One of the biggest challenges for a mobile workforce is keeping track of where, when, and how well your mobile workers are providing service. But choosing the right KPIs can make all the difference.
“Workforce visibility,” a.k.a. a clear view of the makeup and daily activities of your workforce, is a key part of tracking and improving mobile workforce performance. True workforce visibility includes historical data like employee skills, experience, and tenure, as well as real-time data on employee locations, capacity, and work in progress.
When you understand the makeup of your workforce, as well as where they are throughout the day, you can take steps to make things easier for your employees and better for your customers—even when you’re busy managing multiple, complex projects.
Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) you should track to improve your own workforce visibility:
Travel KPIs
Response time: Certain field service operations, particularly repair services for large equipment, depend on swift response times for last-minute appointments. Whether you’re repairing refrigerators, HVAC systems, plumbing systems, industrial items, or other equipment, it’s important to measure how long it takes from the initial call to the technician’s arrival.
Travel time and distance: Every minute your workers spend on the road costs money: fuel costs, wear and tear or vehicles, depreciation, and time spent away from the job site. Be sure to measure average travel time and average travel distance for each member of your mobile workforce. Also keep track of fuel costs, as well as estimated wear and tear/depreciation, to get the full picture of travel costs to your organization. Measuring travel time and distance will also help you spot outliers—and therefore, opportunities to be more efficient. If certain employees are spending more time on the road than others, now you have the data to dig deeper and identify what’s causing them to travel further or spend too long in the car.
On-time arrivals: Today’s field service landscape is highly competitive, and customers know they don’t have to settle for a 4-hour service window. Field service providers should strive to provide precise appointment times, not “estimated service windows.” The margin of error is much larger for a precise appointment time than for a long service window, which means you must diligently track how well you meet these appointment times. Track your percentage of on-time arrivals to see if you are meeting your targets and identify variables that are affecting your arrival times.
Service KPIs
Customer satisfaction: When your service is delivered in customers’ homes, offices, and other personal spaces, their satisfaction is key to your success. You can use on-site surveys, follow-up emails, phone calls, or even chatbots to gauge how satisfied customers are; if possible, improve your response rates by giving customers several different ways to provide feedback. You can collect even more valuable data by gauging customer satisfaction at different points of the process, including before and after service, to identify where your strengths and weaknesses are throughout the customer journey.
Length of appointment or service: Whether it’s the time it takes to repair a piece of equipment or provide treatment to a patient, the length of time it takes to deliver service is a crucial performance indicator. Track the time each worker spends at the job site to identify potential training needs, unique client situations that lead to longer appointments, or product serviceability issues that may affect the same type of equipment at other job sites.
Scheduling KPIs
Time to schedule: If your work is scheduled out in advance, time to schedule is an important metric. When customers’ appointments are booked faster, customers are more pleased with your service and mobile workers know what to expect in their day-to-day work. Monitor time-to-schedule as a KPI and see if you can book appointments faster or spot variance in scheduling processes among administrative staff.
Overtime: Track the overtime hours being logged to spot trends in workforce performance and productivity. Make sure to account for any business priorities that led to increased overtime, such as a sales push, bigger workload, or expanded territory. The results may lead you to hire additional team members, spread out the work more evenly, or proactively prevent burnout.
Mobile Workforce Performance KPIs
Job completion rate: Follow-up visits and rework quickly drain time and resources from a mobile workforce. Completing jobs on the first try means higher customer satisfaction, more efficient field service work, and happier employees. Track how many jobs your mobile workers are completing per day, per week, and per month to start, but also track how many jobs mobile workers are completing in a given time frame compared to others. Are there certain mobile workers who are completing fewer jobs than others? Is there a different job role, travel issue, knowledge requirement, or another factor that’s causing these jobs to move slower? Analyze your data to see how you can replicate the speedy resolutions and cut down on the slower ones.
Utilization: How much time is the mobile worker spending on actual service delivery vs. travel vs. administrative tasks (filling out paperwork, talking with teammates or managers, attending meetings, etc.)? Is the mobile worker being used to their fullest potential, or are they sitting around waiting for new jobs to come in? Employee utilization is typically calculated by dividing billable hours by the available hours; in other words, if a home healthcare nurse bills 20 hours of client work in a 40-hour work week, the utilization rate is 50%. This is a key metric for mobile workforces, but it’s important to not stop there: a great mobile workforce management system should help you optimize for employee utilization, but also customer retention, employee retention, cost reduction, and other business priorities.
Service level agreement compliance: Especially for field service companies, service level agreements (SLAs) are crucial to consistent, high-quality service. Keep track of how often you’re reaching (or not reaching) your SLAs so you can take corrective action before it affects customer satisfaction and/or revenue.
Using Your KPIs for Success
Your KPIs are only as valuable as the business goals behind them. Make sure the data you track is consistent with your organization’s priorities so you can get true value from your KPIs. For example:
- If your goal is customer retention, prioritize KPIs related to the customer experience: customer satisfaction scores, response time, job completion rate, and on-time arrivals.
- If your goal is employee utilization, prioritize KPIs related to how your mobile workers perform in the field: number of appointments handled per day, average time per appointment, job completion rate, and other appointment metrics.
- If your goal is cost reduction, prioritize KPIs that affect your overhead costs: travel time and distance, appointment length, overtime,
Tracking your progress over time depends on establishing a strong benchmark for your KPIs. Before you start tracking KPIs, determine a fixed goal that you will compare each metric to, or identify a prior period you will compare data points to for a long-term trend line.
In addition, think about how you can be transparent with employees and performance metrics. Workers are more engaged and more satisfied with their work when they know what criteria they’re being judged on, so make sure KPIs are clear and well-defined for mobile workers.
Are you ready for a clearer picture of your mobile workforce? Schedule a demo today.
