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Salesforce Field Service Lightning (FSL) for Field Service Management

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Customers expect personalized and connected services. They want services that are proactive, predictable and cohesive across the different channels, including phone, email, webchat, and social networks, to provide a place for excellent customer experience.

What is Field Service Management, FSM?

Field Service Management helps organizations manage any kind of workforce that needs to be executed in a remote location. The key players that collaborate in Field Service are:

The Customer who requests a service.

The Agent who receives the service request and generates the work order.

The Dispatcher who ensures that a service appointment is created and assigned to the right Technician on the field based on schedules, skill level, and geographic position.

The Field Service Technician who receives the service appointment and makes the visit to the site and completes the job.

The 360-degree view of customers to know your customers more intimately, helps you find success in the Field Service realm. Technicians are equipped to deliver personalized experiences for your customers, and studies have consistently shown that most customers expect them now. With changing customer expectations, not all businesses are equipped to deliver what customers expect, particularly in the area of Field Service Management. FSM not only makes the organization exceed customer expectations and manage field service efficiently, but it also gives field service workers and their managers new solutions for building a greater customer engagement journey.

What are Some Common Business Challenges in Field Service?

  • Difficulty managing on-site resources efficiently.
  • Lack of communication between back-office and on-site teams.
  • Inaccurate service appointments created with wrong or no resource.
  • Uninformed on-site technicians.
  • Inability to provide prompt on-site service.
  • Poor work quality.
  • Tiring manual paperwork.
  • Declining profit margins.

What are Some Companies that Could Benefit from FSM?

  • Manufacturing companies that install or repair equipments at the customer’s site.
  • Property Management companies that provide services to keep ongoing operations.
  • Insurance companies that have their task force in the field.
  • Home health care companies with nurses serving patients at home.
  • HVAC companies where technicians install or repair systems on-site.
  • Logistic companies that deliver and pickup at the customer’s site.
  • Utilities companies where technicians are dispatched to install or troubleshoot and repair.
  • Engineering and Construction companies that perform install, maintenance and repair.

What Can Field Service Lightning (FSL) do for Organizations?

Seamlessly connect with customers

Agents, dispatchers and field employees are on a single platform, giving them a 360-degree view of the customer. The field technician will be able to access the customer purchase and service history, enabling them to resolve the issue at the first visit and possibly upsell the customer another product. They also have the ability to create work orders from cases, to generate service appointments for field technicians, and to manage entitlements and service contracts.

Optimize schedules and intelligently assign jobs

Business rules and service objectives are enforced when assigning work to resources.The Dispatcher console has a remarkable user interface with shift management and resource absence capabilities. The work is routed intelligently based on the 6W’s: Who does What, Where, When, for Who, and with What.

Harness Einstein AI to increase first-time fix rate

Empower your workforce with image recognition technology to give greater insight to identify assets and parts using images. Using this technology, the technician makes sure that the right product part is used, thus increasing the likelihood of a first time fix and avoiding mistakes. The power of this intelligence to mobile workers increases their productivity considerably.

Equipment and Inventory Management

Ensures that the products and trucks are present at the right location. FSL can help track inventory locations, inventory depreciation, product transfers, product requests, and shipments. It provides the executive team the visibility into product availability, track inventory consumed/returned, and predict product replenishment timing. Dispatchers and managers are able to send technicians to the field with assurance that they have the right equipment and knowledge to complete the job during the first visit.

Manage jobs from any mobile device

FSL mobile app for Android and iOS brings the power of on-site job management to the mobile workers. It provides real-time collaboration during transit—showing job schedules, van stock and inventory, and knowledge articles from an easy-to-use mobile app with offline capability. The mobile app has push notifications and chatter to communicate with dispatchers, partners and customers. Additionally, it allows the geolocation tracking of field technicians, generation of service reports, and finding of other work orders in nearby locations for the team.

Make smarter decisions

Field Service Analytics app gives intuitive visualizations based on your field service data and provides just-in-time analytics for field service managers and dispatchers. Field Service analytics empowers managers with answers to help technicians perform the right service at the customer’s site, providing clear insights to improve each on-site experience. In addition, it has the ability to integrate with other applications and to drill into their data—all from one app. These features working in tandem allow smarter decisions and actions to be taken.

We will deep dive into each of these features in the upcoming weeks, so keep an eye out!