By Barkley Busby
Vice President and Co-Founder,
Today, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 will be released in Q4 of 2014. Microsoft is wasting no time when it comes to adding features to their CRM software. In fact, CRM 2015 is announce just 4 months after the spring ’14 release.
So, what’s included in this new version? I’ll give you the summarized features in this post. But if you are interested in digging deeper….
There is lots to be excited about when it comes to the new features included in CRM 2015.
MARKETING
The world is changing and it is impacting how companies need to engage with customers. Customers are 57% of the way through the buying cycle before they engage with you. Marketers, more than ever, need to be there every step with the customer, ensuring that when the customer does reach out, sales, marketing and the customer are all on the same page. Marketing owns more of the customer journey than ever before, so they must engage customers in new ways, across new channels in a personalized, relevant way. At the same time, marketers are being held increasingly accountable for the ROI of their marketing investment, yet most lack the ability to track campaigns end-to-end and understand impact in real-time. More than 50% of CMO’s feel unprepared for the new marketing landscape.
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing enables your marketing team to seamlessly go from planning, to execution, leveraging the power of Excel and Power BI to measure campaigns across channels from start to finish so you can bring your marketing vision to life. You can engage customers one-to-one across channels, build your sales pipeline and demonstrate the impact of your marketing investments in real-time.
- Multi-channel marketing
- Email editor
- Campaign Management Console
- Integrated Social Listening
- Sales Collaboration
- B2B Marketing
- Marketing Resource Management
- Internal Process Automation
- Geographical Expansion
SALES
In order to help sellers sell more effectively by selling more, winning faster and driving results, we are pleased to deliver the following features:
- Guided Sales Process
- Product Families
- Sales Hierarchies
- CRM for Tablets Enhancements
CUSTOMER SERVICE – Case Management Enhancements
The challenge for customer service organizations is to balance delivering amazing customer experiences against their cost to service for an optimal mix over time. Cost of service varies significantly across channels, so companies are investigating how to provide differentiated levels of customer support, while looking at how to empower their agents and make them more efficient and effective.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM enables companies to build customer loyalty, empower agents and drive resolution by providing relevant, proactive and personalized service across all channels. Companies can connect their customers with the right answers to their service inquiries at the right time, via their channel of choice across web, social, chat, mobile and phone.
SOCIAL – Microsoft Social Listening
Social has changed the way people engage and communicate. Today’s customers are more informed and getting their information in new ways and from new sources. Decisions are influenced by discussions online and user reviews. In fact, 75% of B2B customers are likely to use social media to influence their purchase decisions, and customers are over 70%1 of the way through the sales cycle before they contact you. Most of today’s social listening tools, however, are so complex and expensive that they’re only available to an elite few – which means relevant information rarely gets to the front lines who need it. At Microsoft, we believe this valuable information should be available to everyone.
PLATFORM
Powerful tools allow you to tailor Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet your unique business requirements. Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitates the delivery of rapid business value with an agile solution framework that can be easily tailored and configured. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform provides a declarative paradigm that ranges from defining the data model to providing integrated persistence, security, API access, user experience and programming paradigms based on a modern open architecture. The following investments in our platform capabilities further our commitment to an open, customizable and extensible product and online service.
- Search
- Business Rules
- Business Process Flows
- Calculated Fields
- Business Rules Editor Improvements
- Field Level Security
- Compatibility
has been working with Dynamics CRM for over 10 years - since CRM v1.2. We've helped many clients get the most out of CRM - even extending CRM to track information such as teachers, inventory, portfolios and more!
If you are in the market for a new CRM solution or looking for ways to expand your existing CRM investment, we’d love to talk. or call 205-408-9991. As experts in as well as , we understand your challenges and can suggest practical solutions. We will help you achieve your strategic objectives faster…and may even help you add a few more achievements to the list.
