I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire FieldOne Systems LLC (“FieldOne”), a world-class provider of field service management solutions that allow organizations to better manage and deliver service to their customers in the field.
In today’s connected world, people expect to engage and be engaged by organizations in new ways, in ways that are most convenient for them. To help businesses respond to these changing expectations, we are committed to providing the most comprehensive customer service offering, and this includes the best field service capabilities. Field service management is a specific but critically important area of customer service, providing companies with the ability to deliver end-to-end field service. This is a unique, and transformational point in time for these solutions as enterprises look to improve their responsiveness to customers with service in the field – taking service directly to the customer anytime a service cannot be managed by phone or other channels.
In this critical area, FieldOne really stands out. They have the baseline functionality that organizations need to drive a more effective field service operation. They are a leading provider of end-to-end solutions that enable businesses to drive revenue, reduce costs and deliver great customer service. Their industry-leading solution specializes in delivering a full set of capabilities that include work order management, automated scheduling, asset contract, inventory and procurement management, workflow capabilities and mobile collaboration – providing enterprises with a comprehensive modern field service solution. This gives companies the ability to do things such as adjusting routing on the fly and delivering service arrival estimate times within a smaller window, which is essential for more personal customer engagement.
FieldOne is a great fit for Dynamics CRM adding to our extensive customer service capabilities – which includes chat, knowledge management and self-service functionality from Parature which we acquired in January of 2014. Like Parature, FieldOne is offered to customers as a cloud service. It’s built on Microsoft technology for fast integration, it already works great with other Microsoft productivity offerings like Office 365 and SharePoint, and has cross-platform capabilities meaning it can work on different devices enhancing the mobile experience which is so critically important in field service management. FieldOne was built from the ground up to leverage Dynamics CRM, and this means that our customers can take advantage of its capabilities right away.
Today’s announcement also reflects the investments we are making to deliver true systems of intelligence – enhancing our current offerings with predictive learning and analytics to deliver an intelligent, proactive customer engagement solution. Field service businesses are aggressively trying to move away from a reactive break-fix model to a predictive service based model. With this acquisition, Microsoft can help companies tap the potential of predictive service by bringing together the powerful combination of FieldOne, Azure IoT and Cortana Analytics. That means that organizations can use insights that effectively provide servicing proactively while streamlining the provisioning of service to significantly reduce costs.
Microsoft is dedicated to providing customers with complete and comprehensive solutions that address their end-to-end service needs. Today’s acquisition is a major step forward in providing the most complete customer service offering in the market through Dynamics CRM. And with the potential to enhance these capabilities through machine learning and predictive analytics, we are changing the game in customer service.