Salesforce comes up with a functionality named field service management to manage and enhance an organization’s field personnel, resources, offerings, and operations. The activities involved in field service management include allocating and scheduling work orders, dispatching personnel to carry out new tasks, interacting with field personnel while they are on the job, controlling product inventories, and gathering data from the field. Companies may streamline workforce operations, boost output, and make daily living easier by improving their field service management. Field service principles and techniques are now being used in mobile work by a variety of industries, including sales, mobile healthcare, and real estate.
Importance of Field service management
- Boost productivity – The workers / technicians will be able to concentrate more on completing their assigned duties and spend less time worrying about updating, visiting, or losing prospective business once field service management is implemented throughout the company.
- Service to sales conversion – In-service businesses, frequently have a sales component, which may occasionally be utilized to upsell a new item while fixing something. Managing maintenance work order through field service management tools can help in managing additional sales.
- Maintaining transparency – Field service management requires complete transparency at all levels. A clear line of sight between each person is necessary. Field service management promotes this openness by making data regarding short- and long-term performance available to everyone.
- Dynamic Environment Management – One of the key benefits is being able to manage a dynamic environment. Customers may be impacted on certain days by routine, or service-related problems. With this functionality of salesforce, such issues are easily diagnosed and fixed.
- Satisfies client expectations – Customers have very high expectations for the level of service the workers provide. Field service management enables you to efficiently organize your team’s workload while preserving client satisfaction.
Benefits of field service management
- Increasing uptime – To achieve high performance and minimize downtime, identify necessary maintenance works / repairs earlier.
- Reducing field service costs – Make sure the appropriate technician is allocated to the task and give them access to the appropriate data on a single platform at the appropriate time.
- Empowering field service technicians – Provide technicians with remote support and mobile capabilities that will aid in their safety, compliance, and ability to diagnose and finish jobs quickly.
- Improving first-time fix rates – Leverage data and insights to carry out maintenance tasks in the most effective and efficient way possible at the appropriate time.
- Increasing customer satisfaction – Assess the level of client satisfaction being provided by the technicians and act quickly to resolve any problems or unforeseen delays
Challenges of field service management
Here is the list of challenges that technicians faced
- Maintenance technician’s challenges
- Unskilled workforce
- High operational cost
- Lack of technology to manage complex assets
Taking on these issues can result in the workforce working less hard, accelerate knowledge transfer and give technicians in the field more support.
- Mobile service technician’s challenges
- Scheduling conflicts
- Miscommunication
- Ability to obtain essential data
More main system capabilities, such as the capacity to communicate in real-time, access precise technical specifications and GIS location data, and evaluate asset maintenance histories, must be made available on phones and tablets to address these issues.
There has been a significant evolution in field service management. Conventional paper forms have been replaced by mobile solutions. Even though the digital transformation of field service has significantly enhanced efficiency, productivity, ROI, customer and staff satisfaction, and more, it comes with inherent challenges for service providers as the technology advances, customers demand more. A robust Field Service Management system can help in alleviating these challenges and offer a win-win situation both for the business and customers.
