Drowning in dashboards
Modern field service software can report on everything, which tempts owners into watching fifty numbers and acting on none. The teams that actually improve focus on a small set of KPIs tied directly to decisions.
The six that matter
- First-time fix rate. The cleanest measure of operational health. Drives customer satisfaction and margin at once.
- Revenue per technician per day. Your fundamental productivity number. Watch the trend, segment by tech, find your coaching opportunities.
- Schedule adherence. Percent of jobs completed in their promised window. Below 85% and you have a planning problem.
- Average response time. Booking-to-arrival for emergency work. This is what customers feel most acutely.
- Technician utilization. Billable hours divided by paid hours. The gap is windshield time, idle time, and rework.
- Customer satisfaction / review score. Lagging but unforgiving. Trend it and tie it back to the operational metrics above.
What to de-emphasize
- Raw job count — busy isn't profitable; revenue per tech is the real story.
- Total revenue alone — without margin and utilization context, it hides problems.
- Vanity dashboards — if a metric never changes a decision, stop watching it.
The review cadence
- Daily: board health and response time — are we keeping promises today?
- Weekly: revenue per tech, utilization, schedule adherence.
- Monthly: first-time fix rate and customer satisfaction trends.
Make the numbers visible
KPIs hidden in a back-office report change nothing. Put revenue per tech and FTFR on a screen the whole team sees. Visibility alone moves the numbers — people optimize what they can watch.