2024 Release Wave 2 Highlights: Dynamics 365 Field Service

Increasing Customer Satisfaction While Optimizing Technician Productivity

Providing services to customers in the field is all about increasing first-time fix rates and improving customer satisfaction. At the same time, service organizations need to keep costs low by optimizing resource productivity—through advanced scheduling and giving technicians mobile capabilities.

No matter the size of your operation, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service can scale to meet your needs while seamlessly integrating with other Microsoft technologies and third-party applications to provide a unified ecosystem. With these capabilities, you can transform your service operations through enhanced processes and user experiences as you manage, schedule, and perform service tasks in the field.

New Field Service Capabilities Driven by Artificial Intelligence

With the Field Service 2024 release wave 2 plan, Microsoft has announced process enhancements that service businesses can expect to see between October 2024 and March 2025. Covering key functions such as work order management, resource scheduling, asset management, and technician tools, a key focus area for this release wave is Microsoft Copilot.

Copilot AI technology embedded into Field Service provides modern, task-oriented experiences across all personas:

•  Frontline workers can work within Microsoft Teams to retrieve information about customers and incident documents while initiating remote assistance calls using mixed reality technology.
• Managers can create, manage, and update work orders from within a web interface, Outlook, or Teams.
• Dispatchers can swiftly book field technicians—matching skillsets, locations, and availability to customer needs.

In addition to infusing more AI functions within Copilot, Microsoft is enabling organizations to more effectively manage field operations. This includes seamless integrations with Teams, Outlook, and Viva Connections, a tool that connects users with news and resources.

Reducing the Time to Manage Work Orders and Hunt for Information

With Copilot AI, dispatchers can also work more productively as they manage and schedule their workforce. For field personnel, they can spend more time focusing on fixing issues as the Copilot web app finds and updates critical information.

Here are some of the other new Field Service features in release wave 2 powered by Copilot:

• Configure order summaries to quickly get an overview of the key points of work to be done.
• Summarize work orders in Outlook or the Field Service mobile app with key details so technicians don’t waste time hunting for information across multiple forms.
• Access work order recaps—notes, products, services, tasks, and activities—without digging through all the information.

With these features, Copilot keeps users in the flow of work across interfaces on the web, mobile, and Microsoft 365. This allows managers and frontline workers to ask questions, update information, and streamline their processes.

Mobile App Boosts Technician Productivity

To stay on top of service work orders, it’s vital for workers in the field to have digital tools to engage with peers, the back office, and customers. To empower your team, here are three key new features in the wave 2 plan that can be accessed on the Field Service mobile app:

• Using Remote Assist within Microsoft Teams when taking over a customer desktop (with permission) to engage via mixed reality technology and apply annotations to help resolve a service incident.
• Selecting table columns from an Excel file to include in mobile offline sync.
• Viewing mobile offline sync data with Application Insights that track how users interact with applications.

With this rich set of features that work in offline conditions, the Field Service mobile app provides a trustworthy companion for your frontline workers.

Optimizing Resource Scheduling

New resource scheduling features in Field Service enable companies to triage unscheduled work orders efficiently. For example, they can schedule the nearest technician with matching skillets to deliver service sooner to customers.

An enhanced schedule board gives dispatchers, project managers, resource managers, and even authorized third-party service providers tailored views to customize functionality to their needs. The enhancements include a responsive user interface that facilitates intuitive interactions and faster form load times.

With improved usability and performance, technicians and dispatchers can manage schedules more efficiently, leading to increased productivity and employee satisfaction.

Pinpointing the Best New Features to Leverage

Dynamics 365 Field Service allows organizations to move from paper-based reactive service to delivering proactive and predictive world-class service. This empowers digital transformation and innovative business models, such as outcome-based service.

With Microsoft constantly rolling out new Field Service features, it can be a challenge to know which ones can most help your business. To navigate all the 2024 Release Wave 2 enhancements, Velosio is here to help.

We are among the largest and most recognized Microsoft Dynamics partners, with thousands of active customers. Many years as a recognized leader in ERP, CRM, cloud productivity, and business intelligence solutions have repeatedly landed us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.

We will be glad to advise you on when each Dynamics 365 Field Service enhancement will be available, which enhancements make sense for your environment, and how to sync them with the service functions you already rely on. Contact us today to learn more.