Salesforce Field Service Lightning: The Secret to Success
As a Salesforce Consultant, what does Salesforce Field Service Lightning mean to you?
In the 90s/ early 2000s, considering our televisions needed to be repaired, we were okay with waiting at length to get it fixed by an electrician. Fast forward to today, imagine the television down for a week – that means no favourite shows like GoT, Suits, etc, – what a nightmare that would be! The expected wait time for a fix like this has decreased over the years and perhaps we are even prone to ‘instant service’ these days. The idea of instant service has pushed all businesses to reassess their operational strategies around both sales and service.
Service: “The new cash cow!”
Service today has become an integral part of an organisation which not only drives service revenue but also opens up avenues to ‘farm’ and cross-sell. Service has become a strategic business differentiator that studies customer expectations, their experiences and adjusts its own strategy to deliver a consistent, quick and easy experience to its customers. Prior to this, service was a business cost centre thereby bringing margins down. Growing customer service expectations have transformed the service vertical from a cost centre to a revenue generator – the new cash cow!
From a service perspective, customer satisfaction is a direct representation of how quickly service is received, an issue is resolved, and/or how easily a customer can communicate with support force who can answer their question. There are 2 words in the statement above that are important and need more analysis – quickly and easily. Let’s start with the latter and then we’ll touch on the former. ‘Easily’ – why should this be a parameter in our service engagements? The answer is simple – with the advent of the internet and the plethora of online websites that sell commodities, an organisation’s first customer touch point could well be service personnel. Brand image and product receptivity start with that first phone call to the service centre, an email to a support alias or a visit to a service store. This ascertains the fact that service personnel should possess the skill-sets needed to resolve the issue and also be “soft-skilled” in a way that elevates the experience that the customer is entitled to, as a part of the service expectation of today. The next notion to break apart from our statement earlier – ‘quickly’! As it embodies the very idea of the highest quality in the lowest quantity of time.
What does Salesforce Field Service Lightning provide to Consultants?
What Salesforce Field Service Lightning provides to us, Salesforce Consultants, is an opportunity to consult, understand, digest, and help deliver a client’s service strategy. We recommend starting with their main objectives from a service perspective. Unless the overarching goal is confirmed, which disintegrates into smaller tangible actions, the project would be a mere product setup rather than a service transformation. The product has been developed in a fashion to have an engaging, strategic, and on-going conversation with the customer. This is where Salesforce IT consulting matures, manifests and moulds to become business consulting. Field Service Lightning is not just a product/package that is to be installed and implemented. There is much more of an opportunity to transform the way service is received by your client’s end customers!
Here is my advice after working as a Salesforce Consultant over my career where I have implemented many instances of Salesforce Field Service Lightning. If you want to deliver a successful Field Service implementation, identify what the service agents/technicians need and how they will benefit from the tool. The value proposition relies on identifying the what and the how of the data.
So, I’ll ask again, what does Salesforce Field Service Lightning mean to you? Do you see it as just a package to be implemented or a means of transforming the way service is delivered by your client. I hope that you can be the one to help them leverage it and realise the full benefits.
Need a partner to help implement Salesforce Field Service Lightning with your business? Work with ProQuest Consulting today!
