Support Overview

Required licence

crm. Every screen described in this folder is part of the plain CRM licence — there is no separate support licence to buy.

At 09:40 on a Tuesday morning somebody at Marina Plaza Hotels picks up the phone and tells Al Nokhba that a guest-room split unit stopped working after last night's power cut. From that moment on, everything the support desk does lives in this folder: who called, what about, whether the unit is still covered, who was sent, how long they took, and what was said to the customer along the way.

This page explains how the pieces fit together — and, just as importantly, what the support corner of CRM deliberately does not do.

The screens

You reach all of them from Customer Relationship Management → Support.

Screen	Arabic	What it is
Complaint - Suggestion	شكوي - إقتراح	The intake log — see Complaints
Trouble Ticket	طلب دعم	The case file, with a status and a clock — see Trouble Tickets
Ticket Execution	تنفيذ طلب دعم	The technician's timesheet — see Ticket Executions
Ticket Follow Up	متابعة طلب دعم	The conversation record, and the status gateway — see Ticket Follow-Ups
CRM Service Contract	عقد خدمة	The paid cover agreement, which is also the invoice — see Service Contracts
CRM Update Contract Status	تغيير حالة عقد خدمة	A one-purpose document that stamps a status onto a contract

Two doors into the same work

The desk has two intake documents, and new installations regularly ask which one they are supposed to use. The honest answer is that only one of them is compulsory.

The Complaint - Suggestion answers "who called, about what, and is the product still covered?" Its real value is the search built into it: pick the customer, press Search, and the screen offers rows drawn from that customer's committed sales invoices (or service contracts, depending on how CRM Settings is configured). Choosing the right row fills in the invoice, the product, the serial number, the warranty period and end date, and the address in one action. It is also the only screen in CRM that can record a suggestion or a plain remark rather than a fault.

The Trouble Ticket answers "who is fixing it, since when, and where is it now?" It is the document with a status, an assignment grid, a stopwatch and a running discussion thread. Any real work is tracked here.

A desk that logs every inbound call — including questions and compliments — will want both, and will press Convert To Ticket on the minority that turn into technical work. A desk that only ever records faults can skip the complaint entirely and raise tickets directly; nothing is lost except the invoice search.

The complaint is a log, not a workflow

The complaint validates nothing at all, and its Status field is never changed by any process — not even by Convert To Ticket. A complaint that has spawned three tickets still reads Initial until somebody edits it by hand. Treat it as a notepad with good auto-fill, not as a case that progresses.

The chain that actually exists

Complaint - Suggestion
        │ Convert To Ticket
        ▼
   Trouble Ticket ─────► Ticket Execution   (hours worked, completion %)
        │        └─────► Ticket Follow Up   (what the customer said, and the ticket's new status)
        │
        ├─ Convert To FAQ ──► CRM FAQ entry
        └─ development request ──► CRM Development Request

Every arrow on that diagram is a button somebody presses. Nothing on it happens on a timer, and each generated document opens unsaved — you still have to fill in what is missing and save it.

Following the canonical example: complaint CMPL-0207 on 6 April becomes ticket TKT-0451; two executions (TEXE-0662 and TEXE-0679) record 4.0 and 3.0 hours; follow-up TFUP-0333 parks the ticket on Postponed while a compressor is on order; and service contract CSC-0044 is what makes the ticket read Covered By Contract.

Support and machine maintenance are separate worlds

This is the single most common wrong assumption about the CRM menu, so it is worth stating bluntly.

A trouble ticket cannot be raised against a maintained machine

The machine maintenance suite — machine files, maintenance orders, maintenance notices — is a different product that happens to sit in the same menu. The Trouble Ticket's Product field accepts stock items and real-estate rental units only. A machine registered in the maintenance suite cannot be selected on a ticket, on a warranty, or on a service contract line.

There is no button, no reference field and no report that joins the two. If your business maintains registered machines, faults on those machines are logged as maintenance notices in the maintenance cycle, not as trouble tickets. Do not plan an after-sales process that hands work from one to the other — the hand-off does not exist.

The two also keep separate warranty registers. The warranty a trouble ticket consults is the CRM warranty file described on the Warranties page. The maintenance suite keeps its own warranty periods on the machine file. Neither one reads the other, so a product covered in one register is invisible to the other.

What this area does not have

Read this list before you promise a customer anything.

• No service-level agreements. Severity, Ticket Type, Relative Weight and Expected Execution Date are all recorded on the ticket and never read by anything. Estimated Fix Period is never compared with Actual Fix Period.
• No due-date alarm and no breach detection. Nothing watches the clock.
• No escalation state. Escalate To is a single field plus a button that stamps it. It changes no status, notifies nobody, and there is no queue of escalated cases.
• No notifications of any kind — no e-mail, no user message, no mobile push when a ticket is assigned, changes status or goes stale.
• No scheduler anywhere in CRM. There is no task schedule, no reminder and no recurring job in the whole module. Everything that looks scheduled happens because a person pressed a button.
• No stock and no money. No document in this folder except the service contract touches inventory or the ledger. A ticket execution does not consume spare parts and does not bill labour; if parts are needed, they are issued with an ordinary stock document and nothing links that document back to the ticket.
• No customer-facing portal. Customers cannot see, raise or comment on their own tickets, and the FAQ file that a ticket can create is read by nothing — see FAQ.

Where to see a customer's history

There is no "support history" tab on the customer file. What support staff use instead:

1. The Trouble Ticket list screen, filtered by Customer. Its criteria are Customer, Responsible Employee and Product, and it shows Customer, Responsible Employee, Product, Serial Number and Status. This is the intended per-customer history view.
2. The Ticket Execution list screen, filtered by Trouble Ticket, Employee, External Responsible or Customer — the right place to answer "how many hours did we spend on this customer?"
3. The complaint's Related Records tab, which lists the tickets, executions and follow-ups descending from that one complaint.
4. The ticket's own Executions and Follow Up tabs, scoped to that one ticket.
5. The service contract's Executions tab, which lists tickets that were matched to that contract — with an important caveat described on the Service Contracts page.

Reporting: none

CRM ships no system reports and no dashboards at all — not for tickets, not for complaints, not for contracts. The module's only printed form belongs to the CRM Visit, elsewhere in the module. For anything resembling a support report, use the list screens above with their criteria, export to Excel, or build the figures in BI. This is covered in full on Reports and Printed Forms.

Setting the desk up

Before the first call comes in:

1. Create the classification files the desk will pick from — Complaint Type, Complaint Source, Problem Classification and Problem. These are described on Problem and Complaint Catalogues.
2. In CRM Settings, set Compliant Source (Sales Invoice or Service Contract — this decides what the complaint's search offers) and Number Of Result Sources Of Complaint (how many rows it pulls; it falls back to 10 when blank). See CRM Settings.
3. Create Books for the four support documents, so each gets its own numbering. None of the four uses a document term, so there is nothing else to configure on them — the only document in this folder with a term is the service contract.
4. Register the warranties that shipped with the products you sell, and raise service contracts for the cover customers have bought. Without at least one of the two, every ticket will report Not Covered.
5. Decide whether support documents should carry satisfaction surveys. Adding Trouble Ticket or Complaint - Suggestion to Add Questionairs Page To in CRM Settings gives those screens an extra questionnaire tab and a Create Questionair action.