Whether your organization services medical equipment, automobiles, or solar panels, the question is the same: How often do your technicians resolve customers’ problems on the initial visit?
That’s your first-time fix rate.
First-Time Fix Rate (FTFR) indicates the percentage of time a technician is able to fix the issue the first time, without additional expertise, information, or parts.
You’re under increasing pressure from senior management to boost revenues and cut costs, while maintaining service levels to customers. So how can you strike the right balance between what appear to be competing objectives?
The answer lies in your service organization’s FTFR.
When you focus on improving this field service metric, it’s like pulling a lever that can simultaneously increase customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and create new revenue by freeing up technicians to handle more jobs every day.
According to Aberdeen Group research,
“When you have a high first-time fix rate, you avoid multiple truck rolls and the additional costs that go with that like the extra labor, increased dispatch and lost service opportunities,” says Sara Cerruti, vice president of global customer transformation for ServiceMax.
The extra expenses incurred when a technician must go back to a job a second, third, or even fourth time will take a substantial chunk out of your bottom line.
For example, let’s compare the difference between a best-in-class organization and a laggard, if each company averaged 400 service calls per day. An 88% FTFR for a top-performing organization means 48 service calls (12%) require additional visits.
By comparison, the lowest-performing organization’s 63% rate translates into 148 service calls (37%) that aren’t resolved on the first visit. These organizations require multiple dispatches on 100 more jobs per day than the best-in-class companies.
When you consider that service calls not resolved on the first visit require an additional 1.6 dispatches to fix the issue, at an average cost of $200 to $300 per truck roll, it is no secret that the cost burden mounts quickly for companies saddled with low FTFR calculations.
As a result, field service leaders must either add more technicians (and more overhead) just to keep pace with high-performing competitors, or they need a solution to ensure a higher FTFR.
The calculation is simple as long as you know the total jobs worked, and those resolved on the first visit. The calculation for first-time fix rate is: Total jobs completed on first visit / Total jobs completed = First-Time Fix Rate.
You can apply this at a macro or micro level. You can calculate individual FTFR for technicians and field service personnel to help you keep better track of KPI’s, trends in metrics for certain jobs, training needs, and more.
Identifying the factors that drag down your company’s FTFR is the first step. But what can you do to improve performance?
Consider these 3 best practices of high-performing service organizations:
In our 16 years of experience in field service management, we have found 3 common culprits that cause low first-time fix rates for service organizations.
First-Time Fix Rates can be a challenge for many organizations, but those who excel in this metric have one thing in common: the right solution. ServiceMax is designed precisely for this purpose, offering a comprehensive solution to improve First-Time Fix Rates, boost asset uptime, and more. Revolutionize your field service operations with our FSM solution.