Customer service is often an adjunct to the actual business product that you provide. For example, if your business is selling software, customer service might be focused in a call center where your agents use the telephone to authenticate licenses and solve customer-support issues.
What if your business itself is a service? In this scenario, scheduling your service with Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not just support your product – it is your central business activity!
Creating various levels of service
Service scheduling can be challenging for a business that provides various levels of service activities. For example, some services can involve tasks like routine maintenance (Level One, L1), while a second level of service might be providing general equipment repairs (Level Two, L2). The highest service level might be to provide critical repairs to equipment essential to your customer's business operations (Level Three, L3).
In this kind of service environment, your resources (service technicians) might not all be trained to the same service level. For example, as the next diagram illustrates, an L3 technician is trained to handle all service activities. But an L2 can only be scheduled on L2 or L1 tasks, and an L1 technician can only perform L1-status service activities.
- Level 3 can perform levels L1, L2 and L3 tasks
- Level 2 can perform levels L1 and L2 tasks
- Level 1 can perform only level L1 tasks
Scheduling to this level of complexity can be handled by Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The key to matching levels of services, to the skill level of various service technicians, is to separate the resources by skill level and then place them in skill-defined resource groups.
Preparing services using priorities
Before scheduling can begin, prepare resource groups and services that reflect your business needs. The next illustration shows a clear way to define skill levels for resources and create levels of services.
In the above illustration, in Step 1, Prerequisites A and B show the creation of the following sample groups and services:
- Create resource groups for L1, L2, and L3 service jobs and place the equivalent service technician resources in each group: for example, only technicians with L1 skills should be added to the L1 Resource Group. For information about creating resource groups, see the Help topic, "Create or edit a resource group."
- Create three services, one for each level of service activity: L1, L2, and L3. For information about creating services, see the Help topic, "Create or edit a service."
- When you create the level-1 service, include all the resource groups (L1, L2, and L3) in the Required Resources tab. For level-2 services, include only the L2 and L3 resource groups in the Required Resources tab. For level-3 services, only the L3 resource group should be added in the Required Resources tab.
By nesting your resource groups inside your service levels, you enable the scheduling engine to quickly locate the correct technician for any level of service activity.
Scheduling service activities using priorities
Your service scheduler can now schedule the correct resource to provide the right level of service using the Service Calendar. Follow Step 2 (green) and Step 3 (yellow) in the previous diagram to select the level of service that a customer is requesting, and then match that service priority with an available and aptly skilled technician.
By matching levels of services to skilled resource groups, you can place the right person on the right job.
Related Links
Scheduling for a service business
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