As more and more companies are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint, it forms a great opportunity for you to make your field service sustainable. It is high time that you should adopt sustainability to be the strategic pillar of your business and should promote the same values when you’re selecting your employees and partners.
But it’s easier said than done. You need to work on getting a reliable field service management solution that could help you build customer trust and reduce carbon emissions. This is something that you need to set up sustainability to achieve success.
We’ve covered here a few ways that you can follow to make your field service sustainable while growing your business.
One of the biggest challenges to achieving sustainability in the field service sector is fuel consumption. There can be situations like inclement weather, last-minute schedule changes, and heavy traffic, which can all lead to an extension of time on the road.
With skill-based routing, you can make sure that the right person for the job takes the most efficient route. This would be supported by real-time automation that will help you respond quickly to emergencies. This way you can save on gas, reduce emissions, and limit the impact on the road, thus contributing to sustainability.
Any kind of errors in estimating service or travel time, and parts required can completely disturb the schedule for the day. If these inefficiencies keep adding up they’ll lead to an increase in the carbon footprint.
You can streamline your field service activities and support sustainability using Artificial Intelligence. It helps you take different factors into account like traffic patterns, distance, and weather to predict how long the representative will take to drive to the job.
AI can also help to evaluate the history of similar tasks in the past to estimate how long a job will take.
It is not necessary that your service requests need on-site appointments, instead, there can be times when remote assistance could help. Your mobile workers can enable visual remote assistance to help customers and solve problems they’re facing in real-time.
Enabling remote assistance will help you to cut the time spent on the road. It means that there will be fewer emissions and wear and tear on roads.
Whether it is about automation, AI, or remote assistance, you just need a single platform that could enable you to ramp up your field service while managing sustainability. It’s time to adopt Salesforce and transform your field service for better efficiency and sustainability.
You can even reach out to our experts for a customized Field Service Lightning solution to boost the productivity of your on-site workers.
For any field service leader, safety is always on the top of all priorities. Your team would be able to do well with their tasks are you’ve set them up with the right enablement so they can achieve success. That’s the kind of secure field service management every company should have.
It is paramount to have safety in jobs related to field service. Technology has evolved rapidly over the years to meet the growing demands of society by helping businesses to access tools to develop smarter strategies that could keep their employees and customers safe.
Let’s have a look at some ways companies can get better revenue growth by making their field service secure.
Visual remote assistance allows your employees to deliver safe support and guidance without having to visit on-site. This helps to boost customer satisfaction while allowing employees to finish more jobs in the time they save as they won’t have to travel from site to site.
According to the report by Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer, 96% of people believe that customer experience has a great role in transforming buying decisions.
Remote assistance also contributes to keeping mobile workers off the road and safe, thus driving their productivity which ultimately boosts the revenue.
You can enable digital self-service so customers can manage their own appointments, making field service visits easy and safe. Customers would be able to track the reps in real-time when they’ll be on their way.
This gives customers the opportunity to plan the visit according to their convenience and get the work area ready before the mobile worker arrives.
Work plans help employees and contractors by providing clear step-by-step directions to ensure correct, consistent, and safe service delivery. Such plans help in improving first-time resolution rates and also cut down exposure to possible hazards on visits.
With these work plans, you can also get an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell to generate revenue. You can include questions about safety for your mobile workers as part of your work plans. You can include questions like:
This type of essential information can be quickly captured by workers from the customer so they can identify potential opportunities to boost sales and support.
Safety has a lot more role to play than protecting your employees and customers from harm during any service. With methods like remote assistance, work plans, self-service, and secure field service management can even contribute to revenue growth, bringing in recurring customers.
There’s a lot more you can do to improve your field service. You can learn more about Field Service Lightning with our certified consultants.
For organizations belonging to professional services, it matters the most how they handle their field service. For a growing business, a paper-based system or some disjointed apps would not do the work of managing the field service efficiently as a connected field service management solution would do. That’s where you need a solution efficient enough to bring the teams together to improve the way field service is managed.
Salesforce Field Service Lightning can be your solution to reduce inefficiencies and connect your operations to boost mobile workers and customer safety. It’s all because of several features that this field service management solution supports, making it easier to handle it all.
While you can access many capabilities and add-ons, you don’t have to go for them all at once. You need to know the key features that your solution must-have. We have listed here some of such features that you must consider for your field service solution.
Having a single console system would give you a complete view of field job status, making it easier to assign, track, and cancel job assignments. Dispatchers can be able to view schedules, track locations, and conduct skill-based task assignments. It will also help to eliminate overscheduling or job crossover.
Mobile workers act as the face of your company, and not only in the literal sense. 89% of service decision-makers mention that customer experience with a mobile worker works as a reflection of their brand. This makes it important to deliver the best service, which can be done by implementing mobile capabilities in the field.
Mobility will empower workers with quick access to information at all times so they need to deliver the best customer service. A connected mobile worker will easily have a complete view of the customer even before arriving at the appointment, thus giving the worker an idea about the service needed by the customer.
The job completion rate will automatically increase when you manage your work orders digitally. It can prove to be a vital way to instantly track all updates about the assigned field job while making the data visible to everyone involved in real-time. Managing orders digitally also means that there will be no more lost or miscategorized forms, which can seldom be the reason for delays in invoicing.
A field service management solution reporting and analytics will add value to your operations. It will allow complete visibility into operational performance across the field service. You can track everything from job scheduling to the status of the work.
It will allow users to view metrics like hours billable, hours logged, and the completion rate of work orders.
Your connected field service solution should add convenience for tech-savvy customers with online appointment booking. It can be done either with your customer-facing app or through a customer portal on your website. You can consider issuing ongoing automated notifications and service reminders through your app, email, or text messages.
You now know all the top features that your field service solution should possess. But the question is what solution can provide it all to you. Considering Salesforce Field Service Lightning will give your business the ease of managing your field service centrally while adding mobility to your business. Talk to our experts at 360 Degree Cloud to know more ways of improving your field service.
No wonder how we work in the company matters a lot, but we can’t ignore giving equal importance to the services we provide onsite. The importance of field service management has grown a lot and is still increasing with the ongoing demand for onsite services. With remote services gaining more and more popularity, it has become important for companies to pay attention to improving field service operations.
With cloud-based field services enabled by Salesforce, companies can go beyond boundaries to deliver the best onsite services to customers. It would keep agents updated with the tasks in real-time while tracking job status.
While many businesses concentrate on improving their internal operation functions, they fail to focus on enhancing field service. If field service is not handled right, there can be many issues, both on customers’ and employees’ end. Some of the common challenges at the customer end would be:
If your customers are facing any or all of these issues, chances are strong that they’ll prefer choosing a competitor next time for service. Implementing the right field service management will help to take corrective actions that will boost brand loyalty.
It’s quite clear now that field service operations are as important as your internal operations and any issue with those can cause you to lose customers. That’s where you need to adopt some smart ways to improve your field service management. Here we have listed some ways that could be helpful.
Mobility is the very heart of connected field service operations. When you provide your field agents with enhanced mobility, they tend to act more. Salesforce field service allows them to access more than just schedules and appointment details on the go, so they can get all the relevant information quickly, irrespective of their location.
Without a proper pattern of scheduling, the field service process would go completely ineffective. But with Salesforce, your agents can access cloud-based tools that would enable real-time scheduling, that will update the agents even about the up-to-the-minute changes. It would also help with scheduling automation for enhanced experience so appointments could be assigned to agents intelligently, based on their skills and availability.
The key to success in field service operations depends upon how effective the tracking is. This means that you should not just be able to track the progress of the jobs but should also be able to track your field agents. Salesforce makes it all possible to track the status of work and progress of field service agents.
If your agents don’t know what customers want, they certainly won’t be able to achieve their satisfaction, That’s where they could use build-in analytics tools to access customer data and plan targeted email messages and campaigns to anticipate needed services. All of this data can be gathered to prepare detailed analytical reports to provide better service.
Being able to deliver onsite services efficiently while managing client data and tracking job status is something every company would seek. This will give the company more power to improve service delivery while achieving customer satisfaction.
It’s time to upgrade your field service management and automate your operations. Contact us and discover what Salesforce field service features would be suitable for your business.
For any field service organization to be successful, it is important to give ample attention to the management. Managing the field forces and service technicians can be one of the most challenging operational tasks. But thankfully, Salesforce Field Service can make it all easier. Whether it is about managing the entire mobile workforce, tracking job status and labor hours, or managing transactions, Field Service can make it all possible and now in a better way with Field Service Lightning Mobile Extension Toolkit, which is in beta version as of now.
To make the management easier, Salesforce came up with Salesforce Field Service Lightning mobile app. This mobile extension for FSL is the one-stop solution to add advancement and additional functionality to make on-site job management easier and efficiently manage your mobile workforce.
With Winter 21 release, Salesforce provided ease to developers to create their own HTML-based mobile extensions for native FSL App. The feature of FSL Mobile Extention is currently in the pilot. We can expect some more changes and updates from Salesforce until it goes functional.
While working with any Salesforce mobile app, you need to consider several limitations and considerations that come along to design a use case. FSL provides its end-users with a wide variety of choices of types of actions to be performed. These features are built natively on Salesforce via flows or standard quick actions.
But currently, FSL comes with a limitation. Currently, you cannot build a fully customizable flow that runs aura components or a lightning web component in the background. So, you need to consider using FSL Mobile Extension Toolkit to use your custom screens with fully customizable user interface flows
FSL Mobile Extension Toolkit has some of the following limitations.
The functional version of the Field Service Lightning Mobile Extension Toolkit is still to be launched. It can be expected anytime in future releases. Contact our team to stay updated on what comes next in FSL.
Salesforce Field Service Lightning is the Salesforce product that works best for any business that involves people working in the field for repairs, maintenance, deliveries, or installation. But that’s not all. The effectiveness of field service can also be seen in inventory management. Guided field service and warehouse inventory management can now be brought together.
For a company that needs to manage inventory, it is important to track teams, trucks, distribution centers, and warehouses. Using field service, the lifecycle of products can be tracked within a single platform, making it easier to manage.
For SMBs and large-scale companies, managing stock in the warehouse can be a struggle. Guided field service can simplify the process to manage warehouse inventory. Here we have listed some benefits of the same.
All of these benefits make it easier to stay updated on warehouse inventory details and manage deliveries and production accordingly.
Salesforce field service has simply transformed the way an inventory can be managed. Guided field service allows you to track inventory at every stage of the lifecycle. Here’s how warehouse inventory management can be improved using field service.
You can create field service locations for all the places where you have your inventory, like warehouses. This makes it easier to track your stock and be prepared for renewal before the stock goes out.
You can add products in the work orders, work types, and work order line items. This would make it easier for you to track your orders and service providers.
Using guided field service, you can build line items for products and materials to be consumed for production. This is how you can always stay updated on the consumption of your inventory products.
You can easily track and manage the transfer of goods between your company warehouse and different locations for storage. You can create shipments to store information related to relevant transportation.
As your business keeps growing, it can be difficult to stay updated on the current stock in inventory, so you never get low on material. Bringing guided field service and warehouse inventory management will simplify it for you, managing everything virtually, with timely alerts related to stock.
Upgrade your inventory management with Salesforce. Reach out to us to know more about how you can make inventory management easier.
Every customer has gone through the pain of scheduling a field service appointment and getting the responses like- “Please wait, you’re put on hold” or “You have been slotted into the next week’s schedule.” If you are giving such responses to your customers then it is all because of your inefficiencies in field service management.
Do you know that 84% of customers say the experience delivered by a company is as important as the products or services it delivers? Well, that means that every time you keep a customer waiting, you might end up risking the reputation of the company. Your customers deserve to get same-day assistance and asset installation. Salesforce Field Lightning Service can help you make a difference here.
A mobile workforce without a field service management system is like trying herding cats. Field service management is usually required in sectors where it is needed to employ mobile workers and contractors. It could be in public utilities, telecommunications, professional services, manufacturing, transportation, and so much more.
Field service management is all about coordinating field operations like scheduling service appointments, tracking product stock, appointment status, etc. With customers and contractors adding to the business, it’s nearly impossible to manage it all without an automated system. Thank goodness for Field Service!
Customers always expect some control, convenience, and flexibility whenever they connect to a business. A company thus has to strategize its field service to offer customers the most convenient experience. Salesforce Field Service Lightning has simplified field service to a great extent and has provided companies the roadmap to scale up customer engagement. Here we’ve listed some ways connected FSL in Salesforce can help you build a proactive customer engagement model.
Work on providing your customers with self-service capabilities to create and change requests across different communication channels. This can be done in multiple ways:
i. Create a customer portal. With an easily accessible customer portal on the business website, customers can book or update an appointment. They can even access FAQs this way to know the answers to their common questions, which might prevent the need to put a query.ii. Leverage chatbots. Customers always look forward to getting an instant response to their inquiries, and you can provide them so through chatbots. Chatbots enabled on your website can field common requests like making an appointment or checking a service request and creating a seamless customer experience.
iii. Provide visibility into service history. Make your customer portal a one-stop shop for customers, allowing them to book appointments and track the service history platform on the same platform. This will eliminate redundancies in problem-solving and the need for customers to call up for details.
It could be frustrating for the customers to keep calling to ask where a mobile worker is or why they haven’t reached the service delivery yet. Sending automated updates to customers via SMS, email, or the customer portal can reduce this friction. This helps in reducing call volumes for dispatchers while improving customer satisfaction.
Organizations can automate their entire post-visit process with a list of services recorded in the customer portal. Offering them a digital payment option is a great way to continue the services, so there is no need to visit to pay the check or cash. Also, for any of their questions, allow the customers to connect directly with agents through chat. You can close the feedback loop by reaching out to their preferred communication channel. Deploying an automated survey or questionnaire on everything from issue resolution to their experience with a mobile worker can also be helpful. This helps in evolving staffing and training to meet customer needs and address the issues head-on to maintain customer loyalty.
Chances are customers are not recalling a service after purchase until they need it again for fixing any damage to it. They won’t be remembering your company unless scheduled maintenance is a part of your service contract. The company agents have to stay proactive and use real-time data to understand asset conditions and detect when it’s due for preventative maintenance or upgrades. It is helpful to the customers and also continues engagement beyond the times when there’s a problem.
When it is about pleasing the customers, you should always be ready to go the extra mile. Customers will make or break your brand, so it’s always worth finding ways to improve customer engagement. Salesforce Field Service Lightning will help you improve your field service in all those ways that could keep your customers closer to you and more satisfied.
