Salesforce Field Service maintains its position as a market leader with features and functions that give companies to ability to serve their customers with industry-best business processes that have them at the competitive forefront. Every Salesforce release takes the Field Service product to the next level with remarkable updates to existing features and new tricks up its sleeve that ensure Salesforce's offering is always in consideration for its customers when looking at meeting Field Service Management requirements. Each release yields upgrades and enhancements that further Field Service's value proposition and fuel continued innovation for implementers and customers, not only in terms of Field Service use but how it integrates and is used with the other Salesforce Clouds and external systems in clients' technology stack.
Like this past Summer release, we wanted to list our favorite features and changes from this latest release - Winter '24. These are some of our personal favorites - the ones that we like best - but as always, each release brings the goodness and Winter '24 is absolutely no exception. There's so, so much in it and you can review what the release brings to the table for Field Service in its entirety here.
Obviously, there's a lot to like about anything AI-related in the Field Service space. Mobile Work Briefings give technicians and other field workers an automatically generated summary of what the next work order has in store for them, giving them initial insights in one place. This allows them to be more efficient, only having to look for any attributes or information in the Work Order if they're not provided in that briefing. This gives a taste of what AI brings to the table for Field Service, with On-Site Knowledge Search and Post-Work Summarization coming soon. Very exciting stuff and just the tip of the Field Service GPT iceberg
Organizations that utilized multi-day appointments could not make the transition to Enhanced Scheduling & Optimization but now Salesforce has taken care of that with the addition of the functionality to ES&O, filling in another important gap between the new and more efficient enhanced engine and the tried-and-true "old" scheduling engine. With each passing release, Salesforce tidies up these loose ends and soon customers will be able to get the increased performance and great new features of ES&O without giving up anything that the current scheduling engine and related optimization provides them.
This is great because while you've fairly recently been given the ability to bundle appointments, there was no mechanism to handle this automatically. Scheduling these appointments together makes sure that the same resource is being sent at or near the same time to handle all of the work in one visit, increasing customer satisfaction by having as many of their needs taken care of during that visit as possible. Instead of dispatchers having to find and group these appointments together using the Dispatcher Console or having service agents figure out that there's already an appointment scheduled for that customer, optimization services group them when scheduling, saving time for both Dispatchers in the back office and technicians in the field.
The transition from standard Scheduling and Optimization to Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization can be a daunting task with inherent risk, especially for organizations that have sophisticated Field Service operations with configurations, customizations, and automations set up over many years. While there are a lot of resources available to refer to (like this), this new series of guided steps helps to ease that anxiety and navigate a Field Service Admin through the steps to get an organization to the ES&O milestone faster. Related to our #2 above, as ES&O fills in those gaps between it and the "old" scheduling engine, the transition becomes an inevitability, so the easier it is to make the switch, the better.
Skills matching in Salesforce Field Service is one of its most impactful features - helping to make sure that the right people are staffed for the right jobs at the right times. Matching Skills in SFS has historically been a yes or no proposition - if one or more Skills were needed for a Service Appointment's Work Type, either the resource had them or they didn't and the Scheduling Engine would consider that a hard and fast rule when finding matches. This new change gives some needed flexibility in the rules to handle "EITHER OR" situations, which can definitely help in many complex scheduling scenarios, like different languages as mentioned in the Salesforce example, or having something like a minimum level of a skill (e.g. Level 3 OR 4) defined for a Scheduling Policy. Incredibly useful in many possible use cases - especially when wanting to potentially allow more possible matches for service agents and others that are using the Book Appointment or Candidates features to find technicians to schedule work to.
These seem like minor changes but one of the key things that helps with the adoption of Field Service is making the system even easier to use, especially for the day-to-day use cases. We love these little tweaks because they make dispatchers more efficient and anything to avoid them having to click through to additional object records to get their jobs done is a win. Salesforce continues to be proactive about these usability updates, and as a result, they'll continue to keep their implementation partners and, more importantly, their customers happy. There are a few more of these types of usability updates in the Winter '24 release and they're all pretty interesting for those using SFS on a daily basis.
Setting up Skills for Service Resources is always a fun task during implementation and ultimately you can run into some extremely complicated scenarios, especially when it comes to technicians having dozens and dozens of individual, unique skills in their skillset. Any technical limitation gets in the way of effectiveness "in the wild" so being able to search through ALL of a resource's Skills via the Gantt chart's skill filter definitely helps make sure that all of the available resources are coming up in a search. As an implementer, it allows us to avoid having to think up potentially convoluted ways to work around that limit. The last applied filter is also very nice, especially if you're bouncing from screen to screen or use the same filter often.
Data Cloud was a hot topic at Dreamforce 2023, even though AI was the buzz-worthy subject that captured everybody's imagination. Being able to include Field Service object data in a unified data set that gives insight into a customer is definitely a great thing - having customer-related FS data like how many appointments they've had, what product warranties are applicable to their assets, the work they've had done historically, etc. - being able to synthesize that with data from other sources like purchase history and personal attributes really contributes to providing the whole picture for a service organization and feeds into a whole host of activities, like upselling and cross-selling. It can even help service agents better disposition an issue a customer is having. And that's not even getting into the AI scenarios that could come up that use that data, like Einstein Copilot. Very exciting stuff here.
Preventative and Predictive Maintenance is definitely here and if not in place in an organization, very close on the horizon. But it's one thing to use IoT data to help an organization complete maintenance activity proactively rather than break/fix but how effective is that maintenance if you go out to do the service and it doesn't actually prevent anything? And when your teams are going out to complete a break/fix, is that asset effective afterward? Or are there expensive return visits because they're not spending the appropriate amount of time doing the job right the first time? Field Service already allows for the tracking of downtime but now gives a couple of different metrics to help assess how effective the service organization is when completing repairs - Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) gives a sense of how long it's taking the teams to complete repairs and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) gives an indication of how effective the repairs are. These can help to give a clearer picture of efficiency and effectiveness beyond the number of service appointments there are and how long the appointments actually took for asset repairs and maintenance.
You hardly need to talk about the benefits of being able to scan barcodes in the FS Mobile App versus having to hand-key the numbers manually. However the number of use cases using barcodes is significant, so the application of this is very meaningful. Aside from just managing inventory, you could confirm the asset being worked on via a barcode scan, scan barcodes to create quotes and invoices, track asset movement, and so much more. Making it easier on FS Mobile App users is always a good thing - we'd rather have them using their hands for installations and repairs than for typing in barcode numbers. While there's some development work needed to get this going, once up and running it works with iOS devices and works with multiple barcode types - no additional hardware or software needed!
Speaking of making things easier for FS Mobile App users, the world within the app is greatly expanding with the advent of its LWC ability. Deep linking has been available for a while but now combining the two to make sure that data can pass between the mobile app, LWCs, and external websites opens up many possibilities for ensuring that the FS Mobile App provides a capable but extensible "sub-platform" for its users. While the FS Mobile App is designed with technicians' best interests at heart, no app gets all the use cases nailed out of the box, so the more capabilities it provides to 1) allow for LWCs to fill in those gaps and 2) provide opportunities for seamless integration with external apps, the easier adoption is going to be and more capable the overall system is going to be.
Visual Remote Assistant is an amazing product with a whole host of features that bring customer service and Field Service operations to a whole new level. The product keeps getting better and better with every release and while it's still new, the feedback gathered from every implementation continues to fuel the feature's development. In this case, customers wouldn't be able to interact with VRA unless an agent serving them was online and available to assist. This change allows the customer to be able to upload images related to their case/work order when it's convenient for them and then the agent can utilize that in a synchronous support session or in an asynchronous fashion via other communication channels (e.g. email/SMS.) Being able to handle things at the customer's convenience is something that definitely helps to ensure their satisfaction and that's at the forefront in many Field Service release updates.
As always, there is a ton more in the Winter '24 release for Field Service and a huge amount for the release for other clouds and features of Salesforce as a whole. It's incredibly exciting to see Salesforce continue to get better and better each release and these changes show that they are truly in touch with their customers and even in touch with their implementers!