Q&A: Salesforce’s Mark Cattini on What’s Next for Field Service Management

The field service space is expanding in both size and importance, with nearly 90 percent of service decision makers saying that mobile workers in the field directly impact their impression of the brand.

Salesforce is keenly aware of this, with co-CEO Keith Block stating on a recent earnings call that field service is a critical, strategic part of customer service for our customers, and pointing out that as of Q2 2019, Field Service Lightning was growing at nearly 100 percent year-over-year.

Further evidence of Salesforce’s focus on field service is last year’s acquisitions of ClickSoftware and MapAnything (now Salesforce Maps). Now, with the combined power of Field Service Lightning, Click and Salesforce Maps, Salesforce is poised to deliver the world’s most intelligent, innovative and complete field service solution.

We recently welcomed a new leader to our field service business: Mark Cattini, SVP and GM of Field Service – the former CEO of Click. We caught up with Mark to hear about the future of field service at Salesforce.

You’re new to Salesforce from ClickSoftware. Tell us about your journey thus far?

Customer success has been my passion and has always been my single most important focus in business. I’ve been in the software industry for 30 years at companies like Lotus Development, MapInfo, Autotask and most recently ClickSoftware. As varied as those technologies are, the common mission has always been to be laser-focused on customer success. When I joined Click in 2018, I was amazed by the company’s deep expertise in field service and the degree to which our customers relied on us to manage crucial business processes with Click technology. It’s very exciting to now be part of Salesforce, which shares the same values of trust, customer success, innovation and equality.

Service Cloud empowers companies to deliver a consistent, end-to-end experience for customers, all the way from the contact center to in-person service delivered by mobile workers. And because it’s built on top of the world’s #1 CRM, companies can gain a complete view of their customers and deliver fantastic, personalized service, regardless of where the interaction takes place.

Field service is a key part of this and is getting huge traction with our customers of all sizes across the world because companies realize delivering mission critical service, in-person, is a differentiator. Click brings 30 years of field service industry knowledge to the table, and additional investments like Salesforce Maps provide the power of location to businesses. Click and Salesforce Maps, combined with the Salesforce Customer 360 platform will help companies elevate field service to deliver mission critical service. It’s a very exciting time for sure.

What do you hope to accomplish as the new GM of Field Service?

At Dreamforce last year, we announced that we’d deliver the world’s most intelligent, innovative and complete field service solution by combining the connected experience that the Customer 360 Platform offers with the depth of ClickSoftware’s Field Service Edge’s capabilities. And we will.

Our vision around the digital transformation of service is centered on increasing automation, and delivering better business outcomes to service organizations through technologies like AI and analytics. This doesn’t just come from the integration of Click, Salesforce Maps and Field Service Lightning, but also from the power of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud , the capabilities of Einstein (for AI), MuleSoft (for integrating the necessary data) and Tableau (for analytics). This represents a suite of market-leading technology that can deliver exceptional service anywhere, anytime, whether the customer is calling into the call center, connecting via SMS from their mobile device, or receiving in-person service from a field technician. In addition, building on the technology partnership that Click and Salesforce have enjoyed for many years, and the combined deployment experience and subject matter expertise, we are confident we can realize this vision at a rapid pace.

My role is to make this promise a reality, and deliver on a field service management vision that brings the best of Salesforce and the best of ClickSoftware to service organizations around the world.

What challenges exist in today’s field service market, and how is Salesforce positioned to help?

Most noticeable is that advances in consumer technology have significantly raised the bar for customer experience. For example, when people have real-time visibility into their rideshare, they now expect the same from their service provider. Consumers expect rapid response and regular communication about the service delivery, rather than the traditional four-hour service window several days away.

Salesforce is able to deliver on customer expectations by using artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve service delivery. By calculating the best resource to deploy for a specific task based on all the many variables (such as required skills, travel distance, required parts etc,) our field service technology delivers the optimal schedule to meet customer service level agreements – and even updates that schedule dynamically as new tasks arise during the day. This enables service organizations to know how best to deploy their mobile workforce, but also make commitments to their customers they can keep.

What’s coming next?

Going forward, we will be focused on delivering field service management on Salesforce Customer 360. For existing ClickSoftware customers, we’ll be announcing specific plans for your products soon, and how you can take advantage of the innovation uniquely available on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. We’re making significant investments across product development, partner enablement, and customer success to accelerate your field service management journey and help you unlock the value of Salesforce’s field service management platform.