Maximizing Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction With  Salesforce Field Service

Delivering exceptional field service is necessary – and expected from customers. Yet, many home service businesses struggle to effectively manage their field operations gracefully, leading to disappointed customers, missed profits, and weakened customer loyalty.

So how do you prevent that from happening in the first place? With Salesforce Field Service, implemented by NuAge Experts, a ConvergeOne Company.

To dive deeper into this topic, we chatted with Mike Daniels, our Practice Director of Salesforce Field Service, to gain more insights about Field Service operations.

Meet Mike Daniels

With more than five years of experience as a Salesforce Cloud Evangelist and almost two years as a Practice Director of Salesforce Field Service at NuAge Experts, Mike is the guy when it comes to Salesforce Field Service.

His wealth of knowledge and expertise in the field makes him an indispensable asset to the ConvergeOne team, and his deep understanding of the Salesforce platform allows him to provide customers with insightful, effective solutions.

Throughout his career, Mike has consistently demonstrated his ability to understand customer requirements, identify the best product fit, and create customized solutions that meet their needs. He is dedicated to ensuring successful project execution and delivering high-quality results that exceed customer expectations.

Mike works closely with ConvergeOne’s sales and delivery teams to bridge the gap between customer requirements and the successful execution of projects. He is a skilled communicator with a talent for breaking complex solutions into manageable pieces, ensuring customers are comfortable and understand every aspect of their projects.

What common challenges are driving businesses to consider using Salesforce Field Service?

Mike says companies are looking for ways to maximize visibility and efficiency in their field operations. They aim to formalize scheduling and resource planning and streamline their service delivery process. This drive for improvement stems from either the deployment of field teams for installations or the need for in-field service and maintenance work.

“The key thing they’re typically looking for is to get more visibility into where their teams are out in the field, to do a better job of getting ahead of the process, to have a more formalized scheduling approach and resource planning.”

“In a smaller company, it’s really around those goals of getting visibility into that and being more efficient and effective and having a more seamless and automated service process or a delivery process for new installations. That’s what we see a lot of.”

Mike explains that clients seeking these solutions are either existing Salesforce Sales Cloud customers or companies that need to service their products in the field. The common goal among these clients is to automate the “last mile” of the service delivery process, which involves sending the right personnel with the right technical resources and training to resolve customer issues in a single visit.

“Sometimes these people are existing Salesforce Sales Cloud customers, and they want to finish off that last mile. They have the ability to record their sales cycle transaction of closing an opportunity and reporting back against that. They may already have Service Cloud up and running where they’re triaging and handling cases,” he says.

By implementing Salesforce Field Service, companies can achieve visibility, efficiency, and drive customer satisfaction to new heights.

Field Service vs. Field Service Plus: What’s the difference? 

There is a significant difference in terms of functionality when it comes to Field Service and Field Service Plus.

Field Service Plus offers the full range of capabilities for both dispatchers and field technicians, making it a suitable solution for organizations whose technicians are out in the field and have an existing relationship with a customer.

One of the key benefits of Field Service Plus is the ability for technicians to self-schedule. This allows them to plan and book follow-up appointments with customers on the spot, increasing efficiency and streamlining the process.

“Field Service Plus is the highest level. It gives you the full functionality both as a dispatcher and as a field tech—a good solution for firms whose techs are out in the field. They’re more of a situation where they have a relationship with an existing customer, so they would want to come back and do the work themselves if they could. They’d like the ability to be able to self-schedule.”

Has the move to remote work pushed more companies to roll out Field Service?

With years of experience working remotely, Mike emphasizes the advantage of the field service industry’s typical remote operations, which has made the transition to remote work easier compared to other sectors, such as call centers.

“We’ve been in a very fortunate situation where we had many remote employees. So our team really operates as a remote-first team. So we, internally, are very familiar with that,” he says.

“I’ve done remote work for the last 20 years. I haven’t had a desk in an office in 20 years. So my perspective is probably a bit different than most in that way. I’ve been in this kind of role even before I was working for Salesforce as a Service Cloud Product Evangelist.”

Post-pandemic has boosted the trend toward remote work, and Salesforce’s setup is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this shift.

“The lifeblood of field service is to get those inbound calls, to get those deals done, to get those service requests, and to send folks out to the field. So I think we’re a great logical fit on the backend of their service offering.”

The alignment between ConvergeOne’s offerings and NuAge’s expertise in field service has only strengthened the company’s position in the market. With a more robust team and a wider range of skills and expertise, ConvergeOne is well-positioned to continue delivering top-notch services to its customers.

As Mike says, “There’s definitely a benefit to our target markets around the Home Services industry. That’s a paradigm that fits them very well. So we’re looking to grow organically in that way.”

Despite the challenges posed by the recession, Mike remains optimistic about the future and is confident that the positive trend will continue.