Top benefits of Salesforce for field services companies

Modernizing sales, service, and marketing technology have become a key goal of field service-based businesses such as HVAC, lighting, janitorial, pest management, and similar companies.  Many of these types of businesses have old or non-existent customer relationship management (CRM) systems. But, as customer data continues to grow, and businesses must continually find ways to stay competitive, the need for a high-power CRM fully integrated with other customer systems becomes critical. Salesforce for field services companies may be more of a necessity than a nice to have.

Rolling a truck costs a company time and money so each truck roll should be billable with profit. A fully integrated software platform, from lead-to-cash, enables field service companies to maximize revenue and delight customers with excellent service.

Salesforce Field Service Lightning allows field services companies to manage crews’ workloads, keep track of parts and equipment, and track the status of work orders.

Read through our list of top benefits of Salesforce for the field services industry below:

1. Eliminate inefficiency and lost opportunities caused by spreadsheets

Are you still running your business and managing contacts with spreadsheets? This is problematic for several reasons. First of all, if a sales rep leaves, that spreadsheet may either leave with them or becomes lost in a mess of documents on that rep’s computer. With it goes opportunities and prospecting history to keep deals moving.

Customer and prospect correspondence history is critical to developing a successful long-term relationship and plan. Secondly, data entered in spreadsheets becomes old and unusable quickly. It’s also difficult to turn spreadsheet data, especially opportunities, into meaningful information that can be used to cross-sell, up-sell, or retain a customer.

2. Improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the key to a successful service business. Customer satisfaction today means making your customer’s life easier by making it easy to do business with you. People expect almost instantaneous follow-up and prefer to communicate on their own terms, over their preferred platform.

With Service Cloud, you’re able to solve your clients’ issues better and faster. Service Cloud connects your customer service team to the field service team, account reps, and more to ensure they are adequately informed when working on an issue. Because the systems are connected, your customer service team is able to communicate to the dispatcher and field reps to ensure the customer is taken care of as timely as possible. This streamlines the process and allows your business to exceed expectations.

3. Simplify and streamline business processes

It’s quite common for field service businesses to struggle with managing people and their labor force effectively due to the nature of the market. The sales and dispatching processes involve a lot of coordination with different departments, and because of that, these businesses need to ensure their home office teams can easily share customer data and collaborate with teams in the field. To simplify these processes and ensure a seamless experience for customers, field service businesses should implement a CRM that is integrated with field service software.

When implementing a CRM like Salesforce, it’s common for field service companies to re-engineer their business processes to a more streamlined format. This is often the case when information is scattered in multiple databases, spreadsheets, and email threads all over the organization. There’s no one central source of truth for customer and work ticket information, which can lead to confusion and errors. Bringing this data together in the CRM generates efficiency and simplifies the operation for everyone.

4. Grow revenue

A modern CRM system can help businesses grow revenue in many ways. Salesforce provides easy dashboards that highlight crucial sales, service, and marketing metrics. That gives sales, accounting, and service managers a pulse on their processes and which areas to focus on. It also allows them to manage their operations via mobile devices, ensuring wherever the team is, they can get the job done.

Using customer data to understand cross-sell and up-sell opportunities are one of the key benefits of Salesforce. On average, the ROI of Salesforce translates to an increase of 25% in cross-sell and up-sell activities; a 23% increase in deal size, and a 30% increase in sales productivity.

5. Mobile access

Field service employees need to be able to view and edit customer information and work ticket statuses on-the-go. For instance, a field service tech might find additional sales opportunities when they are out servicing the product, so accessing these features on a mobile device is key. By using Field Service Lightning, field service techs are able to improve their first-visit resolution and onsite job management. This mobile solution allows for real-time collaboration with access to job schedules, truck availability, articles, and more.

It should also be mentioned that each Salesforce license provides instant access to the Salesforce Mobile App, which enables your employees to do administrative work from any device, in any location. Salesforce Mobile App customization can be completed quickly for a substantially smaller cost than developing an app from the ground up – giving your team all the functionality they need to update data from the road.

Get our free user guide for Salesforce Field Service Lightning.

About the author

Matt Dillon is a VP of business development at Concentrix Catalyst. He has worked in a variety of roles at many technology organizations and loves finding creative solutions to complex technical challenges.