Effective field service enables companies to manage their mobile workforce, improve customer satisfaction, and drive meaningful growth. In order to address customer needs quickly, managers must be able to easily schedule, dispatch and manage field service crew. However, managing a mobile workforce requires a significant investment. The cost is even greater when you need to dispatch a field worker long distance or during overtime hours, adding to your overall costs.

Organizations are constantly looking to minimize field service costs and maximize growth, without impacting customer experience. Optimizing field scheduling and dispatch management usually creates the most value, for both companies and their customers.

Improve customer experience

Whether you’re a service or a product company, field service offers an effective way to drive growth by acquiring new customers and delighting existing ones. You can improve customer experience and delight your customers by improving the ease, convenience and speed with which you provide field service.

Customers want greater control, convenience, and flexibility, and are accustomed to making appointments, placing orders, and receiving instant confirmation on their smartphones. This is where workforce field scheduling and dispatch management play an important role. From initial contact with the customer to visit resolution and follow-up, field service organizations must follow these steps:

• Give your customers the ability to request and schedule service via any channel of their choice (social media / phone / SMS etc.)
• Ensure that you provide accurate response times and meet your commitments
• Share the ETA of your customer’s assigned field worker and keep them updated of any delays or changes via instant notifications
• Provide your field workers with easy access to customer and job details from their smartphones, with offline capabilities for access in remote areas

Real-time scheduling and dispatch

Field workers face many challenges such as unexpected traffic or roadblocks, problems with site access, customer cancellations. You must quip field workers with the best schedules and routes for the day based on their jobs. Provide GPS and navigation features to ensure workers know where they are going and the best way to get there. Route optimization ensures that the right field worker gets to the right job at the right location at the right time. This saves time, costs, improves worker productivity and customer satisfaction.

Develop a holistic approach

Having end-to-end visibility from a connected field service solution like Salesforce Field Service Lightning, ensures faster, better decision-making. You can integrate and have a holistic view of your field service operations – from field workers and jobs to customer information.

Benefits of Salesforce Field Service Lightning

• Customers can book a service appointment anywhere, anytime through an authenticated community, or public on your website
• Service agents can schedule the service work order from any case while having a 360 degree view of the customer
• Dispatchers can optimize job scheduling based on customized business rules, improving utilization and overall response time and customer satisfaction
• Field technicians can perform the service and report on service tasks on-site from any device
• Learn how companies are optimizing their field service operations using Salesforce FSL. Create and manage work orders, optimize schedules, assign jobs, and deliver fast, intelligent field service on one platform.