Bernicia has been providing quality homes and services to people in the Northeast for over 50 years, earning a reputation as one of the country’s leading housing providers. To support improvements with their customer service experience they recently purchased Salesforce Field Service and requested Alscient’s expert help to meet their specialist needs.

Bernicia were looking to deliver a better customer experience to cover their existing Field Service processes initially for the Damp & Mould and Responsive Repairs areas.

The requirement to Alscient consisted of the following:

• Enable full utilization of Salesforce Field Service (SFS).
• Empower customers with self-service capabilities for rescheduling, cancelling, and tracking service appointments through a branded Experience Cloud integration with Field Service.
• Implement the Field Service Mobile app to support a customized job execution process for the Electrical Responsive Repairs team.
• Expand customer communication via fully integrated email and SMS notifications within Field Service.
• Enhance Case Management, Work Order Management, and Workforce Management functionalities.
• Provide the ability to track the service duration planned against realised.
• Support bi-directional integration with QL (Housing Management System) to synchronize Cases, Work Orders, Assets, and Products/SoRs.
• Manage Cases and Work Orders against SLAs at key process stages.
• Facilitate follow-up appointments and customized job lifecycles.
• Provide real-time reports and dashboards to track the progression of Cases, Work Orders, and Service Appointments.

Alscient addressed these requirements in a phased approach making use of Salesforce Field Service and Experience Cloud.

We initially held a series of discovery workshops to ascertain the full set of requirements. A design document was then provided to capture the full set of requirements. Following sign-off of the design, functionality was built out over a series of sprints. End user feedback was provided throughout in the form of show and tells. Following a period of system testing the solution was then handed over for user acceptance testing (UAT). Following successful completion of UAT and end user training the system was made live.

A branded web page was provided (housed on Experience Cloud), enabling tenants to access their service appointments, where they can reschedule, cancel, and track the engineer’s arrival in real time. SMS capabilities were also integrated with Field Service, enhancing communication throughout the job lifecycle.

The solution seamlessly integrates with Bernicia’s diagnosis tool, streamlining the workflow for agents and dispatchers by helping them select the appropriate items for work orders. It also supports the “visit in pairs” complex work process to ensure multiple resource assignments were made for properties and job types.

To improve the mobile experience, a custom component was developed to simplify the selection of SoRs for follow-up jobs. Additionally, real-time integration with QL, the existing housing management system, was expanded to push updates to the customer and housing information directly into Salesforce. Details of Cases, Work Orders, and Service Appointments within Salesforce are also synchronized back to the housing management system, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry.

A custom process was developed to track service execution times, allowing Bernicia to compare planned vs. actual durations. This enables data-driven reporting and provides opportunities to enhance service efficiency.

All aspects of the project were successfully delivered, within the original budget with the customer experience being enhanced via the provision of a true Field Service solution with enquiries being captured by the call centre team directly resulting in Service Appointments being raised in Salesforce and dispatched out to operatives who supported updates back into Salesforce via the Field Service mobile application.