September 25, 2020 BY KIMBERLY MILFORT
Home installation and service come with a special set of challenges in 2020. Recently, Salesforce Customer Success
Managers spent time with executives from the home improvement and telecommunications space. These are people who know
better than anyone that risk can be a moving target. As this year has shown us, things can change quickly, even from
moment to moment.
There were five themes that emerged from the executive roundtable: collaboration, trust, accountability, visibility, and
communication. Each of these concepts play out in new ways during the COVID-19 crisis.
1. Collaboration: Make safety a shared responsibility.
Keeping customers and field techs safe is not a challenge any one person or team can solve alone. Field techs are
finding new ways to make home installations safe. Customers are asking important questions. Executives are taking note
and implementing new safety protocols in the field. We also heard plenty of discussions beyond install, especially
around pipeline concerns for residential direct sales business models. The era of COVID-19 necessitates training for
field reps around things like video calls, digital signature usage, and more. Some sales reps are now required to get
trained and certified on new technology, enabling them to close deals remotely.
Leaders are encouraging team members to reach out and learn from one another using innovative models and collaboration
tools. Organizations are hiring Chief Health Officers, forming COVID-19 centers of excellence, and creating task forces
to find new ways to transform business in the new normal.
We’re all learning as we go, and we need tools to enable people to interact safely. If you’re looking for ways to help
your team collaborate, check out Chatter. It helps you connect, engage, and motivate employees to work efficiently
regardless of their role or location. This Get Started with Chatter knowledge article will help you get started.
2. Trust: Empower field techs to make judgement calls on site.
Providing physical and psychological safety means giving field techs the power to decline to enter someone's home or to
discontinue the install for any reason, with full support of their company.
Ensuring field techs have this authority is essential since there can be a few customers who say they are not having
symptoms, but in reality it’s a different story. A field tech may show up and observe signs of COVID-19 on site and feel
the need to leave for safety reasons. Some companies have even taken the step of informing customers that they may not
provide home service at all in the future if there is a refusal to socially distance, wear PPE, or disclose symptoms.
Empowering dispatchers to pivot quickly is an essential part of protecting and supporting field techs in unpredictable
circumstances. A field tech may be able to reschedule with a customer for a future date, but they’ll oftentimes need
help from a dispatcher to potentially fill open time in their calendar. If your team needs to shift gears and
reschedule, Lightning Scheduler can help them get that done quickly. Learn how to reschedule field service and build
appointment templates in the Lightning Scheduler Trailhead module.
3. Accountability: Require customers to agree to safety terms.
Challenges exist around educating customers on ways to keep field techs safe. A higher level of accountability on the
customer’s part is required to ensure they comply with 6-foot distancing rules, PPE, and health status disclosure.
Companies can improve the customer experience by requiring education and acceptance of safety terms in order to confirm
an appointment.
To set expectations, send an email to customers before field techs arrive. Learn to create an email template in Lightning Experience so you can save time while
sending email directly through your Salesforce instance.
4. Visibility: Give leaders consolidated access to the latest data.
Some companies are proactively keeping an eye on hotspots and declining to do in-home install or service during peak infection rate periods in certain markets. This means teams need to be able to move capacity, and enable field techs to work in another market, if the one they were slated to work in has become a hotspot. It requires comprehensive, centralized access to command centers, dashboards, contact
tracing, and other crisis management tools on a single
reliable platform.
Check out the Work.com Basics Trailhead module to learn about our suite of apps, expertise, and services to safely
reopen your businesses.
5. Communication: Enable contact center flexibility.
Contact centers are expanding their scope and sometimes shifting to a more proactive approach. Agents have been much
busier. They’ve been handling more questions from customers who are doing their own installations. Agents have also been
making more outbound calls to help prepare customers for an in-home install, ensuring they understand contactless
protocol and what to expect during an appointment. Call center agents have also had to be trained and skilled up on new policies related to COVID-19.
Your business can build its own learning modules to get your teams up to speed fast. A great way to do that is by using
myTrailhead to build your own employee and customer enablement platform. You can learn how to create new learning experiences with myTrailhead.
It’s essential that field techs who need to be in customers’ homes are properly prepared. Business leaders can ensure
this happens by providing the right tools for field techs, dispatchers, and call center agents. It also means having
open conversations about collaboration, identifying what’s needed, and moving swiftly to implement.
What are you doing to create better collaboration between teams? We want to hear about your experiences. Here’s how to
share your story:
