Delivering the best customer service is the first step towards creating a truly customer-centric business. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service ensures this by integrating your Dynamics 365 CRM with on-field service operations to optimize your overall customer experience further. Field agents are equipped with powerful analytics-based applications and remote connectivity options that help them deliver proactive service.
Key Benefits
Some of the key benefits of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service solution are:
- Proactive service delivery that detects issues early on, even before the customer notices them
- Optimized service scheduling with AI-based analytics that helps save cost and time involved in on-site operations.
- Reduced time to resolution by empowering technicians and service managers with the right tools and adequate information required to solve the issues on the first try
.png)
Dynamics 365 Field Service Tutorial: Key Capabilities
The Dynamics 365 Field service solution provides several features and functionalities that make it a lot easier for service professionals and technicians to interact with customers and provide on-time resolutions. It helps combine AI delivered customer insights and knowledge bases to offer the right solution every time.
Technicians can be dispatched with optimized routing and scheduling so that the most qualified and nearest technician gets to the customer site as soon as possible. You can also automate your scheduling tasks and have more time to focus on the quality of service provided to your customers. Additional features like asset history management help you track your work progress effectively and make sure you don’t miss out on any critical resource or service query.
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service also enables better collaboration among your technicians and can be easily accessed via mobile devices allowing technicians to optimize their service at all levels.
Here is a brief rundown on the key capabilities and a guide on using the Dynamics 365 Field Service that you will find helpful.
.png)
Dashboards
The field service dashboard neatly presents the various options and settings needed to create the work orders and track them. You also get an overview of current progress by configuring key field service metrics and measures such as business value and feature details to monitor KPIs.
Work Order
A work order is created whenever a task is to be done and contains all the relevant information about the work. It is used to coordinate the service-related activities and resources to be used for a particular service ticket. It can refer to any type of work, be it a new installation, bug fixes, repairs, or routine maintenance activity. A work order is created once an activity is initiated and goes through the following lifecycle:
- Creation
- Schedule
- Dispatch
- Service
- Review / Approval
- Invoice and inventory adjustment
Work orders can be created by accessing Field Service > Work Orders and clicking on +New. To access existing work orders, you can select from the list of work orders and make the updates. Some information that you will have to specify for each work order includes the summary, primary incident, total pricing, tax details., follow-up instructions, preferences, source of work order, address, and location.
You can associate a work order to a particular service task, product, or service and map them to track it effectively.
Schedule Board
A schedule board lets you get an overview of available resources and the bookings you can make. Set the data filters and preferences to optimize your schedule views and make efficient scheduling that makes the best use of available resources. To access this functionality, click Resource Scheduling > Administration > Scheduling Parameters and select Resource Scheduling Optimization section. Enable the Connect to Maps field and Save the record.
To view the schedule board – Click Resources Scheduling > Schedule Board.
The schedule board shows you a map with details of resources, location, organizational units, booking, and current requirements.
Service Delivery: Agreements
An SLA is used as a means to establish a strict deadline on service operations. You can enable this functionality with the Field Service using the following steps:
- Go to Settings > Customizations > Work Order.
- Enable the SLA option under the Communication & Collaboration header on the work order form.
- Save and publish the changes.
Enter the active Field Service settings under the Field Service Settings, after which you will be able to define the SLA KPI instances under the Field Service SLA configurations tab. You can define the SLA terms like Time from Promised and Time to Promised. For instance, you can give service assurance that a service professional will reach out to the customer within 3 hours of a customer complaint.
Inventory Module
This software solution helps you automate inventory management tasks and optimize your several related activities like warehousing, inventory transfers, billing products during work orders, purchasing, returns, and inventory journals.
Resources Features
You can optimize resource scheduling via the Field Service Application and achieve better scale, customer satisfaction, and cost-effective service deliveries. This feature lets you assign resources to tasks considering distance and skill level resulting in reduced travel time and number of tries to fix.
You can configure resource scheduling based on different scenarios like overnight scheduling, single resource optimization, simulation, intraday scheduling, and emergency scheduling, depending on your needs and priorities.
For each job or work order created, you can pick the most appropriate resource from the list of available resources by running the resource scheduling optimizer. The results could be a cluster of routes, sequential booking, and time-efficient scheduling, which can help make your scheduling efficient and cost-effective.
Use Of IA To Assign Your Resources
With the help of Azure IoT and advanced analytics, Field Service helps create work orders automatically and assign the right resources before for faster issue resolutions. Sometimes issues are identified and resolved even before the customer notices them.
For instance, the equipment can be monitored for any faulty condition. If any such event is triggered, such as a need for an urgent replacement of parts, a work order will be created automatically. The automatic scheduling system will make sure the next available nearby resource with the right skills take care of the issue as soon as possible.
Dynamics 365 Field Service Tutorial: Learning Resources
Here are some more additional resources that can help you get a deeper understanding of the Dynamics 365 Field Service and provide in-depth tutorials.
Microsoft Learn
Microsoft Learn provides an implementation learning module aimed at high-level users like business decision-makers, business users, functional consultants, and project managers. These are learning paths with varying durations anywhere from 5 to 11 hours designed to help you understand the business impact and operational efficiency that Dynamics 365 Field service solution can bring to their business.
It allows them to learn the several winning strategies to implement the Field Service solution successfully. It also helps you identify any editing inefficiencies in current workflows and how to optimize them with the help of the Field service solution.
You will learn how to configure the Field Service implementation and manage work orders, agreements, inventory, and purchasing. Further modules will also teach you how to implement the Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile solution and deliver a customized mobile experience for your customers.
Choose the learning path corresponding to your role, be it a business decision-maker or a functional consultant, and get started with the field service solution.
Learners are expected to have some degree of familiarity with the Dynamics 365 platform and associated services.
Certifications
The Microsoft Learn platform also provides various certifications that indicate the proficiency you will have with using and implementing the Field Service solution upon completion. These certifications could differ based on the role, namely, Developer, Administrator, Solution Architect, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, AI Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Security Engineer, and Functional Consultant, and so on.
You can choose your learning path and get the relevant certifications. Your technicians and service team can also get certified to upgrade their skills and deliver optimized performance when making use of the D366 platform.
The two certifications relevant to the Field Service Solution are:
- Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Field Service Functional Consultant Associate
- Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Fundamentals
Conclusion
GestiOnTheGo offers expert consulting services and can guide you with everything you need to implement the D365 Customer Service platforms successfully. Contact us today to get all queries cleared and learn to make the best use of your Dynamics 365 Field Service.
