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.
Why a high First-Time Fix Rate matters in field service
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,
- “Best-in-class” field service organizations resolve the issue on the first visit 88% of the time
- “Average” companies achieve an 80% FTFR
- “Laggards” struggle at 63% FTFR
“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.
What’s the impact of low First-Time Fix Rates?
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.
How to calculate First-Time Fix Rate
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.
How to improve First-Time Fix Rate
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:
- Enhance inventory visibility
If the issue is a lack of spare parts, give technicians access to real-time inventory information and the ability to order parts from the field. This will reduce technicians’ tendency to stockpile parts in their vans, while ensuring that the right parts are available where and when they’re needed.
- Improve dispatch
Equip your dispatchers with all the information they need, in real time, to assign jobs to technicians who have both the appropriate skill sets and parts on hand to resolve the customer’s issue correctly the first time.
- Facilitate collaboration
Give your techs remote access to the collective knowledge of your entire company through real-time social and collaboration tools. This way, technicians can get the answer to their questions quickly, via their smartphones or tablets, to fix the problem during the first visit.
What causes poor First-Time Fix Rates?
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.
- Lack of spare parts: The technician arrives at the jobsite and realizes he or she doesn’t have all the parts on hand required to fix the issue.
- Lack of skills: The technician doesn’t have the necessary knowledge or training to solve the problem. Or the technician takes too long trying to fix the issue and needs to schedule a callback to finish the job.
- Poor communication or planning: Communication can be one of the quickest ways to either improve or hinder FTFR. Examples include the customer not being on site for the day, or the asset has been moved to another location, and that information is not communicated to the technician prior to dispatch. Whatever the reason, the technician must make an additional visit to close the work order.
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.
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