Extending Salesforce with IoT insights to improve customer and field support

Industries such as consumer goods, HVAC or household appliances feel an increasing pressure in their respective markets to make their products “smart”, and start out with IoT by either retrofitting products with sensors and connectivity or by launching new smart product lines altogether.

If your company has an install base of physical products connected to the internet and is collecting the data they send through, you should be celebrating achieving an important milestone in your company’s digital transformation journey. But the journey is only just beginning. Once your products in the field come online, there are still challenges that you need to overcome to justify the investment and see real and immediate business value.

Creating business value from IoT investments usually requires closing the gap between the IoT solution and your line of business operations. One such case is using IoT data to improve field support, which can in turn lead to better customer service and better SLAs. If you have the right tools, customer and field support for connected products can be easy and cost-effective, and you can achieve that with the combined powers of Salesforce, a popular customer support software and Waylay, the leading IoT automation software that provides powerful business logic and analytics capabilities for IoT.

Are you already using Salesforce Case Management for customer support?

Salesforce Case Management is a feature of the Salesforce Service Cloud that enterprises are using to record, track and resolve customer issues across sales, service and support. If you are already using Salesforce for customer support, and are also starting out on your IoT journey with connected products, you are the perfect candidate to use the Waylay automation platform and connect the IoT solution to your line of business applications.

Waylay is an IoT automation PaaS that enterprises with connected products in the field are using to create advanced analytics and business rule logic in order to improve operations and support new digital services for customers.

Enterprises can quickly build IoT applications for proactive care, predictive maintenance and product field support using Waylay’s powerful build engine with the drag and drop business rule editor and then use the Salesforce case management system to allocate and manage support resources.

Example case: improved customer & field support for connected refrigeration systems

An enterprise selling industrial refrigeration systems has an ongoing IoT project with 1500 internet connected systems already deployed at various industrial customer sites across the country. Raw sensor data from the equipment is ingested by the Waylay cloud platform, where it is processed both in real-time and stored for use cases that require later batch processing.

The enterprise’s IoT team have set-up a series of business rules to run on the incoming data in the Waylay environment, that allow them to monitor the equipment in order to assess overall health in real-time and to analyse behaviour trends over time. Meanwhile, the enterprise’s field operations and customer support teams are managing incoming support queries via the Salesforce service platform. These teams operate in isolation from one another and lose out on tremendous opportunities for process improvement.

Benefits of using Waylay and Salesforce together

By integrating Waylay and Salesforce, the IoT team and the operations team can now work together and benefit from increased convenience and flexibility:

• The IoT team have set-up a series of business rules within Waylay to flag specific fault codes received from the equipment such that, through the Salesforce and Waylay integration, support tickets can be automatically created within Salesforce as soon as the live fault code is received, without any human intervention. The operations team no longer needs to passively wait for customers to call and can pick up the issues at the right time. Customers are happy with the faster response times and proactive support.
• Salesforce service intervention cases are now created based on actual usage data from the refrigeration systems themselves, instead of periodicity-based. This saves time and money spent on unnecessary interventions.
• The support team is now better qualified to reply to customer calls, as IoT data is made available to them and they can perform better root-cause analysis using IoT log files, before field interventions are scheduled. This results in reduced costs on visits, better technician utilization and better customer satisfaction.

• The field engineer can take advantage of Waylay’s batch processing feature to upload machine log files on site and get immediate analysis results via the Salesforce lightning app

This example shows the business value that resides in closing the gap between your IoT solutions and your line of business applications. Improving field support is one of the most common use cases, where you can see immediate value for your teams and customers.

For a technical overview on the Salesforce integration visit our technical documentation page or get in touch with us to schedule a free private demo.