Salesforce can provide numerous benefits to businesses in the energy and utilities sector by leveraging its robust suite of cloud-based CRM solutions. Read on below to find out our key Salesforce highlights for energy professionals using the platform.
Field Service Management
The first major benefit of Salesforce for the energy industry is its Field Service Management functionality. For energy and utilities companies that require on-site service and maintenance, Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning offers capabilities to manage field operations efficiently, intuitively considering various factors such as technician skills, location, availability, and customer preferences to assign the right technician to the right job at the right time. It provides real-time visibility into field activities to track job progress, automates work order dispatching to accurately capture the resources that are utilised, and enables technicians to access customer information, communicate and collaborate using mobile devices. Technicians can also access a centralised knowledge base, which includes manuals, troubleshooting guides, and best practices. Field Service Lightning also facilitates collaboration with peers and subject matter experts. Technicians can ask questions and share knowledge to resolve complex issues more effectively. This results in improved service consistency, swift response times, enhanced productivity, higher ‘first-time fix’ rates and better customer satisfaction.
Project and Asset Management
As essential facets of any organisation in this space, Project and Asset Management are made even more efficient by Salesforce. Salesforce’s project management features enable effective planning, collaboration, and tracking of project milestones, resources, and costs. Salesforce provides task management features that allow you to create, assign, and track tasks within a project. You can set priorities, deadlines, and reminders for individual tasks. Collaboration features, such as Chatter, enable team members to communicate, share files, and collaborate on project-related discussions in real-time.You can also assign team members to specific projects or tasks, track their availability, and monitor their workload. The system also facilitates scalable asset management by providing a unified view of assets, maintenance schedules, and service history, thereby optimising asset performance, tracing depreciation and reducing downtime. If another Project or Asset Management tool is already embedded in your business, Salesforce’s capability to integrate to third party systems result in the ability to manage all of your business processes all from the one system, with all information feeding in to help you make the best decisions and operate to the highest industry standards.
Compliance and Data Management
When it comes to Compliance, Data Analytics and Reporting, Salesforce’s powerful analytics tools, such as Salesforce Einstein Analytics, enable energy companies to gain valuable insights from their data. By analysing customer behaviour, market trends, and operational data, companies can make data-driven decisions, optimise their processes, and identify new business opportunities. The platform provides robust security measures, Audit Trail and Data Governance and Regulatory Compliance Solutions to protect customer data. It employs industry-standard encryption, access controls, and monitoring to ensure data integrity and confidentiality. Salesforce also offers compliance with various privacy regulations, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), by providing tools and features to manage data subject rights, consent, and data retention policies. All of this can be neatly summarised in Salesforce compliance reports and dashboards to monitor, visualise and demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements.
Sustainability and Emissions Monitoring
Salesforce has also developed solutions specifically tailored to help energy companies manage sustainability initiatives and renewable energy projects. These solutions provide functionalities for carbon footprint tracking, energy usage analytics, renewable energy procurement, and compliance management. They assist companies in aligning with environmental goals and regulations while optimising their energy consumption and costs. By leveraging Salesforce’s supply chain management tools, companies can track suppliers’ sustainability performance, assess their environmental practices, and collaborate on sustainability improvements. Furthermore, Salesforce’s Carbon Accounting feature within Sustainability Cloud enables organisations to calculate their carbon footprint accurately. It helps you understand the greenhouse gas emissions associated with your operations, supply chain, and business activities. By analysing this data, you can identify emission hotspots, implement emission reduction strategies, and report on your carbon footprint to stakeholders.
All of this, alongside Salesforce’s comprehensive and highly customisable Sales, Service and Marketing features, can significantly benefit companies in the energy sector by improving customer relationships, streamlining operations, optimising project and asset management, enabling data-driven decision-making, and supporting sustainability initiatives.
If you are interested in how Salesforce can elevate your business, give us a call on 0117 230 2390 or email us at hello@performa-it.co.uk.