Using Microsoft CRM

Thursday 17 May is National Learning at Work day, with events promoting Learning at work happening across the UK. To support the day, we've created these Top Ten Tips for Learning to help and encourage business to make learning fun and relevant:
 
Motivating and engaging employees through learning – 10 Top Tips

Microsoft Demonstrates Dynamics CRM Success with Its Own Move from Siebel

At this year’s Convergence conference, Microsoft revealed how the company had finally managed to wean itself from Siebel and implement its own Dynamics CRM system throughout its business.

This week’s blog topic of ”What do users get in exchange for buying into a CRM platform?”  Tracy Kinsey's 26+ years’ experience working directly with customers has generated a common theme.  That theme or promise is that the users will see productivity gains and process improvement, but the facts point to a high percentage of post implementation let downs.

Some would say to be the best at playing the air guitar you need a tennis racket, a pick and some great 80’s rock ‘n’ roll. I would argue the extras are just nice to have “features” not requirements and your focus should be on the user experience. Universally, we all enjoy playing the air guitar and I would guess if we keep from adding too many features to the process all of us could be rock stars!

Dialogs are new to CRM 2011 and have come on since the early releases.  The later service releases now include some very nice functionality in dialogs, so here’s a simple example of how to setup a short process that uses dialogs to provide users with a wizard to set the primary contact on an account record.

Dialogs are to be found in the same area as workflows; Settings -> Process Center -> Processes

Due to the new challenging economic realities of the global hyper-competitive environment, many firms are desperately trying to sustain performance levels and keep customers happy.

The CRM world is a much different place now than when I found it over 20 years ago. I have seen a fundamental shift in the overall approach to CRM, the processes that we embed in our solutions and the technologies that we leverage to access and exploit the information that we have captured. One of the most fundamental changes that have occurred is the rampant demand for mobility.

CRM: Sales and Marketing get hitched

With February 29th the traditional time for an unusual marriage proposal, we’ve got one of our own.

Many marketing specialists see themselves as the incisive, statistics-led brains of the operation and sales folk as the sometimes truculent operatives who won’t do as they’re told. Meanwhile, ask a salesperson for their opinion and they will tell you that they do the hard work which keeps a business alive, while marketers mainly play around doing fancy designs.

According to a new Nucleus Research report, adding social features and mobile access to CRM applications increased the productivity of sales people by 26.4 percent. Beyond productivity, social and mobile can help align CRM with broader corporate objectives.

Understanding and retaining customers is critical to the success of any organisation. This concept is the core tenant for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions deployed by businesses around the world. To be effective and deliver a real return on investment, a CRM solution needs to be easily accessible, widely adopted and enable people to get the information they need from it to easily do their jobs.