Setting annual field service technician goals—and rewarding your service team when they achieve them—motivates your techs to improve their performance, which in turn improves the bottom line of your business. By giving your technicians the opportunity to increase their income, while setting measurable and achievable goals designed to grow your business, you ensure that your goals are aligned.
When you carry out annual technician performance reviews to assess your service techs’ skills, contributions, and value to the company, that’s also a good time to discuss ways to improve job performance and set smart goals for maintenance technicians.
But which goals should you set? How can you track your techs’ performance while ensuring they can check on their own progress independently? Without implementing an effective field service management software, it can be difficult to keep on top of the targets you set.
ServiceTitan’s software provides service businesses with all the tools service businesses need to manage daily operations, including key performance indicator (KPI) tracking, reporting, and goal setting for team members across your organization. Additionally, our payroll features make it easy to set up performance-based pay models for your team, so you can be sure your best technicians are paid for their efforts.
To help your company set smart goals for maintenance technicians, we’ve compiled a list of eight technician training tips from service industry experts. We’ll also explain how ServiceTitan’s field service software can help you implement these tips within your organization.
8 Steps for Setting Annual Field Service Technician Goals
ServiceTitan offers comprehensive service management software that helps you set field service technician goals and monitor performance. To find out more, request a free, personalized demo.
1. Use Technology to Improve Tech Performance
Help your techs meet those customer service, sales, and technical goals by equipping them with the most up-to-date technology available. To set goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound), you need to ensure that your techs have access to the right technology. The idea is to make goals easy to achieve, as you want to get your techs onboard with growing your business.
By implementing the right technology, specifically field service management software like ServiceTitan, you can free up your techs’ mental bandwidth by automating mundane tasks. This gives them more time to work on improving their skills, doing a great job for customers, making more sales, and increasing billable time.
How ServiceTitan Mobile Improves Tech Performance
ServiceTitan’s field service software not only provides business owners with all the tools they need to manage and grow their business, but also gives your service team a mobile app that puts a comprehensive, cloud-based field management software system at their fingertips.
This bolsters your technician’s ability to:
1. Minimize Non-Billable Time
While every company must build some non-billable time into its schedule, ServiceTitan field management software is designed to reduce the amount of time technicians waste filling out paper forms or manually entering job details when they could be providing billable services.
2. Improve Management of Paperwork
With ServiceTitan Mobile, your techs get access to all the information they need directly on their tablet. Say goodbye to lost paperwork by uploading forms directly to ServiceTitan and setting them up to appear at specific stages of the work cycle. Techs have to complete each form before moving on to the next, ensuring they never miss a thing.
Your techs can also access all of the information your customer service representatives (CSR) collect when the customer calls: names, addresses, contact info, notes, outstanding estimates, job details, and so forth. Techs can even listen to a full recording of the customer call within ServiceTitan Mobile. All these details, available on demand at the work site, streamline the service process and improve tech efficiency.
3. Process Payments
When a job is completed, ServiceTitan Mobile provides techs with tools to conveniently process customer payments before leaving the job site.
With ServiceTitan, techs can securely photo-capture checks and credit cards in the field, or send the customer a link to an online payment portal. You will no longer have to wait for checks to be dropped off at the office or wait in line at the bank.
With ServiceTitan Payments, checks and credit card payments are automatically processed the next day and online payments are processed 2-3 times faster. All of these factors speed up the payment process and improve cash flow for your business.
4. Track Their Own Performance
ServiceTitan Mobile allows techs to track their own performance based on metrics you set.
The technician scorecard is shown directly in the main dashboard of our mobile app, just below the daily job schedule, to make it easy for techs to monitor their progress.
All of these metrics are also visible for office employees, so they can also track each tech’s performance. For business owners and managers, ServiceTitan allows you to track each employee’s timesheet as well as providing detailed analytics and payroll reports (more on this in the next tip).
2. Give Your Techs Field Service Goals Based on KPIs
Key performance indicators differ from business to business. Your business may place an emphasis on maintenance contract signups, while a competitor lives or dies by the number of overall jobs completed. The KPI you set for employees should reflect your overall organizational goals.
Collecting and monitoring the right metrics gives you a true picture of how efficiently your business is operating, which you can use to optimize your performance. With ServiceTitan’s technician scorecard, business owners get real-time updates on generated revenue, memberships sold, and more for each tech.
ServiceTitan’s dynamic dashboard can be tailored to track and display the metrics and KPIs that are most relevant to your business. You can customize it to track each metric by day, week, or month, sort transactions by business unit or date range, and monitor stats in real time as ServiceTitan syncs information through the cloud. This gives you insights to identify which areas your techs require training in and gives them what they need to improve their performance.
Here are some key field service technician performance metrics that ServiceTitan helps you monitor:
1. Average Response Time
If your business responds to emergency calls, understanding your average response time can help you increase the number of jobs performed in a day.
Using ServiceTitan dispatch software allows your team to efficiently schedule jobs, keep your techs on time, and improve the customer experience.
2. Mean Time to Repair
This metric measures the average time it takes for your techs to carry out onsite repairs and complete the work order. How long this takes can vary for each job, but giving your techs access to education, resources, and technology helps shorten this metric and increase tech efficiency. It’s important, however, to ensure you don’t overschedule techs and make them rush through jobs, which will have an impact on customer satisfaction and reduce the chances of spotting upselling opportunities.
3. First-Time Fix Rate
Your first-time fix rate allows you to track the number of return visits your service team makes to deal with a single job. A high first-time fix rate means you can profit more frequently from new jobs.
To improve this metric, ensure your dispatch team assigns the right techs to the right jobs based on experience and expertise. It’s also important that techs arrive at a job with all the tools and equipment to complete the work.
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4. Monitor Repeat Visits
Repeat visits show the number of times your tech returns to a job to finalize service within a set timeframe. A high rate of repeat visits could mean it's time to examine how jobs are dispatched and scheduled, and whether techs require more training.
Consider cutting the number of appointments technicians are assigned in one shift, so they have plenty of time to finish the job on the first visit. Also cut down on unnecessary travel time by using GPS-based dispatching. By making their routes more efficient, you’re giving techs more time to work at each job site.
5. Service Contract Attach Rate
Maintenance agreements provide your business with a consistent revenue stream, particularly at times of year when business is traditionally slower. If your service techs don’t regularly sell contracts, revise your service agreements to be more attractive to commercial clients and homeowners, and train your team on how to pitch the benefits of your maintenance contracts to customers.
6. Average Ticket Price
If your technicians in the field discover additional problems or sales opportunities, give them an easy way to provide customers with detailed quotes and good-better-best options.
ServiceTitan’s mobile app gives technicians access to a customized pricebook with various options they can show customers. This allows them to present customers with accurate estimates and pricing within minutes, giving them a convenient way to sell more to customers and an opportunity to increase their average ticket price.
3. Set Maintenance Technician Performance Goals
Beyond increasing average ticket price, or improving monthly revenue, you need to ensure the quality of the technical work your service techs provide is top quality. The ability of your field service technicians to complete technical tasks accurately and efficiently directly affects your company’s reputation. Maintenance technician performance goals need to include several job-based technical objectives, each determined by a tech’s job description and their training.
For example, a technical objective for a garage door technician might include the ability to replace the laser eye and test it for functionality. For an HVAC technician, you might include the safe handling of Freon and other chemical refrigerants to comply with local environmental regulations.
Whatever the trade, setting specific maintenance technician performance goals helps your employees learn and grow, ultimately boosting their paychecks, and your company’s bottom line.
4. Implement Performance-Based Pay
Whichever field service technician goals you set and whatever the KPIs you choose to monitor, one of the best ways of keeping techs on board with those goals, and motivated to achieve them, is to tie their performance to their pay. Set achievable targets for specific KPIs, and reward your techs with bonuses, commissions, and incentives for reaching them.
Manage Performance Pay with ServiceTitan
It may seem complex to move your service technicians to performance-based pay, but with ServiceTitan’s contractor timesheet software, you can easily transition to paying commissions and bonuses accurately and fairly, while also gaining insight into your exact labor costs.
In ServiceTitan, you can set up different commission rates and bonuses for each tech, or choose the same structure for the entire team.
If you choose to continue paying on an hourly basis, however, vendor runs, wrench time, and drive time are all automatically recorded in each tech’s timesheet, and you can configure overtime in just a few clicks.
Our built-in sign-off feature allows techs to check their timesheet and performance pay and either approve it, or query it, before a payment is made.
No more wasted office visits—simply get your techs to sign off in the mobile app and everything is good to go.
5. Technician Goal Examples: Grow Revenue with More Sales
Effective service technicians provide detailed and accurate answers to customers’ questions about home repairs, future upgrades, and new products on the market. Technician goal examples might include setting specific milestones when making sales presentations to customers, such as increasing average tickets sold by 10 percent.
Most service techs know how to fix a mechanical problem, but struggle when trying to sell the customer additional services. If you train your technicians to provide detailed quotes and estimates with clearly defined good-better-best options, they’ll come across as more knowledgeable and trustworthy to your customers—which means more revenue for your business.
Instead of making customers wait for your sales team to contact them later, train your techs to sell your company’s home services before they ever leave the job site, with an easy-to-use, all-in-one field management software solution.
How ServiceTitan’s Field Services App Helps Techs with Sales
With ServiceTitan’s field service mobile app, technicians can easily provide detailed quotes to customers with accurate pricing—especially when a service call leads to the discovery of other needed repairs or the customer expresses interest in installing a new product. Technicians can build a quote and send it to the customer in minutes, straight from their mobile device.
Techs can browse dynamic pricebooks with vivid photos, manufacturer videos, product information, the latest pricing, and more, to generate tiered Good-Better-Best estimates and proposals for customers on-the-spot. Techs can then use ServiceTitan’s presentation mode to present these estimates to customers in a beautifully styled and professional way, making the offer more attractive to the customer.
Additionally, ServiceTitan offers on-the-spot customer financing options that can be approved in real time. When a customer realizes they can afford to install a new A/C system, for example, they are more likely to close the deal.
Include revenue growth as one of your techs’ smart goals to build confidence and increase their earning potential, and add value to your company by gaining the trust of more customers.
6. Provide Better Customer Service with Efficiency
A technician capable of solving even the trickiest of electrical or plumbing problems can’t serve your company well if they’re rude, leave a mess in the customer's home, or refuse to explain the problem in a way the customer can understand.
Effective technicians pair their technical skills with the ability to handle customer complaints, provide professional, accurate, and polite advice, and establish a strong reputation with customers.
Review how your techs spend their workdays and look for ways to improve efficiency. Do they spend too much time, or too little, on an average job? Do they take the most efficient route to a customer’s home? Do they show up on time and notify you when the job is done? Do they offer to pick up other jobs, when needed?
Technicians who go the extra mile for your customers are typically your company’s top performers, and that should be clearly represented in their service technician performance review.
ServiceTitan’s Customer Experience Features
Today’s customers expect a more tech-driven, on-demand experience, and this includes electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and other trade services. This means keeping every customer in the loop about the jobs they book with your company, and providing a seamless customer experience, with as little inconvenience as possible.
Adding a ServiceTitan Web Scheduler (or Chat to Text widget) to your website gives customers an easy way to schedule a job. The web scheduler shows real-time availability—so customers never have to wait for a confirmation email, and you improve your call booking rate.
With ServiceTitan, you can keep customers updated about the status of their job by sending out appointment reminders and technician arrival information via text message.
Customers can track where their technician is located on a map, and know exactly when they will arrive for the appointment, in the same way you do with a ride-sharing app.
7. Develop Work Ethic Objectives for Maintenance Technicians
Service workers might excel at the technical aspect of the job, but if they’re unorganized, show up late, or don’t work well with others, they can hurt your business. Work ethic objectives measure your techs’ soft skills and show you how well an employee meets company standards.
Develop work ethic objectives for each of your field service techs, so they know how to meet your expectations.
Some technician goal examples might include: compliance with following directions, flexibility to work in a variety of conditions and environments, tact when dealing with irate customers, initiative to get the job done, and a desire to improve their skill set.
8. Equip Techs with the Best Tools to Do Their Job
Make sure your technicians arrive at their service calls with all the tools they need to get the job done quickly and efficiently. When conducting a service technician performance review, inspect their tools and truck inventory to make sure they’re operating at full capacity.
Keep in mind that providing the right toolkit also includes utilizing the right software, which helps your team’s efficiency and allows for business growth.
How ServiceTitan’s Software Gives Your Business Efficient Processes
ServiceTitan makes it easy for service companies to implement efficient systems and processes in multiple ways:
Consistent Systems for Call Booking: ServiceTitan’s call booking software gives customer service reps all pertinent customer information (caller’s name, job history, and contact details) as soon as they pick up the phone. Past customers can be greeted by name and reps can ask about previous work. ServiceTitan’s drop-down menus guide call takers to ask for all the required details before sending out a tech.
Cloud-Based Documentation: Every document and form created and altered within ServiceTitan is stored in a cloud-based repository, accessible by anyone across your organization. Techs don’t need to keep track of estimates, invoices, or write down future appointment details. By using ServiceTitan Mobile, they have easy access to all of their customer’s important job details and past work history.
Form Creation: Techs and managers can build custom forms in ServiceTitan to gather customer details in the field. Using forms at the job site gives techs a consistent process to follow on every job. Forms can be set up to be completed before moving on to the next step of a job, reducing errors and return visits. You can also trigger specific forms to appear during certain types of jobs, including maintenance checklists for specific types of equipment, for example. ServiceTitan’s forms guide techs while in the field and makes them appear more professional and efficient in front of customers.
Templates: ServiceTitan offers a wide range of templates to give customers well-presented proposals, estimates, pricing, invoices, and more. Our easy-to-complete templates look professional, can feature your business branding, and techs can show them to customers on a mobile device, or forward them by email.
Want to find out how ServiceTitan can help you set up and monitor your techs’ performance goals? Book a free, personalized demo now to find out more.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
