Support

NetSuite has robust features to allow it to function as a support management system. It has the ability to track support cases and manage a full knowledge base, including the management of topic categories, and solutions to common problems. We’ll take a look at each of these in this video. Support is managed under Lists and Support. From here we can view existing cases, or create new ones, and that’s where we’ll start. Here in the new case form, we can enter any information we need to, to create a support case. I’ll go ahead and enter a subject. We also need to enter a company, I’ll just pick 3M for this since it is first in our list here. I need to pick a profile over here, and I’ll pick this Honeycomb manufacturing, since that is the only one I have. These profiles are managed under Setup, Support and Case Profiles. The case profile is used to determine case routing rules, how notifications about a case work, and how case escalations work. I have the option to assign this to someone if I want, or I could let this be assigned automatically based on case rules. Depending on how you have cases setup, this may also default in, as either you, or someone else. I will leave this blank for now. We can select a contact. If we click the drop down, we see that this list is filtered to only those contacts, that are attached to the company we selected here to the left. I’ll click this first James Smith contact. You may or may not have caught this, but the email and phone number were changed when we selected this contact. These default in from the company, but are then overwritten by the contact, if the contact has that information. This email address is the one that will be used to send notifications to. Though, if you need to change this, you can do so on a case by case basis. Most of the rest of these fields, in the header section, should make sense on their own. For example, we can change the status from Not Started, to In Progress. We can set the Priority, though this can also be set, or updated, through the case management rules. We can set an Item this case is about, we can set a serial or lot number, set the type, and so on and so forth. Most of these lists, at least the ones that are specific to cases, are listed under Setup and Support. And, most of the list values can be edited, created, or deleted as needed. Under the Communication subtab, we can add the message the customer provided, as well as our reply. If this had come in through an online case form, this message would have already been filled in. If this was called in, or given to us in another way, we would need to manually enter the message. We can type in a reply here in the reply dialog box, and can perform some formatting of the reply. This reply will usually be sent to the customer when we save the message, unless we uncheck this Send to Customer checkbox. Above this we have the option to insert a solution from a template. This can be useful when there is a problem we know about, and have a canned solution to. When this is sent to the customer we also have the option to copy the message to one or more employees. Below all of this, we have a second set of subtabs that are common to communication on most records. The same as most records we can log phone calls, attach files, notes and other information. In the related records subtab, we can attach solutions to this case. That is, if there are solutions that have been created, that are applicable. The Escalations subtab is more functional if the case has already been saved. In this tab, you can see if the case has been escalated, or you can escalate the case if you need to. Typically, an escalation means that the problem either needs to go to a different and higher-level tech support, or that the problem was not resolved within the service level time frame. You can also add a message for when the case is escalated. The time tracking subtab allows us to track time that is spent working the problem. This is valuable so that we can tell how long our support cases tend to take, for them to be worked to conclusion. It is also valuable in case we need to bill our customer for the service that was provided. This time tracking is similar to what we looked at, when we were looking at employee transactions, and ties closely to that. Once we are satisfied with our support case, as it has been entered, we can click save to save it. Usually there are processes or workflows in place when we save a support case, and this is where they kick off. We can see from the green bar that this was successfully saved. In NetSuite, you can create Knowledge bases where you can publish Topics and Solutions, internally and externally to one or more websites. Creating the knowledgebase and publishing it is beyond the scope of this video, but we will talk about topics and solutions. Basically, solutions are articles about how to do something. Topics are how you organize those solutions. These can both be created under the Lists and Support menu. Let’s create a new topic first by hovering over Topics and then clicking New. Here we can give our topic a name, I’ll enter Video Training. We could have this be its own top level topic, or we could set this as a subtopic of another one. I’ll set this as a subtopic of downloads, because maybe these videos are available to download. And, I’m actually going to change the title to, Video Training 2, since the original video training that I created when I was creating this lesson is still here. We can provide a brief and more detailed description if we want to. It is usually a good idea to enter this information since this is what is shown in the knowledge base, so I’ll go ahead and enter this now. Now that our topic is created we can save it. Solutions are organized under topics. We can create a new solution by going to Lists, Support, Solutions and clicking New. We will create a solution of, Video on How to Package Products for Return. We can assign this to an individual we want to review it, before it is published, if we want, using this Assigned To dropdown. The status is going to determine whether the solution is published or not, those that are unapproved cannot be published. You can also setup a workflow that determines an approval procedure for new solutions, and this is somewhat common if you actively use the knowledgebase feature. The abstract is a sort of short description for the solution. The description is the full article itself. You can use HTML and CSS code here as well as, the standard text. So, in our case we might put a link or an inline frame to the video on how to package products for return. Under topics, we can select where to place this Solution. Let’s go ahead and select Video Training and click Add. We could place this solution under more than one topic, and this is pretty common for a solution that applies in multiple places. If we go to Related Records, we can also pick other solutions that are related to this in some way. For example, maybe we also have a solution that lists our shipping address. This might be a good idea to list as a related record. The Communication and System Information subtabs are the same as, or similar to, those found in other records. Once we are satisfied with our solution, as we have created it, we can click save. This is pretty much all there is to creating a solution.