Audaxium Blog

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:

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There are a lot of NetSuite customers out there.

There are a lot of NetSuite customers out there who are using NetSuite’s support tools to keep their customers happy.

But how many of you are measuring just how well your support reps are doing at increasing customer satisfaction? After all, that is the goal isn’t it?

It’s perfectly possible to use a NetSuite custom record, a couple of saved searches, a form, and, optionally, a script to automate things, to track and report on satisfaction.  Once a case is closed, the system can send out an email to the customer contact asking for their feedback. The customer clicks, fills in a simple form, and they’re done.

If you don’t know how to set this up, give us a call and we can walk you through it, or set it up for you.  If you do know how to do this, then just go set it up!

Consider tracking the rep who is assigned to the case, the customer, the contact who created it and the product or other main category you use to manage cases.

Also allow your customer to put in some comments and you’ll now have a great way to see how your support team is doing and hand out some pats on the back, cupcakes, or cold hard cash for those reps that exceed at keeping customers happy.

Yesterday I gave you a few tips and things to consider when making custom searches.  Here’s a few more things to consider as you’re taking a deep dive into the wonderful world of NetSuite Custom Searches.

So click the “Use Advanced Search” button and let’s go!

Summary Tab

So you’re an expert with criteria and results.  Great.  Now I want you to go on over to the criteria tab, look down, and check out the summary subtab.  It’s a powerful tool that you should know how to operate.

Basically this tab can be used to filter out results that would normally be included when you use the summaries on the results page.  

For example, maybe you are searching for companies and looking for average sales order size and you want to filter out companies where the average is less than $500.  Or, perhaps you want to show the last time (maximum of date) that a prospect was called but you want to filter out maximum dates that occured this week. I’m sure there are even better examples of creative uses of this feature.  

The tip?  Go mess with it and figure it out.  It can take some experimenting

Highlighting

It’s rare that I see a search with highlighting. It’s very useful and can help focus attention on the results.  Make sure you consider using it regularly, it’s pretty simple. Just set your criteria for the highlight and then what you want to do to the row that meets that criteria.

Keep in mind that your highlighting criteria doesn’t need to be in the results so you can basically add visual information without adding columns.

Here’s some examples.  In a list of Prospects, highlight yellow those with open quotes worth more than $10,000, highlight in red those that have no calls in the past 90 days.  In a list of Customers, flag those that have made their first purchase in the last month.  In your list of calls, bold those where the contact has an open support ticket!  Better to know that before you call no?

Criteria vs Filters

Often a NetSuite user will search for lets say opportunities, with a create date of this week, and show a bunch data about them.  They’ll save the search, and then go make another one for opportunities created last year, with the same columns in the results.

Rather than do this, pop over to the “Available Filters” tab.  Select the create date field, add it as a filter and remember to click the little box that shows the results in the footer of the search.  Add a few filters.  Now you can have a search result that you can dynamically filter to get at just the data you need.  Pure awesome.

“My Team”

If you happen to be creating a search where you just want to see your own stuff, AND, your search is so awesome you think others should use it too, consider filtering by “My Team” rather than your username or “is Me”.  This pops up all over the place, in transaction searches for example where Sales Rep = Mine, or on events where Organizer = Joe

The My Team filter will show everyone who reports to you, or whoever runs the search, using the Supervisor information in the HR tab of your employee record. This is a nice way of making the same search usable by multiple people, and therefore reducing KPI and dashboard clutter.

Allow Subscriptions

NetSuite allows you to email the results of searches based on a few criteria, you already knew this.  Rather than just adding recipients explicitly consider hitting the check box to allow users to subscribe to the email notification, or search results. This is for public searches and ones that send emails when the record being searched is created or updated.

Lead notifications are a great example of this.  It’s pretty intuitive why email out the fact that a lead has been created for you would be a good idea.  If you let users subscribe, it also means they can unsubscribe at will, and resubscribe later.  This self serve option is better than requiring you, the owner of the search, to keep making changes to the recipient list.

If there’s one thing you can spend some serious quality time with in NetSuite, it’s the searches.  It’s rare that I get a search challenge I can’t meet one way or another.  Because they are used to create custom KPI’s in NetSuite it’s a good idea to become familiar with all their in’s and out’s.

Here are some common tips I have for those who have moved beyond the basics of searching in NetSuite.

Selecting the Type

The first thing you do when you create a search in NetSuite is select the type of record you want to search.  It seems obvious and I won’t go through the long list of record types here.  You can search on any record type you want.  But here’s something to consider.  If you are doing a search that includes related records, carefully consider what record you might want as your starting point.  

Example. Are you looking for Opportunities with outstanding estimates attached?  Or are you looking for Opportunities attached to outstanding estimates?  There’s a difference and it will affect your results slightly.  In this case the one to many relationship will give you a different perspective.

The reason for this brings us to the next point…

Related Fields and Records

One thing I see NetSuite users miss regularly is the fact that you can search and filter records based on related records and information.  For example, if you log a call, that call record will typically be attached to the lead or prospect.  You can now search for leads and prospect that have been called by you, on a certain date, with a certain subject.

In the criteria tab, if you scroll to the bottom of the “filter” pulldown you’ll see related records with a “…” beside them.  Click and a box will pop up with fields from that record.  You can do this on both the criteria and results tabs. You can get very creative with this and really dig deep into your data. Experiment with this, make it your friend. 

Go Private

I’ve seen a few instances of NetSuite with hundreds upon hundreds of searches show up for users in both the “Menu” and in the list of public searches.  Most of these searches are wrong, irrelevant, or out of date. Do yourself a favor and don’t click the “public” check box and don’t click the “Show in Menu” check box on your saved search.  You’re just cluttering other users’ interface if you do and making it harder to find what they are looking for.

If you do want to make a search available to someone, just hop over to the audience tab, and select who should see it. Keep the menu reserved for very common and highly used custom searches.  Don’t make your admin clean up your mess for you.

(Remember that making searches public is a role permission, you might not have permission to do so.) 

Transaction Main Line

When searching transactions often people get confused as to what they are looking at, items on a transaction or the Header.  For example the amount on a line, and the amount of the entire transaction are different.  

For this reason you’ll see a “Main Line” field.  In the criteria you can set this to be true or false depending on what you want to see. 

In the results tab this field shows as the  * symbol.  If you are confused, put this field in the results and you’ll see which rows of your results come from transaction headers as opposed to the items they contain.

Result Summaries

One thing you’ll discover fairly quick is that when NetSuite shows search results it will show the same record multiple times for each time it’s found by the search.  For example you search for companies, and show, in the results, company name and call subject.  For each different call the company name will show on a new row.  If you’ve called the company 5 times, there will be 5 results rows.

For this reason you’ll want to use the “Summary Type” column to group things up, count them etc.  Get familiar with them. Once you use a summary you need to summarize each field you want to show in the search.

But here’s the real tip.  When you drill down on the search, the “non-summarized” results will show.  So even if you don’t want a particular field to show up in the actual results, if it’s useful,  let people see it in the drill down by including it in the results, just without being summarized.

More to Come

Tomorrow I’ll post a few more tips that I have in the back of my mind.  And, because a picture says a lot, I’ll probably record a video for this as well sometime soon as well.

If you have other tips and tricks, leave a comment!

Shortest tip ever.

If you ever extract data from NetSuite, and hand it off to someone with the intention that it might get manipulated and imported back in, please remember to export the Internal ID of the record!

End tip.

It doesn’t matter what the record is.  It could be contacts, companies, transactions or items.  It is possible to work without the internal ID but it’s a lot simpler to use it.  Most records have 2 or 3 fields the import utility can key off of but the internal id is the one that gives you the most confidence when messing with data.  

You don’t need to worry yourself with doing this in normal searches, just when you want to re-import your data later.  And if you’re unsure, include it.  It’s also useful if you want to compare data exports later.