OREANDA-NEWS. May 04, 2016. From the customer perspective, field service gets a bad reputation — and it’s no secret why. Field Service horror stories are ubiquitous — like the technician who arrives at the very end of a 4-hour appointment window, without the right tools to solve the problem. Your customer’s expectations dramatically exceed this disconnected experience.

Delivering smarter, more personalized, and faster field service to the empowered customer presents unique challenges, but the benefit to the customer (and the business) is worth it.

Field Service Lightning is the latest tool from Service Cloud to ensure that your business can meet rising customer expectations with rich insights. Although field service presents its own unique set of challenges in meeting and exceeding customer expectations, with Field Service Lightning your company is equipped to deliver the same connected experience in the field and close the customer experience gap.

But what does connected field service look like from the inside? To deliver connected field service, agents need a combination of customer insights and easy work order management. When the customer reaches out and requests a field service appointment, the service agent needs a full view of the individual customer and their needs, so they can create and schedule the right work order. Work orders also need to be mobile, connected, and fully integrated with additional areas of the business and CRM, including accounts, contacts, assets, cases, entitlements, and service contracts.

The next step in the field service process is scheduling via a dispatcher. Dispatchers need to ensure that the right job is paired with the right mobile employee every single time and that the job is completed in a timely, efficient manner. In order to do so, they need to intelligently schedule and dispatch work orders, as well as track and monitor the service delivery in real time. Additionally, dispatchers need to be able to communicate with field technicians and make changes in real time when alerts arise for issues that require immediate attention. When dispatchers have the right tools and information at their fingertips, they can make sure the job is as seamless as possible for both the field agent and the customer.

Field technicians need access to work orders and other key information on the go, including real-time job updates, schedules, inventory, and customer information so that they’re always working off of the most current information. To increase first-time fix rate numbers, field agents must have everything they need to get the job done quickly and effectively, right from their mobile device. Your field agents may not always have the answer to every single problem, but with the power of mobility (and even offline connectivity to records and information), these technicians should be connected to the right reports, resources, and experts from anywhere at any time. This eliminates the need to schedule a follow-up appointment with the customer due to lack of information in the field.

Your customers understand that the field agent may not be able to understand the intricacies of each individual issue right away, but the customers do expect that the agent has the right tools and technology at his fingertips to find the right answer sourced from experts.

When your company can deliver the type of customer experience that taps into the preferences of the modern customer, you’ll boost your customer satisfaction and customer retention numbers and, in turn, boost your profits.

To learn more about Field Service Lightning, check out the demo.