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CRM in the Time of COVID 19 Pandemic

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Businesses are shrinking rapidly, most companies are struggling for survival, and globally the sales teams are redefining their strategies in the pandemic hit world. This is simply because work needs to happen by collaborating with colleagues remotely to address customer issues and to pursue business opportunities.

This is where CRM systems like MS Dynamics CRM come to play. For more than a decade now, we have been working closely with a cross section of industries from BFSI to Manufacturing to Retail, and even Aviation and Healthcare, amongst others. Our clients are leveraging the capabilities of MS Dynamics CRM and more so now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our clients and their teams have been utilizing the D365 to make sure the customers are being serviced, issues are being resolved, and opportunities being identified, even while they may be working from their respective homes.

In essence, the clients using MS Dynamic CRM are able to:

Connect

The future is digital. With reduced offline interactions, customers are looking to connect and seek solutions from companies online. In such cases, corporate websites are usually the first touch point and since employees are working remotely for the next few weeks at least, data from the websites can get misplaced. In scenarios like this, MS Dynamics CRM makes it easy to integrate with a website, which helps in importing all completed information/forms by a visitor to the site into the CRM system. The data once imported in the master database gets channelled to the right process owner with reminders and alerts in place. This ensures that the data doesn’t get lost in the world of web.

Automate

Much focus has been on the COVID 19 pandemic and the resultant fallouts, but, one must also consider that since physical meetings are a thing of the past, virtual meetings are the way forward in the current times. One can automate a host of workflows and alerts in the MS Dynamics CRM, which helps in identifying the right person’s credential, who is responsible to send out timely responses. Moreover, with a click of a button, activity reports can be automatically generated and shared across teams, once configured.

Campaign Management

MS Dynamic CRM is equipped to send out emails, text messages and e-mailers to large customer databases, ensuring consistent and timely communications with an underlying corporate message. These messages can be personalized and tailored according to the consumer demographics and the product groups. One can also track the results of each consumer campaign and shared.

As one of the leading MS Dynamics CRM implementation partner, we at Pragmasys Consulting help you chalk out the digital transformation journey for your customers. The digital transformation will help them leverage the business benefits and you can gather insights to provide a profitable and fulfilling customer experience.

Write to us for a free consultation to know more

Best CRM services by Pragmasys

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The Microsoft Dynamics CRM is committed to delivering business insights to organisation and helping them provide higher service levels to customers. Better quality customer service leads to higher customer retention, better customer loyalty and recommendations to family and friends. Personal recommendations are the best way to gain new customers for any organisation. Building up credibility and a good reputation among its customers is what every organisation strives for. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM has played a major role is assisting organisation give their customers a satisfying experience.

Boost customer experience: Organisations are able to deliver intelligent customer service solutions which results in a high percentage of customer satisfaction and increase in customer retention. With the Microsoft Dynamics CRM services agents are better informed regarding the customers history and thus able to offer better services and solution options. Customers are happy to speak to agents who are updated about their records rather than having to explain their history all over again. The MS Dynamic CRM allows the customer to feel gratified and happy with the overall experience. Organisations go all lengths to ensure that their customers are satisfied. Disgruntled customers are bad for business and with the Dynamic CRM system it makes it a lot easier to iron out ripples of discord between the customers and the expected levels of service. Reclaiming customers and building up a bridge of trust and confidence becomes much easier and stress-free with the use of the MS Dynamics CRM system.

Increase business sales
Every organisation is on the quest for ways to increase business sales. Sometimes the search extends to hiring reputed sales experts. Many organisations feel that a person reputed for his past performance in another organisation can replicate the same for them. At times it happens and sometimes things don’t work out quite the way it was expected.

Sometimes getting the team to attend motivational seminars to encourage better performance is a method employed by some organisation for the improvement of sales. Motivation is a great way to boost the morale of the team and get them to put in their best efforts. But giving them a tool to help them do the job better is the best way to get your teams performance to peak. The ideology to boost performance levels has been ideally capsulated by Microsoft in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM services. The CRM system is a great tool that assists the sales agents along each step of the way. It provides them with the required information as and when required.

Empower sales agents
When your sales team has a certain amount of information access and the ability to make some lower level decisions for customers it makes them feel empowered. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a tool that assists the sales agents with a lot more than they could imagine. It gives the agents a certain amount of access to customer information that enables them to be fore armed on how they should approach the customer and the loopholes that they can capitalise on. It taps in to potential customer’s online activity and provides the sales agent with tips on their areas of interest. This information can be used by the sales agents to promote the right products and make a confirmed sale. Personal customer information can be useful for sales agents who are skilled on how to use it to their advantage.

Instant access to information
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows sales agents to access information on the go. Sales agents that are out on calls can log into the CRM system through a laptop or a smart phone and get access to information regarding a particular customer who they intend to visit or are on the way to visit for a sales call.

Sales agents who are cold calling or prospecting can have the facility to append new records to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system and update it with the information of the new contact. Sales can be instantly recorded and calls backs can be noted with reminders. Sometimes customers give references and this information can also be updated on the CRM accordingly for the sales agent to follow up on at a later time.

Using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM services has helps many organisations to grow multi fold. Most of these organisations attribute their progress to better systems and easier information access. Management staff have found the Microsoft Dynamics system very helpful as they can get instant updates and customised reports whenever they need.

Enhancing Business Productivity using Dynamics CRM

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Productivity is an important component for any business applications offering, and that is especially critical for sales organizations where people need to quickly respond to customers’ needs.

In today’s market, customers have more options than ever when choosing the companies they choose to do business with. Because of this, it is essential for an organization to fully understand their customer right from the first interaction through the last interaction and it should be seamless across organization. The truth is, if you don’t meet your customers’ expectations, then they will take their business to your ‘competitors’.

You can avoid this unwanted situation and enhance your business productivity by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems allow easy information tracking and sharing to ensure that each interaction with a customer is meaningful, productive and pleasant.

Following are the top 6 ways to enhance business productivity using Microsoft Dynamics CRM and meet your Customers expectations

1. Effective Time Management: Time is always a precious commodity at a workplace. Dynamics CRM prompts users to follow up on activities and automates alerts when important events occur, or if certain activities are missed.
2. Business Intelligence: Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides users with a multitude of business intelligence and data visualization capabilities that they can use to instantly get accurate up-to-date information including ‘sales forecasts’, ‘targets’, ‘quotes’ to drive sales growth. Some of the key elements of a good BI system include:
– Tracking of key performance metrics
– Employees targets Vs Business targets
– Actionable Information
– Fact based decision making
3. Empowering Sales/ Service people: with the right information at right time: CRM helps in tracking each interaction with customers thereby empowering your sales people.
4. Salesforce Automation:  Salesforce automation suite effectively and accurately manages your sales process. With the Sales capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, your Sales team can save time and sell more effectively in this era through seamless integration with Dynamics CRM.

What does this mean to companies using Microsoft CRM?

It presents sales teams with the accurate and consistent information required to effectively drive opportunities through the sales process faster and better. This process give businesses an opportunity to completely focus on the critical customer life-cycle (lead generation – acquisition – conversion – retention – loyalty), right customers and priorities, thus increasing the sales team’s productivity and sales revenue of company.

Data is available via the web or a smartphone both online or offline. Thus even when sales team are on the road they have 24/7 access to dashboards containing the real-time information they need to respond to changing needs of customer and organisation.

For example, it is quite valuable for sales representatives to know about issues that their customers have brought to the support team or marketing materials that have recently been sent from the marketing team. It is equally valuable for the marketing team to be able to understand where a prospect is in the sales process. Today’s CRM systems make it possible to share this relevant information.

5. Seamless Integration with different tools : One of the most powerful propositions of MS CRM is the integration with different tools such as – ‘Microsoft Outlook’, ‘Microsoft Lync’, ‘Microsoft SharePoint’, ‘Yammer’ and ‘Microsoft Social Engagements’. Integrating these additional Microsoft technologies into a CRM environment can provide the benefits to an enterprise’s whole CRM community, from the CEO to the end user and customer.

6. Mobility: Another key element of modern CRM systems and Microsoft Dynamics CRM specifically is that of mobility. Everyone is on the move and people need to access data beyond the walls of the office. CRMs have migrated from the office to the mobile world. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is available on all the major devices which mean a user can access information when and where they need it. Providing access on mobile devices ensures that the information is entered into the CRM and a manager can see reporting in real-time.

Below are the few additional features of Dynamics CRM, which helps to increase the business/end user productivity

Immersive Excel experience:  Now you can use Microsoft Excel Online to do a quick analysis right from Dynamics CRM Online, eliminating the frustration, time and effort required to switch between applications. Sales people can view their respective data in familiar Excel spreadsheets, perform what-if analyses and upload changes with one click, all while maintaining the sales workflow.

 

Microsoft Social Engagement: You can easily pinpoint leads from social media and understand social buzz around a product. You’ll instantly gain access to powerful social tools and connect with customers, partners and prospects on various social media sites.

Self-service analytics: You can effectively analyze customer data using Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated with Power BI. Using the new out-of-the-box connector and templates for Power BI, Business can analyze sales performance, drive pipeline goals, prepare forecasts and efficiently manage account team activities.

Dashboards are another powerful feature in Microsoft Dynamics. It helps you to track the day to day activities and sales pipeline through various sales stages at a glance. The CRM Overview dashboard shown below displays the sales pipeline, Opportunities and open activity records.

This post is by Kishor Sanap

CRM Integration made easy with web service

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Integration made easy with web service

(Single Plug & Play Solution to call Different web service (without adding Reference) like SOUP-UI)

CRM integration is a major challenge for organizations of all sizes. All businesses today are focusing more on customer and front office to be able to provide higher value-added services and support to them. The reason for doing so is obvious, as it helps them maximize their ROI, lead to greater customer satisfaction, ensures higher revenue leading to healthy bottom line.

Due to browsers’ cross domain restriction, you cannot have JavaScript functions executing on a CRM form event or when a ribbon button is clicked calling web services outside of the CRM domain. The issue is related to a security perspective.

In this article, we are providing an example of how Single Action can be used to make a request to different web services outside of the CRM domain from a record’s form event. For this you would need to provide only the web service URL and required inputs.

Scenario
In some CRM deployments we need to call multiple web services according to the requirement for different events and there is a possibility that the web service is hosted on an environment other than the CRM Domain. So there is need of Single Plug & Play Solution to call different web services.

Process Configuration
To overcome the problems in integration of web services, we can write a Single Action that would be enough to integrate multiple web services with required number of input & outputs.
Here is the process to implement this solution. The steps are really simple to understand and implement.

1. Create an Action of type process. This action would have say 4 input values and 1 output value.
2. The action would need a custom workflow activity which will work as bridge between CRM application and the external web service which could be either in same domain or different domain. This custom workflow will be responsible for fetching the required details by calling the expected web service.

Please refer to the attached dll of the custom workflow which you could use directly in any action to call web service by passing the input parameter only. Please note that you do not need to add any type of web reference of any web service.

 

Calling Action from JavaScript

This is the last piece of the puzzle. At this point, we simply need to call the action created
from a web resource library on any event ( e.g. Ribbon button click, OnChange of a field value etc.).

To call action from web resource library you need to write a function that is triggered when the expected event occurs at client side.

This function will trigger an action in effect and consume the values returned by action, read the output values and use the same as required.

Alternate Solution

To call web service in other domain, another solution is needed to deploy intermediate web service in same domain and call this service from CRM web resource library. This approach has its own side effects. E.g. Fluctuating results, Performance issues, maintenance in future in case of additional web methods to be added etc.

Conclusion

With the solution of using actions to call web services in this blog we get benefited in terms of:
1. Plug and Play Solution
2. Improved Performance
3. No Fluctuation in Results
4. Very Less Maintenance
5. One Time Efforts

This post has been written by Pradip Jadhav

9 Steps to Implement an Effective MS CRM System for your Organization

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Running a business is not easy. Even if you have the best teams in place with all the knowledge and skills you need, it still takes a lot of time and effort to have all aspects of your business in place. The best way to tackle that is to have an effective MSCRM is place. Following are the 9 simple steps to implement an effective MSCRM system for your organisation:

  1. Qualify: This stage defines the bench-marking of all processes, responsibilities and business strategy alignment to outline the organization’s understanding of the MSCRM system concept and bring to light any business issues that needs solutions through the MSCRM.
  2.  Initiate : This stage creating an efficient project team and an overall framework of plans. This is critical because based on this, the  outline of the project is developed and an understanding of how the project will be managed and the goals achieved will be derived from here.  The key elements to be considered are :
    • defining the development processes
    • clarifying roles and responsibilities
    • ensuring one common source of all customer information.
  3. Define: Usually a series of workshops are conducted to understand and analyse the organization’s current business and IT strategies w.r.t the defined project goals, to ensure the business Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and project are properly aligned.
  4. Design: The design phase targets the customer’s business processes and redesigns them to function more efficiently in accordance with its objectives and KPIs. The organization’s various stakeholders also get to see how the mscrm solution would be aligned to the business plan, including specific requirements that would have come up from various departments.
  5. Build: Post the design phase, the prototype of the conceptual design with the standard system starts taking shape. All functionalities including reports, interfaces and programs/ applications specific to the customer can be seen here.
  6. Prepare: In this stage the solution is compared with the situations discussed during the ‘define’ and ‘design’ stages. Changes as required are made along with the data population, post which the migration take place.
  7. Transfer: This stage is the key. Usually the consulting company runs through a series of workshops with organization staff to ensure they are trained in the new solution and can carry out their day-to-day activities in the most efficient manner.
  8. Sustain: In this stage  the consulting company does more hand-holding and provides with additional support as required during the business cycle, for smooth flow of activities.
  9. Review: This stage involves a review of how the business and system are aligned, including how business changes, process updates and new staff training are being managed within the system along with new requests  that may crop up from the organization’s point of view.

Top 5 Steps to a Successful CRM Initiative for CEO’s

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Stakeholders in any business, while implementing CRM, must completely own the project. This begins from identifying the goals to documenting the different business processes and tangible metrics. Eventually the success or failure of any CRM implementation will depend on the buy-in from the senior management.

Following are the top 5 checklist pointers for CEO’s to have a successful CRM initiative

Identify and evaluate all the processes that demand change, the current bottlenecks, work-around and simultaneously put together all the tangible metrics to measure performance.

Establish a customer focused culture along with implementing a scalable system, keeping in mind, that all information, resources will grow/increase with time. Also, it is essential to have a go-to-guy within the organisation, responsible for integration with your other applications to provide a complete overview of the customer.

Identify the businesses most profitable customers and provide timely/ customised products, services, and promotions that keep them updated and valued.

Recognize the ever changing dynamics between individual department needs like between sales and marketing teams. The need to know the details and results of marketing campaigns, customer interactions is the order of the day. It is good to have sales, marketing and customer service team communicate over a common platform like CRM to avoid misunderstandings, customer side errors, interaction history tracking, etc.

Understand and review reports that can be customised depending on the organization need to understand the success of a CRM implementation.

MSCRM for SME’s

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Start up companies/organization owners while wanting to take the next leap, are always in a dilemma of whether to implement a CRM solution or not for their business. In our experience, we have observed that one of the major factors which determines the success of any business is to have access to timely and relevant data. All businesses have data starting from their own customer information to sales data, vendor lists, marketing campaigns, events that they have done and the results thereof. The issue with most scenarios is that, though all these data is maintained, they are often with individual sets of people, different excel sheets and independent pieces of software and it is often difficult to access all this information and use it to the best of purpose required.

This is when an effective CRM solution like MS Dynamics comes into picture. It helps reduce the scattered information and helps to streamline all operational data at one place, which can be easily accessible across the organization by various departments. While an effective CRM will help business leaders in an organisation to understand and anticipate their customer requirements, the business delivery professionals also need to start enhancing their service turn around time so as the customer experience is enhanced. Though CRM tracks every interaction that a company representative has with a customer or a prospect, it also starts reflecting the real issues & positives from a customers’ point of view like any unanswered emails, issues, queries, requests or the result of a successful marketing campaign/event.

One basic check that all business and process owners should keep in mind is that a CRM solution gives measurable returns however the results come gradually over a period of time. Implementing a CRM solution requires a strong buy-in from not only CRM process owners but also other functions like sales, service, marketing teams, who are the actual users of the system as a whole. The main reason for buy-in is that often sales representatives have their own preferred medium of communication with their set of customers and they may see a CRM solution as a hindrance in adopting to a better/faster solution for collecting, maintaining and analyzing reliable pieces of data at one go. Keeping everyone’s requirements in mind, we provide a simple UI platform in terms of MS Dynamics CRM solution to users to perform their daily tasks in the most efficient manner. This ultimately helps businesses grow and define an overall landscape for the organization with intelligent data analytics and minimal manual effort.

Enhancing Sales With CRM Dynamics

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Traditionally marketing and sales roles have been treated as two different functions in an organization. However, with the evolving digital media, this differentiation is getting blurred. There is an increasing noise within the two teams as to who is poaching into the others territory and this is largely because all are dependent on information.

Typically, a customer to an organization’s products / services is already aware of their presence through Email campaigns, Website, Facebook, Twitter or an Event/ Promotion. The customer has already signed up for some program and hence the details should be available in the one database or the other. Therefore, it is ever so important for the Marketing and Sales Heads to know:

  • Who is the customer?
  • From where the customer is coming?
  • Why is the customer visiting the brand?

With this changing digital landscape, need of the hour is a perfect CRM solution like MS Dynamics CRM becomes an answer to many such questions and database management. At the same time, CRM also contributes towards effective client acquisition and retention because all the customer interactions (emails, sign-up details etc.) are stored at one place. There are practical scenarios like multiple representatives handling the same case with multiple histories. This way, while the marketing team can use CRM and track data, to ensure that all categories of customers know about the products and services that the organization offers; the sales team gets to use the same data to be on top of sales targets and fulfilling customer requirements.

It is hence very important to have one centralized MS Dynamics CRM platform which all departments can access customer information to understand customer needs better and deliver services/products accordingly.

Top 10 Features of the New MS Dynamics CRM 2015

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The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 is loaded with new features and awesome additions. Some of the features like search enhancements has been long requested, so we are delighted to put together the favourites for you

1. Search: Improved search capabilities provide a quick way to find and navigate to records by letting users enter keywords in the search box on the navigation bar. The search box supports using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard character, and allows the user to search across record types and get a full list of matching search results. The new Advanced Find icon, which is now on the nav bar helps find matches for a certain type of record. Also on the search results page, one can select a filter from the drop-down list.

2. Synchronize more information between CRM and Outlook/ Exchange: Users can now easily sychronize more information, including:

– Additional contacts and tasks fields
– Assigned tasks
– Appointment attachments

3. Tablet Enhancements: Two critical improvements to call out for Dynamics on iPad, Windows 8 and Android tablets including creating offline drafts and later synchronising the changes with connectivity and building an app home page personalised with pinned records & dashboard views.

4. Business Rules: Have now been enhanced and include the following:

– Write once, execute everywhere Business logic is now even easier to implement and enforce
– Server side execution allows business rules to be executed irrespective of whether changes are made through the client or on the server though the SDK. Rules can be executed on create or update of the record and form specific actions (field visibility, lock/unlock and field requirement) are ignored.
– Express richer business logic
> If.. Else if.. Else support enables more complex structures to be easily defined
Combine multiple expressions using simple and/or grouping to enable the definition of richer conditions. For instance, if the lead rating is hot or if the lead is from an existing account, mark this lead as ‘ok to pursue’.
> Support for default values and behaviors
– Set up each record just right for your sales reps by pre-filling information when a record is created. Express condition-less business logic for rules formed of Set Default, Show/Hide, Lock/Unlock, Set Required.

5. Business Process Flows: The introduction of the Client API for business process flows, provides complete programmatic access to active and enabled processes. With JavaScript code, implemented by one of your developers, it is now possible to ensure that the user is always working on the right stage of the right process in any given situation. For example, if a priority prospect is tagged on one or more field values, JavaScript can be used to accelerate this priority prospect to a stage later, in the process flow thereby removing the need for the CRM users to unnecessarily progress this lead through every defined step.

6. Calculated Fields: With the MS Dynamics CRM 2015, one can define the calculated fields in the CRM User Interface without needing to write code. The calculated fields contain a value calculated based on conditions and a formula defined within this field. Imagine, we can now use KPIs and metrics anywhere and everywhere, e.g. Information like Share of Wallet, Total Relationship value for customers will now be available readily without any code or customizations.

7. Campaign Management Console: The new CRM 2015 edition has been enhanced to include complex multi-condition triggers to fine tune responses, embedded cross campaign offers and A/B testing. A/B testing provides marketers the confidence that their efforts will deliver the desired impact by easily setting up and running A/B tests that are multi-objective with results displayed via in place real-time analytics.

8. Integrated Social Listening: This edition of CRM comes with an integrated transactional and social insights and positively impact on your brand with sentiment analysis.

9. Product Families: Sales operations managers can easily configure product offerings that bundle related products together and provide tailored pricelists giving sellers the ability to position the best products at the best price. Salespeople can see suggestions for cross-selling and up-selling, and get recommendations for accessories or substitutes right on the opportunity form while they are working their deal.

10. Sales Hierarchies: With this release manage and report on your sales data in a way that maps to your business, users can see how info is related or grouped by viewing accounts, products, or users in hierarchical charts. One can click a block of info to get more details and navigate to the info you’re interested in. For example, from the hierarchical view for accounts, one can:

– See how an account is doing in overall revenue
– Drill into tiles for sub-accounts to see where the deals are coming from
– Find out who is working an account and enlist help from others by sending email or sharing the account with other salespeople
– View important details about each account, such as credit limit and latest activity posts for the account

With these new additions, the sales, marketing and customer service teams in an organisation using MSDynamics CRM 2015 will see a boost in productivity.

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