Field Service Lightning – An efficient way to optimize field service solutions

Field service industry is one segment that is mostly under pressure to synchronize their tasks. They have high-end responsibility of keeping a track of on-site services, dispatch of technicians for installations, repairs, maintenance and honoring the customer SLAs. Field Service Lightning, one of the Service Cloud offering, manages all operations involved in Field Service industry i.e. scheduling field service appointments, dispatching mobile workers with their equipment, tracking technician location, product stock and appointment status.

Field Service Lightning focuses to align right employee, to the right work order, with the right equipment, at right time to meet customer expectation. It connects the entire workforce on one platform to deliver smarter, faster, more personalized on-site services to customers. Some key features comes with Field Service Lightning are:

• A set of custom objects, work rules and scheduling policies that can be used to define ideal scheduling model.
• A dynamic scheduling board that gives dispatcher and supervisors a 360-degree view of all scheduled service appointments.
• Inventory management to maintain parts stock with their location and quantity.
• Entitlement process setup.
• Smart scheduling capabilities with respect to technician skill level, travel time, location, and organization business hours.
• Smart set of triggers to customize appointment scheduling and display preferences.

Any organization interested in implementing Field Service Lightning need to have four key players, each with a specific role:

• Administrator who will be responsible for setting up the core features according to business requirements.
• Contact center agent, responsible for taking inquires calls, create cases and work orders, booking appointments – pulling customer, asset, and other data across salesforce to increase speed and accuracy.
• Dispatcher, responsible to schedule and assign work intelligently and optimize resources based on access to information about time, skills, location and other business rules
• Mobile worker or Technician, receive work orders, manage and update job progress, and deliver a consistent customer experience in the field using mobile app.

Salesforce Field service lightning comes up with mainly 3 solutions:

• Core Field Service Lightning: After enabling Field Service Lightning in the salesforce org, admin has to setup some out of the box features to make other components functions more smoothly and without any hassle. This involves setting up of business hours, break hours, holidays, technician’s skill set, standard appointments requirements. Admin and agents also has to enable mobile app so that technicians can easily access and input required data into the system. Setting up stock inventory is also one of the essential step admin has to perform in this step so that technicians can request what they need when they are at the customer location.
• Field Service Lightning Managed Package: Once core settings are setup in the org, admin has to install a managed package which comes with Field Service lightning. This managed package comes with a dispatcher console so that dispatchers can optimize scheduling appointments according to core settings done by admin. This managed package also comes with a 360-degree view over which all the appointments, technician’s availability can be seen and provide options for different scheduling actions. Using the dispatcher console, dispatchers can actually optimize to align right technician to the right job at the right time.
• Field Service Lightning Mobile App: Field service lightning mobile app which actually works even without web access, is basically designed to be used by the mobile workforce. Technicians, using this mobile app, can actually check assigned work orders, access customer’s contact information, update their work logs, setup and access their appointment’s schedule. Technicians also have access to different knowledge articles to complete any tricky tasks.

Benefits of Field Service Lightning

• Optimize task allocation to align correct technician based on their skillset and availability.
• Connects customers, agents, dispatcher and technician on a single platform.
• It offers reports and dashboard for analytics as well.
• It eliminates time, investment and effort of deploying and integrating different field service solutions as it comes as a one stop solution for all the required tasks.
• Determine service characteristics using entitlements.
• Improves productivity, service revenue and customer satisfaction.