Microsoft has a fine support team and offers six free support incidents your first year of using Dynamics GP with the Business Ready Advantage support plan.   But there are many advantages to using a partner that staffs a help desk devoted to understanding your GP environment.   Here are the top ten benefits to using your Partner’s support desk in addition to using Microsoft self-support (Knowledge Base). 

1. Access to a support team which is comprised of several full-time Microsoft Certified consultants with decades of experience using Dynamics GP is critical in quickly resolving your issues.  Having at least two people available to take our urgent questions is key no matter how large the partner’s customer base.
2. Building relationships with customers by dealing with the same team member on their issues is comforting for customers.  Knowing that same friendly, patient, competent team member who helped them before is available to pick up where they left off.
3. Being a liaison between the GP users and the customer’s IT team helps the support team bridge the gap that sometimes exists between the two teams.  Sometimes the IT team and Accounting team do not speak the same language when troubleshooting an issue.  The support team member can do the translating for you.
4. Access to a broad variety of resources within the partner organization is also key.  Some issues that affect GP have their roots in other IT issues like network s.  Being able to access the other team members at the Partner is a benefit that can save lots of time.
5. Choosing from a variety of methods of communicating with the support team efficiently addresses your issues by urgency.  If your system is down, you can send an urgent e-mail or call the team directly.  Every day issues in e-mails will be reviewed immediately, prioritized and responded to promptly.
6. Experience with a support team that is a core fixture in their business.  The support team has years of best practices when dealing with support cases efficiently.  Microsoft Gold Certified Partners who are in President’s Club are successful members of the Microsoft community who understand how to make their customers successful.
7. Fair billing is important.  The support team member should listen carefully to the issue and determine the urgency and scope of the request.  Knowing whether the issue can be resolved remotely or if time needs to be scheduled onsite is important for resolving the problem quickly.  If questions can be answered “off the top of his head” with no research involved, the support team should not charge for those incidents.
8. They use the Microsoft CRM Support module to store the customer related information so that it is accessible to the entire sales, implementation and support teams.  When anyone needs to contact a customer, they can see all of the open and closed support cases and the resolutions as well as the remote login information and Dynamics GP environment information.
9. Remote Access can be a great way to troubleshoot.  The support team has a variety of options to gain remote access to the customer’s servers.  They may use remote access via Remote Desktop, Citrix Server or Windows Terminal Server to troubleshoot problems and run fixes. They also can use Live Meeting, GotoMeeting, or WebEx to connect directly to the user’s workstation to work with the user and see the problem first hand.
10. A working knowledge of MS SQL and how Dynamics GP works with the MS SQL database will benefit the support team member when troubleshooting your issues. 

Crestwood has a dedicated support team that will be your support partner in the Chicago area.

By Peter Fricke, Senior Support Consultant at your Chicago Area Microsoft Gold Certified Dynamics GP Partner, Crestwood Associates.

August 8, 2009 by Crestwood Associates

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Tags: Chicago Dynamics GP Partner, Chicago Microsoft GP, Illinois Great Plains, Illinois Microsoft GP Partner
Posted in Choosing a VAR/Partner | Comments Off on Ten Benefits to Working with a Partner with a Microsoft Dynamics GP Support Desk

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