CRM Online (MS Dynamics CRM Online)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables your company to manage your sales, your marketing campaigns and your services.
This is accomplished through MS Dynamics CRM Online. All this will be more detailed in the following sections:
CRM 2011
(Online version available at the end of 2010)- New Features
- Demos
- Third Party Vendor Applications
MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 Summary
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online enables your company to manage your sales, your marketing campaigns and your services. It also enables customers to see sales information, quotes, salesorders, marketing and service information that is related to their company.
This all happens through the MS Dynamics CRM Online that includes the following components:
Sales Management
Marketing Management
Service Management
CRM 4.0 Features
Overview
Internet Customer Solutions, Inc. is offering the Microsoft webenabled Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System (CRM Online). The Microsoft CRM Online system enables you to manage your sales (leads, contacts, opportunities and accounts), your marketing campaigns (target lists, email, fax, telemarketing), your services (schedule your services/jobs for customers) and to manage the workflow (trigger actions when events take place). The slide show below illustrates in general main components of this CRM system.
MS Dynamics CRM Online 2011 Overview
The main features of the MS CRM Online consist of Sales Management, Marketing Management and Service Management. Each main feature will be described below.
Sales Management
Sales Management overview
The CRM system obtains your leads or contacts from your MS Outlook, or from manual data entry. You can create new sales opportunities for your specific products/services.
You can create
Sales activities
(phone call, email, fax) with the help of a calendar, and include reminders.
Marketing Management
Marketing Management Overview
CRM Online enables you to create and manage marketing campaigns. You can create your target lists, select the campaign media to reach your customers, and create the message (sales literature).
An activity for each lead on the list will be automatically created.
Service Management
Scheduling the resources (crew, field technicians, equipment and tools) is quite challenging. Service management makes it a lot easier.
CRM Online enables you to assign services to employees, and to schedule those assigned services.
Service Management Overview
The MS CRM online screens above were taken from the web interface of MS CRM Online. All the screens of MS CRM Online can also be seen via MS Outlook as illustrated below:
A great strength of the MS CRM Online is that it can be integrated with most of the other MS products as seen below.
CRM 4.0 Demos
A customer video can be seen by clicking on play icon in the center:
CRM 4.0 Project Management Methodology
Our company uses the Microsoft project management methodology called "Sure Step", which provides a step by step guidance during each phase of a Microsoft Dynamics project such as CRM. Such phases are planning, implementation, migration, configuration, upgrade and ongoing optimization. In this way Sure Step helps to reduce the potential for costly budget overruns and resource shortages.
For more details about Sure Step, click here.
Competition
A survey was just completed in Jan. 2011 about which CRM system is the most used. MS Dynamics CRM system is used the most. Current MS Dynamics CRM 4.0 who are testing MS Dynamics CRM 2011, really like the new upcoming CRM 2011 version. Ease of use, integration with MS Outlook, MS Exchange, MS Sharepoint, MS Office, and other MS Dynamics solutions such as AX, GP and Navision, are the main reasons for their votes. Learn more about the survey results and people's feedback.
CRM 4.0 Benefits
The overall benefit is that once you have a web enabled CRM system, you can now grow your business revenue and profit. This growth can be accomplished in the following ways:
· Expanding the volume of sales leads while ensuring proper follow up for all of them
· Expanding your sales force
o Add sales people without increasing your administrative overhead
o Increased sales performance because they get sales leads automatically, and assign them to their distributors/dealers
· Running more targeted promotional campaigns
o Mailers, fax or email can be sent out to targeted group of customers
o Mailers, fax or email can be sent out to targeted group of distributors/dealers
CRM 2011
CRM 2011 has all the features of CRM 4.0 plus a lot of new features. The major new features are as follows:
Familiar Experiences
User interface is very similar to the MS Office user interface with a ribbon menu that changes based on the entity (lead, account, contact, product, price, opportunity, quote, ..) you are looking at.
Role tailored forms and views: a role can only see or change information based on its roles permissions. Eg. customer service can not change the price of a product. This is enabled by field level security.
Advanced personalization. Eg. show me only the accounts with an annual revenue > $200,000. A.k.a conditional formatting.
MS Outlook interface is fully graphical.
Intelligent Experiences
Real-time dashboards: all types of graphs (pie charts, plots, funnel charts, maps, .. ) based on customer data
Guided processes (workflows)
Visual analysis and navigation: Inline visualization meaning that graphs change as you change the search or filter criteria.
Declarative design: Business goal tracking meaning that you can specify monthly sales goals for a sales manager and his/her sales people, and track actuals versus these goals. Pervasive auditing meaning that every change can be tracked for auditing purposes.
Other: Productivity enhancements: recent views, one click to get specific views,
Connected Experiences
Business connections: Eg. connecting a sales person to contacts, opportunities, etc.
Contextual Sharepoint: Each entity can be connected to its document library in Sharepoint, that comes with document management (online editing, delete, view, sharing). Team management meaning team ownership of records (sales team A owns a certain list of accounts), team security and team reporting.
Cloud solutions and extensions: Advanced import and export.
Dynamics Marketplace: third party applications can be downloaded, paid for and installed from within CRM 2011. Such applications may offer additional features such as eg. pulling market lists of leads, and/or industry specific features such as detailed job cost management.
Third Party Vendor Applicatons for CRM 2011
Third Party Vendor Applications exist for:
Why Use Internet Customer Solutions, Inc?
Internet Customer Solutions, Inc. has uniquely positioned itself in the market by:
· Offering a total Internet solution which is customized for your business, but will also save you a lot of money
· Having planned, selected, and deployed all the computers and networking for a customer’s specific needs
· Having planned, designed, developed and deployed all the application software from scratch
· Having strong experience with databases and E-Commerce
· Having well documented proposals, good project management and support commitment