Summary

We've covered all of the Customer Service concepts and could keep going on the possibilities for setting up Customer Service in Microsoft CRM. Let's take a quick look at what we've covered.

Microsoft CRM has an extensive structure for setting up detailed Service Contracts. Each Contract is based on a Contract template, which contains skeleton information about the Contract and its schedule. Contracts can have multiple line items detailing how each product the customer owns should be supported. Associating Cases with Contracts will keep track of how much service the customer has used against their Contract.

Service Cases can be used to facilitate a variety of diverse processes including, but not limited to, Technical Support, Customer Service, and Implementation. Cases are associated with the Contact or Account receiving the service as well as the Contract, which provides the terms and allotment for the service. Activities are used to log all customer interaction related to the Case and can be used with Workflow to enable multistep process involving multiple Users, Teams, and Queues.

Queues are organizational units similar to folders that are used to hold Cases and Activities. Queues can be instrumental in enabling Workflow. Both Cases and Activities can be assigned to Queues.

The Microsoft CRM Knowledge Base leverages Microsoft SQL Server's Full Text search capability and enables an organization to organize and search a varied amount of information. The Knowledge Base has a simple system of submittal and approval and a clean interface for searching and browsing through Knowledge Base articles. Nearly any type of information can be housed in the Knowledge Base and its usefulness doesn't stop at maintaining customer-facing information.

There's a lot to the Customer Service component of Microsoft CRM. The upcoming chapter on Workflow will provide many more ideas for how to streamline your services process.