The First-Time Fix Trap: Why Your Best Metric Might Be Your Biggest Problem

For decades, the First-Time Fix (FTF) rate has been the Service Desk’s crown jewel. It sits proudly on dashboards, usually hovering around 70% or 80%, framed as a badge of efficiency. We tell ourselves that if we can solve an issue the moment a user calls, we are winning.

But there is a quieter, more uncomfortable truth beneath that number. Every “quick fix” represents a moment where a colleague’s productivity ground to a halt. If you are celebrating a high FTF, you are effectively telling your organisation: “We are proud that we disrupt your day 70% of the time you call us, because we can usually fix the damage in five minutes.”

It is time to stop measuring how well we react and start measuring how effectively we prevent.

Halving the Score

The real challenge is not “How do we get to a 100% First-Time Fix?” but rather “How do we halve our FTF score by making the issues vanish entirely?” When you look at your FTF data, do not see a success story. See a list of failures.

A high FTF is often just noise. It suggests the Service Desk is handling commodity issues, such as password resets, “how-to” questions, and basic software glitches. If something takes five minutes to fix over the phone, it should have taken thirty seconds via a bot or, better yet never happened at all.

And every time we celebrate an FTF, we risk ignoring why the issue occurred in the first place. If a technician fixes a mapped drive issue in three minutes, the ticket is closed, and the score goes up. But if that same issue occurs 400 times a month, that “quick fix” is actually a massive drain on organisational energy. We closed the ticket. We did not solve the problem.

We also tend to forget what the user actually experienced before the fix. A five-minute resolution usually follows ten minutes of frustration and five minutes on hold. The user has lost twenty minutes of their day to a problem that was “easily solved.” Multiply that across hundreds of contacts a week, and the cost becomes staggering, even when the fix rate looks heroic.

Why This Matters for ITSM Teams

Shifting away from the FTF pedestal is a sign of a mature service management strategy. Low-maturity teams focus on activity – how many tickets we closed. High-maturity teams focus on outcomes—how much uptime we provided.

For Service Desk Managers, the shift is really about resource allocation. If you can automate the bottom 30% of your first-time fixes, your analysts are suddenly free to act as Problem Managers. They can dive into the telemetry, identify the noisy applications, and work with infrastructure teams to resolve those issues at the root cause. That moves the Service Desk from being a cost centre to a value driver.

Industry trends are reinforcing the point. The move toward XLA (Experience Level Agreements) reflects a growing recognition that users do not care if you fixed it on the first call. They care that they did not have to call you in the first place.

Closing Thoughts

Measurement is the compass of IT Service Delivery, but if the needle is pointing at the wrong thing, you will end up in the wrong place. We need to stop using FTF as a vanity metric and start using it as a diagnostic tool. Ask yourself: why is the score so high? Every percentage point represents a person who had to stop working to talk to us.

The goal should not be to be the best at fixing things. It should be the best at ensuring things stay fixed.

I will be going deeper into the “Proactive Shift” and how to dismantle the cult of the First-Time Fix during my session at SPARK 26. We will look at practical ways to turn your service data into a roadmap for total incident prevention. I hope to see you there.

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If you are looking for help to improve your service desk’s first time fix rate but don’t know where to start, SDI can help. Take a look at the SDI Health Check service to help you get where you want to be, fast.

“Using another one of the high‑level recommendations from your Health Check, we built an Escalations Management process and put a dedicated team in place. And honestly, the results have been amazing. We’ve cut wasted effort by about 83%, our customer experience is positive, and we can track and report on every escalation that comes in. Those insights are now feeding directly into our new Customer Service Improvement forum, which has been a game‑changer for how we drive improvements.” Nola Muir, Divisional Manager: IT Servicing, Discovery SA