Introduction to Contract Management in Dynamics CRM 2011

Simon Phillips, 26 April 2011

 *

In my previous blog posts, you learnt all about cases in Dynamics CRM 2011, which capture the customers’ requests and product information used by customer service teams to address support issues. Most of the service requests your company receives are not likely to be resolved by referencing a single knowledge base article. Instead, each request is probably routed through an involved process that includes verifying a customers’ information and service agreement terms, obtaining details about the problem, and escalating to the correct customer service representative to resolve the case. Large customer service teams typically have several tiers of support resources so that senior-level representatives can focus on complex or advanced issues while level-one representatives take calls from customers and verify basic information.

To facilitate the routing process of service requests, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 allows customer service teams to manage multiple service agreement types and submit cases to service queues. Service contracts are agreements that define the support terms offered to a customer, either during a specified time period or for a specified number of cases or hours. Each contract contains one or more contract lines, which are the line-details such as service term, pricing, and other conditions for the service specified in the contract. Contracts are valuable if your organization offers support services to its customers, because they allow customer service representatives to quickly identify each customers’ eligibility for support.

Over the next few weeks I will be covering the following areas of Contract Management within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011:

• The Contract Lifecycle
• Creating a Contract Template
• Creating a New Contract
• Contract Lines
• Activating and Invoicing a Contract
• Cancelling a Contract
• Modifying a Contract or Contract Line
• Renewing a Contract
• Create a contract Based on an Existing Contract
• Cases with Contract

For more details and a more in-depth look at each and every aspect of Contract Management, stay tuned for my upcoming posts.

* Image from: http://kauripoint.biz/images/contract.jpg