Having used Contracts and Contract Lines for years in CRM 4 we are now trying to migrate to Entitlements.
The biggest challenge we are facing however is how to recognize a customer who has multiple "maintenance contracts" (our way of thinking about it), each with a different SLA, when the customer wishes to look at the consolidated view. I will explain.
If Customer A has three sites, each with a contract for us to maintain the Wireless LAN at those sites. Site 1 has an 8 hour response, sites 2 and 3 have a 4 hour response time.
It appears we need to create a separate entitlement for each site - which is really cumbersome. And entitlements have no way of recording the financial cost of this "contract", which contracts and lines did.
We could create all those separate entitlements and roll them up into a consolidated view but I cannot help but think I am missing something here.
Surely not everyone wants to have a fixed # cases or amount of time that is used - entitlements should also allow for a customer to call all year for a fixed fee - this new entity does not seem to track the cost of the entitlement - I know we can ignore the #cases and report based on a negative value to identify the effort expended in supporting that site but it seems to be one step forwards, two steps back with entitlements.
Any insight into an alternative, more elegant way of tracking multiple sites and multiple customers, when you have to go into settings to see the total list of "contracts" and still have no financial measurement?
