Most Field Service organizations closely monitor their first-time fix rate (FTFR), which Aberdeen defines as:

“The resolution of a work order/customer issue on the first service visit.  Any repeat visit, secondary truck roll, or service call cannot be for the same issue.” 

While this definition is generally accepted and will be used in this post,, I offer another, slightly stricter. definition that will cause you to focus improvement efforts on additional issues.

Why does First Time Fix Rate matter?

Aberdeen published this chart showing the primary Field Service goals sorted into two categories; those companies with first-time fix rates greater than 71% and those with FTR at or below 70%.

From this chart, we can conclude that a 70% FTFR is approximately average. Note that organizations with 71+% FTFR have set improved response time and reduced costs by managing repeat visits as a much less critical goal than those with a lower rate. However, the high FTFR folks are still focusing on improving CSAT and growing revenue.

Let’s look at the four goals

Improving FTR improves customer satisfaction – As this chart from TSIA shows, there is a strong correlation between FTFR and CSAT over a narrow range.

If you are trying to increase your Overall CSAT, then a 0.2 change is a big deal!

Increase revenue – When you have to send a field engineer back for a second visit, she may be earning income for a billable call but not as much as if she were going to a new customer. That is because your company probably caused the repeat visit, and you should not be billing for all the visit costs.

Reduce costs – This is the jackpot! If your engineer performs an installation, warranty call, or contract call, the labor, travel, meals, etc., all get charged to your expense account. If your organization is small and you frequently fly engineers from call to call, these costs can mount quickly. For example, if you assume that any flight segment costs $500, and your engineers fly from city to city, then the revisit costs one extra segment plus possibly a car, hotel, and extra meals. Over a year, that can become a budget buster!

Improve Response Time – This is easy. When your engineers are fully booked with jobs, including repeat visits, response time for new calls declines. There goes your CSAT.

What causes revisits?

Revisits are sad because the majority of them can be prevented! Here is AAberdeen’sanalysis of their survey data:

  • Parts unavailability (i.e., incorrect or no part available) – 29%
  • Customer/asset not available for service – 28%
  • Improper diagnosis at the time of dispatch – 19%
  • Technicians did not have the right skills – 15%
  • The resolution was only temporary – 8%

If you think about each reason for a revisit, you will come to the same conclusion as I did – Improper diagnosis at the time of dispatch is a significant contributor to the lack of parts and technicians with the wrong skills. If the person providing phone support to the customer were confident in his diagnosis, he would make sure that any possible required parts would be available when the “right”” engineer arrived at the customer.

Dispatching an improperly trained engineer is primarily a management issue. Field engineers must be trained before they are sent to customers. If they are not fully trained, they must know how to perform most diagnostics and have the skills to work with a remote technical support person on site. When an untrained engineer is dispatched, it is frequently because the support person decides that anyone who arrives to fix the problem is better than having the customer wait. In other words, everyone loses! This is never a good situation; in this case, the customer, dispatcher, and engineer will all be dissatisfied.

The service experience design or the eengineer’straining is also responsible for most cases where the customer or the asset is unavailable. The way to minimize this situation is to have the engineer directly contact the customer and supporte both the asset and the person will be available when the engineer believes he will show up. The engineer must contact the customer at least once more before arriving – to either confirm the arrival time or to change it if necessary. This is both common courtesy and good business.

Who should own the first-time fix significant?

This is a major field service KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and belongs to the Head of Service. However, the Field Service (FS) Manager has a responsibility to make sure thadequatelyteam is properly trained and to coordinate with the technical support and logistics managers to ensure that the organization (and the engineers) have a very high chance of making each service visit positive for all parties. This is such an important measurement that I recommend making the three managers equally responsible for this KPI, and an significant and equal component of each person’s variable compensation.

I know I did not include the Training Manager in this discussion, even though that person has a significant role. I believe the FS Manager must ensure thadequatelyers are properly trained. She should coordinate with the Training Manager and make the engineers available when the Training Manager calls for them.

Change FTF to Clean Visit

If your engineers are dispatched for more than one service call daily, then FTFR is a perfectly good metric. This occurs when printers, copiers, office equipment, some medical devices, and relatively uncomplicated industrial and laboratory instruments are serviced. But I like a different measurement when the service call is designed to spill over to two or more days. I call it the “clean”visit.

Let me explain. A multi-day service call can result in a first-time fix even though the engineer, the customer, and the service center must perform heroic efforts to finish the job.Let’s sayy that a field engineer needs a part that she does not have or has not been sent ahead. She calls back to the dispatcher, who determines that none are available in the stockroom. They then discover that one was recently sent to another engineer in another city. He gets a call and confirms that he has it and does not need it for his current job.

The engineer has to interrupt his work and tell his customer that he has to leave for an hour or so. He takes the part to FedEx and ships it overnight. When the shipping engineer returns to his original job, he finds out that the customer has left for the day, and the engineer has to return the next day. That wasted two hours on the current day. The next day the first engineer has to go to the FedEx location to pick up the part and head to his customer. She arrived later than the customer expected because of the delay in picking up the part. The job gets completed, and the service engineer reports the first-time fix. But two engineers and two customers were interrupted, and the service organization was slightly out of control.

Key Takeaway

Unless all disruptions to smooth work are identified, analyzed, and corrected, the service organization will always disappoint customers and make their field teams’ lives miserable.

Please seriously consider using the clean visit as the monitoring metric for extended jobs. Please contact me if you have a low FTFR and cannot identify and solve the problems causing the poor performance. We can start with a complimentary one-hour conversation to see if we should further investigate working together on this challenge.