Salesforce Field Service Lightning, which was released a little over two years ago, has many awesome new features in the Summer ’18 release. As the fastest growing product in Salesforce company history (and one expected to book over $100 million this year), significant investment has been made in this product.
Salesforce focused on improving technician workflows, data security, the dispatcher experience, Lightning Community updates, and upgrading the Android app in this release.
With all of these new features, it’s easy to see why many companies are making the switch to a product that sits on the same platform as their customer data, providing even deeper insights for company leaders.
Which features are you most excited about? If you’re not on Field Service Lightning yet, are you ready to make the switch?
Welcoming Work Standardization to the Stage
Field Service already provides you the ability to create Work Types which are standard templates for Work Orders for work that is commonly done. With the Summer ’18 release, you can now attach Knowledge Articles to Work Types to provide your field service technicians with even more information.
Additionally, articles can be attached and detached on the Work Order and Work Order Line Item in Lightning Experience. This provides so much more flexibility to your service team, as articles were previously “view only” in Lightning Experience. For example, let’s say your technicians regularly have to go out and repair a machine. Simply attach the article describing how to do the repair to the work type so anytime a new work order is created off of that work type for that machine repair the technician has this information at their fingertips. This also puts these knowledge articles front and center to experienced technicians who can share their knowledge to update and refine the articles.
You can also standardize the steps in which work is done with the new Path for Field Service. Like Leads and Opportunities before, you can now implement a Path for your Work Orders. Path provides your technicians with key fields for each stage and guidance for success allowing you to provide information and help to your technicians even while they’re out in the field. Since a Work Order can have multiple final status’ (Canceled, Cannot Complete, Completed, and Closed), users are prompted to pick one of these values when they go to close the Work Order. For items closed with a positive status (Completed or Closed) the final status appears in green. For those that have a negative final status (Canceled or Cannot Complete) the final status is red.
Field Service’s Maintenance Plan Enhancements
Maintenance Plans automatically generate work orders for future maintenance visits based on your criteria. Plans can be associated with accounts, work types, service contracts, and assets. Prior to Summer ’18, maintenance plans had to be manually generated by clicking a button on the maintenance plan to create a new batch of Work Orders. Now, you can choose to have a new batch of Work Orders created whenever the current batch is nearing completion. You get to choose how far in advance the new batch is generated and can also pause generation if the last work order on the current batch is still open. This will save your agents tons of time as they don’t have to go in and manually do this for each and every maintenance plan. It will also ensure that no maintenance plans are missed and that your customers are always receiving the service they require.
In order to make Maintenance Plans more visible and easily accessible, you can now add the Maintenance Plan related list to the Account, Contact, and Location page layouts. Agents are able to quickly get information on the customer’s maintenance plan from common objects and can also easily determine if a location is associated with a Maintenance Plan.
Salesforce Field Service Security
Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption and Field Audit Trail is now available for Field Service functionality. Certain fields on work orders, work order line items, and service appointments can be encrypted to boost the security of your customers’ data. The Description, Subject, and Address fields are now available for encryption on work orders, work order line items, and service appointments.
Additionally, another Salesforce Shield component, Field Audit Trail, is now available for all supported fields on work orders, work order line items, and service appointments.
Beyond new Salesforce Shield capabilities, you can also create criteria-based sharing rules on field service objects. This allows you to have more control over your sharing settings and who can see specific types of records. The field service objects that now support this include Location, Product Item, Return Order, Service Appointment, Service Resource, Service Territory, and Work Type.
New Field Service Lightning Communities
Summer ’18 takes Field Service to an entirely new level with communities. You can now see all Field Service Lightning standard objects in Lightning communities. Previously only work orders, work order line Items, and Service Appointments were available. This is a huge step in providing more transparency and up to date status of Field Service items with your customers, employees, and contractors.
Filter Related Lists on Service Reports
With this new feature, you can now streamline your service reports by adding filters to show customers only the information that they need to see. These filters allow you to remove records from service reports that are not relevant. You can have up to five filters per related list and filters can apply to picklist or boolean fields, making your Service Reports more relevant to your customers than ever before.
Field Service Managed Package: Wait No More!
Let your dispatchers have a whole new experience with the updated Field Service Managed Package. Instead of having to wait up to 10 seconds for an update in the Gantt chart, dispatchers can see it live! Changes to the Gantt are reflected in real time, allowing your dispatchers up-to-the-second information when they need it most.
The Salesforce Summer ’18 Release also includes updates to how your dispatcher perform tasks. Things like reviewing technician’s daily routes, the ability to ignore first/last trips of the day when routing, and doing manual scheduling have all been improved to give your dispatches an even better experience and to be more effective at their jobs.
New Mobile Updates for Android
With Field Service for Mobile Version 4.0 for Android, users are now able to access some of the best features that were previously only available on the iOS app. This update includes a ton of productivity features for Android including the ability to queue up chatter posts offline, dependent picklists, allowing technicians to create custom list views, and being able to show images in Knowledge Articles. This new version of the Field Service mobile app for Android will be available for download in the Google Play store by the end of June 2018.
With all of these enhancements, how could you not want to make the switch to Field Service Lightning? If you are already on Field Service Lightning, what features are going to help take you and your business to the next level?
For more information, check out the release notes here!
