A field service metric measures performance in various operational aspects of a field service company, such as job completion rates or call booking rates.
Tracking and measuring field service metrics is critical for understanding performance across your organization. Without this data, you’re flying blind. Many companies only measure metrics ad-hoc, such as periodically checking call logs to see how many calls came in over the last few months. Some field service businesses don’t measure metrics at all, and without a reliable, automated system, tracking them can be both difficult and tedious.
In our experience, the best way to measure field service metrics is to use an integrated field service management solution like ServiceTitan. This software not only tracks your field service key performance indicators (KPIs) through user-friendly dashboards but also manages other business operations, such as call booking, dispatching, and billing.
Additionally, field service management software boosts operational efficiency and saves time by eliminating the need to switch between complex spreadsheets and tools, reducing the risk of missing important information.
In this guide, we cover 19 key field service performance metrics and explain why they’re important.
Essential Field Service Metrics
Then, we explain how ServiceTitan’s field service management solution automates all this for you and can:
Note: Although field service metrics and KPIs are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a subtle difference. Service metrics are anything quantifiable and reflective of the health of a part of the business. KPIs are the metrics that you determine are most important and worth tracking day by day, often in a dashboard.
To discover how ServiceTitan’s tracking and reporting features can benefit your field service business, keep reading or book a free, personalized demo with our team.
1. Call Booking Rate
When your field service team answers incoming calls, some calls are identified as lead opportunities, and others are not. It's important to know what percentage of those qualified lead opportunities result in actual booked jobs. This is your call booking rate, and shows the effectiveness of your CSR process (their pitch, how they’re handling the calls, what they’re telling prospects) and how well individual CSRs are executing that process.
By tracking and understanding this KPI, contractors can determine how effectively their CSRs are capturing leads and booking calls. A best practice is to listen to the calls that are not booked and identify why the call was not booked.
To improve your call booking percentage, give CSRs additional training, coaching, and information to increase their ability to book more of these lead opportunities.
Call Booking Rate = Total number of lead opportunity calls ÷ Actual bookings made
2. Job Rate per Day
This is the measurement of jobs completed per day by each technician to give you a measure of technician efficiency.
Typically, it is affected by the travel time to and from jobs and how efficiently the technician works. A low job rate per day could indicate a sluggish technician or even that the wrong technician was dispatched.
Job Rate per Day = Total number of jobs ÷ Number of days
3. Average Response Time
How quickly do your techs respond to customer calls? Monitoring this important metric measures the efficiency of the call handling and the technician’s response time. It informs your customer service goals — and, in turn, helps increase the average number of closed tickets.
If your business responds to calls for emergency service, understanding your average response time can help you fit more jobs (and more revenue) into your workday.
Average Response Time = Total time to respond ÷ Number of responses
4. Mean Time to Repair
This is the average time it takes for your techs to perform onsite repairs and complete the work order, which is an important gauge of a tech’s productivity. This varies widely on a call-to-call basis, but giving your techs access to education, resources, and technology can help shorten this metric and increase tech efficiency.
Just be sure to not shortchange the time your techs spend in a customer’s home by scheduling too many calls in a day. A knowledgeable tech needs ample time to complete each job to the customer’s satisfaction and also to spot upselling opportunities.
Mean Time to Repair = Total time to repair ÷ Number of repairs
5. Mean Time to Complete Job
Mean time to complete jobs is the average time it takes your business to complete an entire job cycle — everything from the initial dispatch call to scheduling, servicing, and billing.
Understanding this field service performance metric will help you analyze your company’s workflow and see where you can improve productivity and efficiency.
Mean time to complete job = Total time spent on jobs ÷ Number of jobs
6. First-Time Fix Rate
Ideally, your techs should complete jobs in one visit without returning multiple times for the same issue or install, which would be inefficient. A high first-time fix rate means you can profit more frequently from new jobs.
To improve this metric, ensure your dispatch team assigns the right techs to the right jobs based on experience and expertise. It’s also important that techs arrive at a job with all the necessary tools and equipment to complete the work.
First-Time Fix Rate = Number of jobs not requiring a follow-up visit ÷ Total number of jobs
7. Repeat Visit Rate
Repeat visits show the number of times your tech returns to a job to finalize service within a set timeframe. A high rate of repeat visits could mean it's time to examine how jobs are dispatched and scheduled, and whether techs with the right skill set are being dispatched, or if they require more training.
Consider cutting the number of appointments technicians are assigned in one shift, so they have plenty of time to finish the job on the first visit. Also cut down on unnecessary travel time by using GPS-based dispatching. By making their routes more efficient, you’re giving techs more time to do actual work.
Repeat Visit Rate = Total number of repeat visits ÷ Total number of visits
8. Technician Utilization for Billable Hours
Technician utilization measures how many productive, billable hours your techs spend during their shifts — one of the most crucial field service monitoring metrics when it comes to tracking productivity.
Providing service to customers and making upsells count as productive time. Getting stuck in traffic or traveling back to the office to get additional tools is unproductive downtime.
If your tech utilization rate seems low, evaluate ways to improve scheduling and dispatching.
Minimize time wasted between jobs and provide an integrated, mobile platform for instant communication between dispatchers and technicians in the field.
Technician Utilization = Time spent on field service jobs (including upselling) ÷ Total amount of time worked
9. Average Travel Time
The average travel time for a technician to travel to a job site is an important field service management metric. This will gauge scheduling and dispatching tasks, measure employee performance, and indicate overall job efficiency.
Unnecessary time spent on the road or stopping to collect supplies indicates inefficient use of route planning or not sending the closest technician to a job. This can be remedied by using GPS-based dispatching software.
Average Travel Time = Total travel time ÷ Total number of service calls
10. Contract Uptime
To calculate contract uptime, figure the percentage of problem-free operation for any piece of equipment, such as an HVAC unit, that’s covered by the service level agreement (SLA).
If your company makes an unusual number of service calls for equipment covered by a service contract, it may be time to examine your installation practices, evaluate the quality of your supplier's products, or figure out how to adjust your maintenance contract terms for improved profitability.
Contract Uptime = Time service is functional ÷ Total time
11. Service Contract Attach Rate
How often do your technicians sell maintenance contracts or service agreements to customers? These maintenance agreements can provide a steady revenue stream for your business, especially during slower times of the year.
If your techs or CSRs don’t convert contracts on a regular basis, revise your service agreement offerings to appeal to more homeowners and train your team on how to best pitch the benefits of your maintenance contracts to customers.
Service Agreement Attach Rate = Number of customers with a service agreement ÷ Total number of customers
12. Average Ticket Price
This is an important metric for monitoring the profitability of service calls and whether upselling opportunities are being maximized.
If your technicians discover additional problems or sales opportunities, give them an easy way (such as ServiceTitan’s mobile app) to provide customers with detailed quotes and good-better-best options.
Providing instantaneous information will likely increase your average ticket price, as customers can conveniently accept an estimate for installing a new product or additional services on the spot.
Average Ticket Price = Total ticket revenue ÷ Total number of tickets
13. Service-to-Cash Rate
This is the time it takes for customers to pay you after a job is completed. Slow payments stifle cash flow and usually indicate inefficient back-office processes, such as inefficient or (often) nonexistent invoice follow-up processes, or even delays in sending invoices.
Speed up your service-to-cash rate by using software that lets technicians automate paperless documentation and invoicing (and indicates which invoices need following up), and take payments directly from customers.
Service-to-Cash Rate = Time taken for customer to pay for a service after job completion
14. Customer Retention Rate
Examine customer retention to determine if your company consistently grows the customer base and increases the number of repeat customers. Study those long-term and repeat customer profiles to determine the key steps to keeping customers happy and providing quality service.
Be sure a CSR follows up after every job — whether through a phone call, email, or text — to immediately address any issues, and improve the overall customer experience, and thus customer satisfaction. Train CSRs and technicians to ask customers for reviews and surveys immediately following a job, or use software that automates this for you.
Focus on improving service to reduce customer churn and increase the likelihood they’ll refer your company to others.
Customer Retention Rate = Number of customers at the end of a period ÷ Total number of customers
15. Customer Satisfaction Rate
Customer satisfaction is a critical goal for service businesses. It can be difficult to measure quantitatively, but customer ratings are one way of determining how happy your customers are, while collecting feedback brings more detailed and actionable insights.
Use software that automates review requests after every job. Respond quickly to positive and negative reviews, and match up reviews with employees and jobs so you can take the appropriate action. For example, some techs or employees may need additional coaching.
Customer Satisfaction Rate = Star rating out of 5 + qualitative feedback
16. Customer Acquisition Cost
In the world of marketing, customer acquisition cost equals your ad spend divided by the number of booked jobs as a result of that spend, over a certain period of time. It’s important to keep track of this to monitor profitability.
Aim for the lowest CAC possible, adjusting or abandoning any marketing campaigns with an excessively high CAC. Utilize targeted email marketing to get your message to the right customers at the right time, at a lower cost per acquisition than most marketing methods.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = Total costs of acquiring new customers (such as ad spend) ÷ Number of booked jobs in a given period
17. Revenue per Lead
To find your bottom line, look no further than revenue per lead. This is the total volume of sales divided by the total number of leads, including canceled leads. As you look at field service performance metrics, it’s important to examine the percentage of closed leads. If your company closes only a small percentage of total leads, it’s time to re-examine key business practices.
For Weldon Long, President of Wright Total Indoor Comfort, revenue per lead provides a key metric. As Long told Contracting Business: “That’s the best metric we’ve found.”
Revenue per Lead = Total volume of sales ÷ Total number of leads
18. Job Profitability
This metric is an important one to consider alongside the average ticket price to calculate the profitability of each job. Examining this metric closely means you can identify whether you need to increase (or decrease) prices and in which areas.
Profitability is a function of many things, including pricing (we recommend flat-rate pricing over hourly, as explained here), technician pay, jobs per day, and more.
Job Profitability = Revenue − Costs
19. Business Growth Rate
All of these critical metrics help you measure your company’s KPIs. Closely tracking field service performance metrics and KPIs will accelerate company growth, while also revealing areas where your teams need improvement to achieve profitability goals.
While revenue certainly factors into growth, it’s important to consider all aspects of the business and look at a variety of field service performance metrics. Analyzing your company’s data in real-time allows you to accurately gauge everyone’s performance and make measured changes to grow successfully.
Learn more about KPIs in the ServiceTitan Playbook and download our free KPI Guide here.
The #1 newsletter for the trades.
How to Track & Improve Your Field Service Metrics
Whichever field service metrics you choose to focus on, collecting and monitoring them will give you a clear picture of your business efficiency and indicate how you can optimize performance.
Unfortunately, as mentioned above, many field service businesses don’t have processes in place to consistently track enough metrics or, in some cases, any at all. This leads to a business that can go off-track operationally without owners or management being aware or knowing early enough to fix problems in time.
Tracking these metrics sporadically is difficult. While it’s technically possible to look at service records and figure out a first-time fix rate, it is tedious and could even be impossible if those metrics aren’t intentionally tracked in the first place.
As a result, the most reliable way to track these metrics is with software that automates the entire process. ServiceTitan ensures that all the metrics we’ve discussed in this post are tracked from the beginning so you don’t have to worry about gathering and analyzing incomplete pieces of information after the fact.
ServiceTitan software automatically captures and crunches all the numbers for you and presents the metrics in easily digestible dashboards, which you can use to improve your business performance and increase profitability.
Here’s an overview of how our software helps you monitor and improve on all the field service metrics we’ve discussed.
How ServiceTitan Helps Track Field Service Metrics
ServiceTitan’s dynamic dashboard lets you filter dozens of KPIs and metrics so you can track how your business is performing. Because you can monitor every marketing campaign, job, technician, and CSR, in real-time, you gain deep insights into what’s working and what’s not.
Example KPIs include:
First-fix response times
Number of calls per day per technician
Number of memberships that are expired/canceled/renewed
Number of leads generated by a Google Ads campaign
Number of jobs booked per CSR/technician
Revenue generated from each advertising source
And more
You can track revenue and trends by sorting data by date range or type of business and then drill down further into service requests, types of service, response times, technician, etc., to see exactly what’s driving revenue.
For example, if you own a plumbing business, you could track how many new heat pumps your company has installed in the last quarter using some of the field service metrics we’ve discussed in this article. Then you could filter the data to see what the average spend was, how many of those customers have taken up service agreements, where those customers are located, which technicians carried out the work, and the average installation time. This information can flag the customers who should be included in a direct mail campaign to encourage them to book a service or take out a membership agreement with you.
This granular information would show you where you should be focusing your efforts to drive further revenue.
Note: You can use our software's metric, the Titan Score, to determine if you’re fully utilizing ServiceTitan's capabilities. Available on your ServiceTitan account dashboard, the Titan Score aggregates performance metrics into seven business practices. Data shows that a higher Titan Score, indicating greater adoption of the software's features, correlates with significantly higher revenue.
Track Technician & CSR Performance
You can track technician and CSR activity using ServiceTitan’s scorecards.
Technician scorecards give business owners real-time updates on generated revenue and memberships sold for each technician. The CSR scorecard allows you to review incoming calls, conversions, and other CSR metrics when customers call your business.
Again, viewing the data at this level of detail gives you valuable insights so you can provide coaching, if needed, to keep your team agile and productive.
Execute and Track Marketing Performance
We discussed the customer acquisition cost metric above. With ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, you can attract leads with hyper-targeted marketing campaigns (such as email, direct mail, and Google Ads) and monitor your marketing efforts to see what’s working and what isn’t.
The ServiceTitan Marketing Scorecard allows you to track your ad campaigns and monitor how many calls — and how much revenue — each campaign has generated. You can drill down into the type of jobs booked as a result of a specific campaign.
The green highlighted areas of our Heat Map symbolize areas where you’ve generated the most revenue. This way, you know where to spend your ad dollars to see the biggest return. You can also use Service Titan’s heat map to view job locations. This helps you see which job locations are growth areas for your business, and which are not so you can adjust your marketing activities accordingly.
You can read more about executing marketing campaigns with ServiceTitan in these posts:
How ServiceTitan Helps Improve Performance & Increase Profitability
ServiceTitan’s field service management software streamlines your entire field service operations from call booking to billing by smoothing out inefficiencies and helping employee productivity.
Here’s a summary of the key features and how they help improve some of the specific field service metrics we’ve covered in this post:
Close More Jobs with Efficient Call Booking
Improve your call booking rate by using ServiceTitan’s call booking software, which speeds up the entire call booking process and increases customer satisfaction by:
Automatically populating customer information when the call comes in so your CSRs can greet customers by name.
Offering drop-down menus so that all the necessary information is collected and no opportunities are lost (such as closing an open estimate).
Providing property information such as age and size so that more opportunities can be spotted.
Recording calls so training can be given for calls that don’t convert.
Optimize Service Delivery with Smart Scheduling & Dispatching
We’ve mentioned how smart scheduling and dispatching software can help with a number of metrics, for example, job rate per day, average response time, tech utilization, and more.
ServiceTitan’s scheduling and dispatching software helps improve these important metrics by.offering:
Intelligent schedule optimization that helps your dispatcher keep your techs flexible all day by adapting to traffic issues, appointment changes, and any other curve balls.
Automated job confirmations by text so that customers can conveniently confirm their appointments and their responses flow directly into your dispatch board.
Route optimization that tracks technicians, helps locate the most efficient routes, and sends the right tech to the right job.
Technicians can access all of this information efficiently and directly via our mobile app, which we’ll discuss next.
Keep Your Field Service Technicians Agile with ServiceTitan Mobile
The ServiceTitan mobile app replaces a wide range of paper-based processes — invoices, estimates, memberships, contracts, etc. — and can be accessed by techs from any device.
With ServiceTitan Mobile, techs can do the following when they are out on service calls:
Access work order and customer information in real-time so they are always prepared for each job.
Build instant digital estimates with accurate pricing and product information that customers can approve on the spot.
Offer customers financing options so that estimates can be confirmed quickly.
Maximize upselling opportunities such as maintenance contracts that bring in more revenue.
Create invoices and take payments directly from customers so you get paid faster.
And more.
Making these processes more efficient and accessible helps service companies improve metrics such as service contract attach rate, service-to-cash rate, and tech utilization.
Boost Customer Metrics by Delivering Awesome Customer Service
ServiceTitan’s software helps you monitor your customer satisfaction rate by automatically sending a survey request to customers after a job has been completed. This makes it easy for customers to share their experience on an online review site (Google, Yelp, etc) while it’s still fresh in their minds.
ServiceTitan also offers a reputation management tool that automates sending review requests to customers, lets you reply to reviews, and provides insight into how specific technicians are performing. Responding swiftly to reviews (good and bad) increases your chances of improving your customer retention rate.
Learn more about how to ask customers for reviews to improve your online rankings.
Track & Improve Your Field Service Metrics with ServiceTitan
We’ve discussed the importance of tracking 19 specific field service metrics in this article. The ones you choose to focus on will depend on your individual business, but it is crucial that you have a reliable system to track them intentionally.
Whichever metrics you monitor, using field service management software like ServiceTitan to track your field service KPIs and manage all your other business operations helps you make data-driven decisions that boost business performance and increase profitability.
To see how ServiceTitan can help you set up and track field service metrics for your field service business and streamline your operations to increase revenue, sign up for a free demo.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
