Audaxium Blog

Over the past 2 years using and managing a NetSuite implementation I’ve seen it help reduce the impact of crazy events in a number of ways.   Certainly these are true of most “Software as a Service” applications but NetSuite stands out because of it’s ability to handle the vast majority of your critical business functions.

In my previous job, as Director of Operations at a NetSuite customer, one of my worries was what happens if some kind of big event occurs.  Even though I was fairly confident that we’d do ok with each of them I often thought through scenarios and tried to figure out the impact on the business.  

Here are some examples where I think having a SaaS system like NetSuite can really help.

Weather

If you live anywhere where you get a lot of snow on occasion you’ll have experienced the conundrum; “I’ve got a lot to do, should I risk the long drive into the office or just stay home.”  What happens when the weather is particularly bad and most people can’t make it in?  Does your office come to a grinding halt?

With NetSuite in place the standing rule can be, stay at home, work from there.  You don’t put employees at risk on the roads, and, customers and prospects can still get the service they expect.

How often do big weather systems shut down your office and strand employees at home?

Widespread Illness

Now of course everyone should stay home when they’re sick.  And you should rest.  This is normal and every office can handle a few people out.  But what happens when there is a widespread flu outbreak?  

Every business should plan for the situation where leaving the home, and coming to the office is not advisable because there is a more widespread flu outbreak or other such illness that scientists warn us about.  Could your company still operate if everyone has to stay at home?

System Failure

Most midsized and small businesses I know simply don’t have the ability to get decent redundancy in their systems.  

One customer I knew had a storage failure one day. They lost 7 years worth of company data and files.  When they went to restore using backups they found that they were corrupt and couldn’t be loaded.  They went out of business.

Fires happen. Power in your building fails.  Servers fail.  Drive Arrays Fail.  While the probability may be low just what would you do if it did occur?  Could you keep operating, either from a different location or on different hardware?

Recently a marketing team was preparing to do a promotion that needed to go out that day.  Then the power went out in the local area.  Did they get the promo out?  Of course.  Zip home, hop online and hit the “execute campaign” button.

Laptop/Desktop Failure or Change

Have you ever lost a laptop, or had a desktop fail?  Just what is on those systems?  Do sales reps keep customer data in excel files?  Is the Quickbooks database on there?  Do you have customer sensitive data on individual workstations?

Being able to simple switch machines and lose very little is a wonderful experience for both the user and the IT guy.  There’s a lot less yelling while the data is recovered.  Or a lot less crying if the machine has been lost.

Virus

I like this particular category as a separate one.  There’s a different set of probabilities involved.  How often to individual users or your server get brought to their knees by viruses?  

In my experience it happens.  Perhaps one out of ten users for a day a year.  Again, it’s very nice to be able to move a user to a different machine while removing the virus, and not have your company data at risk from them.

Almost every company has an anti-virus solution in place.  But what happens when they do hit?

Remote Access

Maintaining connection to remote offices, in a secure fashion, can often be a pain.  By having all the information hosted, in one place, there’s less to worry about and the remote office is just as productive as your own.  It’s also much easier to get a remote location up and running as you expand.

Conclusion

All these situations come down to the same thing.  Stuff Happens.  Your data can be safe and you can get access to it from anywhere.  Seems simple.

So what are you doing to make sure that this is the case for your company?  Consider: Sales, Marketing, Accounting, Customer Support, your WebStore.

But Wait!

What about my Internet Connection?  What if I lose my Internet?

This is a fairly common question.  One that I have multiple answers for.

First, it’s normally your connection, and it’s relatively painless to put in a redundant connection in the office. It’s way cheaper than redundant servers and disk arrays.

Second, internet outages tend to last for minutes, not hours.  In these cases it’s like electricity.  You can send people home and they still can work.

Third.  For remote, or on the road folks, like sales reps, it’s now fairly affordable to get them cellular wireless cards for their laptops.  Depending on where you live.  Heck, in emergencies you can access Netsuite on your iPhone or similar device.

My wife, recently, was kind enough to get me a subscription to my favorite magazine, The Economist.  In my opinion it’s got some of the best analysis of world issues, including technology, of any magazine or paper.

Last week I came across an article that mentioned NetSuite.  Check it out here.  The article discusses how, because of Moore’s Law, more and more computing power is available, but, during the recession, companies are going to instead switch to lower cost solutions that offer the same features as existing ones.

Here I think the Economist has it partially right.  There will be some companies that trade down technologies to cut costs.  But, using NetSuite as an example of a tool that does the same for less money is missing the boat.  NetSuite, and other applications like it, can enable a vast number of businesses to do far more for less money.

For the vast numbers of us employed in small businesses, we know that there is still lots of room for improvement in the tools we use today.  Putting in place NetSuite can really be a giant step forward to all those companies out there who are outgrowing Quickbooks or Sage BusinessVision.

This article was prompted by this post by Michael Fauscette, an analyst at IDC who’s blog I read.  Frankly, his post has been bothering me all day.

NetSuite Cases

Michael comments about how Salesforce.com has announced that customers can sign up for a service that will tie in a customer support application to facebook, google, etc.  He seems to validate that “Salesforce.com claims that over 2/3′s of all customer service conversations will take place in the cloud” and then describes how the application works.

Michael begins his article by saying that he hates calling IVR or voice recognition systems and this is what drives him to social networks for support.

To me it seems like the problem that needs to be solved is not, “How do I give support to customers on Facebook” but how do I build a great support system for my customers.  And it is this topic I’d like to address, along with my thinking on why this announcement by Salesforce will mean little to the vast majority of small and medium sized businesses.

What to do

Don’t use voice recognition exclusively - Lets give us all, including Mr Fauscette, a break.  Those systems don’t work well enough yet.  Always give your caller an out to get to a live person in one key press.

Have multiple support points of entry – Different customers want different methods of contacting you.  These will obviously include phone, and email but should also include a web form, perhaps live chat, and social media pages and contact points.

Have enough Resources – It may not be easy to provide the people you need to answer questions in tough times but just remember its about expectation management.  If you make it appear like you can get a person in 5 minutes, and it takes 60, people will be angry.  If they know it will take 4 hours for a call back, at least they’ll know.

Consider managing your inbound support calls in a way that spreads the demand out over time and makes better use of your support teams time.  Collecting cases via email and calling customers back actually can help manage this quite effectively. 

Track all issues – This might sound obvious but many smaller companies don’t have a system like NetSuite or one of it’s competitors to capture all the emails, phone calls, and web form submissions.  If customers know their issue is being tracked then they’ll feel better that someone has got the ball.

Build a Knowledge Base – Don’t waste your teams work by not capturing what they learn.  As time goes by, and the knowledge base grows, your team should be able to respond faster and faster to issues.  This takes some time to manage, keep clean and up to date, and polished, but the ROI is significant.

Measure the full Experience - Many companies measure how long a case takes to close, or the time of the call.  Make sure that you have a way of measuring how long it takes a customer to find you, get through your menus and get to a live person, or to the answer they need.   Monitor this often!

Provide Visibility – When building a support team you have 3 groups who need visibility on cases and their status.  Your own team should be able to see the big picture of open and inbound cases. Your companies management team should be able to see, in real time, what’s happening in support land.  And your customer should be able to see case statuses online, update them, close and reopen them.

How? - There are a lot of systems that can help you do this.  Obviously NetSuite has been able to do these things for quite some time.  

What not to do

Turn off a point of contact – A number of companies, for some reason, end up turning off one point of contact or another.  Sometimes it’s email, sometimes it’s phone.  Doing this is very rarely a solution.  If your system can handle the multiple inbounds, change the system. Don’t railroad customers. It sucks

Dead End a Path – My pet peeve is when I go down a path to get help and it stops. Nothing says “go away” to a client than having your phone system say “Goodbye” or “this email inbox, support@company.com is no longer monitored”.  The other day I called a company and the message came on, “Our call times are longer than normal, please call back again later.  *click”  At least let me leave a message.

Ignore the Web – It is true that your customers are talking about you.  Online.  But if you’re reading a blog you get that.  Monitor the places your customers are talking and get engaged.  I recently got help from a rep of Polar, the heart rate monitor makers, online via twitter, and it made me a superfan instantly.

Getting online and joining or building communities is where we are headed, and where many customers now expect you to be.  Get there.

Why Automating Social Media Support may not work

It’s too broad for effective capture - Support works best when customers have confidence that where they are leaving a question is going to get an authoritative reply. Perhaps if this is on your company facebook page, this might work.  

Noise to Signal Ratio - Customers talk about a lot of things.  If you monitor twitter for NetSuite, you’ll get lots of random comments, or even “netsuite help”.  It’s better to direct customers to a support mechanism that works via these tools then try and filter out the random comments from the customers that need assistance.

Entitlement - As much as we all want support to be “free” it rarely is.  A good support system will ensure that the customer getting help is identified and is entitled to help, or, is encouraged to do what is necessary to get official help.  It’ll be difficult to do this on the cloud.

Size Matters - Obviously if you’re a SME your customer base is similarly sized.  This is true for the vast majority of companies.  Picking them out of the crowd online in an automated way will be difficult.  Build a good system, and they will come, mainly.  This announced integration will only be truly valuable for a few large companies who want to offload a vast number of customers onto the web to chat amongst themselves and help each other.  Not a bad thing, but not for everyone.

Conclusion

In this day and age there’s no excuse for bad customer support.  It’s a choice as to how good your company is at it.  Don’t make people like Mr Fauscette swear at a phone system that’s not recording their voice.

There’s nothing new here.  It happens from time to time.  But surprisingly more often than you might think.  A company signs up for the “Big” system and kills itself trying to implement.

And this… Shane Co’s Reference for SAP

Turns into this…  Shane Co’s bankruptcy

Basically they spent more than 10% of a years revenue on SAP!

They spent more than a million dollars per store!

I’m very surprised that they didn’t shut it off a lot sooner.  I’m more surprised that SAP hasn’t taken the reference off the website.

I have seen this happen before.  Quite often systems like this are really more like toolkits, rather than configurable off the shelf systems.  And there is a lot of heavy lifting to do to get them going.  It gets complicated, and complexity kills implementations. 

It can happen as well with hosted systems but with something like NetSuite there is a level of complexity that is removed by going hosted.  And you can turn on the system in phases to get quick wins early. But most of all, it’s just way cheaper and isn’t going to kill your company in the process.

My 2 cents for the day.

Now, before you go off making an acronym and plastering it all over the place, consider this.  Do customers want to have their “lifecycle” “planned”?

I say no.  After all, you have many types of customers, and while some may want a lot of attention and service.  Many may just wish to purchase, or browse, and be left alone.

The important thing of this exercise is to consider just what different types of customers want, and expect, from your company.

I feel that this type of analysis should drive your selection of a CRM or business system. Not doing the work to figure out what customers actually want will drive you in the wrong direction in marketing, sales, and service delivery.  Essentially you need to map out just what is expected in the relationship between you and your customer, and then figure out how to manage that relationship.

Lets assume for a moment that we’ve taken care of customer segmentation.  We are focused on a particular group with common interests and desires. Now consider the following categories and the questions therein.

Information Gathering

What types of things are people looking for?  Map how this changes over time, before they are a customer, after, and way after etc.

Wait, Stop. It’s not what you want them to know.  Erase the whiteboard and write on it what they actually want.  If you don’t know.  Go figure it out.

Do they want features, use cases, testimonials? What about pricing?  Options available? Comparisons with competitive products. If it’s comparisons you’d better know where those conversations are happening online.

Maybe they are looking for downloads? Updates?  Oh, and if you just decided to put up a FAQ.  Make it good.  99% of the FAQ’s out there are really quite useless.

Knowing what information your consumer needs over time, combined with how they consume that information should direct a lot of your CRM/Businses system strategy.  You simply need to be organized enough to put the right information in their hands at the right time.

Purchase Options

Your CRM strategy should be determined, in part, by what your customer could possibly buy from you.  Depending on complexity, product and pricing management could be key. If you sell 400 different items that are often bundled together in different ways, are fairly pricey, or can be confusing then you may want to ensure that you have a great quoting system in place as opposed to a generic webstore.

A nice question to ask yourself is; “How hard is it to buy from us?”  Pro Tip: It shouldn’t be hard.

Service Options

What kind of service do people expect before and after the sale?  Have you asked them?

What kind of service are people willing to pay for?

Do you need some ability to manage the delivery of those services?

Social Interaction

If you customer is my wife then she doesn’t want to talk to you.  Just send the product.  But if your customer is me then you’ll want to call me up and chat pre and post sale.  Regularly.  But you don’t want to sell to me because I’m cheap.

Do your customers expect meetings and visits?  Calls?  Regular email?

Do they want a dedicated sales rep?  

Do they expect you to have an online presence beyond your website?  Live chat?  Service via Twitter?

The level of engagement your customers want should drive you to a CRM tool that can manage and automate, if required, the appropriate level of interaction.

Problem Resolution

In my personal opinion, handling customer issues is where you build customer advocacy.  If your CRM system handles support in isolation from the rest of the customer information you’ll see a disconnect between sales and tech support.

But, how much support does your customer need?

Is it involved and detailed? Or simple questions?

Does your customer expect you to track issues?

Do they expect to be able to manage their cases and submit new ones online, via email, phone, in store?

Education

Here’s where we ask, what do you want customers to learn?

Just what is that information?

Where is the value in that information for the consumer?

How do they want to consume that information?  Have you asked? Do you have metrics?

Do your systems allow you to segment your customer base to provide the right information at the right time to the right person?

Just how often do customers want to be bombarded?

Should you be pursuing an opt in strategy? (There is only one answer to this question)

Subsequent Offerings

Does previous purchasing history predict future purchases?  Really?

How often to customers actually repeat purchase?  Do you really know?

Should your CRM system be able to give you this information?

Do you actively market to existing and prospective customers differently?

Customer Growth

Does your customer grow with you? 

How long, normally, does this relationship last? 

How far back in the relationship do you need to look to have a meaningful conversation should one be required?

Customer Complexity

Just how do you go about defining the customer?  Is it a company?  A person? Who do you actually sell to?

Your CRM system selection should ensure that you can, with reasonable accuracy, capture the reality of your customer.  Sometimes you don’t need much, and just need a name, email, and credit card, but you might need to track multiple divisions, different currencies, many contacts, and other relationships.

In Conclusion

As you answer these questions and think about your business, you should ask yourself, would it be useful to have a system that can track all this in one place?  The answer may in fact be no.  Seriously.  But in some cases it will be yes, in which case, you’re at the right blog.

Here’s a video on the very very basics of NetSuite. 

Often I’ll have to explain to a new employee of a customer just what NetSuite is.  So this video is just what I would scrawl on a whiteboard and chat about for 5 minutes.  It’s not for someone who knows what NetSuite is.

It’s also an opportunity for me to mess with uploading a video to youtube.  I plan on doing some video casting and wanted to experiment first.

So, if you’re here you probably know what NetSuite is.  So don’t watch this video.  Deal?

How can you tell that people need information 24 hours a day?  By seeing when they log in to their most important work application.  

And just in case you’re stuck in the last decade, that’s not their email.

This is a graph that shows the number of logins of a company that uses NetSuite.  My first NetSuite implementation.

It clearly shows that while there’s a lot of logins in the morning, there are quite a few in the early hours in the morning.  

Even when many users are deskbound, they will log in at all hours to clean up issues, check their calendar, and check on things.

If you have a system that limits users, and their connectivity to the system based on either time or location, then you’ll simply miss out on giving your employees information when they want to consume it.

Yes, they do have a few night owls… Strange but true.

One of the problems with New Years Resolutions is that they typically have to do with your personal life and it’s tough to keep going with them once you get back to work.  So, here’s some new years resolutions that will improve your bottom line and, therefore, give you the flexibility to get outside and become the champion you know you can be!

Love your customer

There’s nothing like an out of date customer database.  Full of customer contacts who have retired, or worse. The information hasn’t been kept up to date so when they call in you really have no idea if the information you’re looking at is accurate.  That means you don’t get engaged and appear slow to find answers.

2009 is the year you’ll clean up your customer information.  There’s no better way to do that than to implement a new system!  It’s very cathartic. But, if that isn’t in the cards, schedule some time for your team to call customers, tell them that you care, and update the records.  You’ll feel better, they’ll feel better, and I’ll bet you turn up some opportunities for more business.

Show Progress

Is your sales team down in the dumps?  Do you field the same complaints over and over about the tools they have to use?  There is real value in picking some key pieces of technology and improving them.  

Your business systems, CRM, ERP, Support, are what sits in front of users all day.  Well, that and email.  Giving users modern technology that works they way they expect can do wonders to motivate people. People like to work for companies that invest in productivity.

Show Results

It’s pretty common knowledge that we all need praise now and again.  And the younger the person it seems like it needs to be a bit more regular. Personally I like to be given compliments on an hourly basis…  

So how long does it take for you to get the information you need on someones productivity?  What hoops do you have to jump through to show your boss that report that confirms you are the rock star of the team?

Implement a system that gives, in real time, a snapshot of what your team is up to.  It could be sales, website hits, calls made, quotes delivered, cases closed, or forecast accuracy.  If you have a dashboard with immediate access to these things it’s a lot easier to call someone up and say “Nice job, thanks for the fine effort”

Fix Problems Faster

If problems would get fixed faster we’d all be that much farther ahead.  2009 is the year that you put in place a system to give everyone in your company visibility into internal, and customer “issues.”  

Customers do actually like to know that their issue is being tracked.  So if you’ve waited to move away from that excel spreadsheet or stand alone application for tech support maybe now’s the time to look at a tool that can set off fireworks if problems lag for too long.

Go Mobile

One way to make everyone in your firm a lot happier is to offer a little flex time.  Working from home can do wonders for your carbon footprint.  And, it lets you check on things from the golf course.  Shhh.  If you give employees access to your systems no matter where they are, you’ll notice that stress levels come down a bit.  No need to hammer out some quotes before racing off to pick up the kids at 5.  You’ll see people logging in after hours to clean up tasks.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll get an extra 3 hours or work out of people.  It just means that by having options, everyone will feel that much better about the work they do do.

Oh, and, from personal experience, trying to remote desktop to the office, or trying to sync apps is not good for anyones morale!  Go for a nice, tasty, hosted app.

Eliminate Double Data Entry

It’s 2009.  Isn’t it time that you got away from exporting and importing data from a million different systems as a Lead becomes a Customer?  Now doing a system integration isn’t exactly everyone’s definition of a good time, but maybe having an integrated system is?

Good Luck

Perhaps the above resolutions give you some ideas.  Perhaps they prompt you to take a look at a system like NetSuite or it’s competitors.

Today I went for a excellent run.  And during that run I had one of those moments where you achieve perfect clarity, vision, and visualise an entire blog post in an instant.

This is not that post, because, of course, the next thought through my head was “That’s obvious, now keep up the pace.”

This post formed from the kernel I remember from that thought.

The Question

Essentially what ran through my mind was the following.  Does your company aim to be a high touch, customer responsive, and customer aware organization?  Or, and it’s not better or worse, is your company well positioned to be a low cost provider?

For small and medium businesses it is very easy to get caught in the middle.  Heck, I’ve had years of experience getting smashed by a boulder and some other really hard thing.  All to often there is a desire to over service customers, or, lose business based on dated views on pricing, either discount too much, or not enough.

Now, as times are tough.  Figuring out your strategy becomes increasingly important. Both in the short term, and long term.  There are probably several exceptions out there, where companies can be successful doing both.  But I’d venture to say it’s rare.   And, of course, I neglect all those companies who really compete with their product functionality and placement in the market.

One System

So what you ask?  Well, my endorphin induced thought was that Netsuite, being the awesome system that it is, can really be used by companies employing either strategy, but will implement each slightly differently.

NetSuite of course, can both help get a much better picture of customer habits, information, and profile while at the same time giving tremendous visibility into the profitability of the business, each transaction, and each customer.  What you chose to focus on will drive how you approach your implementation.

If you’re a high touch, customer centric organization you’ll focus much more on a few different areas.  You’ll start with marketing and the customer record.  You’ll track more custom information and have more reports written to drive the behaviours of your sales team. You’ll have a more detailed review of the sales force automation tools.  There will be more focus on the commission tools.  And, of course, you’ll want to nail the customer support end of NetSuite and give your customers the attention they deserve.

If you’re a cost and volume focused company you may in fact implement the above areas of NetSuite but they may be less critical.  Or you’ll give them a pass altogether.  NetSuite will provide you with detailed financial reporting and real time updates of the trends.  You’ll focus more on inventory management, perhaps time and expense billing, or maybe even project management if you’re a services team. Your dashboards will be chalk full of custom key performance indicators driven by the numbers.

Homework

So if you’re about to implement NetSuite here’s some homework.  You might want to do this with a whiteboard.  And, if you’re really inspired give me a call and I’ll stand beside that whiteboard and wave my arms and talk a lot, stoking the fires.

What, today, really causes people to argue in management meetings?  Usually in those debates 1 or 2 areas of information are at the root.  What are they and where would that information come from in NetSuite?

In the cost/customer matrix where do you sit as compared to your competitors?  Where do you want to go? Do you have the information to manage that shift day to day?

Write your vision at the bottom of the board.  Write some behaviours you need your team to exhibit at the top.  Leave lots of room.  Now fill in the following from the bottom up to connect the two.  Strategies, Processes, KPI/Metrics.  

Do you have the system to get you there?  What is the area you need to improve the most?

Figure that out and you’ll be well on your way to getting out of the mushy middle and implementing a system that keeps you laser focused on your goals.

The Holidays are winding down, and while I am stuck in the middle of nowhere I have managed to gain reliable access to the web.  

I’ve been wanting to re-write this post for some time.  There’s a lot of reasons to take a look at NetSuite.  As a customer of 2 years, looking back, these don’t all match with why we picked NetSuite, but they are the ones that stuck.

This list is meant to give some food for thought.  Different companies are going to have different viewpoints based on their needs and processes.

10 – Role Based

One of the things nice things about NetSuite is the fine detail you have when you design different roles for users within your organization.  Of course, this means that it’s important to understand what all of the hundreds of permissions do.  But that just takes time or a little help.

NetSuite, by default, has the permissions of the default roles very close to what you’ll need people to be able, and not able, to do, and they have the commands laid out in a fairly nice manner relative to where you’d expect them to be.  This allows you to get started with NetSuite a fair bit quicker then you would be able to to if you had to build the layouts by role from scratch.  Most of the roles we used were pretty standard but we did copy the default roles and then tweaked them over time.