ServiceNow Field Service Management: Transforms Field Operations for Success

ServiceNow Field Service Management has powerful capabilities allowing you to deliver field service experience for customers and employees from one unified system. Here in this blog, you understand what ServiceNow FSM is, its functionality, pricing, and more.

So, let’s get started.

What Is ServiceNow Field Service Management (FSM)?

ServiceNow Field Service Management is a cloud-based tool that allows businesses to streamline their field service operations, such as installing, repairing, or maintaining equipment and managing various on-site tasks seamlessly.

It efficiently matches the tasks to the appropriate field rep based on their skills, location, and other factors, eliminating confusion and chaos.

Not only the business but also workers or technicians can leverage the mobile application to record details of their tasks, such as how long it took them to reach the location and complete it. This also helps businesses track where their workers are and what they are doing.

Additionally, if any problem arises on-field, this tool connects business teams, processes, and systems so they can find the root cause and solve the issue promptly.

ServiceNow Field Service Management provides a range of applications and features to help businesses assign tasks, manage technicians, and gain insights into their operations. Let us look at them.

ServiceNow Field Service Management Applications And Features

1. Access Hours Management

This feature allows you to schedule a task for a worker only for a specific time. Suppose an air conditioner is to be installed at the customer’s premises between 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. only. Thus, the system will automatically assign this task to the appropriate representative between these hours to complete the task on time without any delay.

The administrator and dispatcher can also manually assign tasks outside these hours.

2. Capacity And Reservations Management

This system helps managers distribute the work among their team members fairly, ensuring that no one is assigned work beyond their capacity and less than what they can perform. With this, businesses can achieve better workload management and seamless working without any confusion.

ServiceNow capacity management application also allows plans of the tasks based on priority. The reservation rules allow you to reserve a certain percentage of time for tasks such as urgent repair, regular maintenance, or administrative.

3. Change Management

It is an integration that lets you create tasks or jobs, called work orders, from a change request. A change request is a formal proposal for any alteration in a product or system.

Whenever there is any change in the work order’s state or when a comment or update, known as a work note, is added to the work order, this system allows you to track it. You can look into its progress directly.

ITIL agents take care of this job, follow the IT Infrastructure Library framework for IT services, and leverage the Now platform to perform all these activities. They get a unified experience and ease of tracking work orders without leaving the change request.

4. Contractor Management

This tool lets you connect with third-party contractor companies and their staff to assign and manage their work. It helps in:

• Onboarding contractor companies
• Assigning tasks
• Reviewing and reassigning tasks
• Fallback assignment

Let us understand it with an example. Suppose you own a cleaning services firm and have an internal worker group, But during the peak seasons, the demand is too high for your team to handle. So, you onboard an external contractor company named ABC and their staff to take control of the extra work.

With ServiceNow Contractor Management, you assign a cleaning project to the ABC firm’s manager based on criteria like skills, coverage area, and various product models they use. Further, the manager of ABC firm logs into the Contractor Portal and sees the new project. They accept it and assign tasks to their team members.

Additionally, suppose one day you come up with a small cleaning project, but none of your internal team members can perform the services. In that case, the Contractor management system will automatically assign this task to the ABC firm.

5. Crew Operations

ServiceNow Field Service Crew Operations is a tool that helps you build a crew or a group of field service agents assigned to work together. Now, you do not have to manually assign tasks to each member or collect them all together and then assign tasks or resources to perform work. This tool will take care of it!

Also, it is efficient for the crew leader to keep track of everyone’s work using a mobile application. With it, they can easily determine who is responsible for what job.

Key features this tool provides:

• Create crews for events or situations
• Highlight crews based on their skills, location, covered radius, and availability
• Map to pick out the closest crew based on real-time location
• Automatically assign tasks to crews based on dynamic scheduling rules

6. Emergency Exposure Management

It is a ServiceNow Field Management feature that helps track and manage health emergencies or potential conditions like COVID-19 among field service agents and customers.

This feature lets you identify the potential condition of a worker, check their work order history, get a detailed report about it, perform actions to tackle the situation and enforce compliance policies.

Let’s understand it differently. Suppose you run a business that provides internet installation services. You have a team of technicians, and one of them, let’s call him John, tests positive for COVID-19.

The emergency exposure management will work in the following manner:

• Check Work Order History: After you get to know about John’s situation, using this system, you can look into his work order history. With this, you can find out various customers whom John visited and also can track the other technicians that came in contact with him during this period.
• Run Reports: Further, you get a detailed report of all these customers and other technicians.
  Take Action: Based on this report, you can inform all the affected customers and technicians about the situation. Additionally, you can block John’s calendar to prevent any new task from getting assigned to him for a specific time.
• Enforce Compliance Checks: After encountering this situation in your business, you are responsible for enforcing compliance. You can build a survey or a form that asks every technician about their COVID-19 test or vaccination details. The system lets them proceed only when they pass a certain check.
• Check Agent Compliance Status: With this tool, you get a ‘field service safety dashboard’ feature to see the technicians properly adhering to the safety compliance and who are deteriorating it.

7. Dispatcher Workspace

ServiceNow field service management offers this feature, allowing dispatchers to manage field teams and customer experience. You can foresee potential issues and improve efficiency. Basically, you get a comprehensive view of all your tasks, teams, locations, and status, and it lets you manage work efficiently.

Here is what you can do with it:

• Manage Work Order Tasks: Dispatcher workspace, dispatch map, and task map allow you to handle all your tasks. With these, you can assign tasks to agents based on their location, skills, task priority, and customer relationships they have built. The system is efficient enough to automatically assign and optimize tasks as they are created. Moreover, you can also reassign a task if needed.
• Dispatcher Dashboard: This dashboard provides real-time data about the various operations performed by field agents and their performance. You get instant visibility of pending dispatch items and the agents’ current status.
• Work In Dispatcher Workspace: By using this, you can filter out the tasks shown in the task panel. By searching them on the basis of keywords, you can sort the list based on a schedule or start and end date. Also, it lets you view all technicians’ work schedules, tasks, and time off events. Moreover, you can view the technicians available to perform a job and determine the best one for a specific type of task.
• Manage Appointments And Crew Operations: By using work order task forms, you can now manage customer appointments and create/assign crews for work order tasks.
• Intelligent Task Recommendations: This feature recommends that you fill agent schedules with tasks that help improve agent utilization.
• Soft Booking: This feature allows you to design optimal scheduling solutions as it automatically moves work order tasks from the scheduled state to the assigned state.

8. Field Service Territory Planning

It is a tool that helps you organize and manage territories for better work scheduling. A territory could be anything: a geographical area, a type of account, a customer, or another.

Here is what you can do with it:

• Create Territories: You can create territories by drawing them on a map or matching specific attributes to create detailed service areas.
• Assign Agents or Crews: You can assign agents or teams directly to territories without creating assignment groups.
• Visualize Resources: You can view your resources, like agents, teams, and assets, across different territories. You can also overlay custom data to visualize multiple points of information.
• Modify Territories: You can change the boundaries of territories to include new data points.
• Improve Efficiency: The tool helps improve scheduling efficiency, reducing travel time and cost.
• Minimize Overlapping Territories: You can use an interactive map to minimize overlapping territories for better scheduling and resource use.
• Manage Resources: If you’re a territory manager, you can manage and allocate resources for your territories.
• Analyze Performance: You can view and analyze performance data, like open tasks, agent utilization, and average travel time per territory, in the Field Service Territory Performance Analytics dashboard.

9. Incident Management

ServiceNow incident management with field service management is an integration that lets you create work orders directly from an incident record. An incident record is a report of a problem created by someone who faced an issue of a particular type.

Not only that, but also you can keep track of how a work order is progressing in the incident record itself. It is a handy tool for managing incident records and keeping them organized.

10. Intelligent Task Recommendation

This feature helps dispatchers fill in the gaps in agents’ free time slots. If an agent is free or a task gets canceled due to any reason, this feature suggests tasks that the agent can take upon.

Using the ServiceNow Agent mobile application, agents can see these tasks and take them upon without waiting for the system to allocate them to them. It ensures that agents are making the best of their time.

The tasks that are recommended have to meet certain criteria:

• The task is listed in the Work Order Task table.
• The task is in the Pending Dispatch state, which means it’s waiting to be assigned.
• The task is within the agent’s coverage area.
• The estimated task completion time fits into the free time slot in the agent’s calendar.

11. Machine Learning Solutions

It includes a tool named predictive intelligence that uses machine learning to suggest solutions for work orders. It is basically like an intelligent assistant that helps you find solutions to work orders more quickly and accurately.

You can find similar work orders and knowledge articles that can help solve a current issue. To do the same, it trains predictive models and applies machine learning to your data.

By using predictive intelligence, your resolution time is reduced. As it recommends similar work orders and articles on similar subjects based on a short description, agents can investigate and resolve the cases faster. Additionally, the recommended articles on similar subjects help them resolve and reduce error rates and costs.

12. Managing Appointments

This feature allows customers and employees to book service appointments at a specific time slot.

Customers can view time slots using the service portal it offers and select the one that suits them. On the other hand, the agents and dispatchers can also book appointments for their customers.

The process is as follows: when an appointment is booked, a work order is created, or more based on the type of service. Further, these appointments can be rescheduled or canceled within a specific time limit set in the system.

In order to use the appointment booking feature, configurations need to be set up at two levels – the application level and the service level. The application level configuration applies to all services that support appointment booking, while the service level configuration applies only to that specific service. Both configurations need to be active for appointments to be booked. This feature helps manage service appointments efficiently by allowing customers and employees to book appointments based on available time slots.

13. Mobile Application

ServiceNow field service management offers a mobile application that allows you to manage your service tasks from anywhere, anytime, whether you are online or offline. It lets you organize and prioritize your work or tasks easily.

Here are various things you can do with this application:

• Optimize Your Schedule: This application recommends the quickest route to reach a service location so you do not face any delay. Also, it suggests the best ways to complete a task efficiently.
• Manage Inventory And Locate Parts In Real-Time: You can manage your inventory with this application, and the asset map included lets you find parts in your nearby locations. With this, you can track all the assets used to complete a work order task.
• Stay Connected With Your Team And Customers: This application allows you to call or text your peers for help. Also, you can contact customers directly for any help or assistance.
• Work Offline: Even when you’re offline, you can still execute assigned tasks, manage assets, access your schedule, track the time stamp of updated tasks, and close work orders. The data for offline tasks is stored on your device and synchronized with the server when the device goes online.

14. Planned Maintenance

This application is not a Service Management application but works along with it. It lets you manage and maintain your assets, including devices, vehicles, etc.

Work orders and requests can be made based on time or application usage. For example, a work order could be made every few months. Or, a work order could be made after a machine has been used a certain amount.

It uses Maintenance Plans, which are used to start making work orders or requests. These orders or requests are instructions on how to carry out maintenance on your assets.

15. Playbooks

These are like instruction manuals for your field service teams, providing a step-by-step guide to help them complete their tasks efficiently.

In simpler terms, it helps your teams to know what to do and when to do it, making their work more efficient.

Playbooks can be used to create processes for managing different tasks. Also, they break down a workflow into several stages, and each stage depicts:

• A list of activities or steps that are needed to be done.
• Status indicators that show the current state of each step.
• Checkboxes and counters that show where an agent is in the workflow.

16. Service Locations

This feature and field service management allow you to add and check service locations whenever possible flexibly. It makes it easier for the administrators to add locations for work orders that are not predefined. But, for the same, they need to set a default validation configuration option.

These options include:

• Using the map: allows you to add locations using the Google map interface.
• Without a map: You can use a specific API to add locations.
• No validation: the location details won’t be checked using this option.

17. Virtual Agent

A virtual agent is like a smart assistant who answers all your queries related to anything. It is an application that helps field service agents by providing quick answers to their work-related questions. It is available to the agents through their mobile app called Now Agent.

Field service agents can also tell the virtual agent to update their tasks in natural language. This smart assistant understands the meaning and context of words just like a human would, making it easier for the user to express themselves.

18. Virtual Conferencing Integration

It is a tool that helps service agents work with their customers and other agents to solve problems. In simple terms, this tool is like a virtual meeting room for field service agents, helping them collaborate and solve problems quickly and easily, no matter where they are. They can do this using video and screen-sharing options in Zoom and Microsoft Teams. All this can be done from their Now Agent mobile app, even when they’re not in the office or on their desktop computer.

Here’s how it works:

• Integration: This tool connects the conference communication channel (like Zoom or Microsoft Teams) with the Notify communication channel. This means you can manage and start a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting directly from the Now Agent mobile app.
• Starting Meetings: As an agent, you can use this tool to start Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings. You can use the “Initiate Conference” option in your Now Agent mobile app.

19. Planned Work Management

It is an application that works like a personal assistant for you and helps you to organize and manage tasks that need to be done regularly. These tasks include maintenance checks, inspections, audits, and more.

You can set up your planned activities in this application and schedule them further. This scheduling can be based on time, usage, or certain conditions. The application creates work orders for these activities.

ServiceNow Field Service Management Pricing

ServiceNow does not offer any specific pricing for Field service management. Instead, they offer custom-made quotes that depend on the needs and requirements of your business. They tend to offer flexible pricing and scalable packages that grow as your business grows.

If you are still facing any challenges or confusion, you can seek assistance from a ServiceNow consulting company. They have a team of experts who listen to your business requirements and, based on them, suggest the best solution or the right package that you should go for.

How To Get Started With ServiceNow Field Service Management?

ServiceNow field service management helps you manage all things related to field services, whether internal or on-field activities or in-house or external team operations. It helps in keeping track of all your field agents and the various tasks they have performed.

To start with Field service management, you must first assess your business challenges and goals. What are the issues or pain points you are facing in your field service business? How can this solution help you? And what do you want to achieve through implementing it in your business? All these questions must be clear at your end.

Further, you can review ServiceNow’s various resources, including reference videos, articles, and knowledge bases. Even after this, you can consult a ServiceNow consulting company if you face any challenges.

Cyntexa is a ServiceNow consulting company with over 400 tech experts. They focus on understanding your business needs to deliver top-notch services.