Reports for Customer Service and Support

Customer service and support departments can be some of the most challenging to work for, and difficult to run for any business. These are the departments that are contacted most often when there are problems, so the challenges are understandable. In this video we take a look at some of the reports NetSuite provides to help service and support deliver a world class customer experience. So, we’re here at the home screen, and we’ll start by going to Reports then scrolling down until we find Order Management. Let’s open up the Sales Back Order Report, followed by the Return Authorizations Register, then the Open Return Authorizations, and finally the Return Authorizations Pending Receipt. Now, I opened all of these in new browser tabs, and the way I did that was by holding the control key down while I was clicking. Let’s start by looking at the Sales Back Order Report. This shows our sales orders that have at least one item on back order. This can be useful to a customer service manager, because it can act as a barometer to tell when more customer service calls might start coming in, if the number of backordered items seems to be increasing. We can tell by the date picker here below that this is a point in time report, meaning that it is run for a specific date. We could set this to a different date if we wanted to see how backorders looked at that point in time. If I hover over the customer, or the date, we can see the option to drill down and get more information. If you watched previous videos in this chapter, I covered this in some of those videos as well. Let’s go ahead and click on the date, and I am again holding down the control key while clicking, to open the Sales Order in a new tab. We could take a look at the SO if we needed more information about it, but I’m going to go ahead and close this tab since I just did this to demonstrate how it works. Towards the top, we have the various report columns showing us the quantity ordered, how much has been fulfilled, how much is backordered, how much stock we currently have on hand, and how much we have on order. In this report we can see that for some of these orders we are both out of stock, and don’t have any product on order. This is something that you normally wouldn’t want to see, but since it is a test account, these aren’t real customers anyway. Right now, we’re looking at all locations, however if you need to change this to only view a specific location, you can. To do this, click the more link with the double up arrows, and then select a location from the dropdown box that shows all our inventory locations. So, I could pick this San Francisco Location and then click Refresh, and we would see this same report filtered to just what was applicable to that location. If we needed to search in this report we could, by using the search down here. This is generally a better way to search than by using your browsers search. That’s because, this search searches through all the data in the report, not just what has been loaded into the browser at the current moment. The browser search by comparison will only look through what is loaded into the browser. If a result would be in the report, but is not yet loaded in the browser, it will not show up when using the browser search. The next three reports that we will look at deal with return authorizations, more commonly known as RMA’s. We will look at them starting with the broadest one and then narrowing down, and in this way, they kind of act like a funnel. Let’s go ahead and click the Return Authorizations tab. Our date picker here gives us a “From” and “To” range letting us know this is a time range report, and we can adjust these as needed to get to just the information we need. We also have other filters here at the bottom similar to the last report we looked at. This report lists all of our return authorizations. Here we can see statuses ranging from pending approval all the way to refunded. If you are looking for every RMA you have, this is where you would find them. Next, we have the Open Return Authorizations, and this is going to list just those that are open in the system. In this context open means almost everything, except those that have been refunded. So we can see in the status tab that we have some that are pending approval, receipt and refund. We can also see the open amount for each of these. It’s often helpful to print this report, this way we have a hard copy and can start following up on why these are still open. That could mean calling the receiving warehouse, customer, etc. In this way we could then check off what we had done, and maybe write notes. Though I would encourage you to transfer those notes into NetSuite. We can click this print icon and we get a preview and options to print this report. From here we have all the standard browser printing options, and these may vary depending on your browser and platform; I’m using chrome on a Windows PC. I’ll go ahead and cancel this now, since I don’t actually want to print it. If working with an electronic copy is more to your liking, you can click this export to excel option down here. Now we get an excel file that is exported from NetSuite and downloaded to the local machine. How you save this and open it might vary depending on your browser and version of Excel. This warning I am getting is because I have a newer version of Excel than what NetSuite is expecting. If we click yes, this will open just fine. So here we can see the same data we had in the report. This probably goes without saying, but I want to make sure to point it out. Any changes you make here, are being made to a file that is stored on your computer, and no longer connected to NetSuite. So, if you make changes to this file they will not be populated back to NetSuite. Since there is not really anything I need to do here, I’ll go ahead and close this file. We may want to get just a little more visual information about these RMA’s. If we click on this graph icon, we get some graphing options. We have options to look at this using one of several formats such as a bar chart, pie chart, or line chart. For this report a bar chart works best, so I will leave it at that. Right now, we’re looking at the date along the bottom X axis, and the open amount along the side Y axis. What is displayed on the X and Y axis is controlled by these “show column vs column” dropdowns. If we want to we can change this first column so that we are now looking at the status. Now we see the dollar amount of open RMA’s in both the pending approval and pending receipt. If these numbers look strange to you though, that is because we are only looking at the top ten. We also can’t change column five to anything other than the open amount, which might limit the use of these charts. Finally, we come to the Return Authorizations Pending Receipt. This lists all the returns that have been approved, where we are just waiting to get some or all of the merchandise back from the customer. In this report, each line represents a separate type of item. We can tell how much we are waiting on by comparing the quantity and received columns. We’ll go ahead and close these four tabs, and take a look at a few more useful reports by going to Reports, then scrolling down to Cases. In NetSuite, cases are used to manage customer interaction. When a customer calls with a problem, the problem and all associated interaction is usually represented by a case. These case reports can give you a good idea of what’s going on with customer issues. For each of these case reports we have a detailed option here, as well as the standard or summary option. You may recall that we did not have this detail option when we were looking at the previous sales order and return authorization reports. For case analysis and case escalation, we have options to look at either open or closed cases, which would be cases that are either ongoing or have been finished. We’ll go ahead and look at the Closed Case Analysis, and instead of using control click, I can also just right click this and open it in a new tab. Let’s also look at these Open Case Escalation and Case Activity by Support Rep reports, and this time I opened these in a new tab by control clicking since that works a bit more quickly. Clicking over to the Closed Case tab, we can start to look at this report. This report is generally used to get information such as how long cases are taking to close, and how many cases are originating from a particular source category, such as phone or email. Much like the other reports, we see there is the standard date range picker, as well as some other fields we can use to filter data. We have different rows based on the case origin, each with their own statistics, and we have columns for each type of statistic such as average time to close, total count, and origin. Because this is a hierarchical report based on employees, we have the option of rolling the data up to the employees’ supervisors. When we do this, most of the statistics do not roll up for this particular report. Watch as I roll up Randy Unger. We can see that the total count of cases did roll up, but the average time to close did not. I’ll go ahead and expand the data again by clicking on the plus sign. As mentioned earlier we have a detailed version of this report that is available to us as well. We could have picked this from the reports menu, but we can just as easily select this View Detail link here, toward the top of the report screen. This detail report shows each case individually, and if there is a case we need to investigate further, we can click the case number and be taken directly to that case record. Coming over to the open case escalation summary, we can see any cases that have been escalated, and when the escalation occurred. We have the option to view more detail for this report, similar to the last one, though I won’t be going into the detail version of this. We have these columns, which NetSuite calls bands, up here that break out time periods. Right now, we are looking at this in 30-day increments, however we can change this by clicking on Aging Options, here at the bottom. Here we can select how many columns we want to see, so for example I can increase this to 6, and we can choose how much time should be in each column, and I’ll change this to 15 days. Let’s click OK and then click Refresh to refresh the report with the new settings. Based on these two changes, we are now looking at the same time range, but have more granularity in where the cases fall. Since our cases all fall at the end, due to our test data, this does us no good, but for most organizations this could be useful. The last report I want us to take a look at is the case activity by support rep. This report is really useful to managers who want to look at what their reps have been doing. So here we have each support rep listed, along with information such as their total cases, response times, close times, and percentages of cases they close on first contact. It’s often helpful to look at this data in a more visual method using a graph. We can do that for this report as well, by clicking the chart icon down here. I’ll go ahead and move this out of the way a bit, so we can see the data while working with the graph. Maybe up here works. We have bar, pie and line graph options, the same as before. We’ll leave this as a bar graph since that works best for this report. By default, we are looking at column zero, which is the support rep, and we can’t change this. So, as we look at data it will be as it applies to individual reps. We can change the second dimension to represent either total cases, which is what we have selected now with column one, or to show average interactions, which is column five, or first contact resolution rate, which is column six. You can’t really see column six’s data right now because it is hidden behind the graph. We can also select to show a second column of data down here. I’ll go ahead and select column six down here, and we can take a look at first contact resolution rate vs. total cases. This would be a good way to tell if we were overloading support reps, based on how many support cases they were fielding vs how many they were able to resolve on the first try. We can see the data for both columns in the report, as well as in the graph if I move this down here. Sometimes it can be a little difficult to get the chart to a good place where you can see both it, as well as the report data in the background. I’ll go ahead and close this now. This report can also be used comparatively. That is, you can run this report for several different months, and see if the numbers are going up, which could be a sign it’s time to start hiring more support reps, or otherwise address the increased load. These are just some of the reports that are available to you. Now that you’re familiar with what is available, I invite you to look around and see what other reports can help with your day to day tasks, and to customize these reports to deliver better client interaction.