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In today’s pandemic context, businesses around the world have embraced digital transformation to re-imagine their internal processes. In partnership with global Salesforce Consultants, the Customer 360 platform has helped organizations witness exponential growth in lead conversion and customer satisfaction scores. And with digital transformation, there has been growing need to make the platform available to field services. And that led to the birth of Salesforce Field Service Lightning.
Salesforce Field Service is a solution that extends the power and flexibility of the Salesforce platform to field service operations. Multiple teams across geographies can be easily connected to everyday field service tasks that require site visits in real time.
What Is Salesforce Field Service Lightning?
Salesforce Field Service Lightning is Salesforce’s new offering as part of its Customer-360 platform to augment the customer experience through field services. One of the hallmarks of Salesforce CRM is the 360-degree insight on customers. With Field Service Lightning, customer information percolates downstream to the field service agents. Along with that, Salesforce also provides a Field Service learning map, a handy resource to guide you on your path to Field Service success.
Let’s dive deeper into the key functions of Salesforce Field Service Lightning to understand why it’s useful for businesses.
Task Assignment
This is perhaps the most attractive feature of Salesforce Field Service Lightning. With this function, you can quickly create tasks for your field service agents and track the tasks assigned in real time. Standard activities such as appointments, maintenance tasks and other field activities can be easily managed by the field agents and technicians.
And because of the fully integrated capability of the Salesforce platform, Field Service Lightning comes integrated with contacts, accounts, cases, and other items. You can get access to knowledge articles and real time tracking of SLA compliance with relevant milestone tracking or visit resolution.
Service and Resource Allocation
Field Service also allows you to automatically customise and assign tasks as per company guidelines. And not just that, it also allows you to book appointments easily based on customer data and tailor the relevant tool for a particular task based on capacity, location, and business rules. Customers can also auto-book an appointment conveniently.
Real Time Inventory
Using the Field Service mobile app, you can view the assets installed at client locations using the barcode scan function. You can scan team barcodes and update the inventory available with a particular truck. This allows the field technician to easily manage the tools inventory and materials that is being transported to the customer.
The required field service tasks can be associated with both the inventory required for the task as well as the skills required to complete them. You can configure multiple storage locations for materials and tools which could be fixed locations such as warehouses as well as mobile inventory such as trucks or backpacks.
Dispatcher Console
You can easily assign tasks and link it to the right agent based on multiple criteria such as work location, required knowledge to accomplish the task, agent availability, and much more.
The dispatcher can get a complete view of all scheduled appointments, their stratus updates, with alerts for issues that require urgent intervention. The field service map shows you the status of the service task in real time, showing the current location of the both the technician as well as the client. With this feature, tracking and management of field technicians becomes more efficient.
Field Service App
Using the Field Service Mobile app, the field technicians can view the list of pending tasks for the day in real time. Tasks can be viewed in 2 ways: a sequential list for the day ahead or a map that shows the route to follow. Technicians can also fill in the necessary information required to complete the task. The app also provides relevant guidance to the technician to ensure that the necessary steps are followed to confirm the appointment, making their job easier.
Field Service Lightning comes integrated with Chatter. This allows field technicians to share updates with other technicians or the dispatcher in real time. Customers can sign on the app itself and technicians can create service reports by having a digital document about the job.
The app also works seamlessly in offline mode, which may be necessary in remote areas. In offline mode, all Field Service functions are available in the app. This allows technicians to complete tasks in areas where there is limited or no mobile service. Technicians no longer have to be limited by circumstances and can deliver great customer service everywhere.
Data Analysis
Salesforce has set a gold standard when it comes to data analysis and Field Service Lightning is no different. In Field Service, you can easily perform data analysis on the go with just a few taps. You can create comprehensive custom views of technicians, supervisors, and third party contractors. Salesforce Field Service Lightning allows you to easily integrate all data from multiple systems making service and its supervision possible.
4 Advantages of Salesforce Field Service Lightning
Salesforce Field Service Lightning integrates seamlessly with tools of the Salesforce ecosystem such as Service Cloud to deliver greater efficiency and productivity.
Shift Management
Organizing field service teams in shifts and complex trip management is a thing of the past. Salesforce Field Service Lightning is built on an object model that allows for improved and easy management of these processes. Supervisors and managers can easily manage resources and shifts and relieve administrators of unnecessary heavy lifting of mundane tasks.
Dependencies
Linking tasks can now be done easily with Field Service Lightning. More often than not, tasks have dependences and its critical to correlate them to maintain service levels. This is particularly helpful in scenarios where a particular work order has multiple tasks that must be completed.
Service Groups
This allows field service agents to work as a collaborative team for easier planning and execution of field service tasks. This brings in fluidity to the entire service operations.
More often than not, field service teams work under the assumption that everyone has similar skills, which limits a work order to be able to allocate resources using a combination of skills. For instance, if you need a carpenter and a plumber, they should be assigned to different service appointments with the same start dependencies amongst them. This feature comes in handy for certain scenarios such as professional services or complex engineering.
Salesforce is committed to continue its technology innovation to bring value to its customers, their employees and partners across industries. Field Service offers a significant improvement for your business, covering all your task and logistic management needs and ensures that your field service agents can spend most of their time on what they do best and not in mundane, repetitive tasks.
At Girikon, a Gold Salesforce Partner, we offer consulting, implementation, and training across the entire spectrum of Salesforce products. To know more about how Salesforce Field Service Lightning can significantly improve the efficiency of your field service operations, contact us today.
About Author
Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.
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