the Best Field Service Metrics

Field service veterans like to have an intuitive grasp of how well their business is performing. They want to look at budget spreadsheets, ticket queues, and purchase orders and feel how well things are running. But modern field service operations are so complex, interconnected, and increasingly digital that making decisions on ‘feel’ alone is not good enough.

Field service businesses that want to grow need to make data-driven decisions. That requires finding, generating, and presenting solid field service metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

What exactly are metrics and KPIs? Do you need to use the same ones as your competitors? And how can you present those cold, hard figures meaningfully to executives and other non-technical stakeholders? This article answers those questions and more.

What are the Differences Between Field Service Metrics and KPIs?

Metrics are measurements of individual business operations. In field services, they could be internal operations in your office or technicians working in the field. The important thing to know is that they measure specific operations.

Some examples of field service metrics include:

First-time Fix Rate (FTFR)

First-time fix rate measures how often a field service technician completes jobs on the first visit, with no follow-up necessary. In other words, your planned allocation of time, inventory, and labor were correct, and no additional costs needed to be incurred to resolve an isolated problem. FTFR is one of the core metrics for assessing the effectiveness of field service operations. The average FTFR across the field service industry is 80 percent. That is the benchmark any new field service business can use to assess its performance.

Response time

Response time is another common, important field service metric. It is a simple but effective way to assess your readiness. Response time metrics typically measure how long it takes from the initial reporting of a problem to the work order resolution. Alternatively, some field service businesses measure the time from initial reporting to when the technician arrives on site. Reporting can trigger when a customer calls in with a problem report or when remote IoT sensors flag an issue if you have field service software capable of gathering those reports.

Key performance indicators are also quantitative measurements, but rather than measuring specific operations, they are considered measurements for the performance of business units or entire businesses. Put another way, metrics are on-the-ground, operational measurements. KPIs are strategic measurements.

Some examples of KPIs include:

Business performance

Business performance KPIs tend to focus on several financial metrics, such as costs, revenue, and growth rates—measurements that assess how your organization manages its finances.

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction KPIs measure how well your business makes its customers happy. They can help you project customer retention rates, future growth of your customer base and service contracts, and forecast labor and inventory needs on quarterly or annual cycles.

Customer satisfaction data can be quantitative but often is assessed by surveys and soliciting customer feedback. Therefore, you need a field service management platform that unifies those data streams to collect customer service metrics effectively and tie them to your KPIs.

Service efficiency

Service efficiency KPIs measure the effectiveness of your workforce. For example, first-time fix rate fits here, but so do job completion times, measuring repeat visits, and other time and resource-related metrics.

These KPIs will help determine how you deploy and train your workforce. You’ll see where you’re over and under-utilizing resources, what skills you might lack across your workforce, and help inform future hiring decisions.

Best Practices for Presenting Field Service Metrics

Generating valuable metric and KPI data is obviously important. Still, if you want to translate that data into meaningful business insights, you need to present them in a human-friendly way. Fortunately, Dynamics 365 Field Service includes many useful features for generating comprehensive and comprehensible field service metrics. All you need to do is generate them following a few best practices.

Use plenty of visuals

Raw data is called “raw” for a reason. Most people don’t want to consume it. Take your raw metric data and convert it into easy-to-digest charts, graphs, or other relevant visuals. Humans are visual creatures, and information presented visually is much more understandable, especially complex data you might need to present to executives used to seeing a 10,000-foot view of the business.

Use real-world examples

Data is also very dry when it lacks context. Tie your metric data to real-world examples and business use cases. For example, if your company-wide FTFR is 80 percent, you could explain to executives that four out of every five dispatched service calls are resolved on the first visit. Only 20 percent of dispatched calls require follow-up.

That is a real-world workflow instead of a percentage figure with a four-letter acronym—much more meaningful and understandable.

Customize metric presentations for your audience

Different stakeholders within your field service business will have different priorities and levels of technical understanding. For example, you could show your accountants, executives, and technicians the same figures, and each would have quite different takeaways. Customize the metrics you choose to present and their visuals for your audience based on their interests and the business case you need to make.

Provide context metrics

Visuals, examples, and customization all provide context, which can be just as important as the raw data you want to present. Data in isolation doesn’t mean much if you don’t situate it with the right business or financial context. For instance, if a customer satisfaction rate drops, providing context on the cause and the steps to address it can help put the metric in perspective.

Velosio Can Help You Generate Better Metrics

Field service software, like Dynamics 365 from Velosio, can help generate and present valuable metrics you can use to gauge your performance. In addition, you’ll be able to easily see and share your progress toward meeting critical KPIs.

If you’re ready to enhance your data gathering and presentation, contact Velosio about Dynamics 365 for Field Service today.