ServiceNow and Salesforce | Top Field Service Management Tools

Choosing your first or next field service management (FSM) software can be daunting, especially because many of these systems require significant investments in implementation time and cost. The two most popular FSM platforms are ServiceNow and Salesforce Field Service Lightning.

Compare ServiceNow and Salesforce Field Service Lightning

• ServiceNow overview
• Salesforce Field Service Lightning overview
• The main commonalities between ServiceNow and Salesforce Field Service Lightning
• The main difference between ServiceNow and Salesforce Field Service Lightning
• Choose the best field service management software

ServiceNow overview

ServiceNow developed from the IT service management field for large enterprise users. Now it integrates a variety of tools and functions to form a unified workflow solution, which is suitable for field service management like other industries traditionally served.

Although it is more difficult to learn than many other platforms specifically aimed at SME users, it includes a unified experience from job creation to completion of various departments (including IT, human resources, customer service, sales, security, etc.).

One of its biggest advantages is the ability to integrate other tools, but the basic concept of the ServiceNow platform is to create a single system record for all processes or jobs in the entire workflow, so that everyone from users to customers can access and take the next step. pipeline.

Salesforce Field Service Lightning overview

Like Kleenex or Sharpie, Salesforce.com is synonymous with its customer relationship management (CRM) industry. Because the company’s main focus is tools for creating, tracking and executing cases and tasks, field service management is a natural choice, and there are many dedicated FSM platforms even in all its other products because of the company’s program resources.

Between recording customer contact details, facilitating and recording all points of contact and interaction with them, managing tasks throughout the workflow, and giving customers access to necessary operational data about themselves or their work, Salesforce.com has almost no customers There is no very strong product in the relationship field, which makes their FMS solution one of the best in the industry.

Salesforce’s dedicated FSM tool is called Field Service Lightning, which allows you to create work orders, optimize plans, and intelligently assign and manage jobs from any case. It can be accessed through any browser, mobile device (Android/iOS) or Windows-based application as a cloud platform, which makes it widely influential and popular in organizations of all sizes, and makes the field of It is fully accessible to service technicians.

Main functions between ServiceNow and Salesforce

As the two largest players in the FMS field, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow both cover all basic functions. They can all be accessed from any browser on any device, and can be used as a standalone desktop version or cloud-based deployment. They are not only available in English, but also other common languages ​​as well as French, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese.

Because they have proved that they can expand almost indefinitely, the customer base of each platform is very different, but it is suitable for everyone from global corporate users to single freelancers or small and medium-sized single-player bands.

The support options for these two platforms are also very comprehensive, with complete telephone and online support, as well as a knowledge base and video tutorials.

The main difference between ServiceNow and Salesforce

Salesforce is known for simple data entry and access, but customization in Salesforce may require the help of a dedicated administrator or developer. Salesforce allows you to track assets or devices, manage accessibility levels and credentials across users, manage product or service releases, and integrate more comprehensive training than tutorials and FAQs.

ServiceNow does not include any of these out-of-the-box features. And because of the large number of other products and platforms in its app ecosystem, Salesforce has more ways to scale and make it yours.

The interface is also quite different. ServiceNow looks like an email browser client such as Gmail or Outlook. In contrast, Salesforce has a more attractive user interface that you can edit to display only the information you need to view, depending on your specific job.

Choose the best field service management software

In general, Salesforce tends to be more suitable for small companies and start-ups — a bit ironically, given the large number of features you have at your disposal — they have a large number of small customer transactions. This makes it ideal for companies that are looking for a software platform that can integrate data and services from multiple departments.

But both platforms can easily serve larger environments (that is, more than 1,000 employees), so at this level, it boils down to functionality and cost. Functionality is difficult to weigh-depending on your needs, the less widely used ServiceNow may fully meet your needs.

Even if costs seem to be uncompetitive (Salesforce.com starts at $25/month, and ServiceNow’s minimum annual fee is $10,000), your business scale and scope may easily absorb ServiceNow’s much higher fees if it Include the features you need to return a better return on investment.

Because another thing to keep in mind for these two platforms is the conventional wisdom of the people who have completed it, that it is neither fast nor cheap, in some cases the entire implementation plan takes six months or more . It is said that there must be a dedicated software engineer to supervise the project (this will increase the cost), if you operate randomly or asynchronously, the final total cost will be much higher.