With the announcement of Field Service Lighting, Salesforce has tried to close the gap between the customer calling customer reps, and field person servicing the customer based on the complaint or request. For companies using field service representatives like repair and servicing personnel, this is a valuable tool to boost the overall customer servicing experience.
How it works?
The tool allows maximum productivity from the field service personnel. If suppose, your company sends internet service technicians to service your customer, you need to know which field rep is at which locality/ area, where they need to be dispatched to, and what problem they need to solve at a particular house or office. Salesforce FSL allows just that.
Be it scheduling appointments, dispatching the right set of technicians in the right direction, and enhancing the user experience with a mobile-friendly interface, FSL is capable of delivering these advantages through a seamless ‘phone-to-field’ tool.
Key components of Field Service Lighting
With FSL, the below components allow an enhanced user experience at the customer end
1 – Scheduling policies
The right scheduling drastically cuts down the geographic distance a field personnel has to travel to service every open ticket. With Scheduling Policies and Scheduling Policy Work Rules, this can be easily achieved.
A Scheduling policy helps the admin to define a set of rules. This helps find the right technician based on parameters like skill level, maximum geographical distance, and territory assigned. These policies can be set as ‘Customer First’ or ‘Emergency’. By setting these parameters, the next step of service resource allocation becomes simplified and effective.
2 – Service Resource Allocation
With multiple open work orders, having the right service technician assigned to it can be a nightmare, but since you have already set the scheduling policies in place, you only need to see the ones that match the policies and then allocate them to the work order.
There are three appointment booking choices that can be done –
a. Emergency – This option aligns the nearest field service person to the open order, based on the ‘first come, first serve’ principle.
b. Get Candidates – With this option, you can search for a specific resource and then align him/ her to the order. This comes in handy when you need specialized skills (senior resources, supervisor etc.) to work on a particular request.
b. Book Appointment – It may happen that the time slot that the customer prefers for servicing may not have that many personnel attached to it. Hence, with this feature, the dispatcher can see which person is available at the customer’s preferred time slot, and then book an appointment with one of the available technicians.
3 – Street Level Routing
When the field service person is assigned to an open order, FSL gets going in determining the expected arrival time based on his/ her distance from the designated place of servicing. The good news is that on the way, it also factors in delay causing triggers like traffic jams, thus providing a more realistic ETA. With this level of precision, the scheduling hardly ever goes out of control or goes into overlap with another request.
4 – Dispatcher Board
This is a high level visualization that business managers need to look at for ensuring proper work done at the proper time. The real-time monitoring service helps uncover a lot of insights like appointment overlap, needed to ensure superior customer servicing.
Advantages –
1 – Seamless, Streamlined, Successful
Your company can connect the entire service workforce through tools that streamline and empower agents, dispatchers, and mobile employees. The end game is to deliver an incredibly seamless user experience. Dispatchers can utilize smart scheduling to provide real-time work allocation to the right type of technicians based on their experience and service expertise.
2 – Mobile friendly interface
FSL uses the ClickSoftware functionality to enable streamlined workforce management and scheduling on a mobile-friendly interface. The key aim of maximizing service-call efficiency is achieved with this benefit. The mobile-based open work orders allow the dispatcher to align a ticket if the area is on the route which the technician is travelling to.
3 – Up-sell potential
With an all-round view of the customer relationship, the field technician stands a great chance for up-sell. For example during a router repair, if the customer asks about a new service, the technician can take the opportunity to sell the devices and provide a discount on the bundled services.
To conclude
Salesforce has delivered on its key objective – of providing 360 degree view of customers and aligning the right field service personnel to the right request. Both its existing products Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with its three variants (Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Unlimited Edition) will be phased out in favor of Field Service Lighting with its own set of three variants (Lightning Professional Edition, Lightning Enterprise Edition, and Lightning Unlimited Edition).
