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Overview HR & Corporate Communications Marketing & Sales Field Service Professional Services Partner Management

In order for your field service people to resolve an issue in the “one and done” way your customers want, quickly and effectively, they need immediate access to the right information and the right expertise. Your service directly affects customer satisfaction and your overall company reputation, and as such your field service people execute a strategic business role for your company.

If your customer needs a repair part, a calibration, or troubleshooting on site, you dispatch a field service person to the customer location. You want your technicians to be prepared when they walk in the customer’s door, especially given the cost of sending a highly trained person on site. Your technicians want to provide excellent service, so they also want to be prepared. The problem is, what they need to prepare for is dependent on a complex mix of variables – the particular product model owned by the customer, the options installed, the software version of the different components, and much more. Given this complexity, it is virtually impossible for technicians to walk in the door prepared for every possible scenario that may greet them. In addition, a technician often walks in to solve one problem and finds another. Neither the technician nor the customer wants the resolution to be “I have to come back later to fix that second item.” You and your customer both want the quickest time-to-resolution.

Socialtext's solution for field service combines our collaboration platform with a number of function-tailored items: professional services tailored to best practices for field service teams, customized Socialtext People profiles, and field service-specific templates for dashboards and workspace pages.

With the Socialtext collaboration platform, you can accelerate the rate at which new knowledge is available to all service personnel. Service technicians can share knowledge more readily with all other team members, by simply doing their job in a way that is more transparent and open. A service person who uncovers a new problem can document that problem on a workspace page or blog, creating a go-to place to quickly gather facts from colleagues, and for everyone to use as a resource. Any team member who runs into the same problem can quickly search to see what is known about the problem. Field service personnel can search and contribute while mobile, on a wireless device or even off-line. They can easily submit new contributions via email. This not only gives service personnel up-to-date collective intelligence on the issue, but also leads to a fast diagnosis and fix.

Service can quickly gather information and make informed decisions, with current information, on the fly. Team members are able to sense a new problem much earlier, respond to it much more quickly, and service customers in a way that is most prepared and informed.

Team members collectively build a shared portfolio of best practices, and a corporate memory of each issue handled. Colleagues can also better tap into others who have specialized knowledge, because expertise is now visible and findable.

 

6 Steps to Drive Social Software Adoption

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