January 12, 2021
Remote work challenges how you provide service. Gartner suggests that about 85% of customer service interactions will start with self-service by 2022, up from 48% in 2019. As a service leader, you must approach customer interactions differently. Your field support operations are no exception. Today, servitization reigns. Proactive service and long-term customer relationships are expected. But proactive service presents a win-win for all — you reduce service calls, realize upsell opportunities, and provide exceptional customer experiences with Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Field Service App.
3 Ways the New Dynamics 365 Field Service App Helps You Resolve Field Service Issues the First Time, Every Time
Your field service technicians need a cross-platform, multi-device solution to keep up with service
expectations. The new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app enables proactive service and intelligent resource management, topped off with the Dynamics 365 user interface that you know. You get a 360-degree view of customer assets, with insights to detect and solve issues before they become a problem. Check out the full video here
Here are three ways the app promotes service excellence:
1. Enable Technicians to Resolve Issues the First Time
Accessibility is critical so your technicians can review and update work orders while in the field. The Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app is supported on iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile
smartphones, tablets, and browsers. With offline capabilities, you can even interact with data without an internet connection. All service cases, customer information, and remediation steps can be reviewed and updated in real-time in a mobile-optimized experience. This includes tracking and updating bookings, work orders, and asset information.
Easily improve service accuracy with the latest asset data synced from Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management.
When logging into the app, you first see bookings displayed in daily, weekly, or monthly formats. Work Orders provide a map view of appointments that you can modify as needed. Directions to the service location can be generated in your native direction app (enabled through geolocation). You can populate the appropriate service tasks and time estimates, as well as capture photos and payment to help streamline appointments. Also, you can add a list of the appropriate products required for the repair. Easily improve service accuracy with the latest asset data synced from Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management.
For those times that you need extra help, you can access in-context resources such as immersive step-by-step guides and mixed reality tools. Or rely on another expert! With remote, real-time collaboration, you can team up with colleagues to resolve challenging issues. If proactive service is your aim, work smarter, not harder, and leverage rich insights and reporting in the app. Dashboard data can reveal opportunities, as well as increase first-time fix rates.
Other key features include:
inspections
bar code scanning
tap-to-call
voice dictation
geo-location
geo-fencing
You can automate inspections based on the incident type that can be completed as service is performed. To design inspection templates, you simply use an easy WYSIWYG editor to draft questions that utilize drop-down fields, fill-in note boxes, and more. And bonus — if you have analytics turned on, this information can be serialized for processing answers to your services.
Bar code scanning leverages category search inside Dynamics 365 so you can create QR and 2-D bar codes to print and adhere to assets. Simply use the scanner on your phone to scan the code to pull up information about that asset.
Rely on an expert! With remote, real-time collaboration, you can team up with colleagues to resolve challenging issues.
Sometimes you may need to call a customer while in the field. Again, the app makes this as easy as possible with tap-to-call in the record. The app also has phone call recordkeeping capabilities and voice dictation. Press the microphone button, record a note, and that note (saved as a .wav file) can be listened to from the record anytime.
And last, of the additional features we’ll talk about today, geolocation and geofencing enhance the app’s effectiveness by locating available nearby resources during service booking. With geofencing, you can pre-set service areas by technician by radius. When a technician is inside or outside a specified area, the dispatcher can get a push notification. Enable geolocation and you can get directions to the service site right from the booking.
2. Manage Resources and Ccheduling Intelligently
The app also supports intelligent scheduling and dispatching. What better way to ensure a smooth
hand-off between your customer service and technicians than to have easy-to-update workflows and intelligent suggestions provided along the way? With everything in one place, you will achieve total schedule optimization — dispatch the right technician for the job, minimize travel time, and maximize resource utilization.
What better way to ensure a smooth hand-off between your customer service and technicians than to have easy-to-update workflows and intelligent suggestions provided along the way?
AI-enabled scheduling recommendations can help you identify that best fit in a fraction of the time. To meet your needs, scheduling can be fully automated, semi-automated, or manual using an easy-to-use drag-and-drop schedule board and interactive map. Technicians can be assigned based on experience and skill-set, availability, service level agreements (SLAs), and proximity. As mentioned before, the app uses geolocation and geofencing to suggest technicians in the service area. You can view the traffic along their route to the site, as well as get predictive data on travel time and work duration.
Any authorized user at your organization can edit work order details, such as adding the products
required for the repair, or defining the service tasks to complete.
3. An App Built for the Future of Service
The Field Service app for Dynamics 365 is built on the Microsoft Power Platform, is customizable and extensible, and can be branded to your organization. While the legacy app, Field Service Mobile (built on the Xamarin platform) is still available, support for this app is expected to end in June 2022. Many of the services available in Field Service Mobile are already available for the Dynamics 365 app. We recommend the Dynamics 365 app due to the continuous investment into the Power Platform. It’s only destined to get better over time. You can take advantage of all the new features without interruption.
See Other Microsoft Dynamics 365 Resources here.
Ask JourneyTEAM About Getting Your Organization Set with the Dynamics 365 Field Service App
As an award-winning Microsoft partner, JourneyTEAM has a proven track record with successful
Microsoft technology implementations. Let us show you how to improve your customer experiences
with the Dynamics 365 Field Service app. Contact JourneyTEAM today!