How well are you managing your site inspection business?

As you are busy facilitating growth and in your site or property inspection business, you should take a pause and evaluate how well are you managing your business. Are the strategies you are putting in driving the intended results? To check this out you must set in field service metrics that give you countable and measurable data regarding your business. Now, as we talk about numbers, it is common to observe that service owners eventually get highly obsessed with numbers, and in the process, the numbers become the center of the focus, whereas the focus should always be on strategies.

Field service metrics are to be seen as a tool to analyze the effectiveness of your strategies, so they should be centered around strategies, not the other way round wherein strategies are designed to achieve certain numbers. A metrics-driven strategic approach can create a momentary illusion of business growth but in the long run, it doesn't help the business much. So as a business owner you must always very cautiously keep an eye on the thin line between the metrics-driven strategic approach and the strategies-driven metrics approach.

Why strategies-driven metrics approach is ideal for site inspection business?

When your business focuses on the impact of the strategies, you get a better direction to design your strategies, you have clarity on what are your short-term and long-term goals to achieve the strategic objective

Your metrics serve as a path to execute your strategies to achieve your business goals.

Strategic focus aligned with metrics enable you to measure different aspects of your business performance

As you maintain a strategic focus, it is important to involve your teams in strategy-making to ensure that the team understands the abstract nature of strategies.

Metrics to measure the effectiveness of your strategies

As you devise your strategies, it is important to back them with the right kind of field service metrics. In site inspection business, you must focus on five key areas and set the right metrics to align your actions in line with your strategies. These key areas are

a) Operational Efficiency

b) Productivity and performance

c) Customer Experience

d) Customer Engagement

e) Customer Satisfaction

Now, depending on your strategies you can set different field service metrics to measure the effectiveness of these five key areas. For instance, Service request volume, Service request backlog, Inflow, and outflow of cases, can be your metrics for operational efficiency. Similarly, service request and activity type, no. of inspections done, meantime to complete the inspection, average travel time to the job site, repeat visits, etc. can be the service metrics for measuring your Productivity and Performance. Average time for inspection, Average first response time (FRT), Customer effort score (CES), Active and inactive accounts are effective metrics to measure customer experience and engagement.

You need data to set your strategies. Using field inspection software you can derive data insights into all the aforementioned metrics. As the software integrates with your business operations, it automates the field processes and simultaneously records the data that is very useful for analyzing the effectiveness of your business process and strategies.

The next step

As a business owner, most of the time, you will have clarity on what you want from your business. The real problem arises when you assess the 'why' and how aspects of your goals and objectives. There you start making strategies and can make use of site inspection software that not just help you with field service management by automating the processes but also provide you actional insights into the metrics necessary for executing your strategies.

Bhupendra Choudhary is Business Head of FieldCircle - a leading field service management software company.