Setting Up Service Groups
Service groups provide a means for classifying your field service personnel into categories that are easy to use. For example, you can categorize field engineers by the types of products they fix, the customers to which they are dedicated, or the geographical regions they serve. You can also use service groups to categorize support personnel. For example, you can group them by the types of problems they solve or the shifts they work.
Personnel can be classified further by support levels that you associate with a service group. For example, you can define the Tech Support and Functional Support support levels and assign them to the Field Service group, or define the Level 1 and Level 2 support levels and assign them to the Technician group.
Prerequisites
To define service groups:
2. Enter a unique name for your service group.
3. Enter a Description to indicate what the service group represents.
4. Optionally enter Start and End Dates to specify the date range for which the service group is active.
Note: You cannot delete service groups that are associated with support levels.
To associate support levels with service groups and define engineer selection parameters:
1. Select a service group and choose the Support Levels button.
2. Select a Support Level.
You can use a support level with multiple service groups, but you can select a support level only once within a particular service group.
3. Check appropriate parameters in the Installed Base, Service Request, and Location alternative regions to determine which parameters apply to this service group/support level combination.
Your selections determine which criteria will be used to select field engineers for dispatching or support engineers for assigning service requests. The available parameters are Customer, Product, Service, System, System Type, Product Type, (service request) Type, Severity, Problem, Location, Country, City, State, Postal Code, and Country.
For example, you have a Technician service group associated with a support level named Level 1. You check the Product box for Technician - Level 1. This allows you to create dispatch rules later that assign some Technician - Level 1 personnel to service one product, while others service a different product. It allows one employee to service more than one product and several employees to service the same product.
Attention: Once you have selected parameters and saved your work, you cannot modify your selections. You can delete a record only if no dispatch rules exist for the service group/support level combination.
See Also
Setting Up Support Levels
Setting Up Dispatch Rules