Support Plus Brochure

Support Plus turns Customer Service into a competitive advantage

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Verticent® offers the first enterprise application software solution, ERP Plus™, that integrates Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications for manufacturing, distribution and financials with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications for customer support and sales force automation. ERP Plus is an e-enabled software suite that extends communications across your entire organization and throughout your virtual value chain.

The Verticent CRM Solution
Unique to the Verticent solution is a longstanding commitment to CRM. From day one, all Verticent products were designed to incorporate functionality that improves customer communications at every point across the enterprise. CRM has been a consistent vein during the development and evolution of Verticent products, and now SFA Plus™ and Support Plus™ showcase our CRM commitment.

SFA Plus and Support Plus comprise Verticent's CRM solution by offering contact management, opportunity management, time management, marketing automation, customer service and more. Together, these CRM modules deliver the solutions you need to boost corporate sales and improve overall levels of customer satisfaction.

SFA Plus and Support Plus offer all of the functionality of a best-of-breed CRM solution - while integrating seamlessly with the Verticent ERP Plus software suite. They also complete Verticent's end-to-end system to enable information flow from marketing, sales and service to critical back-office operations such as manufacturing, distribution and financials.

Support Plus
Now that you've built a product, sold it and shipped it, you need a tool to effectively handle customer service and support. Support Plus is your solution. It turns customer service into a competitive edge by enhancing customer satisfaction, increasing technician productivity and capturing valuable trend data to improve overall company quality and performance.

The best way to build strong customer relationships is to obtain quality information about your customers - and then use that information to create service and support programs that cater to their individual needs and desires. Support Plus puts all relevant customer information at your service representatives' fingertips - tracking contact, company and contract information, products supported, environment data and case histories. It is seamlessly integrated with Verticent ERP Plus and is ideally suited for mid-range, discrete manufacturers and distributors.

Incident Information
High-quality customer support revolves around case, or incident, information. Whenever you, your sales staff or customer service representatives (CSRs) have contact with customers, important new information is generated. How you capture, store and use that information will determine the success of your company - and the satisfaction of your customers.

The Support Plus module enables CSRs to track and manage customer orders, customer status, product problems, product returns, device history records and customer inquiries.

Incident Assignment
You made the deal. You shipped the product. And now your customer has a question or concern. What's next?

The first, and most important, step in resolving any customer incident involves assigning responsibilities and tasks to your support staff. In Support Plus you can assign cases via contact, company or product. And users can browse through cases by contact, company or product and drill-down into previous incidents for extended case detail.

Customer Browse and Case Browse features also allow users to search by specific details such as serial numbers, symptoms/problems or item/product descriptions.

Incident Escalation
You work hard to solve customer incidents - Support Plus works hard to prioritize them and keep them at the top of your list. Automated workflow within Support Plus is a helpful reminder function that escalates tasks via advanced activity queuing and your user-defined priorities and escalation rules.

Support Plus automatically propagates incidents based on a chain of command or other user-defined parameters such as time in queue, priority, type of case, etc. Automated escalation also means that the software will email and transfer the incident information to the appropriate personnel at the appropriate time. Support Plus ensures that your customers' important issues or concerns are addressed in a timely fashion - and none are neglected or forgotten.

Incident Tracking
Any time you have a question about the status of a customer case, you can access the Support Plus Activity Queue to view all incidents that have yet to be resolved. The software graphically presents incidents as interactive pie charts that support powerful drill-down functionality into various categories of detail.

Using the Activity Queue, you also can track incident resolutions, patches, fixes and problems in a dynamic queue display with drill-down capabilities - accessing information and identifying actions associated with particular products. The Activity Queue enables you to sort and view incidents based on criteria such as open, past due, all open and owner of case.

Diagnostic Knowledge base
Once your support staff has made customer contact and generated new incident information, you'll need a tool to access that information and provide step-by-step solutions to your customers' issues.

The Diagnostic Knowledge base provides predictive diagnostics based on historical problem solving and presents typical customer problems and their appropriate remedies. By accessing the Diagnostic Knowledge base, veteran support staff and new hires alike quickly can resolve common customer problems - even if they've never previously handled that particular problem.

The Diagnostic Knowledge base also automatically flags problems so the most frequently reported problems come up first. It is powered by specific incident experiences - and helps remedy future incidents by providing detailed solutions to your support staff.

Contract and Register Product Information
You know your clients, and you're familiar with their basic business practices. Support Plus helps you become familiar to the nth degree.

Support Plus improves customer service operations by allowing your CSRs to track customers via contracts, registered products and warranties. Now you know exactly who, and what, is covered in every customer support contract.

For example, by generating Return Material Authorizations (RMA) in Support Plus, your CSRs can instantly determine contract and warranty status, tell customers about any pending charges, and alert the receiving dock of incoming items that need repairs. By tracking contract and registered-product information, Support Plus streamlines the entire RMA process.

Support Workbench and Customer Workbench
With the Support WorkBench in Support Plus, you gain immediate visibility into historic customer cases, or incidents. From the Support WorkBench, historic incidents for each contact, whether open or closed, are immediately available to your entire support staff. It also creates and maintains records on any service-related activity - including service calls or shipment of replacement parts - associated with all products delivered to customers.

Featuring intuitive tab-style navigation, the Support WorkBench allows easy access to the following information tabs:

• Sales Info - provides detailed information about sales activities and opportunities 
• Case Detail - shows complete records of incident information and previous cases 
• Case Notes - freeform notes or documents attached to individual incidents 
• Case Log - shows an audit trail of individual incidents 
• Product/Case Attributes - displays user-defined profile data; here CSRs establish profiles with specific details about products and cases/incidents 
• Action Requests - assigns To-Dos to specific support personnel for incident resolution; includes personal To-Dos, external emailed To-Dos and Case Transfers 
• Registered Products - provides information about specific products registered to each customer 
• RMA/Item History - grants quick access to all information about Returned Material Authorizations 
• Diagnostics Knowledge Database - provides step-by-step fixes for typical customer incidents 
• Quick Orders - shows credit, shipping, priority, pricing, taxes, discounts and several other order information fields; allows you to view, maintain or process orders from within Support Plus 
• Warranty Tracking - provides details about specific customer support contracts

For total customer information sharing across your enterprise, Support Plus ties seamlessly into the Sales and Marketing WorkBench in SFA Plus - completing Verticent's CRM solution. When integrated, any data entered into SFA Plus instantaneously is visible in Support Plus, where it is used to monitor all contact with customers after an order is placed.

The Customer Workbench is another feature within Support Plus. With its tab-style navigation, you gain an immediate reference view of key customer information such as registered products, cases, orders, quotes and attributes.

The Customer Workbench window provides CSRs with information they need to resolve customer issues and concerns. It's also a reference tool that delivers a high-level, enterprise-wide view of customer data to personnel in sales, administration, accounting, etc.

Technology
Support Plus can be integrated with SFA Plus for a total CRM solution. Also, back-office integration with Verticent's core ERP modules - Manufacturing Plus™, Distribution Plus™ and Financials Plus™ - means you gain a comprehensive enterprise application software solution developed on one common technology platform with a consistent user interface.

The Distribution Plus technical environment features:

• Open systems, object-oriented, client/server architecture built on PowerBuilder™ platform
• Database compatibility with Sybase™, Microsoft® SQL Server®, SQL Anywhere™
• Client compatibility with Microsoft® Windows® 2000/XP/2007, or thin client Windows 2007 Terminal Server/Citrix Metaframe
• Integration with ERP Plus suite of front-office and back-office solutions

About
Verticent Verticent provides Integrated Enterprise Response to companies around the globe. Featuring fully integrated enterprise application solutions with innovative e-commerce capabilities, the Verticent ERP Plus software suite enables companies to completely integrate the management of front-office and back-office operations.

With Integrated Enterprise Response, companies extend their enterprise operations across the virtual supply chain and successfully respond to customers, suppliers, partners and employees around the world.

The ERP Plus software suite is comprised of Manufacturing Plus™, Distribution Plus™, Financials Plus, SFA Plus™ and Support Plus™ - developed on one common technology platform, by one provider, to deliver seamless integration and enhanced functionality.

ERP Plus, Manufacturing Plus, Distribution Plus, Financials Plus, SFA Plus and Support Plus are registered trademarks of Verticent Corporation. All other products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

 

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