How Field Service Leads the Charge

Our consumer experiences can be mood and life changing enough. Imagine the impact to organizations if their mission-critical power or life-saving medical systems were to fail? What kind people, processes, contracts, tools and technology does it take to insure they have maximal uptime? That is what Field Service is all about, and why its time has come to be the face of an organization’s customer experience.

Yesterday’s “service as an afterthought” mentality has given way to an updated “service as a differentiator and revenue generator” mantra. Contributing to services revenue generation is the double-digit growth projection of field service technicians to 6.2M by 2020. Brand value and customer experience will be as much impacted by the service channel as any part of organizations outside face to the customer. This imperative is confirmed by Salesforce State of Service research that indicates 70% of service teams say their strategic vision over the past 12–18 months has become more focused on creating deeper customer relationships.

What all this means is that investments are increasingly critical to improving customer experience. However, many organizations lag in their adoption of nimble, mobile tools that provide the needed insight to improve first-call close rates, customer satisfaction and service productivity. Salesforce Field Service Lightning provides the needed gateway to gaining these efficiencies like optimizing FE technician routes and tracking trunk stock. This solves many issues of onsite replacement of parts and components where advance replacement or return materials authorizations are not workable.

For those organizations servicing capital assets like mentioned in the beginning paragraph, a predictable and deliberate corrective repair process is an imperative for these mission-critical systems. However, they do require apps and tools that address an extra layer of complexity like customized service-level agreements, special pricing on parts and specially trained field engineers to service them. Capgemini’s Field Service Lightening Accelerator provides this added layer of process automation to handle this added complexity. Natively developed for Salesforce, it provides the necessary extensions and Salesforce1 mobile support with online customer insight to help insure FEs are aligned around the customer with the right parts, right level of service at the right time.

Manufacturers, utilities, consumer product organizations, med device organizations and others can benefit from improved service operations leading the greater customer satisfaction and consequent service revenue.

Looking to improve field service effectiveness? Let me know which areas you are focused on.

Next month I’ll discuss in more detail benefits that have been realized and how they can apply to your organization.