Webinar summary: The right platform is key to seamless service integration

Field Service Seamless Integration WebinarLast week we hosted a discussion about seamless service integration, and how to maximize the potential and accessibility of your company’s data out on the field. The recorded webinar is available for viewing.

Our Sr. VP of Sales and Marketing, Jim Hare, opened the presentation with key points about field service management and data accessibility.

The core of this business is information: Getting relevant data out onto the field has become a critical aspect. We’ve come a long way from the old days of back office call-ins, and now the strength of a field service company lies in its capability to connect all aspects of the business to its organizational data streams.

Of course, it’s connected to the other critical aspect of the field service business: customer experience. The more data and access you can provide your techs, the more beneficial and successful your customers’ service experience will be.

So how do successful companies empower their teams with productive data streams? The answer is your field service management system: this is where all the data must come together. FSM is the connecting point for your data.

There are two obvious options for creating your FSM’s environment: Build or buy. But are either of them ideal?

We can’t help but point out a few of the glaring cons when it comes to off-the-shelf applications: They can be rigid. The user interface might not work for your teams. Customization isn’t as fluid. They require some level of expertise to deploy.

Then again, building from the ground up requires extensive knowledge, textbook resources, and the cost and time invested is much higher than buying.

Is there a third, optimal approach?

Yes. Which is why FieldOne builds on top of an industry-standard platform – Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Our award-winning Sky solution is an integration of the best Microsoft’s CRM has to offer with our original layer of field service management optimization.

Here are just a few reasons why this combination works:

  1. Open architecture: We’re not locked in a single vendor’s approach.
  2. Flexible and scalable: The Microsoft CRM is capable of multi-language, multi-time zone, and more, along with the ability to scale  into the 100,000s of users.
  3. Third party plugins: Further customization with the ability to add on.

For more information, and to hear Ted Kempf, Director of Field Services at Microsoft, speak to the value of interoperability and open architectures, view the webinar now. To learn more about Sky, give us a call (1-866-918-8324) or email.

Forrester: Field service a top tech priority for businesses

Top Technology ChecklistWhen it comes to prioritizing investment in a company’s technologies, there’s no question that departments directly handling the customer will usually come first.

William Band, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester recently reported on results from Forrester’s Forrsights Software Survey Q4 2012. The top three areas of a business to receive technology investment? Not surprisingly, sales came first (42%), with customer service tying for second with corporate services (36%).

But in this survey of 2200 software decision-makers, ahead of marketing, in fourth place, comes field service at 27%. After all, field service is ultimately customer-facing – and therefore an area of business that must excel at offering top service. If techs have access to high quality technology, their customers will absolutely feel it -and of course, the opposite is also true.

This point comes across even more strongly in the mobile portion of the survey. Field service came in second after sales, at 42%, when 704 mobile software development decision makers  were asked which departments get the most focus when it comes to mobile software strategy and investments.

 

So where do your company’s priorities lie? Is field service in the top three? And if not, are you ready to start making a bigger investment in your techs’ success?

No more alphabet soup! Join this week’s service integration webinar

Tired of the alphabet soup?

API, FSM, CRM, RMM, FSA, ERP, SLA, QoS… What does it all really mean for your enterprise, employee productivity and bottom line?

This Thursday, May 16, our team invites you to participate in the next installment of our FieldOne Sky Webinar Series: Seamless Service Integration – A Simpler Solution.

Join us and discover how simple, seamless integration of all of your field service management tools is actually painless:

  • No proprietary vendor “lock-in” that commits you to pay high fees for changes
  • Self-Service Connections for most tools
  • Open architecture, no hidden databases
  • Easy for non-programmers to integrate data

Our guest speaker for this session is Ted Kempf, Director of Service Industries for Microsoft. FieldOne Sky field service management is built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. Kempf will discuss the interoperative features of Dynamics CRM that contribute to making it the ideal platform for powerful applications like Sky.

To register, click your preferred time below:

Our team is looking forward to your participation!

Designing field service software that empowers, not just enables

User experience for your techs

This week, ComputerWeekly.com published an excellent piece: How improved user experience yields returns on investment.

When designing, programming and testing software, the default attitude towards UX, or user experience, consists of a primary focus on public-facing customers. Which is fair; the general point is to ensure that all the features are easily accessible and clearly labeled.

What gets overlooked, though, is that it’s just as important – if not significantly more – to consider the UX within software utilized inside the enterprise. Enterprise employees – in the office or on the field – are using all kinds of applications, and their productivity, as well as your spending, are directly impacted by the UX of those various kinds of software.

The article is so spot-on we just had to add our thoughts from the field service software point of view. Namely, it’s just not enough for a company to offer a list of 200 features that come with a brilliant mobile app. Any app built for the enterprise has to carry out features, tasks and data storage in an integrated way that is natural and easy to use.

This is especially true for the techs. In navigating through the daily dynamic activities of the job, it’s all well and good that the tech’s software is capable of thousands of actions. Bottom line, though, the tech only needs the software to act specifically for the task he’s on right now. Spending time scanning an app for the right features is not an option; no tech on the job can rely on searching for buried features.

Which is why our mobile apps are not designed from an IT perspective or even a back office business perspective. They are designed in close consultation with the people in the field, doing the job, living the workflow. That also includes a heavy emphasis on customer feedback to drive a very natural and human user experience for the app.

Think about it this way: an airplane cockpit is packed with levers, buttons, knobs and screens. There’s a lot there, but the pilot has to be able to locate the part he needs to make his next move. If the layout of the hardware isn’t assisting with streamlining his tasks, working with him to get his job done, then the UX – or layout of the aircraft’s dashboard – is not doing its job.

When it comes to user experience, remember: lots of bells and whistles only make a lot of noise.

FieldOne Continues Field Service Management Webinar Series

Microsoft Guest Speaker Details Simpler Solution for Information Integration in Field Service Management

Next week, our dedicated team will continue leading the FieldOne Sky Webinar Series, covering our cloud-delivered Field Service Management (FSM) solutions, with the next session. Titled “Seamless Service Integration: A Simpler Solution,” the complimentary event explains how FieldOne Sky integrates critical information and documents from disparate enterprise systems into the award-winning FSM application.

Sign up for one of two webinar slots, Thursday, May 16, 2013 – at 9am ET and 12pm ET.

“In this era of open systems companies fear being locked into proprietary software that only the developer can modify.  They set it up so connecting anything to their software is a complex and costly process.

We designed FieldOne Sky to run on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform which is flexible and easy to customize.  This also means that users can connect their other data sources to Sky without any programming code, application programming interfaces (APIs) or other complex tools and systems.  Information access – in context – made simple.” –  FieldOne Co-Founder and CTO Shloma Baum

In addition, Ted Kempf, Director of Service Industries for Microsoft, will discuss the interoperable features of Dynamics CRM that contribute to making it the ideal platform for powerful applications such as FieldOne Sky.

Learn more about upcoming FieldOne Sky Webinar Series sessions for June and July.

For the full press release, click here.