Given rapidly changing technology, product proliferation, and ever-shortening product lifecycles, customer service is becoming the key competitive differentiator. For complex manufacturers, your success is determined by how well your help desk performs, how quickly they respond to customer requests and how effectively you manage them.

You must be able to provide immediate and effective support to customers who purchase your products. If a product does not work or is damaged, the service and repair must be prompt and complete whether the product is under warranty, billable, or under a service contract. Honeycomb®ERP Customer help Desk and Support Management ensures a firm's to respond quickly and effectively to its customer's service needs by controlling the service and repair cycle.

Honeycomb®ERP Customer help Desk and Support Management is designed to overcome the biggest challenge facing manufacturers –while managing support service effectively. Support Services provide the tolls and information required to manage your support department: from tracking calls and managing orders to sourcing resources and performing follow-up services. Honeycomb®ERP Customer help Desk and Support Management helps manufacturers by:

• Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Generating additional revenue streams
• Reducing preparation time for service orders
• Improving support service request responsiveness
• Decreasing support service and material costs
• Increasing utilization of support service manager
• Improving visibility into service orders and availability of support service manager
• Eliminating service penalties
• Daily, weekly, monthly & quarterly performance reports
• Complaints ; logging, assignment & tracking (ticketing)
• Customer notification e-mails & SMS (regular & emergency)
• Escalation process tracked and monitored
• SLA’s verification process
• Mean time between failure monitoring (optional)
• Integration with NMS (optional)

Manage Support Service Staff

Support Service enables you to track and manage your most valuable customer service assets: your support service Staff. The module allows you to plan, maintain and track direct and indirect time through a web-based calendar function. Direct time is automatically entered when a support service order is executed. Indirect time can be added by simply clicking on the date and appropriate activity. This combination helps you to analyze the utilization and availability of your support service staff.

Managing the Cycle

Help Desk and Support Services provides the ability to manage service contracts, launch service and repair orders, define service job requirements, receive and track damaged products, report progress proactively on the customer's repair, and ship/bill the customer with accuracy. The types of services offered are user-defined and can include standard repair, preventative maintenance, advance swap, training, consulting and telephone support.

Service & Repair Order Control

The service order defines the scope of the repair work and specifies the item(s) to be repaired by serial number identification if needed. Using specifications from the service contract, the service order proactively checks the customer's billing and performance arrangements and then stipulates the workflow to be followed for each repair. This service order can then also generate a product repair with appropriate bill of materials and routing, collect repair costs, document notes and comments, and track repair performance data.

Integration with Installation Orders

Honeycomb®ERP Customer help Desk and Support Management provides the option to update the customer site register. The customer site register identifies and maintains material directly from the installation order. This process supports the concept of "as built" versus "as maintenance" site configuration. This dynamic functionality provides full material visibility and enables Service & Repair with the ability to maintain material at the customer site.

Flexible Billing

With flexible service order billing, organizations can specify if labor, material, or other charges are billable. Service & Repair also supports flexible and fixed billing modes and, based on the type of service provided, minimum and maximum billing amounts can be set.

Proactive Workflow

Each service order status can trigger a number of possible tasks and thus provides the ability to tailor the repair workflow. The service and repair organization can define its own status codes and trigger actions such as "create a repair order," "book additional labor," "receive item from customer" or "close work order" in defining its repair cycle workflow.

Tracking and Online Historical Data

Honeycomb®ERP Customer help Desk and Support Management provides up to the minute service and repair order tracking that enables the service organization to ascertain the status of a customer's order and  also reports on service orders that are either at risk of or are triggering penalties because of past due conditions. This application provides an online history of records and archives. Also, all contract and service repair activities – including costs, billing, completions, material and labor – are maintained in history.

Comprehensive Support Service Functionality

Honeycomb®ERP support Service handles all of your customers' service requirements, whether they need service occasionally or 24 / 7. The solution addresses the service needs of your entire enterprise, enabling you to improve the predictability and accuracy of service cycles so that you can provide excellent customer service.
Support Service provides comprehensive functionality including:

• The ability to plan and manage services just like materials
• Service quote and contract management including warranty, level of service, and preventative maintenance
• Point-and-click access to customers' site registers
• Visibility into both existing and planned field service engineer and material availability
• Easy management of pre-owned material through return and repair functionality including item number change and supporting material movement

Service Call Management

Support Service enables you to manage all incoming support service requests including logging, tracking, monitoring, and responding to service calls. The module allows you to:

• Record customer calls
• Capture notes concerning service requests
• Assign action statuses to calls
• Assign priorities to service orders
• Assign the most appropriate service provider, based on skill and availability
• Review a service provider's job queue
• Review the status and history of a customer's calls and service orders
• Escalate calls to higher levels of support as needed
• Close service loops by recording details of post-service follow-up calls

Assignment and Monitoring

• Manage dispatch lists and prioritize open service orders
• Update time sheets, report job status, and add comments to service orders
• Generate a daily list of required items based on scheduled service orders
• Issue, track, consume, and automatically replenish repair kits
• Process replenishment requests

Additional Capabilities

Support Service provides key additional capabilities including:

• Provides up-to-the-minute visibility of a customer's order as well as status and reporting capabilities.
• Records and archives all service contract and service repair activities including costs, billing, completion, material and labor.
• Tailors application to the unique needs of your customers, including user-defined service types, pricing, penalty triggers, and workflows.
• Supports repetitive or cyclical billing to meet customer preferences for monthly, quarterly, or annual billing as well as billable charges and minimum and maximum amounts.
• Automates service process by defining status codes and triggered actions; enables exception-based management of service orders.
• Provides an up-to-date view of customer's product configurations including the latest components installed-down to revision and serial level.

Service Contract Features

• Defines what items will be serviced and for whom
• Specifies the type of service to be provided by way of a user definable type table
• Defines contracts across multiple customer sites ranging from global to a specific serial number at a particular customer site
• Supports service "consumption." For example, a customer can purchase a number of service days up-front and then consume those days as needed. The service fees are then tracked and consumed against the service contract
• Provides item level service/repair terms and conditions
• Provides the ability to specify service schedules, track completions and consumption of service schedules, manage customer billing and provide performance reports
• Provides the ability to generate invoices on a predetermined schedule or as service orders are completed
• Provides notification to customer of service contract renewal deadlines
• Provides specification of penalties that result if the performance criteria are not met

Service & Repair Order Features

• Provides detail of specific work to be performed for customer:

• item(s) to be repaired
• customer site(s) requiring service
• if customer item has been received for repair
• if customer needs temporary replacement item while repair is performed

• Identifies the pre-defined performance commitments that must be met to avoid penalties
• Creates repair order, when applicable, to track costs and activities
• Tracks all required activities following pre-defined workflow
• Reports the service/repair order's current status

Customer Ticketing Management

• The system is web-based enabling the users to access the solution from the Internet.
• Associate trouble tickets with accounts, contacts, products, and other modules to have a better visibility on the trouble tickets.
• Notify trouble ticket update to the customers through E-mail
• Automatically update the status of tickets through E-mail 
• Ticket escalation i.e. if a person assigned a ticket is not available a request for re-assigning will be generated and it will be re-assigned to the next person in line.
• Create custom fields as per your organization requirements.
• All tickets generated are queued as per their pre-set priority.
• Customizable ticket browser layout
• Create fully customizable list views as per Support person's requirement.
• Manage team resources by prioritizing issues and allocating cases based on support rep case load and expertise.
• Job Monitoring how issues/generated tickets are resolved in your organization and identify process improvements for issue priority and escalation definitions.
• It handles group mode, any number of groups can be created.
• Multiple inquiry forms
• FAQs can handle any number of inquiries.
• Automatically attaches to customer account record for better understanding of customer issues.

Answer Library

• Includes full support for the management of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and support for user's ratings to prioritize the most useful information.
• Utilizes a Wiki-like user interface for managing simple, non-technical content, including posting, linking, editing and deleting content.
• Allows user to create, store and tag files for sharing and retrieval. Users can perform full text searches to find the information they need quickly.

E-mail based submission

• Fully customizable and you can deploy without hassles in your Web site
• Secured access to the Customer Self Service Portal
• Search Knowledge Base articles before submitting trouble tickets
• Constantly improve the quality of Knowledge Base by threaded discussions
• Notify trouble ticket update to the customers through E-mail
• Follow up the trouble tickets by threaded discussions

Bulk Customer Notification

• Manage mailing lists based on existing data related to tickets
• Create HTML templates directly from the system
• Send mass E-mail notifications from the selected mailing lists

Defect Tracking

• Define the level of priority for any given incident. Assign higher proprieties for larger problems or more valuable customers.
• Track resolution times across accounts and representatives and define reminders to ensure bugs are handled quickly.
• Rank bugs to inform main customer problems and to inform future product direction.

Information Management & Information Repository

• Includes full support for the management of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and support for user's ratings to prioritize the most useful information.
• Utilizes a Wiki-like user interface for managing simple, non-technical content, including posting, linking, editing and deleting content.
• Allows user to create, store and tag files for sharing and retrieval. Users can perform full text searches to find the information they need quickly.
• Fully customizable and you can deploy without hassles in your Web site
• Secured access to the Customer Self Service Portal
• Search Knowledge Base articles before submitting trouble tickets
• Constantly improve the quality of Knowledge Base by threaded discussions
• Update customer profiles (limited functionality)
• Customers can select and manage their subscriptions to newsletters and email lists which are automatically registered within the CRM module.
• Reduces the number of inbound support calls by allowing customers to search for resolutions within the Customer Self-Service Portal. The self-service portal also exposes the FAQ's written and managed.

Dashboards

• Customer support analysis 
• Monthly Customer support analysis
• Customer satisfaction analysis
• Drill-down the dashboards by time and opportunity stage