Dynamics CRM Overview

Key Features

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides an intuitive interface which sits comfortably within applications your employees are probably already be familiar with. Sales, marketing and service representatives can work from within Microsoft Outlook to access comprehensive customer information, view product and sales literature, track customer related tasks and appointments, and manage contacts.

And since Microsoft Dynamics CRM works seamlessly with Outlook, your employees can manage customer interactions quickly and efficiently. A Microsoft Dynamics CRM user can take a received email from a prospect, promote the email to a customer record, and use pre-configured workflow rules to schedule future interactions with this prospect – all without ever leaving the Outlook interface.

• View and manage account activity and history, including contact information, attributes, meeting notes, attachments, communications, open proposals, and purchased products.
• Use Advanced Find and global search to instantly zero in on key nuggets of information.
• Easily promote qualified leads to new opportunities with a single click. Automatically deliver the right lead to the right person according to product, territory, dollar amount, or any other criteria.
• Easily create quotes, convert them to orders, then track and manage them throughout their life cycle from proposals to invoices.
• Import purchased lists to fuel your sales efforts. Measure effectiveness and maintain lists for annual sales campaigns.
• Initiate, track, and close sales consistently and efficiently with workflow rules that automate sales stages, lead routing, notifications and escalations.
• Work with a full-featured product catalog that includes support for complex pricing levels, units of measure, discounts, and pricing options.
• Create, view and sort a wide range of reports to identify trends, measure and forecast sales activity, track sales processes, and evaluate sales performance. Easily share reports with co-workers.
• Create insightful and focused reports for executives and top constituents that adeptly highlight key sales metrics and sales performance.
• Execute complex pipeline queries easily so you can gain insight into leads and opportunities at every stage of the sales cycle.

For more information, view the Sales Automation Overview

Key Features

Your marketing teams can benefit from highly-automated software that connects them with Sales and Finance. When you have customer relationship management (CRM) software that everyone gets, it’s easier for them to manage campaigns and track results. Dynamics CRM incorporates marketing campaign management to provide:

• Customer profiles and targeted marketing promotions
• Leads tracked based on marketing initiative and customer behavior
• Easy campaign creation and management across media types
• Automatic calculation of marketing effectiveness and ROI
• Profile-driven e-mail and direct mail marketing
• Integration with leading third party email campaign management solutions such as Exact Target

For more information, view the Marketing Automation Overview

Key Features

Increase the efficiency of you customer service team by automating many of the tasks currently managed via spreadsheets or other manual means.  From initial service call or email using an online support request portal, customer service representatives can immediately view associated customer information, service history, and use the knowledge base to deliver consistent, efficient service that enhances customer loyalty and profitability.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a comprehensive customer service solution that is familiar to users, completely customizable to your business process, and scalable to meet the growing de­mands of any size business.

Dynamics CRM incorporates service management to provide:

• Provide a familiar role-tailored user experience using Microsoft Office Outlook or a web-browser that is completely tailored for your business needs
• Create, assign, and manage customer service requests across multiple channels, including phone, e-mail, Web, in-person and emerging channels.
• Manage cases from initial contact through resolution and automatically associate incoming support inquiries with the appropriate case.
• Dispatch cases to queues where individuals and teams can access them easily and automatically route them to the appropriate individual, supervisor or expert.
• Resolve common support issues quickly using a searchable knowledge base and ensure that published information is complete, correct, and properly tagged using built-in review processes.
• Maintain accurate account, contact and service history with automated tracking and response for customer e-mail messages.

For more information, view the Sales Automation Overview

Key Features

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used as a foundation for building line of business applications, reducing delivery times by as much as 60%.  Leveraging Dynamics CRM extensive SDK, security model, dynamic SOA Web Service creation, declarative data modeling, and other platform services make it a fast and easy platform for requirements gathering, functional modeling, development, testing, deployment and upgrading.

Idea Dynamics Solutions has built many large scale applications based on Dynamics CRM and has deep experience with integrating Dynamics CRM with backend line of business applications such as Dynamics GP to provide an end to end solution.  The benefits of using Dynamics CRM as a development platform include:

• Leverage Buy vs. Build for Rapid Application Development Platform
• Built-in Workflow and Tight Integration with Windows Workflow Foundation
• Built-in Role Based Security
• Built-in Administrative UI
• Built-in Search & Filtering
• Built-in Application Generator (Controls, UI, etc..)
• Integration with MS Outlook (CRM client for Outlook)
• Integration with MS Apps (Moss, Dynamics GP, BizTalk)
• Dynamic Export Capabilities (Excel, PDF, etc..)
• Rapid prototyping provides for business process visualization early on in project life cycle
• Ease of UI Maintenance/Changes
• MS App Look and Feel
• Documented Application; Supported by MS
• Easily extendable using ASP.NET, SharePoint, Silverlight, Virtual Earth, Custom Workflow Activities, Mobile and more.

For more information, view the CRM Top 10 Overview