The 5 Numbers That Tell You If a Repair Tech Is Actually Making You Money

You already know which technician is your best. You just can't prove it with anything except a gut feeling and a stack of happy voicemails. That's fine on a five-truck team where you ride along twice a month. It falls apart the day you hire number six and realize you have no idea whether he's carrying his weight or quietly costing you money. A simple technician KPI scorecard fixes that, and it does something else too: it ends the awkward annual review where you sit across from a guy and grope for something specific to say.

Here are the five numbers worth tracking. None of them require software you don't already have. A spreadsheet and an honest look at your invoices will do.

The five KPIs worth putting on a technician scorecard

1. Billable (productivity) percentage

This is the foundation. Take the hours a technician actually bills to customers and divide by the hours you pay him for the same stretch. Bill eight hours out of a paid 10-hour day and you're at 80%.

It won't ever hit 100%. Nobody bills for the drive to the supply house or the morning truck stock. But it tells you how much of the day turns into invoiced work. A tech sitting at 55% is either getting buried in windshield time, getting bad routing from dispatch, or spending an hour in the driveway on his phone. The number doesn't tell you which. It tells you where to look.

Many shops aim for something in the 70–85% range for a field service tech. Below that, the problem is often dispatch, not the technician, so check your routing before you blame the person.

2. Callback (comeback) rate

The percentage of jobs that bring you back out for the same complaint, on your dime. This is the quality number, and it's the one techs hate most because it's hard to argue with.

Calculate it as callbacks divided by total jobs over a period. A tech who runs 100 jobs a month and eats four comebacks is at 4%. Lower is better. Many shops aim to keep comebacks under roughly 5% and start coaching when someone drifts past 8–10%.

Callbacks are expensive twice. You pay the labor and fuel to go back, and you lose the trust of a customer who now wonders if you knew what you were doing. A low callback rate is the clearest sign a tech is fixing things right the first time.

3. Average ticket (average invoice)

Total revenue a technician generates divided by the number of jobs. Simple.

This one needs context or it lies to you. A tech running mostly diagnostic-only appliance calls will post a lower average ticket than one handling compressor replacements, and that's got nothing to do with skill. Compare like against like. Segment by call type before you read too much into the raw number.

Where average ticket earns its keep is in trend lines and outliers. A tech whose average is quietly sliding may be forgetting to charge for parts, undercutting your flat rate, or skipping the second repair the customer would happily have paid for. A tech whose average is wildly higher than everyone else's deserves a second look too, just from the other direction. (See number two.)

4. Upsell or membership conversion

The share of jobs where a technician sells something beyond the original complaint: a maintenance plan, a needed second repair, a surge protector, a capacitor that was reading low. If you run a membership program, membership sign-ups per 100 jobs is the cleanest version.

This is where the money actually hides. Two techs can post identical billable percentages, but the one who signs four maintenance agreements a week is building you recurring revenue while the other is leaving it in the driveway. Track conversion as a rate (memberships or approved recommendations divided by opportunities) so you're measuring the behavior, not just the luck of the route.

A word of caution. Push this number in isolation and you teach people to oversell, which drives callbacks and one-star reviews. It only works read alongside callback rate and your review scores.

5. CSR booking rate (if you track it)

This one isn't a technician number, strictly. It's your front desk. But it belongs on the same page because it decides how many at-bats your techs even get.

Booking rate is booked jobs divided by inbound opportunity calls. If 100 people call and 60 become scheduled jobs, you're booking 60%. A great field team is wasted behind a CSR who books 40% of a ringing phone. Many shops aim for 65% or higher on genuine service calls, scored by call intent. A price-shopper and an emergency no-heat call shouldn't be held to the same bar.

If you don't track this yet, start. It's often the cheapest fix in the building, and it makes every other number on this list look better.

Rough targets to argue about

Treat these as general rules of thumb and starting points for a conversation, not gospel. Your service mix, your market, and your pay structure all move them.

The point of a target isn't to hit a magic number. It's to give you and the technician the same reference point so the review stops being about personality and starts being about the work.

The review template that ends the awkward annual review

Here's the whole tool. Build a one-page sheet, one row per technician, six columns: name, then the five KPIs, each showing this period's number next to your target and last period's number. Print it. That's it.

Now the review runs itself. You're not searching for something diplomatic to say about attitude. You're pointing at a row. "Your billable is strong and your average ticket is up, but callbacks jumped to 9% in June and here are the three reasons we logged. Let's fix that one thing." A tech can hear that, because it's specific and it's fair. And when someone's crushing it across the board, the sheet makes the raise conversation easy — you've got the evidence sitting right there.

Do it monthly and the annual review disappears as an event. It becomes twelve small, low-drama check-ins instead of one dreaded meeting where everyone braces for surprises. Nobody gets blindsided, because the numbers were on the wall the whole time.

If you're building this scorecard while also bringing on new people, our guide to hiring your first appliance repair technician covers what to look for before they ever get a row on the sheet. And how you price the work sets the ceiling on average ticket and conversion, so it's worth reading alongside flat-rate vs. time-and-materials pricing.

Five numbers. One page. No more guessing who's carrying the team.