Service CollABorative January 2024 - KPI’s/Measurements of Service Success

IFS Service CollABorative: Think Tank – KPI’s/Measurements of Service Success

Date of Meeting: 23 January 2024 11:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Topic / Discussion Notes

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: So, we have a small group today. So, I thought we would start to dig in a little bit to a discussion around KPIs and how we measure success, because I think it's an area that I think is evolving for organizations and it's an area that has come up quite a bit when we ask you all what are you interested in discussing. And so, I think we have a session dedicated to this topic later on in our agenda for the year. However, I thought it might be a good tiptoe into that conversation, and it might also give us so my ideas of what to kind of prep or plan for that bigger conversation. So one of us was just sharing their accomplishments from 2023 because he's working on compiling all of that right now. And so they were able to increase calls per day, and then in the call center, increase SLAs and also reduce handle time. What is interesting though, and so I was asking him what they do or if they do anything to measure employee sentiment, engagement, satisfaction, et cetera, because I think the big shift that I see is kind of also related to what we see in the talent topic. And so it's this idea of almost leading indicators. So, of course, we're always going to be a measuring, efficiency and productivity, those operational metrics, but sometimes I think if we could get ahead of what's going on in the background a bit, those leading indicators, it might help us to get ahead of seeing declines or challenges in some of those operational metrics.  What is some of your KPI’s?
• A: Calls per tech. We drove 7 million, 634,000 miles. It's kind of it's always a hard to wrap your head around, but that’s a lot of driving. We're trying to reduce truck rolls, but obviously we have additional calls we're trying to put processes in place to reduce truck rolls, which we're doing a better job on our call center side. But they are there or traveling more. I think we're doing a lot of installs too, council constantly putting out more equipment, it’s a balancing act. Our call center, we've increased our service levels by 2% and then decreased our handle time by .25 which is good. Its progress anyway.
• Q: Do you do anything to measure employee sentiment?
• A: Well, we did a survey. Like Company wide survey. So, we got a bunch of feedback regarding it and it's all around low pay and rewarding and recognition. So, I'm trying to put a bonus plan. We have scorecards for all of our technicians and trying to get that weighted so we can possibly provide a quarterly bonus plan based on how well they're doing. And that scorecard takes into consideration just performance, activities, but also takes in fleet and quality. If we have to return back, first time fix rates. So it all rolls up into one scorecard.
• F: We set up regular engagement pulse check surveys that we've been doing and we built through Google Smartsheet a little bit of functionality. If anybody says anything that's like egregiously positive or negative, it has to be responded to by a manager. What I would say is it started off great and I think as time has gone on, we're seeing less and less folks fill those out. I have 80-88 people on my team. We started out having 70 a month and then it went to 50 a month and now we've kind of levelled off into the 35 to 40 range of which 99% are just neutral about pretty much everything in the same two people at the same 2 complaints. I think I'm still trying to navigate how do you make the surveys effective and not just like the 10 emails we all delete when we wake up in the morning that we see every day kind of thing.
• R: That's a really good point. And I think there's a couple of things that come to mind that are maybe more questions or food for thought. One is, I think surveys are important, but I'm also always an advocate for what else? Because I think like surveys are a great way to get a gauge and to make sure that you are tracking and collecting quantitative data, but at the end of the day, they can never be a substitute for relationships, right? And so I think they are very impersonal and I think they need to be balanced with if you're collecting that information. So, I think it's great that if there's an anomaly prompts or response, I think that's one important step, right? Because if you have something especially good or especially poor, and it's never noted, then that's going to cause a big decline in participation because people don't feel that you're actually listening. I think it has to be married to what the manager relationship looks like and how your dealing with employees in a one to one or a one to few manner as well, because otherwise it just feels impersonal. The other thing is, what is the communication method back to the employees on what you've heard, what actions you are taking or what actions you can't take. I think, one of the biggest things is people will stop giving feedback if they feel that it's not being used in any way. So, if you're not making clear or visible, even a summary of hey in our last pulse check, here's what we heard, here's what our next steps are, etcetera. Then I think that's another reason that participation can decline. I don't know if that makes sense or what any of the steps you take around those surveys are.
• F: Now for us that challenging part, our company does them, but I don't know if they really want to know, they don’t give us any money to solve the problems. So, I mean that that's another challenge or enough money to solve the problems. Thought they hear it, they want the feedback, but then we don't really take action or we think we're taking action, but it doesn't and in the employees mind, that's really not action. So that's the challenging part of managing people. I've got about 450 of them, and there's obviously the challenges with any of those and all of those, and we don't do it consistently. I mean the last survey we did was maybe three or four years ago. So it needs to be regular and w are trying to push our managers to try to do a one on one more frequently. The true coaching appears, how you’re doing, here’s your scorecard, and here’s what you could do to improve XYZ. But it’s work and they’re always right, putting out fires it seems like. It’s a challenge and balancing act.
• R: I think it's a really good point, and I've heard stories of this actually. I think when I was at field service connect in November, I was chatting with a woman there who had been put in charge in, in a global organization in terms of this whole like employee engagement initiative. And so they started taking all of these steps to get this feedback. But then the people at the top are like, umm, we changed our minds. She's like, no, you started asking now you're damaging more than you're helping. So, you're absolutely right that it's tough and I think it's just one tie in, you know what I mean? I think we have these operational metrics. I think obviously most organizations are tying in customer satisfaction and how those metrics are balanced with how our customers feel about our service. I just think the employee piece is an interesting one because it can also be telling of why there are struggles in certain areas.
• F: So, we've tried this. During one of the last future field service, we were talking very engage idly about how do we improve the technicians overall well being. We have a challenge with our technicians and we don't pay them for their travel the way that we pay them for labor. The technicians travel on a heavily reduced hourly rate than labor work. As a result, when we're doing a survey from the field technicians, the most common feedback from our field techs is, we want to travel less. There's too much travel and by virtue of me traveling too much, my overall wages are impacted and we fully understand that we are evaluating our technicians time by paying less for travel than we are for labor, but we're also in an organization to where I cannot charge my clients for the time that I travel, my technicians and we're halfway in between that big company, small company to where I have significant resources, but not enough to have one nearby 2 hours everywhere globally, right? It's a very complicated matter to solve. We took the feedback, we did the analysis we identified. OK. It'll cost us, upwards of $1,000,000 extra a year on labor to pay the technicians the same rate for travel as we do for labor. And we don't have that money right now because that revenue just doesn't tie out whether we have the money or not. It doesn't make sense to go upside down on our jobs to accomplish this. What we can however do is take that feedback and take other actions right. And that's where, we get a little bit smarter about it. OK, so instead of maybe paying them for the travel, can we try to reduce their travel time? Let's implement PSO as an example to try to optimize the technician schedule. Give them more control over what comes next and just try to travel them less. But at the end of the day, even when we take employee service, yeah, there's too much work. But, everybody's overworked. Fair, but the nature of the business drives a lot and we can't solve for a lot of these problems short term, which is where a lot of people's expectations are. So, I don't know, it's a really complicated one. And I think you can listen to the feedback without it always relating to direct money, although PSO implementation costed us, there's a way to address it and I think that getting the concerns, getting them voice, getting that data is valuable regardless. But I will tell you too, that people are sick of sharing their concerns. Coming back from the survey comment, at some point they like, they don't care anymore. And I very much in my role face that every damn day to where people they don't tell me what isn't working anymore. Because why, you don't have time to work on it anyways.
• R: You bring up a really good point with the pay issue, because I think when there's a fundamental complaint like that one, that is I think you would agree, warranted. Right? But just also not solvable at the moment. That can make it really difficult to uncover any more actionable feedback, because they're going to be really hung up on that. So there's a podcast that we did for future of field service a few weeks ago with Marco from Tetrapak and it was all around a presentation he did last year about their employee engagement, employee well being, mental health type initiative and that can sound fluffy, but he actually gets into a lot of specifics that they were able to uncover and how they got that feedback.And one of the things that was really important for him going into that initiative was, and we talked about this in the podcast, like how he did this, but he asked them to set aside any pay related topics so that he could get into what else. So easier said than done, but I mean it would be an interesting listen because he does talk about how and why. I think what is interesting to me is almost like the Venn diagram we have to create between the operational metrics, what does the company care most about. The customer metrics, what's going to be most important to how we impact our customer relationships and then the employee metrics. And I think historically we've certainly focused least on the employee metrics. That's maybe the shift I see that it is becoming more important because of the talent gap, because of the impact those people have on the customer experience etcetera. But it's really kind of looking at how to balance what are often very competing interests, and figure out what works.
• Q: I'm curious two things. One is from a service perspective. What metrics operationally is the organization most focused on? So maybe if you could give me the top three and then same question, but for customers like what matters most to your customers?
• A: I guess we focused more internally around how efficiently we're deploying our engineers. So, looking at how much of their 37 ½ hours per week is tool time, travel time and unaccounted for time, alongside how many tasks they complete in a day. And then also the patterns around returning tasks that they don't complete and the reasons for returning tasks. So, we it's an internal focus in terms of or the engineers delivering as best they can. Because of the contract framework that we work within, the contract penalizes if we fail to meet SLAs. So that's more of an output measure than it's too late then if we measure how much it costs at the end of the month, OK, we need to track that, but that's not going to in itself drive better performance.
• A: We're looking at revenue per technician, calls per day, ratio of productive versus non-productive hours, in general maintenance completion rate, stuff like that. We allow the technicians to schedule their PM's and repairs on their own, but the service events we reschedule for them. So, I think as we move towards PSO then, then that will change dramatically. But at the moment it's more of how efficiently they're running their day and the revenue associated.
• A: So customers are simple. They care about the end result. I found that especially in our world where we're more B to B service oriented organization servicing retail stores primarily not so much end users,  people's homes, et cetera. They are very outcome oriented specifically to the level of noise that we create. They could give a rats bum if we didn't get there on time. Didn't get there in SLA, so it took another 30 minutes, especially on the Mac and the project world. But what they do care about is that the technician solve what they needed to solve when they were on site, right? Did they solve and in one visit? Did we have to return? How many times? What is the level of disruption caused by our employees to their day-to-day operations? So from a KPI point of view that is also where we put our heaviest focus, specifically on 6 parameters, which is, was the tech on time because late does suck, but ultimately, nobody really cares too much. It's not the primary thing, but when you say you're going to be there at 9, be there 9, right? But even though SLA was at 8, be there when you say you're going to be there, proper communication for on site. Did the tech show up at all cause a no show is very disruptive, no matter what happens when after you commit it. What's the technician skilled as in, did they have the tools and the skills necessary to complete the job? Was the technician successful? Did they solve the issue that they were sent out for the first time they came, or did it require a revisit? And if it requires a revisit, that is actually how we measure the heaviest KPI that we present to our clients with revisit right, the first time right. And the last time is, was the technician professional, was his behavior on the part that he show up in an Angry Birds T shirt dressed up as Santa. It all happened right? It's not something that you want to brag about, but there's been some significant behavioral issues with technicians in the past and especially living in a corporate world B2B again. Some of our customers really care about technician behavior and even how they address the manager on duty and Trader Joe's case, they need to call them a captain. If not, our technician is in breach of expectations. So yeah, those are what the customer cares about internally and we can pat it in 100,000 different ways internally we care about the profit rating and ultimately that's where everything drives, cause customer satisfaction plays into our ability to retain a customer and thus profit and growth. But we spend significant effort to increase our bottom line, see if we can grow and make some better revenue so that we can better support our organizations both from our customer experience, as well as from an employee experience point of view. But it all comes back to money.
• A: We have the same issue, same challenges from the retailer or the customer perspective. We have really tight SLA's and we pay liquidated damages by the minute if we're not there to the lottery, not really to the not to the retailer. Our main focus is obviously to try to get there as quickly as we can and resolve the problem the first time. We focused on first time fix rates and then I mentioned the dashboard and calls per day. We're trying to drive that call up because there's no real incentive for our technicians to do another job. They drag their feet on the last two jobs and go home early. So we're trying to incentivize them to basically do more work. We did put a reverse QA process in place for our hotline. We're trying to focus on calls that we think we can solve over the phone without rolling a truck and we've been pretty successful in doing that. We just did a pilot, where we've shaved off 5% of those calls, which is quite a bit, so we're focused on that this year. We've got a team we're standing up to as a third tier to monitor those types of calls, to try to get ahead of them instead of rolling trucks.
• A: We are our small global organization and we are organized regionally. So, each region EMEA, Americas and APAC work in a different perspective with a shared governance. So in terms of KPIs, apart from of course, the revenue and the contribution, we will measure the customer satisfaction and the employee engagement. And this will be the main focus on that matter. In terms of SLA, each customer will have individual respectives, some will for a number of hours boots on the ground. But we are not as mature in that area, so we serve many fields. So, data center is one that will require a more specific SLA engagement, but they are run in a different business area. So I'm not the one running data center. We have mission critical customers as well, so they will require but this will be based on the country. So and yeah, it's not as mature as we expected. For the employment engagement piece, we measure that by a vast survey. This runs every 2 years or so. So, it will bring about engagement, about belonging, about feeling hurt, feeling that they have a voice and that they are free from harassment. So all the other regular stuff. And most importantly what we do with that. So after that we will run some workshops and run actions upon the top three and the and bottom tree and how to change this from this status to the to the future that we want. This is how we've been running this for a while. And it's all about the action plan and about changing from one survey to the other, otherwise it will surface the same issues and then we’re doing nothing.
• R: I mean what we were talking about when we were talking about the employee piece earlier is that it can be tough because there's issues that come up in those employees surveys that really there isn't companies support to navigate. So then you're asking for the input, and you're getting the insight, but the action is lacking, and that puts them, and all of the leadership in a tough spot, right? Because it's almost like if you're not going to take the steps to address the feedback that you get, maybe just don't ask, do you know what I mean? There's a fundamental issue that's really tough right now, it takes time finding information beyond that that is addressable and helpful. But I mean that is a tough thing is it's almost like the employee piece, you have to really have top down buy into on the importance of it and the willingness to take that action.
• F: What I wanted to share is that at least you can be transparent, right? When I think that managing the expectations versus the reality is the very hardest part. Same when I mentioned our tech travel allocation is upsetting to some technicians, but especially if they weren't aware. So in your hiring strategy, being able to share and be very transparent about the challenges that your company faces and the feedback received from other users that knowing that upper management and leadership in general is aware of these items and working on a strategy to solve it. That alone can have significant power too, right? Just because we don't have the money to solve it today doesn't mean that we're not aware, but we can share that we can be sympathetic and you know it adds a level of you are heard. Now let us try to solve it right. That's not tomorrow. That's not Q1, that's not Q2, but we are taking steps and we're going to share with you what steps we're taking to get to the bigger picture. It's that communication.
• Q: Do you see any shifts in what measurements of success are viewed as most important either internally or externally?
• A: I would say from my experience or my perception, unfortunately, the top line is still the goal. So we talk about a lot of stuff, but if the top line is good, everything is good. If it's not good, then it's the trouble. And so the entire system has to improve in terms of walking the talk and you should talk about sustainability. You have to embrace sustainability. If you talk about the customer engagement and mental health etcetera, this has to be part of the agenda as well. And I'm not saying that they're not. It's just that that when things go south, top line is what matters or bottom line is what matters. But the mental health and the overwhelming over overload of work, they will they will be neglected.
• R: Well, my take on that would be maybe your company is even a bit ahead of the curve in having that focus, right? So, it sounds like you're saying there is a genuine interest in those things. It's just that, for lack of a better term, when **** hits the fan, it's going to switch back to just the bottom line, right? Whereas I do believe though in a lot of other organizations, they're not there yet. I don't know that they're even is a genuine interest, it's still just zeroed in on the revenue metrics and there isn't maybe an acknowledgement that at least I believe those other things tie in. I said at the beginning, there's sort of leading indicators, right? If you can take a longer view, those metrics do end up impacting the bottom line. It's just it's not as direct of a correlation, so it gets less attention, but I think there's plenty of companies that still really don't care even when things are in the best of circumstances. And I think that's something that they're going to have to reconcile because, I said at the beginning, I think with the talent landscape and just the way things are evolving, I don't think companies will get away forever with only caring about this quarter, this quarter, this quarter, do you know what I mean? I really do believe that.
• F: I was just going to comment. Ours is a little different. We have 10 year contracts, so we're always trying to do more with less, because as we grow the business, as we put more equipment out there, we don't want to have to add technicians. So we're trying to get smarter, faster, cheaper on how we run the business, so we can continue to drive cost out of the business, so we can bid the next job or the next time it comes around more efficiently. So it's a, it's a little different, but obviously, we're making revenue, obviously we're trying to grow sales, but we're also trying to put more equipment out there. And when we do that, we try to do it more efficiently.
• R: I think this is like anything. It can't be either or, right? It can't be employee engagement or revenue. I mean you can't only care about one or the other, right? You have to kind of find the happy medium, but I think to your point about some of the things that you're working on to see how you can put that third tier in place to improve remote resolution. There's nothing wrong with trying to drive out cost and trying to maximize efficiency. It just can't be at the expense of, you know what I mean? So, it's finding the balance of looking for those opportunities, but in a way I at least almost believe that over time as we see companies go more in that direction of OK what can we solve remotely? What can we automate? What can we take off the plate of our technicians so that they're focused on delivering value, then as we strip out those things that can be stripped out, they themselves almost become more valuable in the sense of they're really left just doing the valuable things. And so we don't want to overextend them. We don't want to have them feel underpaid or underappreciated. Unless we're willing to go without them. And I don't think were there, and personally, I don't think we'll be there. But yeah, it's a huge juggling act.

Podcast Link:

https://www.futureoffieldservice.com/2024/01/10/tetra-paks-proven-ways-of-supporting-field-force-wellbeing/

Next Meeting: 20 February 2024 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Combined CollABorative: Think Tank – Human Centricity: Trends in Recruiting, Hiring & Retention with Guest Speaker Lauren Winans, CEO of Next-Level Benefits

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