Case Study – Luxury Bathroom Manufacturer

Gauri Delivers the World’s First Salesforce Field Service Mobile Solution with 100% Offline Capability

Read how Gauri helped a leading luxury bathroom manufacturer to achieve the world’s first Salesforce Field Service Mobile solution with 100% offline capability.

The Challenge

The Client had embarked upon a major Salesforce transformation programme across all its worldwide subsidiaries, however the groups Salesforce Field Service implementation in the UK was proving to be a challenge. Client felt they needed an experienced FSL architect to ensure that the proposed solution design would fully meet the requirements of the business. Given Gauri’s proven track record in delivering end to end solutions for field service, the Client asked us to step in and lead their FSL implementation, whilst working alongside their companies global IT team and Salesforce (SFDC) in the US.

Our Contribution

Field service transformation, from legacy On-premise to leading-edge Cloud solution.

With a nationwide team of in-house field service engineers and third-party service agents, the Client’s ambition had outgrown its legacy on-premise SAP CRM system, which had been adapted for their field service operations. The system wasn’t scalable, suffered poor failover resolution and system changes were difficult to implement. From an operational perspective, there was no street level routing or live traffic monitoring to minimise travel times between jobs. Communications between service centre staff, field service engineers and customers were entirely phone based and furthermore, with a limited mobile capability, engineers could only synchronise and update the CRM system after they finished their shift and returned home.

The upside potential in using Salesforce FSL to improve operational efficiencies and customer service was considerable, however the client needed their field service engineers to have a 100% offline capable mobile app so they could access all information pertinent to a job and update work orders when not in range of a mobile phone network.

The world’s first go live for Salesforce Briefcase.

Gauri worked with Salesforce product specialists to pilot a beta solution of Salesforce Briefcase for Field Service Mobile. This would provide the Client’s field service engineers with full offline access to parts inventories & prices, historical job data and enable them to perform job validation checks and customer sign off whilst offline. Having now gone live, Briefcase will be officially launched during 2021.

Seamless integration between Salesforce and SAP.

In addition to offline access, the Client required seamless integration between Salesforce Service Cloud and SAP ERP. Being both a Salesforce and SAP partner, Gauri have considerable experience integrating Salesforce with SAP and were able to provide guidance with the integration that was undertaken using Mulesoft.

Some of the key features delivered included:

  • Invoices and warranties generated within Salesforce then recorded and fulfilled within SAP.
  • Inventories updated within SAP via Salesforce after completion of a job.
  • Credit notes initiated and approved within Salesforce then fulfilled in SAP.
  • Pricing & Inventories maintained within SAP and accessible within Salesforce.
  • Alerts within the Field Service Mobile app on which components and complimentary products are compatible with a customer’s existing product, for more expedient fault resolution and upsell potential.

A Complex integration requires great teamwork.

Gauri completed the FSL implementation for the Client despite significant complexity and dependencies. A single instance of Salesforce and SAP was being rolled out across client’s group subsidiaries, and with so many projects running in parallel, efficient communication and co-ordination between the Gauri, the Client and Salesforce teams was essential in the successful delivery of the project.

Customer service excellence through process automation and data analytics.

The Client can now leverage the full power of FSL’s Maintenance Plan to automatically generate service appointments against customer service contracts and warranty agreements and optimise field service resources far more efficiently. Their field service engineers now have visibility of all up-coming jobs to ensure they have the correct inventory of parts to complete the job and realise significant improvements in first time fixes.

Other features and benefits include:

  • Auto generation of customer visit notifications via email, SMS or phone call, with ability for customers to confirm and manage appointments online through Salesforce Customer Community Cloud for Service.
  • Salesforce Live Messaging provides live communications between client’s service team members and customers via multiple social channels. Messaging can be initiated with customers using SMS.
  • Performance tracking now enables customer to optimise field service processes and resources with real time data and analytics including:
    • Engineer resource utilisation
    • Time spent travelling between jobs
    • Number of jobs completed
    • Time spent on jobs
    • Live location tracking
    • On-board inventories

FSL now provides the client with a single holistic view of every customer service call with in-depth product service history. This wealth of structured data will enable them to better understand and validate the root cause of product failures, continue to strive for improved product design and reliability, realise greater operational efficiencies and reduce costs… All this whilst significantly improving customer experience!

We felt we needed further validation of our solution design and required additional resources with the requisite skillsets to complete the project. Gauri were able to demonstrate their expertise in deploying field service solutions, and a personal testimonial from the CIO of one of their clients convinced us they were the right partner to assist us.

The Product Owner

Briefcase has provided us with a robust real-time mobile solution that will enable us to realise significant improvements in operational efficiency and customer service.

The Product Owner

Thank you to you and your team, for all of the hard work, commitment and creativity that went into making this a success in very trying circumstances.

Without you and your team we could not have got to this place, the feedback on FSL has been excellent and with hardly any tickets raised by the initial launch group, it bodes well for the future.

Customer Experience Director