What We Faced
Challenge
An emerging distributor and servicer of large-scale generators was looking to scale the capabilities of their Field Service operation – including scheduling, dispatching, quoting, and reporting – to support growth and ultimately improve customer satisfaction. What started as a small, family-owned business quickly scaled over a decade into four distinct businesses around the full generator lifecycle – sales, service, rentals, and parts. The company knew they needed to invest in improving back-office data and systems to enable on-the-ground technicians to deliver best-in-class customer experience that was unified and repeatable. The ultimate goal was for the organization to scale and support the 25%+ YoY growth of the overall business, but the current state of their Service operations was limiting the organization’s ability to scale and grow.
The client’s Service team is responsible for servicing both preventative maintenance as well as critical uptime, emergency response requests. However, the Service team lacked unified data and processes to deliver a consistent, repeatable field service experience required to scale the organization. Manual, ad-hoc processes utilizing spreadsheets and physical stacks of paper had become the norm. Field Technicians were also disconnected from the corporate office as soon as they started their day in the field. The corporate office was viewed simply as a scheduler to provide the 8-10 customer addresses to visit in a typical week. Field Technicians were limited by scheduling and routing inefficiencies, precluding them from executing more than two on-site customer appointments a day. Also, the amount of after service call data and system updates required were viewed as a cumbersome data entry exercise taking away from valuable travel and customer visit time for Field Technicians.
Increase in customer growth and demand over time made these processes difficult to execute and cumbersome to support scale. The company could not meet Service demands and often had to pass on Service work due to lack of scheduling visibility, planning, and Technician bandwidth.
In an effort to combat their service inefficiencies, MRE Consulting was brought in to provide a holistic people, process, and solution approach to streamline their Field Service operations.
Implemented Technologies
SALESFORCE FIELD SERVICE
What We Did
Solution
The MRE team worked extensively to define requirements and process flows for Service operations to inform the technical design for the Salesforce Field Service solution. MRE developed a unified data model and process approach for the company, resulting in a scalable Salesforce and Field Service platform for year-over-year growth. Our approach viewed service from a customer lifecycle perspective, resulting in a service strategy that connected to the rest of their business organizations (Sales, Parts, and Rentals). Allowing the Service organization to scale seamlessly by on-boarding new Field Techs and have real-time analytics and visibility into the performance of existing Field Techs executing site visits.
The solution was designed for multiple user personas: field technicians, dispatchers, and corporate office support personnel:
- Field technicians: Can access customer history and complete post-work summaries through the Field Service mobile application. Technicians can identify cross-sell/up-sell opportunities and create a request for a parts quote within Salesforce for the Sales organization to action immediately. Previously, this was a manual carbon copy paper form (using carbon copy paper).
- Dispatchers: Use the Dispatch Console to assign technicians to appointments based on skill and availability. They also review reporting analytics to understand scheduling efficiency of their available team.
- Field operations team: Can assist with Work Order processing, confirm schedules, aid Field Technicians on-site and in transit, and ensure all workflows are completed for future Service needs.
- Service Management & Executive Team: Visibility into Service operations through real-time dashboards and reporting on Service KPIs.
The organization redesigned key business processes to improve allocation and utilization of Field Technicians. Key attributes of field technicians such as specific skills, years of experience, location, and manufacturer knowledge were all configured in Salesforce Field Service to for Dispatchers to optimize scheduling taking customer-site and asset specific details into account to auto-schedule with a single button click.
Time tracking was also shifted into the app as part of the post-work order documentation process to streamline the technician experience. This data would then be leveraged for customer billing and accurately tracking Field Technician productivity, breaks and travel time.
What We Delivered
Results
The Field Service project was delivered from inception to deployment in ~6 months. The client is on track to scale its Service Operation to meet its strategic YOY objectives. They are now on-boarding 2-3x new Field Technicians per year in 2024.
Additional benefits achieved:
- Defined new Service KPIs in reporting, converting manual processes to new system automations allowing for a more efficient, streamlined Service operation.
- 20%+ up-lift in Field Technician efficiency, as measured by an increase in # of customer site visits and Work Orders executed per day/week/month.
- 25% growth in future Field Service pipeline by auto-scheduling future preventative maintenance and service appointments based on existing contracts.
- $200k+ savings in a single quarter due to prior inaccuracies in time and parts reporting. Time Tracking visibility improved Field Tech productivity for more accurate reporting and customer billing details.
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