First-Time Fix Rate: All You Need to Know About Improving Your Business Service

First impression is the last impression!

The above quote is quite true for businesses in the field service industry to stay in the market and give tough competition to their rivals. Around 75% of customers are more inclined to buy from businesses that provide a satisfactory customer experience. On the flip side, a negative experience can lead to avoiding a business completely. So, it is important to keep all your service parameters under proper observation. 

Ensuring that a customer’s first experience goes beyond their expectations helps build trust from the start. Therefore, you must understand and maintain a high first-time fix rate (FTFR) to enhance your first impressions and meet customer demands. This blog will uncover the calculations and various steps you can take to improve the FTFR in your business.

What is First-Time Fix Rate?

First-time fix rate indicates that your technician successfully completed the service on their first visit to the client’s site. This means that they had all the required resources and expertise to finish their job without needing to visit again.

A high FTFR means that you are doing a great job and making your customers happy. Whereas, a low FTFR indicates that you need to analyze why your technicians are unable to complete their services on their first visit. 

How to Calculate First-Time Fix Rate

Just like the top performing companies, you can easily calculate the first-time fix rate if you are running an HVAC service business or a liquor delivery business. To calculate the FTFR of your business, add the total number of services finished on the first attempt and divide it by the total jobs completed.

This calculation will help you gauge the successful task completion of your service professionals. The individual data will help you understand where the technicians are lacking in performance so that you can improve them by giving additional training.

Why is First-Time Fix Rate Crucial for Your Service Business?

Whether you are providing home inspection services or others to your customers, you can not review your technician’s performance without all the key indicators. Analyzing the FTFR is important for field service businesses for the below reasons:

Customer satisfaction

When booking a service with your business, customers expect a properly skilled and trained technician to quickly address their issues. A higher fix rate of any first-time service increases your customer feedback and improves your bottom line.

Frequent visits 

When your company can not provide a first-time fix, you may have to allot additional visits to provide a proper resolution. When you have a high FTFR, you can save a lot of cost on additional visits. 

Business reputation

A high FTFR shows that your service department is managing operations and meeting customer expectations efficiently. It improves customer retention and loyalty towards your brand, which will induce more new customers through word-of-mouth.

How to Improve First-Time Fix Rate?

The first step to improving your first-time fix rate is by evaluating it right from the start. It’s crucial to analyze the key metrics – the total number of service calls your technicians resolved in the first attempt. You must also track the repeat visits and the total time it took on solving those issues. 

Here are some other ways to improve your FTFR and reach your goals:

1. Use advanced software

Software like multi-stop route planner can help you streamline dispatch processes and schedule optimized routes in minutes. It plans routes for weeks and months in advance. Moreover, you can quickly reassign a route to another technician if the existing technician isn’t available for some reason.

Thus, you can stay relaxed about finishing services on time and increasing your FTFR. You don’t need to worry about planning or scheduling services for your technicians manually. As a result, you will have the peace of mind of managing streamlined operations and focus on other factors affecting your FTFR. 

2. Understand your customers’ needs

You must have proper clarity about the customer’s expectations and align your technicians as per the particular service. Asking questions to your customers can help you do this. You can ask your customers the below standard questions:

• How long has it been since the issue began? 
• Which is the best time to schedule the service?
• Will there be someone at the location to address our technicians? Or, what is the procedure to enter if there is no one present?
• Is there anything important you want to share before our technician arrives?

The above questions can be reiterated as per your business and the customers you cater to. When you have the knowledge, it becomes easy to follow the next steps. 

3. Assign the right technician

This is one of the most effective and vital factors that will help you boost your first-time fix rate. While you may have all the tools, parts, and field service management software, you must assign the right technician to the right job. 

Companies usually fail to fix a problem due to sending the wrong or less-skilled technician to the site. So, you must match the field technicians to their jobs through factors such as experience level, expertise, and specialization. 

Get Better First-Time Fix Rate with Upper’s Fully Automated Process

Manual route planning shouldn’t be an extra burden when your business is focused on improving user experience. That’s where Upper steps in to make your routing operations smooth and cost-effective, thereby helping you achieve a higher first-time fix rate. 

Some of the benefits of using Upper Route Planner are as below:

1. Ability to track drivers

Upper’s live driver tracking capability assures your dispatchers that the assigned technicians are reaching their locations properly. So, you will have up-to-date information about your team when they are enroute. 

2. Archive routes

When serving regular customers every month, you may have recurring routes, which you can archive through Upper. The software makes it extremely easy for you to refer to repetitive routes whenever you want to assign them to your service professionals. 

3. One-click dispatch 

With Upper, you can quickly assign the optimized routes once you have done all the planning. You can do this through a single click either by sharing routes through the driver app, using URL, or text message.

Conclusion

Parting words are you must track and improve your first-time fix rate to be one of the best performing companies. A good FTFR doesn’t just improve customer satisfaction but also elevates revenue by bringing down costs on repeated services. A combination of the right tools, training, and advanced technology will help you achieve this. 

Upper Route Planner is your one-stop solution to streamline service route scheduling and increase your FTFR. It also helps you take proof of jobs via e-signatures and photos once you reach the location. Want to explore more about Upper? Take a 7-day free trial.