The Second Visit

Ask a field services business where its margin goes and the answer is usually labour, then fuel, then parts. Ask what proportion of jobs require a return visit and the answer is often an estimate. The second question is the one that explains the first.

A repeat visit does not cost a little more than a completed one. It costs the travel again, the technician hours again, the scheduling slot that could have held new revenue, and a customer conversation that starts from a worse position than the original call did.

Where the cost actually sits

The obvious cost is the visit. The less obvious ones are harder to see in a P&L: the capacity consumed on work that was already paid for, the follow-up calls, and the disputed invoices that arrive weeks later because the job history does not match what the customer remembers.

That last one is a systems problem wearing a commercial disguise.

What drives a repeat visit

The technician arrived without the part. Usually because stock visibility is a day old, or because the fault was diagnosed from a description taken over the phone by someone reading from a script.

The job was scoped for the wrong skill set. A two-hour job assigned to whoever was closest, rather than whoever was certified for it.

Nobody could see the asset’s history. The same unit has failed three times this year, and the technician standing in front of it is the only person who does not know that.

The fix is unglamorous

None of this is solved by a better app for technicians, although that usually helps. It is solved by getting three things into one place: what the asset is and what it has done before, what stock actually exists and where, and who is qualified and available to attend.

Organisations that do this rarely report a dramatic transformation. They report first-time fix rates moving several points, which on a decent volume of jobs is the difference between a thin year and a good one.

What it is worth measuring

If first-time fix rate is not on the operational dashboard, it is worth asking why. It is the single number that connects scheduling, stock, training and customer satisfaction — and the one most likely to be tracked informally, by the people who already know which jobs are going to come back.