Best Practices: Improving Roadside Assistance Operations

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Roadside assistance providers have taken into consideration high margins and revenue growth that service can deliver. Service quality has become increasingly critical to business success.

To meet the customer expectation of service quality is a challenging task. But by putting the right processes, technology and training will improve the services delivery quality.

Roadside assistance provider faces a challenge of aggregating the data from the disparate systems. This leads to delay in the services and at times the report won't tally as well. This will not help the service provider who wants to attain high margins and revenue growth.

The key to accessing all the data and gain better insights in real-time is implementing an Omni-channel platform. With the Omni-channel platform, you gain access to the end-to-end reporting in real-time. Omni-channel enables the service provider with the accurate
reporting, metric calculations and intuitive dashboard.

The key metrics to be monitored for any Roadside assistance provider are revenue, cost, productivity, quality and customer satisfaction.

Best Practices for any Roadside Assistance provider are:

1. First Time Fix Rate
2. Mean Time to Repair
3. Mean Contract Uptime
4. Attach Rate
5. Mean Time to Complete
6. Average Response Time
7. Repeat Visit
8. Utilization

Definition – Rate at which a customer issue is resolved with the initial visit.

First-time fix rate metric is largely underrated. Roadside assistance services are focused on customer satisfaction and the first time fix rate should be crucial. Roadside assistance provider can get the average first-time fix rate within the industry and help align the success rate goals. Aberdeen Group found that the top 20% of the service providers have a first-time fix rate of 88%. A poor first-time fix rate may lead to issues with customer retention & referrals.

Definition: Average time taken to repair on-site.

This is also an important productivity metrics. The MTTS calculation is the total time taken to repair divided by the total number of repairs over a specific period. This metrics will help to understand things like onboarding, training opportunities, SLAs and actual roadside service time.

Definition: Percent of runtime for a serviced vehicle covered by the contract.

The vehicle runtime is a key part of the most SLAs and it has to be monitored closely because it impacts the cost, quality and customer satisfaction. A proven history of good runtime builds customer loyalty, referrals, and the brand.

Definition: Percentage of roadside assistance service covered by the Service Level Agreement.

Attach rate is an important metric to track as an initiation point for roadside assistance service to grow its revenue. For a roadside assistance service business to thrive it has to ensure a greater number of customers are attached to an assistance service.

Definition: The average time taken to complete the service/repair.

This helps in calculating the average time to complete/resolve customers issue from the first assistance request. This will help in identifying what is delaying the service resolution. By shorting the mean time to complete roadside assistance providers can help create the better customer experience.

Definition: The average time taken to respond to the customer per roadside assistance request

Monitoring the average response time of your technician will enable you to achieve the SLAs and also help you to optimize the technician’s schedule/day. Keeping an eye on the average response time will help you to be more efficient in dispatching.

Definition: The number of times a repaired vehicle had to be repaired/serviced again by the technician with a defined time period.

This can help you identify if the technician has not serviced the vehicle properly due to lack of skills or training or insufficient testing. Accordingly, the service provider can align a trained mastered technician. The other way of looking at it is the vehicle needs a lot of work and the feedback can be given to the Vehicle manufacturer.

Definition: Productive time vs Total Working Hours

Roadside assistance service providers commit a mistake of having different ways of measuring utilization, therefore it important to make it fixed across the organization. The core purpose of measuring utilization is to utilize each technician as much as possible. This will enhance the individual performance and do away with the team-wide issues.

These metrics will help roadside assistance providers to manage the technicians and also gain better business insights. These are not the only metrics to be considered, these are good to start with metrics.

Roadside assistance provider while purchasing a software need to keep the business issues in mind. Because those issues are the ones that need to be solved with the software. Before opting for a software, they need to identify and unify the complex business processes and information they need to obtain.

Because it’s not EASY!

The software that you are willing to purchase needs to map the information and business processes to the metrics that you want to track can be a challenge if the software is not scalable, rigid and implemented properly.

We have worked with leading roadside assistance providers to solve their business operational issues with bespoke roadside assistance software solutions. The service providers wanted extra control on the technician management and also have an in-depth insight into the performance.

AIMDek’s implemented solution have enabled the Roadside Assistance service provider to monitor and measure the performance metrics and were able to have access to actual data-driven insights in real-time.