How to setup preferred resources for Customers in Field Service

The question which led to this article was:

We respect customer’s preferences in terms of who is coming over to their houses (this was in maid and cleaning services business), so if a customer was happy with a certain staff member, we try our best to assign the same staff member for next service. How can I do that in the new system (Dynamics Field Service)?

This, admittedly, led to some head-scratching but the solution that we discovered was pleasantly an ‘out of the box’ one. Following is how you can set it up:

Step 1:
Go to Customer profile (Account) and click on Related. Then click on ‘Resource Preferences’

Step 2:
Click New to create a new Resource Preference. Select the Bookable Resouce who this customer would like to work with and select ‘Preferred’ as Preference Type

Step 3:
When you will next create a Work Order against this customer, a new Requirement Resource Preference record will be automatically created and linked to both Work Order and Resource Requirement screen:

And when you click on Book button, you will only see that preferred resource in Schedule Assistant:

Note the little heart in front of Customer Name

This way multiple preferred resources could be nominated against customer.

…this leads to the next question:

How to restrict certain resources to be booked against particular Customer?

Just like a customer may like some of your field service staff, he/she may have complained against any of your field staff members in past and you’d not like to assign same field staff members in future.

This is also achievable using the same steps. The only difference is, instead of selecting Preferred as Preference Type, select ‘Restricted’:

When you will now ‘Book’ a Work Order of this customer, restricted resource will not be shown in the resource list:

Hope it helped. I think the last point to mention in the above context is the relevance of ‘Resource Preferences’ record for RSO. RSO also refers to these same preferences when simulating or generating bookings for the customer.

Thanks for reading!