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David Okpala
As we’ve heard from our own customers, Field Service teams are so often overwhelmed with admin and can spend over 1 day a week catching up. And this isn’t the only challenge that these teams are facing: skilled worker shortages, on-the-fly problem solving, fragmented systems that aren’t built for scale, and dispatch teams swamped with requests.
All of this leads to a slower speed of service for customers, missed SLAs (and revenue) and often team burnout and stress. At the Field Service keynote at Dreamforce, Salesforce shared an exciting set of developments that solve all of these issues and more.
Here are the latest AI integrations and innovations designed to help you scale, work and operate with confidence…
Scale with confidence
“Elevating our humans with agents.”
Scheduling & Dispatch
- Autonomous Scheduling – It typically takes a dispatcher 15 minutes to schedule an appointment, and as you grow, imagine the admin and time build up just for this one simple task?With autonomous scheduling, agents can reach out to customers to reschedule an appointment, proactively schedule maintenance and receive and arrange inbound enquiries. Dispatchers can keep track of all conversations in a single view, and step in when the agent escalates a query.
- Dynamic Scaling – Optimise and run up to 50,000 appointments in one go. When it comes to scale, this means you can plan ahead for a larger resource pool, larger territories and over longer periods of time.
- Drone Dispatch – Save your technicians’ valuable time by sending out a drone to check an asset or site. The drone can then share real-time video and images back to the org. Agentforce will analyse the photos and then schedule a technician based on the analysis and diagnosis of the issue.
This helps to improve response times and ensure that your technicians aren’t wasting any time – they can turn up and fix issues asap.
Work with confidence
“Every job should be one and done — the right tools, parts and information to do that job right the first time”
Mobile Workforce
- Geography Information System (GIS) – A rich interactive map (with layers of traffic, environment, weather etc) within the mobile app. This helps visualise the work that needs to be done. It’s linked into the wider org and CRM to also show asset health and warranties.
- Hands Free Form Completion – “I love filling out forms”, said no mobile technician, ever. They’re slow, repetitive, and they’re not glove/protective gear friendly. New voice-filled forms take your natural voice recording and complete the form automatically, field by field. It means less typing, less scrolling, fewer errors and leads to data entry being completed in literal seconds rather than minutes.
- Performance Priming (Offline): We all know that connectivity is not guaranteed in the field, and many customers love Salesforce for its offline services. Now, you can download 5x more data than before with a quick syncing process — giving field technicians access to everything they need to deliver a “one-and-done” experience for customers.
Operate with confidence
“It’s not enough to have to go and look around for your data.”
Operate & Analyse
- Field Service Operations Center: This is a single tool that sits on top of your field service data, giving you a view of what you should be focusing on and triggering the actions to take.A great example is capacity planning. The ops center view shows a side by side view of technician supply and demand, and tells you how to maximise the utilisation of your resources. You can quickly review shortfalls and easily reallocate service resources to get the supply and demand back on track.To get to the root cause of an issue, ask Agentforce, in simple language, questions. For example, why is there a spike in demand? Agentforce will review data from across the entire organisation to find the answers and prompt further action.
In the demo example, Salesforce showed us that demand was up due to an increase in installations. Agentforce then recommended an upsell of maintenance contracts and triggers a message to the marketing team about a campaign to boost these sales. This process brings the whole business together for a direct revenue opportunity from the field.
- Salesforce Go (setup): Perfect for teams who want to quickly get started with Field Service, Salesforce shared that they want implementation to be simple from day one.Built on implementation best practices, Salesforce Go helps teams automate foundational steps in Field Service, with 93% fewer clicks. Teams can then customise on top of the foundations and easily discover all the features they have access to.For customers with Field Service already implemented, the platform provides a quick look at features, helping you learn about and maximise the value of all the features available within the console.
A lot of these features are due to be released in the coming months, so watch this space for further updates.
In a final show of a human and technology collaboration, Salesforce demoed an integration and field service call out using humans, robots and AI. Via a Slack request, the robots were deployed to check the temperature of the room.
After taking thermal imagery and reporting back to Agentforce, one of the dexterous robot was sent to cut the circuit and await a human technician. A fun demo showing the future of the workforce as a collaboration between humans and technology. Watch the full replay here.
Simpala x Field Service: Why wait?
Here at Simpala, we’re specialists in Field Service implementation projects. We get right down to the nitty gritty of your business requirements and goals, to design an implementation project that will help you make quick progress and then scale in the long term.
If you’re considering upgrading to Salesforce Field Service, then don’t want until the the new year. We can support you with the project between now and Christmas, so that you can simply run tests and get started early 2026.
Why wait?