This blog on Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM provides insight into the applications included in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, along with their advantages.
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In today’s world, customers are a company’s most important asset, and businesses are growingly turning to technology to help themselves get the most out of their customers. This is why customer relationship management – defined as a system that manages a company’s interactions with current and future customers by organising, automating and synchronising sales, marketing and customer service – is so important. One of the platforms that facilitate a strong CRM practice is Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.
According to a Harvard Business Review study , when two companies— one being a £5.66million electronics manufacturer and the other being an £6.47 million custom printing company—invested in sales and marketing automation, both saw a first-year ROI of 100 per cent. This shows the impact proper automation software can have on your organisation. This blog will tell you all you need to know about Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, the applications it provides, how it offers its services and the advantages it provides. Read more to find out!
Table of Contents
1) What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM?
2) What are the different applications Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM provides?
a) Dynamics 365 for Sales
b) Dynamics 365 for Customer Service
c) Dynamics 365 for Field Service
d) Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation
3) How does Microsoft Dynamics 365 offer its services?
4) What are the advantages of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is a customer relationship management software package that was developed by Microsoft to focus on enhancing customer relationships for any organisation. In recent years, it has grown as an analytics platform driven by CRM. The CRM Solution can be ideally used to drive sales productivity and market efficiency for an organisation, handle the complete customer support chain, and also provide social insights, business intelligence and plenty of other features and functionalities. As a product, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is also flexible as it offers full mobile support for using CRM applications on mobiles and tablets.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM offers growing and medium-sized organisations a powerful solution to help manage business relationships and transform their sales, marketing and customer service processes. Dynamics 365 CRM’s practical functionality facilitates employees to be more productive and knowledgeable and gives executives deeper and meaningful insights into performance, opportunities and customer relationships. The sales and marketing features provided by Dynamics CRM simplify the way that businesses communicate with their customers, prospects and team members. Its familiar, user-friendly interface is also an added advantage for many businesses, and its feature of easy integration also makes it prevalent.
Apart from its many cutting-edge features, many organisations are attracted to Dynamics 365 due to its easy integration with other widely used Microsoft products like Outlook, Power BI and Office. Additionally, Dynamics 365 features a wide range of other business management products, such as ERP and marketing apps, which makes it an attractive option for businesses that want to overhaul their processes across the board or establish a single digital platform for all their operations.
The Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM package houses a number of different applications to achieve a set of purposes, all of which we will discuss as follows:
With Dynamics 365 for Sales, users can handle their entire sales process, starting from lead generation, pipeline management, account management, and reporting. The application centralises all of an organisation’s sales leads into one place, helps it collect data and helps automate repetitive areas of the cycle so that employees can drive their focus towards building relationships and nurturing opportunities. The system can automatically score, qualify and assign leads, as well as provide real-time analysis at every step of the process to help its users focus their efforts towards the most profitable areas. All the sales and marketing activity is logged in with a single view, so the salespeople get a complete picture of their organisation’s relationship with a customer – thereby making it easier to deliver good service and spot opportunities.
Dynamics 365 for Sales also issues intelligent and automated reminders to keep the leads flowing through the pipeline, making sure no customer is missed out. Its extensive, AI-driven reporting capabilities help highlight successes and opportunities, and organisations can encourage productivity and user adoption and boost employee engagement with the in-built gamification feature. One of the features that distinguish Dynamics 365 from other leading CRMs is that it facilitates native integration with LinkedIn. Since Microsoft purchased the networking platform in 2016, it has been working to integrate LinkedIn user data with its products – and for salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365, having unbridled access to information regarding the site’s 500 million users and their connections is a huge advantage.
Dynamics 365 for Customer Service helps businesses to manage their customer issues better and helps customers find answers to their queries quickly. Its features, such as automated chatbots and portals, let customers do more without needing to contact customer service agents, which therefore frees agents to deal with complex cases and helps close cases quickly. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service helps users deliver personalised customer service to customers, at any time, on any channel.
With the help of assisted service management and opportunities like customer portals and peer-to-peer support, Dynamics 365 for Customer Service helps provide agents with the tools and resources that they need to add value to their customer interactions. Through a centralised interface, Customer Service facilitates agents to create cases, record all customer interactions and solve queries through the customer’s channel of preference. Shared knowledge bases within the application mean that agents are always clued up on customer case preferences and can provide accurate information on company policy and entitlements.
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Dynamics 365 for Field Service helps users to manage work orders, scheduling and assignment of resources for service agents working outside the user’s office. The application also provides a central and accessible repository for resources like manuals, documentation and training materials. The work orders can be generated from customer services cases through customer services cases, through customer portals or e-mails, and assets, inventory and equipment can be managed in real-time. The application also helps users be on top of preventative maintenance by automatically generating recurring work orders.
Dynamics 365 for Field Service also gives field agents a channel using which they can access all the information that they need and lets agents communicate and collaborate with both their customer service colleagues as well as customers themselves. The application also enables users to assign jobs based on employee skill and experience levels, optimises routes to practise maximum efficiency and reduce travel time for field agents – improving efficiency for the business and giving customers a better experience. Like all other applications in the Dynamics 365 family, Field Service is highly mobile-friendly, with mobile applications available across Android, iOS and Windows devices.
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Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation is an application designed to help project-based organisations deliver their services on time and within the budget, with the help of a series of tools to plan, resource and execute billable work. The application covers the entire span of the project lifecycle and centralises teams, and offers features to optimise opportunity management, project planning, resource management, team collaboration and customer billing. Project Service Automation ties all the aspects of project delivery together while also looping in other crucial aspects of the business, such as salespeople.
The application’s project-based contracting feature helps generate accurate quotations that are based on real-time information from across the business, such as project plans, financial estimates and labour pricing while considering factors like profitability and feasibility. Project Service Automation also provides the Project Resource Hub app, which helps field workers have access to all the information they need, and hands them a channel through which they can effectively collaborate with colleagues on any device. The built-in automation helps automate key processes such as the designation of tasks based on skills, availability and forecasting metrics. The financial results and impacts of all projects – like costs, unbilled revenue, and invoices – are put back into the app’s analytics and
shared with the business’s ERP software.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM offers its services in two categories, both of which will discuss as follows:
1) CRM Online: Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM can be defined as a cloud-based offering where all the backend processes (like application servers, setups, databases, deployments, licensing, etc.) are managed on Microsoft servers. Organisations that don't want to handle the technical aspects of a CRM implementation often prefer CRM Online, a subscription-based service. One can get started with setting up their system in a few days and access it on the web via their browser.
2) CRM On-Premise: Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM On-Premise is a more customised and robust offering where the CRM application and databases are deployed on your servers. This offering helps you control all your databases, customisations, deployments, backups, licensing and other setups. Usually, organisations who are willing to go for a customised CRM solution prefer on-premise deployment as it provides better integration and customisation capabilities.
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Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM has several benefits when compared to other software solutions, and some of its features help it stand out from the competition. Some of these are:
1) Seamless integration with other software: Dynamics 365 CRM seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft tools, including other Dynamics 365 apps and all Office 365 apps. This means that one can import customer data from Dynamics 365 into Microsoft Word or Excel templates, run live Excel analytics on Dynamics 365 or link data from Dynamics 365 to Excel spreadsheets that update automatically and maintain security protocols. One can also integrate OneNote and view SharePoint and Office 365 calendars.
2) Reports and insights: Dynamics 365 CRM has a powerful query feature that helps one request data for entities like clients, contracts, activities and more. One can also define their own dashboards in the software to bring forward the graphs, reports and information most relevant to their role. For data visualisation purposes, one can easily import data from Dynamics 365 into Power BI, another Microsoft app, to analyse it against other information. One can also feed data from Dynamics 365 into Power BI dashboards so that the information that interests you the most is always at your fingertips. These insights offer a better understanding of how a business is performing.
3) Deployment options: Dynamics 365 CRM has several deployment options, including cloud, on-premises, or partner-hosted. It must be noted that when using cloud -hosted software, your team will be able to access the information they need any time, from anywhere – but without the hardware and IT costs that on-premises solutions require. Irrespective of the option you choose, your monthly price will follow a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
4) Less expensive option: Dynamic 365 CRM facilitates a higher functionality at a much lower price than other competitive CRM systems. Microsoft offers three different tiers of subscription packages with varying levels of access and pricing. By providing these different options, Microsoft ensures that you can get the best deal out of your investment by paying for only what you really need – nothing more and nothing less.
5) The Microsoft commitment: If your organisation wants to invest in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, you will likely need to work with a Microsoft partner to be able to implement, learn and troubleshoot the software. Microsoft considers its partner channel approach as the best way to scale its business while still providing a high-quality of customer care.
All in all , the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is a Microsoft-developed customer relationship management software package that helps an organisation manage its customer relations. Implementing either of the two offerings of Dynamics 365 CRM helps an organisation drive sales productivity, handle the customer support chain properly as well as improve its efficiency. We hope this blog gave you all the knowledge you were seeking about this topic and helped you make an effective choice for your organisation!
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