It’s been a little over a year since Salesforce added Field Service Lightning to its suite of services. Since the product became available last summer, we’ve been an early adopter, putting it to the test for our own organization.
Here’s how Salesforce describes Field Service Lightning:
Organizations can connect their entire service workforce with tools for agents, dispatchers, and mobile employees, giving customers a seamless experience. Dispatchers can leverage smart scheduling to provide automatic, real-time assignments based on employee skills, availability, and location. Service employees in the field are able to create and update work orders, and can also change requests and job status from any device, making them more productive than ever.
Combined with its other products and services, Salesforce promises that Field Service Lightning will provide organizations with “a unified service platform and ecosystem to ensure that every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to create a memorable experience.”
Months into using it, we’re big fans of the service. Here’s why:
It Empowers Field Service Employees
Armed with a smartphone or tablet loaded with the app, a field service employee can review a customer’s complete record before they even walk through the door. Coupled with a thorough understanding of the issue, thanks to the in-office employee who created the service request, the field service person is equipped to provide much better-than-average service to the customer. Once their visit is complete, they can update the customer record immediately from the app, enhancing the value and accuracy of said record.
It Gives Companies a Holistic and Up-to-the-Minute View of Their Customer Relationships
It used to be that there was no direct, immediate link between a customer’s record in Salesforce and employees working in the field. Customer records wouldn’t be updated with information from the service call until well after the fact. Field Service Lightning closes that gap. By creating real-time connections between in-office employees, customer records and field employees, organizations have a more complete and up-to-date view of their customer activities.
It Provides Way Better Customer Service
One of our favourite parts of Field Service Lightning is the assigning of field service staff to customers based on rules. This intelligent scheduling feature selects the best possible field person for each particular job, based on factors like skill, proximity, priority and the size of the customer’s organization — rules that the user gets to define. Intelligent assignment means the customer receives the very best help for their particular issue. And automation reduces the workload for the Field Service Lighting user.
Thanks to the field service employee’s mobile access to complete customer records, as we outlined earlier, customers can trust that the assistance they receive is based on their unique business, needs and issues.