If your company provides customer field services for businesses or households (from utilities to cleaning services and from road maintenance to local authorities), the ability to keep your field personnel connected and coordinated in real-time can directly impact productivity and customer satisfaction.
To help service providers address these issues, Salesforce introduced Field Service Lightning (or FSL), a mobile solution part of Salesforce Service Cloud. FSL allows you to collaborate in real-time, and directly manage your field work. As a result, your first-visit resolution rate increases, customer satisfaction improves and costs related to repeat visits are significantly reduced.
Your field personnel can use their smartphone, with or without an internet connection, and access information that will help them perform their job more effectively, whilst accommodating last minute changes or emergency calls with more flexibility. Right from their phone, they will be able to create and track work orders, appointments, resources, inventory, maintenance, actions and more, whereas the dispatch centre manages the entire process to its successful completion with full visibility and real-time updates.
Main functions in Field Service Lightning
Work Orders
Work orders represent the work to be completed for your customers, and are a main feature of the field service operations in Salesforce. To divide the work further for billing purposes, or to track subtasks, you can add work order line items (child records of work orders). Work orders help to track the work performed for a specific customer and we can use the add on feature Work Types that provides additional fields like Duration, Recommended Crew Size, Skill Requirements, Products Required, to track the work order and any subtasks more accurately.
Scheduling and assigning the jobs
Field Service Lightning makes it easy to book service appointments from the Service Console or a Customer Community. With intelligent scheduling, jobs are automatically assigned to the right resource based on time, skills, location, and any other business rules you want to apply. The result is a much more efficient use of resources and increased employee productivity.
Manage jobs with a mobile app
The mobile app brings the full power of onsite job management, to the mobile workforce and will work both online and offline. This capability enables to update inventory in real time, by scanning the barcodes on the stock about to be loaded onto the van. You can even use it for the tools your technicians need to take out onto job sites to ensure nothing gets lost.
Roles involved
There are usually four type of user roles involved in setting up and running Field Service Lightning. These are the Administrators, the Agents, the Dispatchers and the Mobile Workers.
Administrators
Administrators are usually the users that set up and have the overall administration of Field Service Lightning. Their role involves installing, configuring, and integrating Field Service Lightning, as well as setting up user permissions.
Agents
Agents deal directly with your customers. They handle inbound cases, create work orders and book appointments from the dispatcher console.
Dispatchers
Dispatchers organise the schedules and manage appointments for the mobile workers or technicians. The Field Service Lightning dispatcher console is the main working space for dispatchers, featuring a dynamic map and a highly customisable Gantt chart that shows upcoming appointments, active team members, and more.
Mobile Workers / Technicians
These are the employees out in the field making the service calls. They receive directions and parts information before heading out so they are fully prepared and equipped for the day’s work. Once they reach the job site, step-by-step instructions and relevant information are available through the app. When they finish their work, they update the job status and register customer sign-off using the app.
Field Service Lightning in action This Field Service Lightning demo from Salesforce will give you a good overview of the solution and how it can be integrated with other Salesforce solutions to get even more value.
If you would like to find out more about deploying Salesforce Field Service Lightning, we can help. Give us a call or email us at Salesforce@coforge.com
