How to Manage Contracts
Today'Æs customer support manager is looking for mechanisms to help ensure that they are meeting and measuring their support commitments and results. Major concerns include increasing the revenue generated by the support organization, lowering support costs, and improving the quality of service provided. As the customer base grows and product configurations become more complicated, the complexity of support options increases.
In order to track the many service approaches required by customers, support managers must have access to a system that allows them to determine the appropriate service levels and performance benchmarks for different contract types. A service contract management solution must leverage complete information on the product configuration that exists at the customer site, allow for service quoting, track support activities, allow for entitlement checking, and provide management reports on usage. The key objective is to provide better access to the information needed to make timely and accurate decisions regarding service pricing and delivery.
ContractTEAM from Scopus
ContractTEAM enables organizations to create and manage various service contracts, measure support revenues, and then use this information to continuously improve the support process. With ContractTEAM, you can generate contracts, verify entitlements, generate quotes and prices, track services delivery and costing, and manage third party support.
ContractTEAM interacts closely with SupportTEAM, ScopusÆ customer service and support tracking offering, by allowing organizations to create, implement and manage a variety of service offerings. The ContractTEAM module gives service providers easy access to information regarding contract terms and conditions, installed base, service history and other information needed to optimize the management of service agreements. ContractTEAM also lets companies easily share this information with remote sites to ensure consistent levels of responsiveness.
Contract Sales and Renewals
ContractTEAM automates the process of creating, updating, or renewing a service agreement. Users have access to information that describes all of the agreements a customer might have (e.g., one for phone support, one for field service, and one for on-site consulting services), for a single product, group of products, site or for the entire operation.
With the help of the Scopus product for workflow management, you can apply business rules to ContractTEAM to generate contract renewals automatically as they are about to expire.
Entitlement Verification
ContractTEAM provides a mechanism to quickly determine a customerÆs service status so that customer support can approve or deny access to various services. The support organization can apply this verification process either prior to or following the actual delivery of service, depending on the companies business policies. Companies can track service eligibility in a variety of ways (e.g., number of calls or time allowed, products covered, etc.) to ensure that every customer call is associated with a service level that has been determined by a service contract. When tracking eligibility of this sort, ContractTEAM automatically logs how much time or how many calls have been used up in a service contract, providing indicators as to when it is time for renewal.
Service Tracking
ContractTEAM gathers information from the SupportTEAM customer support module regarding the services actually delivered to customers so that the system can automatically generate customer usage reports, service sales trends, and billing information. ContractTEAM tracks contract usage in a variety of dimensions including number and type of contracts, duration of contracts, warranty coverage, and scheduled service information.
Third Party Support Tracking
Support for large implementations frequently includes the use of third party support providers. ContractTEAM lets you track the performance of sub-contractors, including automatic verification of a third party invoice against a service agreement, to make the cost and delivery of these services transparent to the customer.