In today’s interconnected era, customers expect a streamlined service experience that’s accessible anywhere, anytime. It’s highly crucial to create a real-time connection between your customer support agents, field service agents and dispatchers to deliver personalized customer support.
This is exactly where Salesforce Field Service, a part of the Salesforce Service Cloud suite, comes into the picture. Undoubtedly, Salesforce Field Service is getting so popular day-by-day due to the advantages it offers when it comes to handling customers’ records and data in the field within Salesforce.
Salesforce has announced several enhancements to its field service offerings that would help customers of its system to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) in refined ways.
The latest enhancements are designed in many ways for a COVID-19 world where efficiency is more critical than ever.
As part of this process, Salesforce is introducing Dynamic Priority in Salesforce Field Service to help organize calls much faster and leave dispatchers to handle other tasks. Technicians would be able preview their schedule to determine what they are most likely to need for today’s workload.
Previously, it was only possible to define priority in the WO (Work Order) and WOLI (Work Order Line Item) levels, but with Dynamic Priority it is now enabled to define priority in the SA (Service Appointment) level as well, which makes more sense. An example for the added value of this is a WO that includes two SAs with different SLA (Service Level Agreement) or different ‘age’. These improvements push forward the efficiency of services provided.
In this blog post, we will explain how you can schedule and optimize appointments in Salesforce Field Service using Dynamic Priority.
Features of Dynamic Priority in Salesforce Field Service
Dynamic priority-based scheduling enables you to:
- Automatically prioritizes tasks based on service level agreements or how important the tasks are.
- Seamlessly manage thousands of field workers and technicians using intelligent algorithms and workflows to allocate multiple tasks and provide real-time tracking.
- Provide AI-powered support for dispatchers, asset performance insights, and automated customer communications to deliver efficient and personalized on-site field service.
How to Schedule Appointment Using Dynamic Priorities
Dynamic priority-based scheduling focuses on considering emergency arrivals first, which means booking the most critical service appointments over the less urgent visit. And if the scheduling action couldn’t find the available time slot, it will overlap a lower priority meeting with a service that you have defined as a high priority.
In some cases, if you have a few urgent appointments, then you can make use of priorities with scheduling actions, including Get Candidates, Book Appointments, or Schedule. Firstly, you need to determine what drives your preferences. You can then configure field service so that planning actions can prioritize visits.
Specify a priority field – In the Field Service Admin application under Field Service Settings, click on Scheduling, then click on General Logic, select a priority field. You also have the ability to choose one or more fields on service appointments, work orders, and work order line items.
1. Assign a fixed priority – For instance, the managed package provides the scheduling Priority field for parent work orders and work order line items. By default, it defines a range of scheduling priority values from 1–4, with 1 as critical and 4 as low.
2. Create a dynamic priority field through a custom formula field – For example, create a formula that prioritizes meetings based on the difference between today’s date and their due date.
- During scheduling and optimization, service appointment priority fields are considered first. And if that field is undefined or empty, then the appointment’s priority is derived either from the work order line item or parent work order field.
3. Choose a priority scale – The default priority range is 1-10, with 1 as the highest priority and 10 as the lowest priority. Here the 1-10 scale performs well in most of the priority cases.
If your use case requires a variety of values, you need to follow these below-mentioned steps.
Go to Field Service Settings >> Scheduling >> General Logic in the Field Service Admin application and choose the optional 1–100 scale.
4. Now, you need to customize the layout of the service appointment page and add the “Schedule Over Lower Priority Appointment” field. When you select this Boolean field on an appointment, the scheduling action prioritizes the assignments.
5. Reschedule appointments that overlap with other appointments. In order to fix appointment overlaps, you can either craft a scheduling recipe or use daily optimization.
How to Optimize Appointments Using Dynamic Priorities
Optimizing appointments is a process that allows you to prioritize essential service meetings over less demanding jobs if your team’s availability is limited. It provides you with the ability to set dynamic priorities, such as values that increase as the due dates approach or passes. While optimizing, priority value can be taken into account when appointments are fixed in time slots.
During the priority optimization, how you use the scheduling priority values depends on your business. In this process, service level agreements and other factors can influence task prioritization factors such as work nature, due dates, and appointment priorities.
Once you have set your priorities correctly, you need to define your settings so that visits can be prioritized through optimization and scheduling.
After the priority settings configuration, you’re good to go for the optimization process. If you want to schedule and prioritize many appointments simultaneously, you can either use Global or In-Day optimization. And if your availability is limited, the optimization will trigger lower priority assignments and schedule higher priority appointments in this slot.
Final Wrap
Salesforce Field Service Dynamic Priority feature is designed to maximize resource allocation and ensure consistency based on the technician’s priority, capability, and availability, leading to better results and improved field performance. Equipped with technology, intelligent, and automated dynamic priority-based scheduling in Salesforce Field Service offers a highly efficient ecosystem to organize and prioritize field deliveries and field jobs in an effective way so that technicians can focus solely on delivering quality and optimal customer service.