Hello,
We use Cases and CRM Calls (Call Logs) in a support
environment. We went live with our support team at the beginning of
December. There a few things we still need to sort through, but
essentially we use it in the following way.
We have a dashboard that is arranged by salesperson (case owner). It
is linked to the customisation version of the Case form which allows context
menu access to this form so that after you have opened the case form from the
dashboard for the first time you can then click on another case in the dashboard
and the Case form will change to match. Of course you can still open the
menu item to access cases if you don’t want that. Call logs for each Case are
used to maintain the progress of the Case.
We have a customised Case form which has a few extra fields of information
and buttons including:
- A Case Closure button (clicking on the button closes the final task in
the workflow, generates a call closure report attaches it to an email that is
opened in outlook).
- Some additional tabs to store extra information, such as the Case
Category, Change request number (parent case) Change request category. Module
and version.
- A tab with a dashboard of the list of Calls associated with that
case.
- The Task Update button generates an email to send to the client when you
complete the Open Case Task.
- A Case Status field which contains a UDcodes list of all of the Case
Status that we use. When you change the status a Call log entry gets
generated automatically.
- If you change the Case Owner a Call Log is generated also.
-We have various BPMs driving some of the functionality, including priority
emails.
The Call log form has a few customisations primarily displaying the update
date and time, category and who entered it. There is also a Send as email
button, which takes the subject and the detail of the Case and generates and
email for sending through outlook.
It has been a lot of work and probably there are other products on the
market. Whilst still it is early days our users are ok with it.
Still a lot of work to do for reporting, particularly KPI reports, but we are
getting there.
One other part we have added is a monthly status report which is ultimately
will be generated through Service Connect and sent to the APM printer for
delivery. Customer Contacts have a field added if they which to receive
this report or not. The report is a summary of Open Cases, Closed Cases
and Cases that are waiting a response from them.
What have we struck as difficult parts:
- The Cases dashboard on refresh resets to the first open case from the BAQ
instead of maintaining its current record position. This can lead to confusion
if the Case form has been opened form the context menu as the Case changes to
reflect the record position of the Dashboard.
- Users dashboard personalizations won’t save.
- if you click on the Case in the Tree view on the Case form you get a .Net
error, which is you click on quit my mistake it closes the whole application.
There is an SCR for this but no Hot fix for 9.05.701.
- Having Service Connect working correctly then making changes and breaking
it the day before I went on Christmas leave!
- Performance.
I think there are a few others which I have struck, but I can’t remember
them at the moment.
Certainly there is a lot of scope for Epicor to improve on this area. Prior
to E9 we used eFrontoffice to support our customers and we had it in place for
10 years, as you can imagine it was difficult for some users to adopt the
change.
Anyway I hope the information helps.
Any other questions I am happy to respond.
I have to give some credit to Jose here, because without his suggestions
and example code for emailing and attaching reports I would not have got
half the things working. I have learnt a great deal during the
process. Thanks.
Kind Regards
Simon Hall