Salesforce Field Service Lightning: make a mash on your customer

This year Salesforce.com has announced a new product called Field Service Lightning. In this article we’d like to share how this tool adds to ease and comfort of the field processing as well as mention types of Salesforce licening required.

What is Field Service Lightning?

Field Service Lightning is the tool to streamline operations across the entire service chain. It is built on Service Cloud and provide a broad picture of your entire workforce to optimize customer experience from the phone to the field.

Roadmap

This is John. He’s a contact center agent.
His customer has an issue. So, John creates a case in Service cloud and also creates a work order related to that case. More than that, in the order a full view of the customer is provided. John also creates an appointment for the field service technician to attend the customer.His case is sent to the dispatcher– Charlotte.

Charlotte is responsible for managing the workflow and technicians. She tracks and monitors the service delivery in real time. Additionally, she is able to communicate with field technicians and make changes when there are issues that require immediate attention.

She sends John’s order to Tom – the field technician. Tom gets the order directly on his phone on the go – SF1 App.  He gets all the necessary tools to solve the problem and visits John’s customer.

Tom updates the job progress through SF1 providing updates in the CRM system  on a real time basis. John is happy because his clients are happy.

 

Our Take

It’s amazing that Salesforce has finally provided a native solution for customers with a field service team for support, installation, repair, or product maintenance. We have implemented similar requirements for our customers before. However, the solution required a lot of customization as well as custom development. Being a part of the Salesforce product offering Field Service Lightning it will organically integrate in your organization ecosystem.

Being generally available Field Service Lightning includes a core set of features, but the best thing is that Salesforce will  add additional capabilities in future releases.

Being a part of Salesforce ecosystem Field Service provides you with an opportunity to manage your service appointments and field technicians within Salesforce. More than that, you can report on all of this information through standard Salesforce reporting or the Wave Analytics Cloud.

If there is a field service team in your organization and you are considering implementing Field Service Lightning, there are a few other things you should bear in mind:

• Field Service Lightning is built upon the core Salesforce objects and the managed package will install the Dispatcher Console, Smart Scheduler, and several custom objects necessary to support this functionality.
• There should be at least 1 full Service Cloud license within your Salesforce Org to use Field Service Lightning.
• Field Service Lightning functionality is available in two new license types (Dispatcher License, Technician License). The Dispatcher License provides users with the access to the Dispatcher Console and Smart Scheduling.  At least one Dispatcher user is required to complete scheduling your service appointments. The Technician license is needed to any user you would like to assign service appointments to.  
• For now, Community Users can’t use the Dispatcher or Technician licenses and, therefore, will not be able to use Field Service Lightning.

Disregard these little nothings, Salesforce Service Lightning seems to be a pretty good solution that will bring your service organization into the Internet of things.

For any questions in terms of  Salesforce Field Service Lightning you are free to contact us.