About Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a robust set of functionality out of the box for Sales, Marketing and Services.  Functionality includes:

Sales

• Native Microsoft Outlook experience: Manage your sales, service and marketing relationships within a single business application.  Automatically synchronise Outlook Email, Calendar, Tasks and Contacts with your Microsoft CRM database
• Single view of the customer: View and manage customer account activity and history, including contact information, detailed notes, document attachments, communications, open quotes, pending orders, invoices and credit limits
• Lead routing and management: Track information on prospective customers, then qualify and assign inquiries.  Leads can be automatically routed to the correct salespeople or teams
• Opportunity management: Easily convert qualified leads to opportunities without data re-entry and then track opportunities throughout the sales cycle
• Sales process management: Initiate, track and close sales consistently and efficiently with workflow rules that automate stages in the selling process
• Sales and marketing list management: Import purchased sales and marketing lists to fuel your sales efforts.  Measure list effectiveness and maintain marketing lists for annual sales campaigns
• Quick campaigns and sales campaigns: Use wizard-driven tools to keep your customers informed and aware of your new products and services
• Opportunity roles and relationships: Build and maintain sales relationships enabling your sales professionals to relate to decision makers, influencers and financial stakeholders within sales opportunities
• Product catalogue: Work with a full-featured product catalogue that includes support for complex pricing levels, units of measure, discounts and pricing options
• Quote and order management: Create and convert quotes to orders, then track and manage orders throughout their life cycle,  If a financial application is integrated, invoices for orders are published automatically into Microsoft CRM from that system
• Quotas: Use quotas to measure employee sales performance against goals.  As opportunities are closed in Microsoft CRM, they are credited against the assigned quota
• Territory management: Create territories for salespeople, enabling them to manage and evaluate territory-based sales processes with workflow rules and reports
• Reports: View, sort and filter a wide range of reports to identify trends, measure and forecast sales activity, track sales processes and evaluate business performance
• Sales literature: Create, manage and distribute a searchable library of sales and marketing materials, including brochures, white papers and competitor information
• Competitor tracking: Maintain detailed information on competitors in a library and associate that information with opportunities and sales literature.  Track competitor activity by product, region or other criteria
• Workflow: Automate leads routing, notifications and escalations.  Workflow rules also make it easy to generate and send auto-response email to customer requests
• Correspondence and mail merge: Use customisable templates to create and send e-mail to targeted prospects and customers.  Print communication materials can be created and sent using Microsoft Word Mail Merge

Marketing

• Develop lists more efficiently: Microsoft CRM streamlines processes for defining, using and sharing lists within your organisation
• List creation: Automatically create lists based on accounts, contacts or leads.  Generate new lists through individual lookups or use Advanced Find to identify potential customer based on a wide range of user-specified criteria
• List import: Easily import information on contacts and leads.  Integrate leads from sources such as databases, text files and Microsoft Excel
• List maintenance: Quickly add or remove members from lists.  Define dynamic lists where the membership changes in real time or static lists with fixed membership groups
• Better manage campaigns: Microsoft CRM enables you to develop sophisticated marketing campaigns that coordinate campaign activities, materials and resources
• Plan campaigns: Use pre-defined system templates, save campaigns as templates to re-use for future campaigns or create new campaigns from scratch.  Define tasks, activities and marketing materials for the entire campaign life cycle, create budgets and define follow-up activities for respondents and non-respondents
• Execute campaigns: Schedule campaign activities to be performed immediately or at specific times in the future
• Track responses: Drive closed-loop campaign execution by tracking responses to every campaign activity
• Monitor results: Generate detailed real-time performance reports that track key performance factors including ROI, response rates and costs per response
• Launch quick campaigns: The Microsoft CRM Quick Campaign Wizard makes it easy to launch simple, powerful campaigns
• Create a list: Use an existing list or identify high-potential prospects using Advanced Find against contacts, accounts or leads
• Define an activity: Choose a specific activity for a Quick Campaign, such as email, phone calls, faxes or meetings and assign to appropriate people
• Choose a timeline: Define start and completion dates for all Quick Campaign tasks
• Track responses and monitor results: Get detailed Quick Campaign performance reports in real time
• Turn leads into opportunities: Microsoft CRM helps ensure that every qualified lead is routed to the right person quickly, reliably and automatically
• Improve lead handling: Easily distinguish new prospects from existing customers and promote qualified leads to new opportunities with a single click
• Automatically route leads: Deliver the right lead to the right person based on product, territory, amount or any other workflow rules that you define
• Transform information into Market Intelligence: Microsoft CRM provides the business intelligence tools you need to understand your customers, analyse your products and services and pinpoint key patterns and trends
• Identify sales trends: Introduce new products and services efficiently and improve up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
• Forecast future sales performance: Allocate marketing resources based on a clearer understanding of trends and opportunities
• Build customer loyalty: Take advantage of service knowledge to proactively suggest replacements of renewals, or even to reward frequent customers

Customer Service

• Case management: Create, assign and manage customer service requests from initial contact through resolution, as well as manage communications and other activities
• Service requests: Automatically assign incoming support inquiries with the appropriate case
• Queuing: Send cases to waiting areas - the queue - where they can easily be accessed by individuals and teams
• Routing and workflow: Route service requests automatically to the appropriate representative for resolution, escalation or reassignment
• Searchable knowledge base: Resolve common support issues quickly by using a searchable knowledge base.  Built-in review processes help ensure that published information is complete, correct and properly tagged
• Contract management: Create and maintain service contracts within Microsoft CRM to help ensure accurate billing for support incidents.  Each time a support case is resolved, the relevant contract information is updated automatically
• Email management (includes auto-response email): Maintain accurate customer-related communication records with automated tracking and response for customer email messages
• Product catalogue: A full-featured product catalogue includes support for complex pricing levels, units of measure, discounts and pricing options
• Reports: Identify common support issues, evaluate customer needs, track service processes and measure service performance
• Service appointment activities: Schedule detailed service activity appointments for your service professionals that automatically synchronise to your Microsoft Outlook calendar
• Services, facilities and equipment: Model your entire service delivery offerings and resource groupings into Microsoft CRM to provide consistent service practices throughout your organisation
• Service scheduling engine: Find qualified and customer-preferred service professionals and schedule service appointments to deliver value-added services for customers
• Global service calendar: Manage service appointments and resource allocation across your service sites and locations with a single calendar view of service professionals, tools, resources and facilities

For more information contact us at bettercrm@cirquent.co.uk or call Annette Giardina on +44(0)20 7717 8500.