Of course, you want to be mindful of skills and project length here. The automatic side gives a lot of potential to set up rules and conditions where your appointments are automatically bundled. The beauty is you can do this manually – a sharp field dispatcher noticing this can quickly create the bundle or it can be done automatically with Flow or code. Well, now there is! Now we can create bundles of Service Appointments, easily joining them together and then assigning the bundle to a single worker instead of having to assign each individually.
On top of all of that, at the end of the day, these are still separate appointments and there was no way to associate them. Or in the case of an apartment building or a shopping center – these are literally different customers that just happen to be at the same address – that’s not always obvious. The problem was this wasn’t always obvious to see – one of these appointments could be a maintenance visit that’s a week out and as a dispatcher, you’re focused on this week and don’t even realize that on Monday you’re about to send someone right back to the same location. If you’re at the location, let’s knock them all out at once (assuming the jobs are small enough to be done all at once of course). Basically, you have 3 appointments for the same location out there – it could be literally the same customer or maybe it’s 3 different customers in the same apartment building – but either way you want to make sure you don’t have multiple trips to go handle these. The concept of “bundling” has always been a challenge for field teams.
#Visual remote assistant salesforce update
I’m mixing it up music-wise as I have a little jazz playing from Sons of Kemet (Sunday morning update – The Smile from Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Tom Skinner had a live broadcast last night. As always the order is based on my interest. If you’ve been nodding your head along with me this whole last paragraph it’s worth signing up!Īlright onto Spring 22. There’s a great LinkedIn group called Field Service United (full disclosure, I’m one of the group Managers) that focuses on all of the different challenges facing field management and has some great content and events. No one (well, almost no one) is going to complain when you re-schedule today because of the blizzard, but if you take 3 days to tell them when their new appointment is, then they will complain about that. This is why you need to be flexible and in constant communication with your customers and technicians, or these ‘somethings’ can quickly snowball into customer sat issues. It’s the life of field management sometimes it’s a blizzard, other times it’s a broken-down truck or a sick technician – but it’s always something. You could have had a perfectly optimized day set up today – the perfect balance of travel time, skills, and response time to your customers – and boom – a blizzard obliterates your schedule. I also find it oddly appropriate that this post is all about Field Service as the blizzard is a great reminder that the life of scheduling and fieldwork is one of perpetual obstacle management. At least this time I’m in the comfort of my home and didn’t need to do a last-minute shopping spree to stock up with food for my hotel room. It’s a full-on blizzard over here in New England so I find myself yet again hunkered down in a snowstorm blogging about the Spring 22 release.