The News

On September 1, 2020 Salesforce announced its next round of updates to its Field Service Management solution. Eric Jacobson, Salesforce VP Product Management, Field Service  and Gary Brandeleer, Senior Director Product Management, Field Service gave me an interesting briefing and demo beforehand. The new releases are all about efficient processing of the engagement throughout the whole process. In detail they are about

• Dynamic job scheduling
• Using Einstein Recommendation Builder to ensure that service technicians have the right spare parts available
• Asset management capabilities that allow companies a detailed view into the installed base at their customers. This is developed in cooperation with ServiceMax
• Improvements to the appointment assistant to provide as accurate as possible information to the customer about the arrival time of the service technician.

The various features shall be made generally available through the next 6 months; as this is a forward looking statement, this may be subject to change. For your convenience, find the complete announcement below. Introducing the Next Generation of Field Service at Salesforce: AI-Powered Tools for Trusted, Mission-Critical Field Service By Mark Cattini, SVP of Field Service Management Today we are announcing the next generation of Salesforce Field Service, equipping teams across industries with AI-powered tools to deliver trusted, mission-critical field service. Built on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce Field Service includes new appointment scheduling and optimization capabilities, AI-driven guidance for dispatchers, asset performance insights and automated customer communications, all of which help ensure jobs are completed the first time, on time, every time. When the pandemic first hit, many industries that send employees out to complete jobs in the field had to shut down entirely. But critical machinery still needs to be repaired — medical devices require servicing, air conditioning units need to be fixed, and assembly line machines still malfunction. After getting over the initial shock of COVID-19, frontline workers got back to work, and have been at it ever since. After an initial dip in March, Salesforce Field Service saw a more than 50% jump in usage between April and July 2020, and is actually now being used 20% more than at pre-COVID levels as companies and frontline workers scramble to clear the backlog of service requests created earlier this year. What’s New with Salesforce Field Service Salesforce Field Service innovations include: • Dynamic Priority enables dispatchers to focus on the jobs that matter most, with intelligent scheduling and optimization capabilities that automatically prioritize jobs based on the service level agreement or how critical the work is. For example, if a maintenance is due or warranty is about to expire, that job will automatically receive higher priority over others.

• Einstein Recommendation Builder enables organizations to rapidly deploy machine learning models to enhance service, including AI-powered recommendations to ensure mobile workers always have the right parts for the job. Einstein will scan similar past work orders for previous, similar jobs to identify which parts will be needed for the current one.
• Asset 360 is a new set of asset management capabilities that ServiceMax is building in partnership with Salesforce. With Asset 360, companies will have complete visibility into their install base, service contracts and asset performance (e.g. machinery, medical equipment) to maximize the uptime of complex equipment and reduce operational costs.
• Appointment Assistant uses live status updates and GPS to automatically update customers on the technician’s arrival time. This keeps customers informed, and gives them a chance to vacate the premises and/or adequately prepare before the technician arrives - increasing safety for both technician and customer while social distancing is advised.

Our customers tell us that it is more crucial now than ever for their field technicians to have the right information and tools to maximize equipment uptime and first-time fix rates. Decades of industry expertise and innovation have gone into building our next-generation field service management product, and organizations across industries are deploying it to keep their equipment working, businesses running, technicians productive, and end customers safe. These innovations are the latest in a series of milestones for Salesforce Field Service, which include last year’s acquisition of ClickSoftware, a leader in field service management. And with the combined power of Salesforce and ClickSoftware, we are truly delivering a complete field service product with all of the capabilities leading service organizations require. This was proven out recently, when Salesforce Field Service was named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management. How Organizations Across Industries and Regions are Using Salesforce Field Service See below for just a few of many examples of how our customers across regions and industries have been using Salesforce Field Service in unique ways to pivot their businesses and keep moving forward.   AAA Carolinas, the regional AAA club serving both North and South Carolina for more than 100 years, provides its members a full range of travel, insurance, financial and automotive-related services. “Salesforce continues to help us meet our goal of deepening customer relationships,” said George Figueiredo, VP Automotive Services. “Incorporating Salesforce Field Service into our wider service offering will help us provide a comprehensive and consistent support experience from the moment a customer calls to when our service technicians deliver the necessary in-person service. The new capabilities will allow us to maximize our resources and ensure that our field service techs are armed with the right information and equipment to best serve our 2.2 million members." Hologic, a medical technology company primarily focused on women’s health, is turning to Salesforce Field Service to quickly view all their products on a given customer’s site, determine which software version it’s on, and analyze its service history. This level of visibility will allow Hologic to provide service more effectively as they have all the information they need right at their fingertips. “One of our main challenges was our dispatch team was operating via an offline excel spreadsheet which was time consuming and inaccurate,” said Matthew Faherty, IS Manager, Customer Experience Solutions. “With Salesforce Field Service we are seeing an improved time to dispatch, ensuring the right field engineer is dispatched and our systems are available to continue improving women’s health globally.” St. Francis Healthcare System was able to rapidly operationalize a new meal delivery program for homebound seniors when the COVID lock down hit in just a few days with the support of its partner, Pacific Point, and its Salesforce account team. Using Salesforce Field Service, St. Francis is able to coordinate local restaurant meals and efficiently dispatches drivers to deliver these meals to the homes of seniors. Now in its third month, St. Francis has delivered more than 50,000 meals to date. During the COVID crisis in France, Wartner employees wanted to extend their platform to facilitate a laundry service for those at the heart of this sanitary crisis: medical staff and nurses. Through delivery management facilitated by Salesforce Field Service and Community Cloud, Wartner delivered more than 8,000 laundry orders to 60 overloaded Parisian hospitals to serve 90,000+ hospital staff in just one week, saving precious time and money in a situation where each minute counts. WBP Group, one of Australia's largest, independent property valuation and advisory firms, needed to reshape how it operated to minimize contact between employees and customers in response to COVID-19. Service Cloud enabled the rapid launch of virtual valuations, creating a safe no-touch experience for customers and employees. Salesforce Field Service has increased the efficiency of scheduling appointments and will be used in the future to manage valuations from end-to-end. Additional Information Go here to learn more about Salesforce Field Service, and check out this demo video of Salesforce Field Service. Check out the Forrester Consulting TEI study, commissioned by Salesforce in July 2020, to learn the benefits four organizations saw over three years with Salesforce Field Service, including a first-time fix rate improvement of 90%. Availability Dynamic Priority will be generally available in October 2020. Einstein Recommendation Builder will be in beta in October 2020. Asset 360 will be generally available in November 2020. Appointment Assistant will be in closed pilot in US in October 2020.

The Bigger Picture

Field Service Management is one of the areas in the wider CRM area with fast growing demand. Dispatching of the right technicians is still more an art than a science, accuracy of appointments on site is difficult to forecast and information to customers is less than optimal. Additionally, it is crucial to achieve a first call resolution to avoid technicians traveling twice for the same incident and antagonizing customers. This potentially means that a lot of different parts need to be kept at hand or even as van stock. At the same time technicians cannot keep an abundance of spare parts available but need to focus on what tasks are at hand. Consequently, it is important for the service technician to have the right parts readily available, which is also a supply chain topic. Last, but not least, the site visit of the service technician is often an opportunity to cross- and upsell. Many parts of this demand have been covered by specialists in the past years, e.g. ServiceMax or IFS. At the same time the big players, including Salesforce, have made inroads to providing good field service management support. They did this both ways, organically as well as with acquisitions. SAP acquired the IP of Coresystems in 2018 and Salesforce acquired Clicksoftware in 2019. The market is highly contested, as a part of the platform play that replaced the applications play of the big vendors. This means that functional gaps need to be closed fast and in alignment with customer demand in order to back the platform.

My Analysis and PoV

Salesforce started its road to Field Service Management in 2016 and, according to the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management has become a category leader since then. This is based upon a solid foundation, which came with Clicksoftware, Einstein’s AI capabilities, fast growth and successful ecosystem play. With this announcement, Salesforce covers a wide range of important functionalities while partly using the strength of its ecosystem. This is evidenced by co-innovating asset management functionalities with ServiceMax, which has some strengths in equipements, which is also a Salesforce funded company. One might speculate about an upcoming acquisition here as ServiceMax is also built on Force.com. However this may be, focusing on asset management at least partly closes the gap that Salesforce has compared to SAP. This part of the announcement might very well be its most important aspect. Improvements to scheduling and identification of necessary parts are important refinements of the existing functionality. Especially the ability to prioritize service jobs dynamically is important. As I wrote above, scheduling and dispatching are still more of an art than a science. According to Gary Brandeleer, most of the knowledge is still in the heads of the dispatchers who also like to stay in control of the process. Based on this argumentation, the dynamic prioritization of the dispatcher works based upon rules that are provided to the system. This also makes the results of the dispatching system easier to understand. On the other hand, combining location and skill information of the service technicians with the type and prioritization of the jobs is something that could be accomplished by Salesforce’s Einstein technology. Salesforce not going the rule-based route is a bit surprising, but still probably the faster way to deliver this much needed functionality. Offering the ability to recommend products and services to ensure that service technicians have the right parts available to complete the service closes the gap to the competition and, to the customer, provides another important improvement. Lastly, we have the Appointment Assistant that can be used to inform the customer about updated arrival times etc. Being built based on the Salesforce Community Cloud notifications do not need to be sent into an app but can be embedded into any web site or application plus the social media channels that are supported by Salesforce Digital Engagement.   All in all, the announcement shows that Salesforce is looking closely at customer requirements as well as how analysts perceive functional gaps. So far, for Salesforce Field Service Management, the result is a nearly meteoric rise into the leaders quadrant of Gartners MQ for Field Service Management – and that being ranked with the most complete vision of the companies that made it into the quadrant, and this although interesting enhancements like crowd sourcing of service are not yet in scope, which would play well with Salesforce being a strong proponent of ecosystems.

AI, IoT, and CRM, three acronyms. However, these three belong together and should not be treated or looked at separately. One important reason for this is that companies and organizations can provide significantly better service experiences and, more importantly, results, by combining the capabilities behind these acronyms. Good field service not only gets dispatched smartly but also equipped with the right parts and, ideally, in a proactive manner. This can get delivered by the combination of Field Service, AI, and IoT data. That’s why I found Salesforce’s early December announcement of having added a component “IoT insights” to its Field Service Lightning product quite interesting. As the press release said, this capability enables service agents and representatives to see IoT signals together with other CRM data, so that the triple p of personalized, proactive, even predictive service is possible. After all, Einstein is embedded into Field Service Lightning for quite some time now. Doing so, Salesforce wisely did not implement yet another IoT platform but enabled its system to ingest data from existing IoT platforms, thus sticking to the core competencies of the company. The solution helps in three areas:

• Enabling of early issue anticipation (rather than detection, which is responsive) and remote diagnosis
• Providing agents with more relevant information, to speed up issue resolution
• And automation via rules and workflows.

Says Paolo Bergamo, SVP and GM, Salesforce Field Service Lightning: Let me first clarify that we're not competing with IoT platforms from the likes of AWS IoT or Azure IoT. Our solution extends the value of these platforms - they provide streams of device data that then flow into our CRM to feed business processes. For example, AWS IoT gathers the IoT data from a connected machine, that then flows into our CRM. The company servicing that machine can automatically set rules to create a ticket and deploy a field technician in the event that machine requires servicing. So where we really differentiate is on two fronts - customer context and empowering employees. By providing companies a way to connect the world's #1 CRM with IoT data, we give them the ability to better understand their customers, prioritize accordingly, and provide world class service. What we see is that companies have historically only used IoT data for operational improvements, not to improve the customer experience. We're changing that, and actually helping companies connect their IoT data with business processes so they can act on that data quickly and effectively, for the customer's benefit. Secondarily we empower employees to deliver their best work, both via access to data for mobile field workers to be productive in their work and also for the business users who need to access that data. If you're looking for specifics, I'd say that:

1. Service agents can have a better picture of the problem with paired CRM/IoT data and previous case resolution (e.g. they can see what sort of warranty the customer has, alongside the device diagnostics, and immediately understand the type of service they should be delivering)
2. Dispatchers can be more efficient in dispatching (they know who to send, what equipment to send the technician with)
3. Automatic dispatching can be applied based on contracts and urgency of the fault, helping prioritization and alleviating rote work so the dispatcher can focus on higher level tasks

My Point of View and Analysis

Salesforce delivered a very valuable improvement of its solution. It, however, is nothing that makes people hold their breath. I’d put it into the category of keeping up with the game. Other companies are talking and acting on this topic for several years already. Think of ServiceMax. And it is nothing that the immediate competition cannot offer in a similar way. Think of SAP and, even more so, Microsoft. But then these two are not that far into productized IoT scenarios in customer service yet. So, having this functionality is important, especially as there are already more devices than humans connected to the Internet, with a trend that shows strongly upwards. Statista expects the number of IoT devices to rise to more than 75 billion by 2025. While forecasts are just that – forecasts – they all have one thing in common: predicting a steep increase of connected devices. And customer service is only the starter. The race will continue in the marketing arena. While we will not see scenarios like in Black Mirror or Minority report anytime too soon (thanks to privacy regulations) lots of scenarios that involve context can be thought of – the simplest one being the ages old fridge that reports out-of-stock to its owner. Some of Hubspot’s thinking is here. For Salesforce it is a wise move to not build an own IoT platform but building value added services on top of them. An IoT platform is just too far off Salesforce’s own value proposition and core competency. In contrast to turning the raw data delivered by the sensors into actionable insight and process. As far as I do see it, Salesforce, as well as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, now need to show and deliver a range of integrated IoT, AI, and bot scenarios that provide significant value to their customers. IoT is already an important channel to be supported. In order to be able to deliver superior experiences, companies need to make use of it. The integration of devices as sensors and actuators, in the context of real-time processes, is key here. Companies will look at their vendors to deliver best-of-breed here.

The News

On April 17, 2018 Salesforce announced their next-generation Field Service Lightning, which shall take customer experiences to new heights. The release implements four major improvements, which are:

• The ability to easily plug in an appointment management into a web site
• Simplified initiation and execution of return processes by customers and technicians
• The ability to select and dispatch repair crews for more complicated service jobs based upon abilities and availabilities
• A guided setup using a visual wizard to set up Field Service Lightning and that reduces the number of clicks necessary to get started by approximately two thirds on average.

Below is the full text of the announcement. Alternatively you can read it here.   Next-Generation Field Service Lightning Takes Customer Experiences to New Heights Paolo Bergamo, SVP and GM, Field Service Lightning & Mobile 4.17.18   If you’ve ever spent a day waiting for the washing machine repair person or the utilities worker to show up, you know how trying it can be. But, when that employee shows up on time, armed with the right parts and is able to fix your problem on their first visit, you’re amazed. Even delighted. It feels like the company has your back.   Here at Salesforce, we’re laser-focused on provided a connected customer experience. That’s the main reason why we launched Field Service Lightning two years ago. We wanted to extend the world’s #1 service platform, Service Cloud, to field service - to equip mobile employees and dispatchers with all the information they need to provide customers with a connected  experience that simply “wows”.   And today we’re excited to announce the next generation of Field Service Lightning that empowers companies to provide world-class service experiences in the field.  

• Appointment Management: Ever spent 20 minutes on hold just trying to schedule an appointment with a company? Our new Snap-ins Appointment Management makes it easy for businesses to embed a scheduling interface on their website (with just one line of code!) and empowers customers to easily create and manage appointments on their own time and from any device.
• Return Orderssimplify the return process for customers and technicians. Customers can initiate a return from a company’s website, or field technicians can create return orders onsite. This means a quick, headache-free return not only for the customer, but also for the mobile worker who is assigned to retrieve the product.
• Crew Schedulingallows dispatchers to assign a crew of multiple people to a job, which is especially critical for complex projects like oil rigs repairs and elevator installations. Now dispatchers can assign different crew members based on their skill levels and expertise, so every job gets done right, the first time.

  And of course … we never forget our Trailblazers! They need simple tools to customize their Field Service Lightning experience.  

• Guided Set-Upoffers an easy, visual wizard that walks admins through a simplified set-up process, reducing clicks to get started with Field Service Lightning by approximately 66%, on average. The wizard walks admins through the process to configure territories, job types, and appointment booking windows to make the initial set-up a breeze. Based on our expertise in field service, admins can establish the minimum viable requirements to get their field service team up and running in a matter of minutes.

  What’s been most rewarding for us since launching Field Service Lightning is the momentum from our ecosystem and customer Trailblazers. Because it is built on the Service Cloud platform, Field Service Lightning is highly customizable.   GearsCRM, a Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner, has deployed 15 diverse implementations of Field Service Lightning. “We’ve seen the immediate benefits that a truly mobile and connected workforce can bring to customers. With Field Service Lightning, our clients are able to provide a first class support experience to their customers and make their mobile workers’ jobs easier. It’s a win-win,” says Harry Radenberg, President and CEO of GearsCRM.   Pricing & Availability

• Return orders and guided set-up are available today for no additional cost with any Field Service Lightning license.
• Crew scheduling is available with Field Service Lightning Dispatcher and Field Service Lightning Plus at no additional cost.
• Snap-ins appointment management will be available in pilot at no additional cost starting in June 2018 to customers with a Field Service Lightning and Community Cloud license.

  Additional information

• Check out thisinteractive guide for field serviceTrailblazers
• Get started with Field Service Lightning on Trailheadhere

  Both, the ordering and the return order process, are built upon powerful workflow and rule processing engines and can be widely tailored to customers’ needs. They help the user through the process with a kind of guided procedure and, where necessary, use AI based tools to come to good suggestions. Demoing the new system, Salesforce uses a cable TV upgrade as their scenario for scheduling and also for returning the old part. Snap-In Appointments Manager The crew scheduling functionality helps optimizing the schedules and repair times using an algorithm that calculates repair times based upon the skill sets of the technicians in the crew and the crew size. Overall, the release of Field Service Lightning is targeted towards delivering an improved on-site experience for both, the customer and the employee, says Dana Chery, Sr. manager of product marketing at Salesforce.

The bigger Picture

Field Service Lightning itself has been launched a bit more than 2 years ago and is used in a variety of industries as diverse as health care and retail. It is heavily invested into since. As Salesforce does not communicate customer numbers broken down by product line it is hard to assess product traction, though.

MyPoV and Advice

Looking at the demo scenarios that Salesforce presents the processes are well thought through and efficient. The four main new features are addressing the needs of customers, users, and admins alike, streamlining processes. This streamlining includes the setup that with its wizard interface can be executed without consultants as long as the demands to the system are not overly complex. This now sounds worse than it is meant, as I do think that the vast majority of Field Service Lightning will benefit from this. As an interesting aside, when being asked whether the process of creating an appointment via snap-ins Appointment Management can also be executed via voice commands, e.g. using Alexa or Siri, the execs couldn’t comment on it. This leads to the speculation that something is in the works here. While voice is not yet mainstream the combination of this well structured process with the, for humans, most convenient form of communication would make a lot of sense – and Salesforce has the reputation of being a frontrunner. These times the way of distinguishing oneself from competition is no more via functions and features but by enabling a smooth and frictionless experience for customers and users alike. I think that for the targeted processes Salesforce succeeded with this release, also continuing to show that advanced analytics features (aka AI) can positively contribute without being hyped or even pushed into the foreground. AI is an enabler in the background. With this release core functionalities got a solid makeover towards the above-mentioned frictionless experience. This should make Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning and therefore Service Cloud even more attractive for customers. Kudos for this. I am looking forward to hearing more from Field Service Lightning. Perhaps something that includes the integration cloud (Mulesoft acquisition)? Prebuilt integrations into other vendor’s customer service solutions could make things real exciting in the highly competitive field service market.   https://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2018/03/salesforce-acquires-mulesoft-defensive.htmlhttps://aheadcrm.blogspot.de/2017/07/salesforce-brings-einstein-to-field.html  

On July 12, 2017 Salesforce announced its new, Einstein-enhanced version of Field Service. This release brings mainly three innovations to the already strong Service Cloud, which is the leading Customer Service solution according to Gartner Group. Here the complete wording of the press release, in case you did not want to follow the link but still are interested in it: Salesforce Delivers Einstein AI and Analytics For Field Service Lightning Built on the Service Cloud Platform, new innovations for Field Service Lightning arm the mobile workforce with image recognition technology, smart equipment management and deep analytics to bolster productivity and efficiency Companies including Atlantic Energy are harnessing the power of Field Service Lightning to deliver insight, onsite SAN FRANCISCO—July 12, 2017—Salesforce , the global leader in CRM, today introduced Einstein AI and Analytics for Field Service Lightning, empowering companies to deliver a smarter onsite customer experience that is built on the world’s #1 customer service platform. Field Service Lightning now brings together the insights and intelligence mobile workers need to increase productivity, boost onsite efficiency and drive revenue. The Salesforce Service Cloud has redefined customer service across every major technological shift—cloud, mobile, social, messaging and more. And last year with the introduction of Field Service Lightning, Salesforce extended the power of Service Cloud to create a full service platform for managers, dispatchers and mobile workers. However, as the multi-billion dollar field service market expands into new industries—including finance, healthcare, manufacturing and retail—there is even more demand to deliver onsite service. Field service technicians have to deal with complicated equipment, don’t always have the right parts and often lack insight into pre-existing customer issues. This leads to confused employees, frustrated customers, and in the end, multiple trips to resolve customer issues. Field Service Lightning Brings Insights, Onsite Now, Salesforce is taking field service a step further, arming mobile workers with the intelligence and insight they need to be more productive and improve first-time fix rates. With three new innovations, Field Service Lightning enables a service organization—managers, dispatchers and mobile workers—to move with speed and efficiency. New innovations include:

• Einstein Vision for Field Service harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to bring image recognition to field service. Companies can leverage pre-trained image classifiers—or train their own custom classifiers—to handle a vast array of specialized image-recognition use cases. For example, with similar looking parts and serial numbers, dishwasher repairs are often complex. Now a dishwasher repairman who needs to replace a water inlet valve can simply snap a picture of the valve, and Einstein Vision for Field Service will quickly identify the exact product type—saving time for the customer, repairman and company.
• Equipment and Inventory Management leverages scheduling automation to ensure the correct work crew, equipment and trucks are always where they should be. Managers and dispatchers are able to send technicians into the field with confidence, knowing they’re armed with the equipment and knowledge they need to complete any job during the first visit. For example, a cable company dispatcher is able to use Equipment and Inventory Management to automatically see which technician is closest to the customer and has the correct cable splitters necessary to get the customer’s television set up successfully.
• Field Service Analytics provides actionable insights for managers to improve productivity throughout their mobile workforce. Service managers can now integrate all of their data into one easy-to-use application for a complete view of their mobile workforce. And then, they can take action right from their dashboards. For example, a service manager at a medical device company can quickly see that several of her technicians are struggling to install an EKG machine, enabling her to identify classes and set up times for them to shadow senior technicians to get on-the-job training.

Comments on the News:

• "For nearly a decade, Salesforce has paved the way for innovation in the service industry," said Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM, Sales and Service Clouds, Salesforce. "Today, we're excited to bring our innovation a step further. With the introduction of Einstein and Analytics for Field Service Lightning, our customers will be able to deliver a smarter, more efficient onsite customer experience."
• "At Atlantic Energy, our goal is to create a cleaner, more energy efficient world," said Noel Zammit, CIO, Atlantic Energy, LLC. "With Field Service Lightning, we're able to arm our technicians with the intelligence and insights they need to service our customers faster than ever -- reducing energy consumption and costs around the globe."
• "While the direct customer experience has benefitted from digital transformation, field technicians still struggle to deliver a modern onsite experience. Customer expectations have escalated across the board, and so have expectations for in-the-field diagnostics and issue resolution," said Mary Wardley, Program Vice President, Customer Care and CRM, IDC. "With features including image recognition, automated equipment tracking and analytics baked into the field service process, digital transformation is reaching the field and will enable companies to run their field service organization faster and more efficiently."

About Service Cloud Service Cloud, the world’s #1 intelligent customer service platform, enables companies to transform the customer and agent experience with an AI-powered, agile platform built for the modern era. Whether engaging customers via messaging, video, communities, web chat, in-app, email, phone or even communicating directly with IoT-connected products, Service Cloud helps leading brands use service as a competitive advantage by delivering personalized, connected customer service experiences across every channel and adapting service operations to business needs quickly. Companies that have deployed Service Cloud have seen an average of 31 percent faster case resolution, an average of 28 percent increase in agent productivity, an average of 26 percent increase in customer retention, an average of 22 percent decrease in support costs, and an average of 35 percent increase in customer satisfaction, according to a third-party research report sponsored by Salesforce. Salesforce has been recognized as a leader for nine consecutive years in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center. Pricing and Availability

• Einstein Vision for Field Service is currently in pilot and is expected to be generally available in the first half of 2018.
• Field Service Equipment and Inventory Management is generally available today with any Field Service Lightning license, which starts at $150 for organizations that have at least one Service Cloud license in Enterprise Edition or above.
• Field Service Analytics is generally available today with any Service Analytics and Field Service Lightning license.

Additional Information

• To learn more about Salesforce Field Service Lightning please visit: https://www.salesforce.com/products/service-cloud/features/field-service-lightning/
• To learn more about Service Cloud, please visit: https://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/overview/
• Discover how Service Cloud can help companies deliver personalized service to their customers via Trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trail/service_cloud

Connect with Salesforce

• Like Salesforce on Facebook http://facebook.com/salesforce
• Follow @salesforce and @servicecloud on Twitter

About Salesforce Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM.” For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE. Field Service Analytics - Source Salesforce These three innovations shall enable customers to drive revenue by increasing field service personnel effectiveness and efficiency plus giving managers actionable intelligence about field service operations and assets. This encompasses the following main features:

• Einstein Vision helps techs identify a part that they do not quite recognize. Einstein responds with details, including the part number, a description and, importantly, a recognition confidence. Field technicians simply take a picture of the object in question and upload it to the Chatter feed. Einstein needs to be trained with around 100 – 150 images of an object from various angles and lighting conditions in order to identify an object.
• The solution got additional ‘smarts’ to help with optimizing equipment and inventory management. This helps to optimize the scheduling of crews, equipment, and trucks.
• Lastly, there are a number of new management dashboards that allow a drill down and analysis into the organization performance and KPI’s that are intended to give managers actionable insight into what is happening in their realm of responsibility.

The first two releases are supporting the field technicians by being part of the mobile apps that they use, while the third one is helping the managers. The mobile enhancements are available on iOS whereas Android is still in a beta phase. This release, according to Mark Bloom, Senior Director Strategy and Operations, Service Cloud, is the continuation of Service Cloud’s journey covering social, mobile, video, in-app messaging and, since March 2016 also Field Service.

My Take

This release seems like an incremental evolution of the existing functionality. For me the most relevant innovation is the improvement in the equipment and inventory management in combination with the new analytics capabilities that are exposed by the dashboard. Of course the image recognition capabilities are amazing, too, but I would put this more into the ‘sex sells’ bucket. It surely can help (junior) field service technicians identify a device but I see only limited value for it unless augmented by more functionality, e.g. an AR overlay rendered into some glasses that helps the technician to safely replace a broken element while keeping the hands free to actually do the work. The equipment and inventory management component has been mainly there before but now has some additional intelligence that helps in making sure that the right materials are available to the technician when (s)he needs it. This is some intelligence under the hood that should help in avoiding unnecessary roundtrips or in getting to the shortest way to resupply. The management dashboard shows a lot of interesting data and analytics, including travel time that will help a manager analyzing what is going on in the team. This is again something that was there earlier, too, and in my eyes is lacking an alerting component. Not every technician that has long drive times or takes long time to fix an issue is a problem. This may be the specialization and/or the locations of the jobs. I would have wished for an alerting component here that looks into anomalies and drives the managerial focus there. Lastly, I am missing a predictive maintenance component here. After all this is something where AI can excel. Unluckily this is something that is only on the roadmap, maybe because it also needs cooperation with the IoT team. Overall I’d say we see a solid round off with Einstein Vision being a nice eye catcher here, as opposed to a big leap. Having said that, the integration of AI technology into the business functionality is mandatory in order to enable a number of scenarios that are not yet possible to deliver. I am curiously looking into future releases of Service Cloud.