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At the heart of any company’s success are its customers. The success and growth curve of any company can be predicted by gauging its customer satisfaction levels and market reputation. One vital component that has a significant effect on these attributes is the quality of customer field service. Are they quick? Are they thorough? Are they reliable? Are they worth the cost? These are just some of the questions that an organization has to prove for every customer they have.
With Dynamics 365 CRM, Microsoft has allowed organizations to leverage data and understand where their customers are and when is the ideal time for them to show up. With the emphasis on a customer-first approach, ‘ask and you shall be given’, has become the norm in customer engagement and support. Booking for services like consultations, deliveries, repairs, etc. at a customer’s fingertips has made convenience a necessity rather than a luxury.
This makes on-field customer servicing an essential business process for many organizations. Companies turn to technology for helping their managers in allocating, routing, and managing their field service agents as well as optimizing and maximizing the overall efficiency of their end-to-end field service process.
This is where Maplytics comes in! Maplytics Field Service Solution handles all your field service requirements as an end-to-end Field Servicing Solution Our efforts in creating this solution have even been rewarded with the community’s constant appreciation and Microsoft’s Preferred Solution badge on Microsoft AppSource.
The best way to grip the power of Maplytics end-to-end Field Service Solution is to see it in action! So let’s explore this with a use case. Consider Josh is the manager at a fast-growing carpentry company ‘BuildsThat Last.’ His company is getting recognition for its quick carpentry services and quality customer support.
Josh has a group of total 7 field service agents under his management and today he is managing one of the highest sales regions, Staten Island, New York. On average, they get a minimum of 10-15 customers daily from this region and his responsibility is to serve all of them. Therefore he has two of his best field agents, William and Joe, prepped to be deployed.
Mindful of the volume of requests, Joshis committed to do an exceptionally good job. He is handy with Maplytics so he knows he will have no trouble allocating route-optimized schedules that will save his field agent’s time and transportation costs. Josh uses the Auto Scheduling feature of Maplytics to do this. First, he plots all Active Cases on the map as shown below and then uses the Auto Scheduling option in Mass Actions to open the Auto Scheduling card.
Now Josh selects Joe and William as the users for whom the schedule is to be generated. To keep the integrity of previously created schedules intact, Josh thinks to select the checkbox of Consider Existing Meetings. This option would take the existing meeting of his field agents into consideration while generating the schedule. He can also choose whether to add these existing meetings to their current schedule or reschedule them. But when checked, he finds his field agents don’t have any existing meetings on the current day, so he decides to leave it unchecked.
He then uses the Advanced Preferences option to set a maximum of 10 meetings in a day where each meeting lasts 30 minutes or less. If there was a situation where Josh experienced a spike in requests, he could easily create a multi-day schedule to resolve all requests in a span of multiple days. Once all the preferences are set, he clicks Proceed to create the Auto Schedule.
Josh now has an optimized schedule for his field reps that was created within minutes using Auto Scheduling! The color-coded nature of the routes makes it simple to clearly distinguish between Joe’s and William’s routes.
Josh then creates an activity for this schedule. He chooses to create an appointment and fills in all the required details as shown below. Once filled, he creates this activity for William and Joe.
Now let’s transition to the other end of the solution. Once the activity is created by the manager, the field agents can then go to the field and start using the Maplytics app on their mobiles or tablets. They can start navigation on their assigned routes using either Google Maps or Waze App and view turn-by-turn navigation while following the route on the field.
Let’s shift to the perspective of the on-field agent William and explore his experience with Maplytics. William has a schedule assigned to him for the day and he’s ready to get started. Firstly, he opens the schedule assigned to him on the map to understand his day as shown below. Once plotted, he clicks on the Navigate button to start his schedule.
As William clicks on the Navigate button, he gets redirected to Google maps where he can easily view the route for turn-by-turn directions. This happens because Williams has set the ‘Navigation Within’ option to Google App in the user configuration detail record.
Following directions is a piece of cake now with the easy-to-follow directions on the map. With the optimized route and the turn-by-turn navigation, William reaches the destination in the least time possible. When he reaches the service location, he uses the Check-In button to register his arrival to the service site as shown below.
William’s appointment is for the inspection and restoration of an antique table. He diligently begins to inspect the table but after 10 minutes she concludes that the table is beyond the scope of restoration and deems it as a lost cause. He uses the Check-Out button to register that he is done with the appointment. Now since his appointment is cut short he’s left with free time. William sees this as an opportunity and quickly decides to schedule another meeting with a nearby customer.
To do this, he opens Maplytics on his phone and clicks the Locate Me button on the Detail Map to plot his current GPS location. Next, he opens his Plot Records card and enters a 2 and 3-mile radii as Search Radius since his next location is more than 3 miles away. He then selects Leads as the data source, My Open Leads as the View and then hits the Search button.
Now William has all the leads plotted on the map which lie within 2 to 3 miles from his current location as shown below.
He uses the tooltip cards of the respective pushpins and looks at the Line-of-Sight Distance as shown below to understand which location is the nearest and most suitable to him from his current location. He sees that the closest customer is only .40 miles and it is also aligned with the route to his next customer! William proceeds to contact the customer to seek confirmation for a preponed service. Once he receives a confirmation, he makes his way to the customer’s location by right-clicking on their pushpin and adding it to the route. He uses Check In to register his appointment, performs the service, Checks Out, and moves on to continue with his remaining schedule.
While the field agents are continuously logging their progress, Josh can monitor how many requests have been met and also track the agents who are fulfilling the maximum numbers of requests by plotting the Check-Ins and Check-Outs on the map. This gives him an overview of the day’s performance by the entire team and individuals.
The above use case illustrates just a glimpse into the everyday life made simple for the managers and field agents in the organization using Maplytics’ end-to-end field service solution. While this solution simplifies organizing and managing field agents for managers, it optimizes convenience and maximizes productivity for the field agents.
Maplyticsis a 360-degree geo-analytical solution that revolves around customer satisfaction and therefore, you can find a huge array of other productivity-enhancing features that allow you to auto create territories, manage territories, perform along the route search, set area of service, and much more within the Maplytics features set!
So if customers are your priority and you would like to introduce the next level of intelligence for your field service, you need to get hands-on experience of Maplytics today with our free 15-day trial. You can download Maplyticsfrom our Website or Microsoft AppSource (don’t forget to check out our shiny official badge of Preferred Solution there!)
Need someone to walk and talk you through this end-to-end solution? We’ve got our support team waiting for you just an email away. You can draft now and click crm@inogic.com to get started with your free and personalized Maplytics demo!
Until the next time –we’ll be around on your map!
