When we hear inspiring success stories, we just have to share them. Today we're launching a new blog series to highlight innovative people who are transforming the way companies view and deliver on-site service using Field Service Lightning.

The first of these Trailblazers who's really earned his bragging rights is Rocky Cloninger, President of Texas Best Stain. His family-owned business specializes in new fences, decks, gates and other outdoor structures. Rocky and his team have been making big changes with Field Service Lightning and he's got some impressive results to share.


So, Rocky, tell us what life was like before you started using Field Service Lightning.

We were doing everything using paper contracts with folders for every crew. The folders were everywhere and it was a mess. We worked on 1,500 projects in 2016 — all on paper. Eventually, we just hit a ceiling on how much paper we could manage with all the business coming in from from Yelp and Google local ads.

That sounds like an extremely challenging situation. How were you able to transform it?

We initially evaluated a solution that involved several different systems before realizing we could get everything on one platform using Salesforce. Working with Salesforce experts, the customization only took four months to build out.

Our sales and service teams were both very excited and ready for it. Overall, adoption wasn’t really an issue. Before we had Salesforce we would lose paper easily because we had folders all over our desks — but you can’t lose things in Salesforce. Now nothing slips through the cracks.

How has Field Service Lightning changed the field service experience at Texas Best Stain?

We are able to schedule estimates and repairs in real time whereas before, when we got service calls and inquiries, there used to be a time lapse between the initial contact and the follow-up call for scheduling. In the past I'd have to get up early every morning to email technicians to let them know where they needed to travel to each day. The technicians weren't able to plan out their personal lives because they didn't know their schedules. It was stressful on both ends.

Now, Field Service Lightning does all the scheduling automatically and reps can look at a whole week's worth of jobs right from their phone. Not only that, but with alerts they get notified instantly if anything changes. They can add notes and pictures so the whole team understands the status of every customer. When jobs get completed, they can mark it done right there on their phone.

How have your numbers improved since adopting Field Service Lightning?

We weren't even able to track metrics before so it was hard to know how well we were doing now. With Salesforce, we've got access to much more information. We're seeing 60% lead conversion — and that's going up. The biggest savings have come from eliminating paper copies associated with service calls. Now we can change the price really quickly if we need to and delete items without making copies. That saves at least five hours a week for each employee. Overall, Salesforce has saved us the equivalent time of one and maybe even two full-time employees with automatic scheduling. We had $2.5 million in sales in 2016 and it was crazy. We did just over $3 million last year and it was easy, thanks to Salesforce.

What's on the horizon now for Texas Best Stain?

We're looking forward to developing campaigns in Marketing Cloud. Scheduling periodic maintenance will be much easier with Field Service Lightning and we anticipate having better customer retention because the experience we deliver is more professional now. Email blasts will allow us to stay in touch with our customers so we can remind them when it's time to put new stain on their fence. Previously, we had more work than we could handle, but now that we're automated, we're ready to blow it up!

Want to learn more about Field Service Lightning? Check out a demo here!