3 Tips to Boost Service Rep and Field Service Tech Productivity

I started my career as a customer service rep, and looking back, I can say I really enjoyed it. But over the last decade, working as a service rep or field tech has become harder than ever — higher caseload, more complexity, and, let’s face it, more burnout. And while autonomous AI is on the rise, and is supposed to reduce effort for agents, recent research suggests that humans are doing more in customer service, not less. For example, 65% of service reps and 66% of mobile workers say that cases are more complex than ever. Coupled with sky-high customer expectations and more pressure on service organisations to generate revenue, this is a nightmare for your service teams.

As a result, it shouldn’t be surprising that 69% of decision makers in service say that service rep attrition is a moderate to major challenge. I’ve seen it firsthand with my own clients. So let’s take a look at the specific productivity challenges that service reps and techs face and my top three steps on how to use Service Cloud and Salesforce Field Service to make day-to-day customer service easier.

The #1 service rep productivity killer: disjointed processes

When we think of customer service reps or field service techs, we picture them in our heads talking to customers in their home or on the phone, actively working to resolve issues. But the reality is that when I took customer calls as a rep myself, that’s simply not the case. Service studies show that reps and mobile workers report spending 61% of their day away from customers. And what are they doing instead? 

• Admin work, internal meetings, and writing case notes
• Toggling between multiple screens (ugh)
• Using fragmented workflows 

And these fragmented workflows may be the biggest offender. They slow reps and techs down and also increase the rate of errors. Neither are great for a positive customer experience. 

So reps and techs are spending a huge amount of time away from customers. But if you design your user experience even a little differently, you can cut down on the time doing other tasks, so they can effectively do what they do best — serve your customers. Read on to learn how.

1. Create a user experience that feels easy

Reduce clicks

Nobody wants to wait on the phone while a service rep clicks around to try and find information. So, first let’s reduce clicks with Salesforce Lightning pages. You can do this by using Related Record and Dynamic Related List Components to show information — not only from a service case, but also from the account it belongs to or the service contract. This also includes quick-access buttons or tabs to give reps access to things like workflows and automation right from their case screen. 

Focus on accessibility

Anytime that you improve accessibility for one person in your organisation, it’s going to benefit others too. With Lightning Pages, consider ergonomic design to reduce eye strain and improve people’s ability to find information. For example, this means adding clear labeling so screen readership is improved. Also try using more visual indicators. Studies show that using visual icons (instead of text) help people identify things more easily.

Make it dynamic

When you have to scroll through a hundred fields, it’s not easy to find what you need. And you often don’t need all of that on the page at one time. So by using conditional visibility with Lightning Pages, you can add more flexibility for admins, have fewer pages to manage, and save space by making individual fields conditionally visible. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

On this example page, I’ve added tabs — not only for case highlights, where I pulled over specific case fields that people might need to reference at a glance — but also for account information, where I’ve pulled cases and contacts for the related account. I’ve also created tabs for things like related work orders and related records. Larger tabs at the top of the screen are easier to find so people don’t have to scroll. And on this Highlights tab, I’ve combined information about the case with related records, like emails, so that reps have everything they might need to reference in one place.

And when we’re talking about a mobile view for field service techs, you also need to just focus on findability of the information. On this page, you can see that the work order has been cut down to just a few fields. The field service tech needs actionable information for their appointment, like the work type and notes from the scheduling team. But they probably don’t need office detail like the date the work order was created. In this way, we’re updating the layout to make sure that we’re saving space and getting the information that techs need to serve this customer faster.

2. Empower your reps to make decisions

You want to help your reps solve issues on their own — without having to transfer customers or put customers on hold. How? Give them ownership. If reps feel ownership, they’ll be more motivated to serve customers and do a better job. You can do this by creating exception-based approvals — in other words, creating approval processes where your agents can be the approvers up to a certain threshold.

For example, begin by allowing your service teams to give a customer a credit or a discount. To do that with minimal risk, try offering a benchmark where you enable the rep to give a discount under 2% on their own, but require approvals for discounts of 3% or more.

You can also give reps and techs more upsell opportunities. If your techs are doing a job at a customer’s home, servicing something that you’ve installed for them, why not empower them to upsell more while they’re there? Let’s take a look.

  

So in this screenflow, I’m empowering the rep to give a discount to a customer. What kind of discount do they want to offer? You can see that when they enter a certain discount amount that’s a little too high, it tells them that they need to have a manager approve that discount for them, and to make it easy, our flow is going to submit for approval automatically. But if they go to offer a discount or issue a credit for a dollar amount that is under our benchmark, they’re able to go ahead and submit that discount themselves — and the customer is taken care of immediately.

The next one is for field service — we can give field service techs access to more than basic field editing through Field Service Mobile extensions. This tech can access Field Service Mobile flows to run through check-in, appointment completion, and customer communication extensions added to their Action Menu. And you can do so much with this, giving them access to upselling screen flows, and even letting them renew or extend service contracts. So they’re able to get the customer taken care of and add to your bottom line — all on their own.

3. Use metrics to increase motivation

We all want our reps to be excited about helping our customers. They can’t do that unless they feel motivated to do so. The way I do this: focus on internal motivation and overall team accountability. For example, try building a leaderboard that celebrates the top performers. That way, you can give all of your reps that motivation to get to the top — and see what they can aspire to. 

Secondly, when you give reps and field service techs access to their own metrics, it encourages them to think about how they can improve. When I was working in a call centre, I looked at my metrics every single day, because I wanted to see how I was improving over time. It motivated me to learn how I could be better. 

And we want to focus on recognition. When you focus on giving workers ways to be recognised, you’re creating feel good moments that will be very motivating. It’s going to make them work harder and longer for you.  

So on this homepage, you can see that I’ve included a dynamic dashboard that allows each user to see their own personal case metrics. I’ve included the ability for them to see their personal case closure current caseload, and then also team metrics. I also like to add fun things like  a little motivation station where they can see themselves and their co-workers being recognised for their excellent work, and rich text components with information they may need to access easily.

And just because field service techs are on the Field Service App doesn’t mean that you can’t give them the same experience. While the Field Service app can’t display a dashboard, you can add a deeplink Field Service Mobile extension to quickly and easily get your techs into the Salesforce mobile app to view their own dashboards and home pages.  For example, how many appointments have they’ve worked on lately? What are their customer satisfaction scores? And how do the top techs score? Giving them information like this, seeing their metrics against the team’s, and seeing how they improve over time give techs a sense of ownership and pride in their work.

Boosting the productivity of your service reps and field service techs doesn’t have to be a huge endeavour. By making tweaks in your current user experience, giving your workers more autonomy, and recognising excellent work within your team, you can quickly see improvements throughout your service organisation.