In field services, your technicians are both your product and your brand. They’re the ones showing up at the door, talking to customers, solving problems, and shaping the experience people associate with your business.

That means it’s crucial that you ensure your technicians are delivering the best service they can. But before you can improve something, you first have to measure it. 

Too many home and field service business owners still fly blind when it comes to technician performance. They rely on scattered feedback or the occasional customer callback to assess how their team is doing. That approach might work when you’ve only got a couple of techs, but as you grow it becomes a serious liability.

Without clear, technician-level metrics:

• You don’t know who your top performers are or who’s falling behind.

• You miss early warning signs of issues like poor communication, rushed jobs, or frequent reservices.

• You can’t tie results back to specific behaviors, so training becomes generic and ineffective.

• You reward the loudest voices instead of the best work.

• And worst of all, you create a culture where excellence goes unnoticed and underperformance goes unchecked.

This lack of visibility hits your bottom line. Missed upsell opportunities, negative reviews, wasted drive time, and preventable rework all add up fast. And when good technicians don’t feel recognized or supported, they leave.

Tracking technician KPIs is about creating a culture of accountability, recognition, and continuous improvement where everyone knows what “great” looks like and has the tools to get there.

Here are the five most important technician-level metrics every business owner should be tracking to improve performance, reduce churn, and drive long-term growth.

Customer NPS Score

Why it matters

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a proven indicator of customer satisfaction and loyalty. It tells you, in simple terms, how likely a customer is to recommend your business to a friend or neighbor. It’s the most powerful form of marketing in field services. High NPS does more than demonstrate that customers are happy: it shows they trust your brand enough to put their own reputation on the line by recommending you to others.

What to track

Start by collecting NPS consistently after each job. The standard question is simple: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or neighbor?”

Scores of 9 or 10 are considered promoters. These are your raving fans, or the people most likely to refer your business. Scores of 7 or 8 are passives; satisfied but not enthusiastic.

Anything 6 or below are detractors, or customers who are unlikely to return and may actively discourage others from using your services.

To make NPS useful, you need to tie responses back to individual technicians. That means sending the NPS survey immediately after a completed job, while the experience is still fresh, and linking it to the technician who performed the service either manually or automatically.

What to do with it

Once you’re collecting NPS per tech, patterns quickly emerge. Which technicians consistently generate promoters? Who’s racking up detractors? This gives you a data-driven view of customer experience at the individual level.

Use NPS trends to:

• Pair your top performers with new hires for mentorship

• Identify training opportunities for techs whose scores are slipping

• Surface common feedback themes — what makes a visit feel exceptional vs. forgettable

• Adjust staffing or service types based on customer sentiment

• Recognize and reward techs who earn perfect 10s

Over time, tracking NPS at the technician level gives you a reliable, measurable signal of how much value your technicians are delivering, which technicians need coaching, and which technicians are driving word-of-mouth referrals or a positive brand reputation. Techs begin to take ownership over the customer experience because they know it’s being seen, measured, and rewarded.

Time On-Site

Time On-Site

Why it matters

How long a technician spends on-site is one of the clearest indicators of service quality, efficiency, and preparedness. If the visit is too short, customers may feel like the job was rushed or incomplete. If it drags on too long, you could be dealing with poor route planning, low confidence, or inefficiency, which all hurt profitability and strain your schedule.

Time on-site is also a signal of how well a tech understands the job, the tools, and the customer. It can help you identify the difference between a confident expert and someone just going through the motions.

What to track

To get accurate data, you need to track start and end times for every appointment, and associate those timestamps with the assigned technician and service type. Most field service management software can do this automatically using mobile check-ins, geolocation, or job status updates.

Once you have that data, calculate:

• Average time on-site per technician

• Average time by job type (e.g., termite inspection vs. mosquito treatment)

• Outliers — jobs that take far longer or shorter than expected

• Time trends — are certain techs speeding up or slowing down over time?

Some field service management tools, like Applause, track all of this information for you. 

Be sure to account for reasonable variance. Some customers have questions. Some homes take longer to treat. The goal is not to overreact to one long job, but to spot patterns over weeks or months.

What to do with it

If a technician is consistently spending more time than average for a given job type, dig deeper:

• Are they over-servicing customers?

• Are they stuck trying to upsell, but without confidence or clarity?

• Do they lack the tools or information to do the job efficiently?

On the flip side, if a tech is racing through jobs (and it’s reflected in lower NPS scores, poor reviews, or higher re-service rates) that’s a red flag. They might be cutting corners, skipping inspection steps, or not communicating properly with the customer.

Use time on-site data as part of regular coaching conversations. Set benchmarks for what “efficient and thorough” looks like for each type of service. Recognize the techs who get it right vs. flies through jobs. And if you're using Applause, you can visualize time-on-site data alongside NPS, reviews, and reservice frequency to get the full picture of how each tech is performing.

In the field services world, time is money, but it’s also trust. Tracking time on-site helps you protect both.

Reservice Frequency

Why it matters

Every time you have to send a technician back to the same customer, it eats into your margins and your reputation. Reservice jobs often signal poor execution, an incomplete diagnosis, or misaligned customer expectations during the initial visit. Even when the return visit is done with a smile, the underlying message to the customer is this: we didn’t get it right the first time.

Over time, high reservice frequency puts pressure on your schedule, your team, and your brand.

What to track

Start by defining what counts as a reservice. Typically, you’ll want to flag any repeat visit to the same customer address for the same service within a 14- to 30-day window. Most CRMs or field service platforms can help you identify and timestamp these repeat jobs automatically.

Then calculate:

• Re-service rate per technician — the percentage of completed jobs that result in a follow-up

• Breakdown by service type — to normalize for complex jobs that naturally have higher return rates

• Location trends — are certain branches or regions seeing more rework than others?

• Correlation with other KPIs — such as NPS, time on-site, or review sentiment

What to do with it

High reservice frequency isn’t always the technician’s fault. It could be due to incorrect scheduling, poor communication, or unrealistic customer expectations. But it is a signal worth investigating.

If one tech has a re-service rate 2–3x higher than the team average, ask:

• Are they skipping key steps in the process?

• Do they need better training on product application or diagnosis?

• Are they setting clear expectations with the customer during the visit?

Conversely, if a technician consistently gets it right the first time — with no return visits and strong feedback — make sure they know their work is being noticed. Recognize and reward those behaviors. Use their jobs as training examples for the rest of the team.

Re-service frequency is one of the most direct levers you have to improve profitability. Fewer repeat visits means fewer trucks on the road, less time spent on non-revenue jobs, and a better customer experience. And when you pair this metric with NPS and review data, you can identify not just what is going wrong, but why.

In short: get more jobs done right the first time, and everything else, from margins and morale to retention gets better too.

Driving Score

Why it matters
Your technicians spend hours on the road every day, and how they drive between jobs impacts far more than just their arrival time. Unsafe or aggressive driving puts your vehicles, your people, and your brand at risk. It also drives up fuel consumption, accelerates wear and tear, and exposes your company to potential liability.

Customers notice too. Your logo is on the truck. One incident of reckless driving can turn into a negative review or even a social media post, and just like that, your reputation takes a hit.

That’s why monitoring driving behavior is fundamentally a performance issue. 

What to track

If your fleet is equipped with GPS or telematics (and if it isn’t, it should be), you already have access to rich data that can be turned into a driving score.

The most common behaviors to monitor include:

• Speeding events

• Hard braking or sharp acceleration

• Idling time

• Route efficiency

• Phone usage or distracted driving (if available)

Most fleet tracking systems can consolidate this data into a composite driving score by technician, updated daily or weekly.

What to do with it:
Driving scores should be part of your regular performance conversations. Recognize safe, efficient drivers publicly not just to reinforce the behavior, but to signal that it matters.

If you notice patterns of risky behavior, don’t wait. Schedule a coaching conversation to understand what’s behind it:

• Are techs rushing between jobs due to unrealistic scheduling?

• Do they understand how their driving impacts fuel costs, maintenance, and safety?

• Do they know this data is being tracked — and tied to their performance?

You can also gamify driving scores as part of your overall incentive structure. Offer monthly rewards for the safest drivers. Display driving rankings on digital leaderboards. Make it something your team takes pride in.

At the end of the day, safer drivers protect your assets, your margins, and your reputation. Tracking this metric turns the drive between appointments from a blind spot into a strategic advantage.

Google Reviews

Why it matters

Nothing drives local demand like great Google reviews. They’re one of the first things a prospective customer sees when searching for a home service provider — often before they even visit your website. In a competitive market, dozens of recent 5-star reviews can tip the scales in your favor. A few neglected or unresolved 1-stars can do the opposite.

But while most business owners think about reviews at the company level, the truth is that individual technicians play a major role in shaping your online reputation. Every service call is a potential review — and every review is a reflection of the technician who earned it.

What to track

To make reviews a performance metric, you need to tie them directly to the tech who performed the job. There are two main ways to do this:

Name-tagging in customer requests

• Train techs to ask happy customers to mention their name in the review (“If you had a great experience, feel free to mention my name — it helps a lot.”)

• This makes attribution simple and helps build customer-facing accountability.

Automated attribution via CRM or platform tools

• If you’re using a platform like Applause, the system automatically tracks which technician completed the job, then links that to any review received within a specific time window after the visit.

• You can then track not just volume, but quality — average star rating, keyword trends, and sentiment analysis per tech.

In addition to star ratings, monitor:

• Review response rate: Are reviews being replied to in a timely, thoughtful way?

• Review frequency by tech: Who consistently earns reviews, and who doesn’t?

• Keyword frequency: What do customers say about each tech? Look for patterns like “friendly,” “professional,” or “rushed.”

What to do with it

First, make sure your team understands the importance of reviews — and that they’re empowered (and encouraged) to ask for them. Technicians often don’t realize that a 5-star review with their name in it is one of the most valuable things they can generate for your business.

Here’s how to make reviews part of your performance strategy:

• Incentivize review collection: Offer small bonuses or shoutouts for every verified 5-star review that mentions a tech by name.

• Automate the ask: Use SMS or email follow-ups to prompt happy customers to leave a review, and personalize the message based on the tech who completed the job.

• Recognize publicly: Celebrate top performers in team meetings or digital leaderboards. Show the whole team that great service leads to real recognition.

• Coach privately: For techs who aren’t getting reviews — or are getting lukewarm ones — provide training and support. Sometimes a small tweak in communication style or setting clearer expectations can make a big difference.

Over time, this creates a virtuous cycle. Techs who know they’re being evaluated based on customer feedback tend to go the extra mile. That leads to better service, better reviews, more leads, and ultimately, more revenue.

Making online reputation a technician-level KPI transforms it from a vague company priority into a shared team effort. And when you get it right, it becomes one of your strongest competitive advantages.

Pulling it all together

The real power in these five metrics comes from seeing them side-by-side. A technician with strong NPS, high review volume, and low reservice rates is likely one of your most valuable team members and a great candidate to model training after. On the other hand, a tech with low customer feedback, long job times, and frequent returns may be struggling silently and in need of support.

The more visibility you give your team into their performance and the more clearly you connect that performance to rewards and recognition, the more ownership and accountability you create.

Platforms like Applause make this easy by tracking all five metrics (and more), surfacing trends, and even triggering real-time bonuses tied to technician performance. That’s how you go from reactive to proactive. 

Track the right metrics. Share them with your team. Act on what you see.

Because when your techs perform better, your whole business grows faster.

Ready to take your business to the next level of performance and growth? Chat with our team to learn how Applause can help you get there.