Audaxium Blog

In my opinion, excellent customer service is defined by engaging the customer to ensure all their needs are met and their questions and concerns answered.  Especially when you haven’t heard from them in some time. When you need to continuously keep tabs on which customer needs to be contacted or reached out to, providing such customer service may be difficult without automation.  This is particularly true when using the support management module in NetSuite. What happens when you’re waiting for the customer to reply?

For example, when your customer opens a support case with you, you’ll reply and then wait.  You’ll want to remind them that you’re waiting to hear back, and doing this manually can be tedious.  Maybe you want to automatically notify your customer that your customer representative is working on your case.  Or, maybe you’d like to send one final reminder before you close the case.  These are just small number of areas where automation can help take the work off of your support reps.

We recently completed a project for a client who needed this type of automation.

The application offers flexible configuration points to meet the needs of the business.

• Configurable waiting period before triggering message to customer.
• Configurable secondary action after message is sent.
• Customizable message content with ability to personalize to customer.
• Expandable to support additional automation based on different types of case status.
• Case locking by NetSuite after another set period.

Would you like to find out more about this solution? Contact Audaxium for more information.

Lead Source: Marketing’s most coveted, and most loathed, data field in a CRM system.

The Importance of Measuring ROMI

It’s stating the obvious to say that B2B marketing teams are being held accountable for a direct relationship between marketing spend and revenue generation. With limited budgets and resources, measuring ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is critical for determining the best marketing channels to generate quality sales leads that convert to revenue.

Since there’s no “silver bullet” for reaching everyone in a target market, marketers are using multi-channel marketing approaches to build their brands and generate sales leads. SEO, PPC, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, video, tradeshows, print ads, direct mail, social media… you name it. The question is: How best to divide up your limited marketing budget and overworked resources among all these channels?

The Challenge in Measuring ROMI

The challenge is that rarely will a prospect buy from you because of a single marketing touch, such as a webinar. How did they end up registering for your webinar? Perhaps by clicking on your PPC ad after searching online for something you sell. Then, maybe they read a few pages of a whitepaper you paid a copywriter to write, or watched a short online video you hired a production company to develop. They may even have picked up one of your fancy pens at your tradeshow booth in the past. Read More »

Recently we’ve been working on a project where the customer would like to merge cases together in NetSuite in order to eliminate duplicates that occur from time to time in the system.  Sometimes customers won’t reply to their case, but will send a new email to support, which will then open up a new case.

In these situations, there’s no way in NetSuite to easily identify that the new case is actually copy of the existing one, and there’s no way to move that incoming message over, except by cutting and pasting.  If you’ve accidentally had two support people working each case, it’s impractical to do that.

If you’re interested in this type of function for your support team, please contact us.

Recently I’ve spoken with a number of companies who’ve been getting decent traffic to their websites, but haven’t been getting as many leads as they feel they should.  This seems to be a fairly common complaint, but the good news is that there’s a few simple steps you can take to improve the number of conversions you get.

Put another way, there’s a few simple steps you can take to make it more valuable, and less painful, for your prospects.

Step 1 – Simplify your Forms

Use conditional fields to keep things short and sweet.With landing pages, less is often more. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than arriving at a landing page, seeing a compelling white paper offer, but then realizing she will have to fill out a long and complicated looking form before receiving anything of value. Companies who ask for more than a handful of data points in the first interaction with a visitor are encouraging form abandonment.

Step 2 – Track User Behavior, not just field data

Track implicit data in addition to explicit data held in your CRM system. Your prospects are telling you a lot more than it seems.You can gain valuable data from prospects on forms, but often even more telling is the implicit information that can be gleaned without your visitors even telling you. Read More »

Many companies still conduct calling programs, using either internal resources or a third party company.   NetSuite has the ability to log phone calls of course, but what’s the best way to automatically populate the call records quickly, rather than filling out each field.

Here’s how one of our customers does it.  This might not be the most slickest way to do it but it’s effective and makes it easy for users to click and log a call.

First, create your custom phone call form.  It can be a copy of your regular one, or it can have more or less fields than usual.  Get the ID number of the form.

Second, create a custom field on the customer record, of type html link, and don’t store the value.  Have the value driven by a formula.

The formula looks like

‘https://system.netsuite.com/app/crm/calendar/call.nl?l=T&refresh=activities&invitee=’ || {internalid} || ‘&company=’ || {internalid} || ‘&cf=47′

The &cf=47 text is telling NetSuite to use Entry Form ID number 47.

Third, create a basic script, or workflow if you prefer, to fill in the form with program specific default information when it is opened.  Below is an example:

var BLITZ_CALL = 7;
var NO_CONNECT_NO_MESSAGE = 6;
var CALL_TITLE = 'Blitz Calling 2011';
var CALL_COMPLETED = 'COMPLETE';

function pageInit(type) {
	setOriginPhoneOnCreation(type);
}

/**** CORE FUNCTIONS ****/

function setOriginPhoneOnCreation(type){
	if(type=='create'){
		nlapiSetFieldValue('custeventcalltype',BLITZ_CALL);
		nlapiSetFieldValue('custeventcalloutcome',NO_CONNECT_NO_MESSAGE);
		nlapiSetFieldValue('title',CALL_TITLE);
		nlapiSetFieldValue('status',CALL_COMPLETED);
		/* nlapiSetFieldValue('message','Does the company do design? Y/N \nWhat design software do they currently use?'); */
	}
}

Now make sure this script is attached appropriately to your call form in NetSuite,  such that anytime someone creates a call using the form it runs.  This is obviously best done when it’s not the default form for people.

Finally, create a saved search of companies that need to be called.  Use any criteria you can think of, there are a million ways to do it.  And, include your custom field above in the results.

Clicking on the link will pop open a call record where your outbound calling person can simply hit submit at the end of the call without have to repeatedly fill out the same information over and over.

For this and other cool NetSuite ideas, connect with us.  If you like this give us a shout-out in the comments.

If your website is an integral part of your lead generation activities, and I hope that it is, you probably use Google Analytics to look at what’s happening on your site on a daily basis.

But what about the details?  Just who exactly is visiting your site?

If you’re selling to other businesses wouldn’t it be great to know what potential customers were reading your content?

Pardot is now offering a very small subset of their functionality, for free, that enables you to see what companies are visiting your site, and what they are doing while they are there.  As long as a company can be identified from a reverse lookup, you’ll get their name in a report.

Not only can you see who’s visiting, and potentially spot opportunities before they contact you, but you can also examine specific visitor behavior, to see if your site is working as intended.  Sometimes overall stats are nice, but sometimes you need to look at the anecdotal behavior of one user.

From the Pardot Site:

Real-Time Reports Online

Log in to your VisitorID account at any time to view up-to-date reports on your identified website traffic.

Tracking which companies are visiting your website can help you both gauge interest for deals that are in progress and identify new target customers.

Detailed Activity View

Dig deeper in to a lead’s activities and see which pages were viewed, how long they spent on each page and what search terms they may have used. The detailed activity view gives the sales team greater insight in to a prospect’s area of interest.

Daily Activity Emails

For a simple way to keep up with your visitor reports, you can choose to activate daily activity emails. Each morning open your inbox to find a report of all visitor activity for the past 24 hours. Easily forward the reports to your sales reps or share with others in your organization.

If you’re interested in signing up, contact us, or sign up at Pardot’s site.

It was only a few years ago that your home page would be where most visitors would begin their experience with your website, but now Google and the other search engines rank your internal pages much more effectively and visitors often ‘land’ on an internal page before reaching the desired start point of your site. So you need to convert these internal web pages into more effective landing pages and get the most leads/sales that you can from them. Here are four simple steps to help you achieve that goal:

Read More »

What’s not to love about automation?  Having things done for you is always better than doing them yourself.

Pardot’s email marketing automation solution is a tremendous application for anyone who wants to do a better job sending emails and generating leads. With rules based email, intelligent lead scoring, and integration with NetSuite, Salesforce and SugarCRM it’s sure to improve almost any marketing department that sells B2B.

The first thing to know is that Prospect Insight, Pardot’s application, works just great as a stand alone application.  When you are using it in combination with a CRM tool it’s designed to operate “in front” of your CRM, feeding it with leads when it’s appropriate to contact them.

The image to the right really sums it up.  Pardot will capture web visitors information and activities, score the lead, automate email followups, and then, when you deem it useful, assign the lead to a sales rep.

Do you have problems with large quantities of “junk” leads?

Do you wish you could sort leads by how interested they are in your website?

Do you wish you could nurture cold leads with a call to action that makes sense for that individual contact?

I could ask a hundred more questions.  But if you say yes, then read no more and contact us to see a demo.

Read more if you must…

Read More »

Just what is the best browser for use in NetSuite?

The other day a customer asked me this question and I gave my usual response based on the feeling I get while using various NetSuite instances.  Normally I feel Chrome is fastest, and Internet Explorer slowest with others falling in between.  Firefox is my usual choice as Chrome has some known issues (we won’t call them bugs) with NetSuite.  Safari also seems to hold up well in the speed department as a few NetSuite users I follow on twitter keep raving about it and I found it fairly snappy as well.

Just for kicks I decided to do a rather unscientific test of 4 different browsers and use the built in NetSuite performance reporting to figure out which were fastest and which were slowest.  The results were surprising.  In fact, I re-ran my scenario multiple times to see if there had been some mistake.

The Scenario

My test was very simple, mainly because I don’t know how to automate the testing and get page load times for multiple browsers using some kind of super plugin.  I ran the test 3 or 4 times and used the times I got most frequently, as opposed to averaging.  This to ensure that my connection wasn’t the issue.  In all cases I got 3 results that were very close for each page.  All tests were done on my Windows XP SP3 Desktop.

I admit that this is rather unscientific and I haven’t removed certain variables and I encourage others to try the same thing and report on the results here.

Read More »

Every company I talk to wants to maximize the value they get out of NetSuite and once you start putting data in, you begin to realize that there is value in tracking as much as possible within the system.

Over the past while I’ve discovered a number of companies who weren’t using or effectively using NetSuite Jobs, or Projects.  (They used to be called Jobs by default, now they’re called Projects but you can call them whatever you want.)

My advice is, if your company needs to manage jobs for customers, or if you need to track internal projects, consider your options in NetSuite.  Here’s some tips.

What’s a Job?

A job or project is actually very similar to a customer record.  It can appear as a sub-record of a customer and has all the same information attached to it such as contacts, notes, transactions cases etc.  It also has some other extra information such as, resources assigned, estimated work, actual work.  You can view a basic Gantt Chart based on the tasks assigned as well.

Basic or Advanced?

Advanced Projects is an additional module available from NetSuite.  It allows you to do a whole lot more with projects than normally.  Check out the advanced project spec sheet here. I would suggest, that if you bill for projects, or use them regularly to track non-billable customer projects that you take a close look.

Automatically Create Items

One of the nice things you can do once you have advanced projects is “automatically” create projects based on the items that show up in Sales Orders.  And by automatically I mean push a few buttons.

All you have to do is go to the item, then the project tab, and select Create Project.

Then go ahead and put in the standard tasks that need to get completed to get that project done.

Now, if that item appears on an approved Sales Order, you can go to Transactions, Customers, Create Projects from Sales Orders. You’ll be presented with a screen where you can select the projects and assign a project manager to each one.

Track Your Time

No matter if you bill your customer directly for your time, or the projects are fixed price, I highly suggest that you get everyone into the habit of putting their time against the project when appropriate.

Becoming disciplined about this is a great way to figure out if your projects are in fact profitable.

In NetSuite you can define the tasks, and then establish a baseline for the effort required to complete a project.  If you do this consistently, you’ll then be able to compare your baseline to the actual time attached to the project if it’s billable or not. If you’re always underestimating the time you’ll have reports that tell you this.

Tracking Pre-Paid Hours

There’s a useful field on a project.  “Remaining Time” equal to the estimated time – the actual time logged.  If you sell your customer blocks of time it’s clearly a good way to keep track of what you’ve delivered and what you owe.

Assign Cases

Remember that you can track cases and attach them to projects just like you can with customers.  There’s no better way to stay on top of things than to track outstanding issues this way.

What it’s not

NetSuite Projects are a good way to track projects, bill for projects and do some collaboration to a degree.  There are some decent reports that get produced once you start keeping them up to date.  But the functionality in NS isn’t designed to track the minutia of a project like MS Project would.  Not that anyone likes MS Project.  If you need to create super detailed project plans that track 100′s of tasks there are other solutions out there for that.

This functionality is also not designed, out of the box, to facilitate collaboration amongst many many employees.  Perhaps you can get creative and add some files, custom fields, and custom records for a project but for team wide communications and file sharing there are other tools out there.

If you need more

If you need more advanced project management functionality you can find it within the NetSuite family.  Simply check out OpenAir.  The main website is here.

If you’re interested in learning more, send us a message and we’ll hook you up with whatever info you need.