Features and Benefits

Drive Successful Customer Interactions

Work in a familiar user interface: Manage and monitor all your interactions within a single business application. Automatically synchronize Office Outlook 2007 e-mail, calendar, tasks, and contacts with your Microsoft Dynamics CRM database. Automatically convert e-mail messages into contacts, leads, and opportunities.

Target your communications: Use customizable templates to create and send e-mail messages to targeted prospects and customers. Quickly create and send communications using Microsoft Office Word 2007 Mail Merge.

Work away from the office: Access robust functionality offline or work from virtually any location using the Web client or a wide variety of Pocket PC devices with Microsoft Windows Mobile® software. Update records, study customer data, carry out analysis, and print quotes even when working offline.

Improve data quality: Automatically detect and remove duplicate records to ensure the quality of your customer data.

Do business globally: Compete effectively for global deals and track sales information in multiple languages, currencies, and time zones seamlessly

 

Gain a Comprehensive View of Sales Data

Gain a complete view of the customer: View and manage account activity and history, including contact information, attributes, meeting notes, attachments, communications, open proposals, and purchased products.

Find information quickly: Use Advanced Find and global search to instantly zero in on key nuggets of information.

Make the right offers: Effortlessly track all interactions, offers, orders, contracts, and relationships associated with your account so that you can offer the right product or service at the right time.

Uncover hidden opportunities: Intuitively track relationships between customers, partners, influencers, and suppliers so you can uncover new opportunities. Understand and leverage complex business scenarios with enhanced support for many-to-many relationships.

Manage and Automate Sales Processes

Improve lead handling and routing: Easily promote qualified leads to new opportunities with a single click. Automatically deliver the right lead to the right person according to product, territory, dollar amount, or any other criteria.

Manage quotes and orders: Easily create quotes, convert them to orders, then track and manage them throughout their life cycle from proposals to invoices.

Manage territories: Create territories for salespeople, enabling them to manage and evaluate territory-based sales processes and results.

Manage sales and marketing lists: Import purchased lists to fuel your sales efforts. Measure effectiveness and maintain lists for annual sales campaigns.

Manage contracts: Easily add, edit, and track contracts associated with individuals or companies, including maintenance contracts and renewal notifications.

Ensure sales methodology relevance: Initiate, track, and close sales consistently and efficiently with workflow rules that automate sales stages, lead routing, notifications and escalations. Empower salespeople to create their own workflows with workflow tools designed for end users.

Communicate Information Effectively

Create campaigns quickly: Use wizard-driven tools to keep your customers informed and aware of your new products and services.

Track competitors: Maintain detailed information on competitors associated with opportunities. Track competitor activity by product, region, or other criteria.

Keep a product catalog: Work with a full-featured product catalog that includes support for complex pricing levels, units of measure, discounts, and pricing options.

Manage sales literature: Create, manage, and distribute a searchable library of sales and marketing materials, including brochures, white papers, and competitor information.

Transform Information into Sales Intelligence

Generate and use reports: Create, view and sort a wide range of reports to identify trends, measure and forecast sales activity, track sales processes, and evaluate sales performance. Easily share reports with co-workers.

Make data relevant: Create insightful and focused dashboards for executives and top constituents that adeptly highlight key sales metrics and performance indicators.

Track pipelines: Execute complex pipeline queries easily so you can gain insight into leads and opportunities at every stage of the sales cycle.

Plan More Proactively
Transform customer information into clear, actionable knowledge thanks to deep analytics that enable your company to respond quickly to changing customer preferences and emerging market opportunities.

Gain a Clear View of the Customer
Gain a clear, 360-degree view of the customer with access to deep segmentation based on comprehensive customer, sales, and demographic information.

Get Your Marketing Mix Right
Use reporting and analysis features to evaluate the performance of your print, e-mail, online, and other marketing efforts so that you can concentrate on your most effective marketing channels.

Manage Work More Easily
Provide your marketers with customer relationship management (CRM) functionality as a natural extension of Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2007, so they can manage customer e-mail, appointments, tasks, and contacts from a single business application. Create marketing communications quickly with Microsoft Office Word 2007 Mail Merge.

Execute Smarter Campaigns
Use intelligent list and segmentation features to reach prospective customers, retain existing customers, and transform successful campaigns into templates that can easily be re-used.

Get Real-Time Visibility
Take advantage of deep reporting and analysis capabilities to track response rates, measure interest levels, and monitor costs for every campaign and activity in real time.

Enable Proactive Offers
Use a holistic view of each customer’s preferences, relationships, and buying history to anticipate their future needs, make effective cross-sell and up-sell offers, and enhance customer loyalty.

Develop Lists More Efficiently

Create lists: Automatically create static or dynamic lists based on accounts, contacts, or leads. Use Advanced Find to identify potential customers based on a wide range of user-specified criteria. Import lists while ensuring accurate data capture using the Data Import Wizard

Complete tasks in bulk: Import data and leads in bulk at non-peak operating hours for optimal system performance with enhanced support for batch operations.

Improve data accuracy: Automatically detect and remove duplicate records in your lists to improve response rates and campaign performance. Easily define rules to correctly handle duplicates.

Manage permission-based marketing: Make sure your list is based on customer permission from the start with native opt-in/opt-out tracking for all contact records to avoid wasted cycles and improve response rates.

Manage Campaigns Better

Manage the campaign life cycle: Define tasks, activities, and marketing materials for the entire campaign life cycle. Create budgets and define follow-up activities for respondents and non-respondents.

Enhance brand value: Collaborate across teams and business units to maintain and enhance the consistency and power of your brand.

Work in a familiar user interface: Automatically synchronize e-mail messages, tasks and contact details through seamless integration between Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Quickly create and send communications using Office Word 2007 Mail Merge, and manage mail merge templates from anywhere in the world through a Web-based interface.

Track responses: Drive closed-loop campaign execution by tracking responses to every campaign activity. Convert e-mail responses to leads or opportunities, qualify leads, and do much more with just a few clicks.

Monitor results: Generate detailed real-time performance reports that track key performance factors including return on investment, response rates, and cost per response.

Launch Campaigns Quickly

Plan and execute campaigns: Use predefined system templates for future re-use in campaigns, or create new campaigns from scratch. Schedule campaign activities to be performed immediately or at specific times in the future, and launch campaigns anywhere in the world with strong multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities.

Communicate clearly: Create professional-looking e-mail templates and effortlessly launch mail-merge-based communications. Intelligently convert e-mails into contacts, leads, and opportunities automatically according to rules you set up.

Define activities: Choose activities for a campaign, such as e-mail messages, phone calls, faxes, or meetings, and assign them to appropriate people.

Improve lead handling: Easily distinguish new prospects from existing customers and promote qualified leads to new opportunities with a single click.

Route leads automatically: Automatically deliver the right lead to the right person according to product, territory, dollar amount, or any other criteria based on workflow rules that you define.

Uncover hidden opportunities: Intuitively track relationships between customers, prospects, influencers and suppliers so you can uncover new opportunities. Understand and leverage complex business scenarios with enhanced support for many-to-many relationships.

Transform Information into Marketing Intelligence

Identify trends and forecast performance: Introduce new products and services efficiently, and improve up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Allocate marketing resources based on a clear understanding of trends and opportunities.

Build loyalty: Take advantage of the 360-degree customer view to proactively suggest replacements or renewals, or to just reward frequent customers.

Analyze demographics: Segment customers by their demographic profile and spot purchase trends as they develop.
Articulate the ROI of marketing: Create insightful and focused dashboards for executives and top constituents that adeptly highlight key marketing metrics and performance indicators and drive home the value of marketing programs.

Deliver Superior Customer Service
Utilize multiple interaction channels, including phone calls, e-mail messages, in-person communications, and self-service Web sites to quickly create, manage, and resolve service issues. Use streamlined access to cases, customer history, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and a powerful Knowledge Base to support customers effectively and productively. Enable customer service representatives to create a more consistent service experience using agent scripting provided through Windows Workflow Foundation or integrated 3rd party products.

Manage Work More Efficiently
Create a productive work environment for your customer service representatives with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Whether implemented through Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server, within the context of a contact center agent desktop, or as a natural extension of Microsoft Outlook®, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help your business to productively manage customer incidents, service contacts, and knowledge from a single, scalable business application. With the familiar Microsoft Dynamics CRM interface, your business can quickly bring new service representatives up to speed while reducing training costs.

Automate Service Processes
Assign, manage, and resolve support incidents with automated routing, queuing, and escalation of service requests, along with case management, communications tracking, and auto-response e-mail. Use Windows® Workflow Foundation to create and execute robust service processes that span the customer service organization. For enterprises seeking to make service a core competency of their organization, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can extend throughout the customer value chain to include other departments or areas of the business, as well as partner and supplier organizations.

Resolve Issues Quickly and Accurately
Improve your first-call resolution rates using a searchable, shared knowledge base of articles organized by product and service category, as well as through integrated “Presence” information and instant messaging. Quickly locate and communicate with subject matter experts, managers, or supervisors using contact information that is embedded right in the CRM user experience. Utilize this advanced capability, as well as click-to-chat and click-to-call functionality, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to truly differentiate the customer experience.

Gain Actionable Insight
Measure customer satisfaction during all stages of the service lifecycle either in real-time or as part of a service reporting cycle. Use historical and predictive analytics to raise customer satisfaction, reduce case handling times, improve first-call resolution, or drive targeted cross-sell/up-sell offers to customers. Incorporate service analytics into product improvement initiatives, quality measurement processes, and warranty program optimization.

Third Party Integration (FUTURE)
Confidently build and deploy world-class Contact Centers through integration with critical contact center infrastructure products, including leading telephony switch, automated call distribution (ACD), and computer-telephone integration (CTI) products from ABetterOutlook, as well as agent scripting, offer management and workforce management, and call quality solutions.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Service

Choose your user experience: Provide unified customer service using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office Outlook, or a user interface completely customized for your business needs, such as a contact center agent desktop.

Manage cases: Create, assign, and manage customer service requests across multiple channels, including phone, e-mail, Web, in-person and emerging channels. Manage cases from initial contact through resolution and automatically associate incoming support inquiries with the appropriate case.

Route and queue cases: Dispatch cases to queues where individuals and teams can access them easily and automatically route them to the appropriate individual, supervisor or expert. Customize service queues so that they match your customer service processes.

Speed problem resolution: Resolve common support issues quickly using a searchable knowledge base. Ensure that published information is complete, correct, and properly tagged using built-in review processes. Build and maintain a solution database that makes it easy for people to find appropriate solutions quickly.

Manage contracts: Create and maintain service contracts within Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage service level agreements (SLAs), refine business processes, and bill customers accurately. Update the relevant contract information automatically each time a support case is resolved.

Manage and automate e-mail response: Maintain accurate account, contact and service history with automated tracking and response for customer e-mail messages.

Maintain a product catalog: Work with a full-featured product catalog, including support for complex pricing levels, units of measure, discounts, and pricing options.

Schedule appointments and resources: Manage service appointments and resource allocation across your service sites and locations with a single calendar view of service professionals, tools, resources, and facilities. Quickly locate qualified and customer-preferred service professionals and schedule service appointments to deliver value-added services for customers.

Manage services, facilities, and equipment: Model your complete service delivery offerings and resource groupings into Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide consistent service practices throughout your organization.

Communicate in real time: See the availability and status of co-workers Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Optimize service handling and resource utilization with the power of instant communications.

Automate service processes: Model and deploy robust business automation for customer service using Microsoft Visual Studio® or a wizard-based design environment. Integrate workflows across business systems based on the Windows Workflow Foundation.

Protect data quality: Automatically clean and purge duplicate records to ensure data consistency and integrity.

Turn data into actionable knowledge: Identify common support issues, track service processes, and measure service performance. Use rich reports that provided standard as part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM or easily build customized reports with wizard-based tools that do not require technical resources from IT.