A KPI Quick Case Study

At Lakeside Service Company, we expect all our technicians to sell to some degree. Some are better salespeople. Others have better technical skills. No two people are the same.

The KPIs need to make sense to each team member and still have value from a management standpoint.

We learned not to put too much weight on categories like sales and average invoices because guys who sell tons of stuff with the highest average tickets are often simply better salespeople. The bad news is they usually have the highest number of callbacks.

Then you have technical guys who don’t sell as much but have almost no recalls because they’re wizards with technology.

It’s easy to compensate people for sales. You build a spiff into it. But how do you do that for guys with lower sales and no callbacks?

These techs are who we typically send out to fix the work of the selling techs. That has a genuine value. This unbillable work is vital to keeping customers satisfied.

So, we settled on the idea of tracking total billable and unbillable calls.

Now, how do we pay the guys? Top sellers love the spiffs. Low callback techs don’t care about spiffs. They want good pay. So, we pay them slightly better than the selling techs.

The downside is that we’re now paying someone in the top bracket to do unbillable work.

That pressures the leader to be a better coach and mentor. It’s on us as managers and leaders to limit the callbacks and cut back on lost revenues associated with them.

This is a delicate balancing act that we are still perfecting. The key is in the numbers’ accuracy and how we share those numbers with the team.

Knowing the Score with KPIs

This is why measuring and tracking KPIs isn’t enough. You must share the data so your team knows where they stand. I like to call that “knowing the score.” We share the data using a combination of whiteboards posted in public areas and using electronics via our Service Titan business management software, which shares individual scores via email. For big team scores, we used digital monitors because updating required to track things on a whiteboard manually was too time-consuming.

But we’re moving back to whiteboards. There’s something about the tangibility of hanging them on the wall. That is what NCI’s John Garofalo taught us to do during his years of mentoring.

Here’s the challenge: the numbers must be accurate. You can’t just haphazardly publish numbers because once you start publishing and posting them for all to see, people get very focused on the accuracy of their numbers. So, you must be able to stand behind the numbers.

This process requires a cultural change that can be both difficult and rewarding. It also evolves and changes over time because as your team changes by bringing in new people, you get a new set of challenges. Each generation seems to bring a new set of skills and challenges with them.

At Lakeside Service, we’ve been using KPIs for so long that they are part of our culture. In fact, if we aren’t providing KPI feedback, they will let us know and hold leadership accountable.

KPIs have become fuel for performance, and the newer team members need the correct support to get on board. Often, their experience with other employers was to be criticized for under-performing. We plunge them into a supportive team environment long enough for them to realize the benefits.

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