Salesforce brings Einstein to Field Service - A Big Move?

Einstein Vision, credit score

Salesforce

On July 12, 2017 Salesforce brought its new, Einstein-enhanced model of Field Service. This release brings specially three innovations to the already robust Service Cloud, that's the main Customer Service solution in keeping with 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 upgrades for Field Service Lightning arm the cellular body of workers with photograph reputation generation, smart device control and deep analytics to enhance productivity and overall performance

Companies which include Atlantic Energy are harnessing the energy of Field Service Lightning to supply belief, onsite

SAN FRANCISCO?July 12, 2017?Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global chief in CRM, today introduced Einstein AI and Analytics for Field Service Lightning, empowering corporations to deliver a smarter onsite consumer enjoy that is constructed on the world?S #1 customer support platform. Field Service Lightning now brings together the insights and intelligence mobile personnel need to boom productiveness, enhance onsite overall performance and force income.

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 problem provider a step in addition, arming cell employees with the intelligence and belief they want to be greater powerful and improve first-time repair charges. With three new improvements, Field Service Lightning lets in a carrier company?Managers, dispatchers and mobile people?To pass with pace and efficiency. New enhancements encompass:

• Einstein Vision for Field Service harnesses the strength of synthetic intelligence to bring picture recognition to area service. Companies can leverage pre-educated photograph classifiers?Or train their very very own custom classifiers?To cope with a good sized array of specialised photo-reputation use instances. For instance, with similar looking additives and serial numbers, dishwasher upkeep are often complicated. Now a dishwasher repairman who needs to replace a water inlet valve can in reality snap a photograph of the valve, and Einstein Vision for Field Service will brief find out the appropriate product type?Saving time for the purchaser, repairman and business enterprise.

• Equipment and Inventory Management leverages scheduling automation to ensure the right work organization, gadget and vehicles are generally in which they have to be. Managers and dispatchers are capable of deliver technicians into the sector with self guarantee, understanding they?Re armed with the gadget and expertise they need to finish any method at some stage in the number one visit. For example, a cable agency dispatcher is able to use Equipment and Inventory Management to robotically see which technician is closest to the customer and has the right cable splitters critical to get the client?S tv set up efficiently.

• Field Service Analytics affords actionable insights for managers to improve productivity during their mobile group of workers. Service managers can now combine all of their data into one smooth-to-use software for a complete view in their cell staff. And then, they might take movement right from their dashboards. For instance, a service manager at a scientific device corporation can speedy see that numerous of her technicians are suffering to put in an EKG device, allowing her to choose out commands and installation times for them to shadow senior technicians to get on-the-procedure 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.

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.

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.