Business Process

Dynamics CRM has a very deep offering around support and yet it definitely needs to be bundled with some thought. Each and every support department has a specific style. Some departments are very pro-active calling and anticipating every need with regards to services and others are reactive. Customers call and the immediate crisis of the day needs to be solved AND tracked. You also have departments which are a mix of both.

For the pro-active services the Microsoft Dynamcis CRM Scheduling functionality is a life saver. What I have seen however is a frustration because companies do not realize that they need to take time to originally configure it. This includes adding what services will be scheduled, who will be scheduled, what each person's working calendar looks like and more. You see if you setup an individuals calendar than the scheduling module can prevent that person from being scheduled in conflict or during time when an individual is not in the office. On the other hand if you do not take the time to learn about the scheduling component or if you try to hack through the setup in 10 minutes then you just generate confusion and misunderstanding.

When it comes to scheduling take a few extra minutes to read a chapter or set aside some time during your install to only focus on utilization of the scheduling component. 

When it comes to reactive support the most common question is how do I capture time? For any given ticket that is created you can have a long list of activities that you perform. Time is captured on the activity record. The activity record has a start time and an end time and a duration time field.

If you do not want to use activities or if you do not want to use tickets (both are optional) then these are business process thoughts. Decide on your business process with a knowledgable CRM resource. You can then move forward quickly with utilizing Dynamics CRM to capture and track not only all the activities associated with any given ticket/case but also all the time invested.