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Sarah Warsaw
Did you know that a field service team of 25 spends, on average, 11,500 hours a year just on reporting and admin?
Hours that take teams away from what they do best – engineering, maintaining and installing products and looking after their customers.
To help our customers get those hours back for their field service teams, we gathered them together for an intimate event on the 26th floor of the Salesforce Tower. The goal was to demonstrate the true value of implementing Salesforce Field Service, connect and hear from the experts.
To demonstrate the impact, we invited our valued customer, Sarah Machin, Business Director at Power Savings Solutions to share their implementation story.
Implementation Benefits
In just 13 weeks, we completely transformed PSS’s internal systems into a platform they now fondly call the OMP, or Organisational Management Platform. The team has a 360-degree view of their customer base, all assets and their team of engineers.
Sarah runs the entire business from this platform; it has saved her time and money, and even freed up some office space as she no longer needs multiple filing cabinets!
Field Service has enabled Power Saving Solutions (PSS) to:
🔋 Grow the number of assets out in the field, without having to hire more engineers to service and maintain them.
🔋 Track operational utilisation and spot which team members might need more training.
🔋 Give the engineers time back to be out in the field, instead of sitting at home doing admin and reporting.
🔋 Automate all invoicing. From a manual process with emails and on-site filing cabinets to automating the sending after each appointment.
🔋 Better manage inventory, as the cost of any parts used is automatically logged and billed for.
🔋 Deliver an improved customer experience. Customers receive a full report with photos, an invoice and a detailed write-up after every appointment.
🔋 Secure investment for the business thanks to on-hand, accurate and up-to-date reporting and data about the entire organisation.
And that’s just the beginning.
The next step for PSS is to incorporate AI into the operation for further optimisations and predictions, with phase 1 here already complete!
Agentforce Innovations and Integrations
Next on our agenda, Stefan Jankowski shared some of the latest Agentforce innovations and integrations for Field Service. These AI enhancements boost productivity and efficiencies for both engineers on the road and in-office dispatchers.
Highlights include:
🤖 Agentforce for resource management helps dispatchers with intelligent scheduling, gap-filling, and real-time updates.
🤖 Smart scheduling boosts efficiency, increasing first-time fix rates by up to 30% with timely info delivery.
🤖 Resource planning console provides full visibility into jobs, workers, and capacity.
🤖 AI helps manage gaps in engineer schedules whilst taking into consideration skills, urgency, distance, and appointment types.
🤖 Mobile workers get AI-powered tools, including pre-work briefs, automated post-job summaries, and simplified data capture.
🤖 Smart troubleshooting uses AI to analyse photos and resolve technical issues faster.
Essential Considerations
The final speaker was David Okpala, our Head of Delivery. With hundreds of projects under his belt, Dave offers a unique perspective on what can make or break a project’s success. He walked us through a few essential considerations for all customers to help them prepare their team for implementation and promote ROI throughout the business.
⭐ Bring people on the journey early, especially those who are sceptical – adoption will grow with involvement.
⭐ Identify and protect your unique strengths, and use the technology to enhance those.
⭐ Focus on one goal at a time. Transforming your business is a long-term project, so stay focused and take it step by step.
⭐ Define key success metrics before the project starts, so that your consultants can design and deliver the solution that will help you get the most out of it.
⭐ Listen to your teams and involve real users throughout the project. The best ideas usually come from those who are using the platform day in and day out.
⭐ Document your business knowledge, getting it out of your head and into the system helps speed up the project, and future onboarding for the team.
⭐ Go-live is just stage one. Implementing a large-scale solution like Salesforce Field Service is a long-term, iterative project. Evolve in line with a clear roadmap.
Not only did the sessions go down well and prompt a lively Q&A session, but it was also brilliant to see customers exchange stories, concerns and experiences. Hearing success stories directly from customers is the most authentic way to see the value of big digital investments.
Are you considering upgrading your field service solution? Check out our detailed e-book, complete with customer stories, to get started.