The importance of 360 visibility in NetSuite
CloudExtend Outlook for NetSuite is a powerful tool that enables your organization to have 360-degree visibility into important communications in the right place at the time.
Your co-workers don't have access to your inbox, however, with CloudExtend, you can give them access to the communications, files, and events you feel are most important. NetSuite then becomes the single source of information (and truth) and your entire organization benefits.
Check out these best practices for you to optimize your CloudExtend usage! ✨
Additional Tips
✅ Create an Internal Process
Create an internal process that is easy for users to follow and ensure they stick with it. Document this process and include it with their onboarding and reinforce it through subsequent trainings. It's easy for users to fall out of practice and miss getting important information into NetSuite. It's your responsibility to ensure this does not happen by monitoring and enforcing usage.
✅ Determine which records to attach to
CloudExtend users can attach emails to transaction records as well as entity records. If your organization has a long sales cycle and works off NetSuite Opportunities you may want to attach emails (and events) to Opportunity records. If you're working on shorter sales cycles you may want to attach emails at the Contact level.
🚨 HOT TIP: We typically advise against attaching emails at the Customer/Company level. Emails attached to a child record by CloudExtend will automatically roll up to their parent level (learn more about email rollup here). Best practice - save to the child and it will roll up to the parent for you automatically.
For example, emails attached to contacts or opportunities will automatically roll up the parent customer record. This gives you the best of both worlds. You can see the email activity where it is most relatable yet you can also see it in one holistic view at the parent level.
✅ Measure accountability and drive adoption
Spend a few minutes per week to monitor usage right down to the individual user. Leverage the power of NetSuite to see emails and events by sender/recipient, entity, and more. If it isn't in NetSuite, it didn't happen.
NetSuite saved searches can be used to determine the number of emails attached to NetSuite. We have created this article to help you build your own dashboard to track usage over time. It's important
✅ Find and view emails in NetSuite with ease
There are various ways to view these important emails in NetSuite. One way to get a holistic view of all activities and emails at the Customer, Lead, or Prospect level is by using the Dashboard View and adding a Timeline to the dashboard.
All communication will always be saved under the messages tab. You can customize the default view (or create a new one) and add Message in the results so that you see some of the message content from the messages tab, versus having to click each email and open it up to see the content.
Lastly, you can use the View History button under the messages tab to see a running history of all communication on that record.
✅ With CloudExtend you can save emails to NetSuite a few different ways; A One-time save, thread based Autopilot or email address based Autopilot. Check out our suggestions below to determine what method is right for you.
One-Time Saving Method: With every email that you want saved in NetSuite, you have to manually save it every single time. When to use it:
You only want very important emails in NetSuite.
You are saving to transactions like Sales Orders or Invoices.
You typically do not have long email threads going on with your customers.
You are on the Group Edition and do not have a choice (Autopilot options are only available on the Enterprise Edition. Ask us about upgrading.)
Thread-based Autopilot: Autopilot enables users to attach an email to one or more NetSuite records and then auto-sync every single back/forth reply attached to those same records, even when they are away from their computer. When to use it:
You want more in NetSuite, than not in NetSuite and you want less clicks to get emails into NetSuite to the right records.
You are saving to transaction records like Sales Orders or Invoices and the email threads typically only involve discussing 1 transaction at a time.
You typically do have long email threads going on with customers and a lot of back and forths.
Email address Autopilot: When you receive an email, you can monitor all future communications to or from a specific email address and have that email attached to just the right record type in NetSuite with zero clicks. When to use it:
You want all important emails in NetSuite without having to do much to get them there. Set it and forget it!
You are saving to entity records likes contacts, customers, vendors, prospects, leads etc.
✨ Email address-based Autopilot is by far the easiest and quickest method to get your emails into NetSuite! Full article here.
✅ Using OneDrive/Sharepoint (Enterprise users only)
Attaching OneDrive and/or Sharepoint files and folders to NetSuite records is beneficial because those associations do not consume any NetSuite storage space and it keeps everything in NetSuite, your source of truth and information.
We recommend using folders when possible because once you link a folder to a record or records in NetSuite, and files and folders are added via OneDrive or Sharepoint, they will roll back to whatever records they are linked to in NetSuite.
🚨 HOT TIP: Learn how you can Bulk upload your OneDrive for Business files and folders to NetSuite.
✅ Switch to CloudExtend Outlook NextGen
You spoke, we listened, and we've been busy working on building the best Outlook/NetSuite integration ever and it's ready for you to try now.
See what's new below and then check out our Getting Started Guide 🚀
See all the differences between the legacy and the latest version in one handy chart.
Additional Tips
✅ Enable Sleep Mode
On inactivity, CloudExtend would put the application on Sleep Mode. Turning this on will optimize the performance of the application.
To enable /disable this feature please go to:
Settings > Enable Sleep Mode.
📌 A checkmark will show it is enabled and the lack of a checkmark will indicate it is disabled.
✅ Exclude inactive NetSuite records when searching for records
Learn how to exclude inactive records from your search.
In NetSuite, Navigate to Set preferences > Analytics > Make sure the Include in-actives in global and quick search is unchecked.
✅ Search by Prefix feature in CloudExtend Bundle
The Enable Search by Prefix changes the way the bundle global search is performed.
When searching for a customer with the search phrase “3M” the global search will use “3M” as the search term. When this feature is enabled this changes to “cus:3M”.
The feature should be enabled by customers who meet the following criteria:
Customers having a large number of records that match a particular search term which can cause timeouts or too much data being returned in the add-in. |
👉 Learn more about it here.
Let your users know where to get help when they need it
CloudExtend offers a number of ways to get help:
Share this Getting Started link with end-users along with this guide on recommended customizations each user should make to the app
Keep a copy of your first end-user training call and distribute that to new employees
Visit support.cloudextend.io and search for your answer
Use the chat at the bottom right of the help center or also from in your application
Reach out to your Customer Success Manager
Check status.cloudextend.io for any known issues