Customers are at the heart of every business, without them even the best products or services will fail. How you manage your customer relationships affects your business growth and overall success. This is why information technology systems have developed solutions to simplify and streamline customer data storage and analysis, share customer information between team members, and track customer interactions.

Customer relationship management (CRM) isn’t just an application of technology, it’s a business philosophy too. It helps businesses better understand their customer’s needs and behaviours so they can build stronger relationships with them.

Acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones are fundamental goals for a business. Implementing CRM solutions to centralise and optimise your customer data ensures that you develop strategies that can effectively build your customer base in the long term.

Utilising a CRM system for your business can help you:

• • Know your customer base better
• • Improve the speed and quality of your customer communication
• • Anticipate customer immediate and future needs
• • Retain existing customers and prospects through helpful engagement and contact
• • Segment your customers for target communications and marketing strategies
• • Provide accurate and high-quality service no matter which staff member is assisting them with historical records of purchases and conversations

Statistics show that CRM tools are among the top three tools and technologies for creating personalised interactions with customers, to build loyalty and create marketing strategies with a better return on investment (ROI). In fact, 91% of companies with more than 11 employees use a CRM system.

Aside from helping businesses learn more about their target customers, CRM also organises and optimises certain aspects of your business processes including marketing analytics and customer data. This allows you to streamline your management system while increasing customer satisfaction.

What is customer relationship management (CRM)?

CRM systems essentially collect, store, access, then analyse information from multiple channels such as emails and social media platforms to assist you in better managing your customer relationships. It also makes your customer data easily accessible between team members. 

A customer relationship management system is focused on helping you manage both business and customer interactions. By improving your business relationships with CRM software solutions, you build stronger connections—from your customers and colleagues to your suppliers and service providers.

Aside from storing relevant customer information, a CRM solution can help you identify sales leads, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns. Utilising CRM gives your business an advantage over competitors because you can develop more targeted strategies to build and widen your customer base. It also ensures that everyone in your team is working more efficiently so that your business can produce great results with less human effort.

Why you should use Microsoft Dynamics 365 for your CRM solutions

There are so many CRM software providers out there, and they aren’t all equal. Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a CRM software solution that is customisable and flexible, ensuring that it can meet different business requirements regardless of an organisation’s size and scale. Depending on your business needs, you can choose Microsoft solutions with a stand-alone application or multiple CRM tools to develop an integrated solution.

Dynamics 365 has the ability to address several relevant areas within customer relationship management including marketing and sales, customer service, field service, and project service automation. 

From small businesses and mid-sized enterprises to established companies, there are many reasons customers prefer using Microsoft Dynamics 365 to implement their CRM solutions:

• • It has an intuitive and easy to use interface that makes it accessible to every staff member, regardless of their knowledge level in CRM systems.
• • It can be integrated with other Microsoft products to streamline business processes.
• • It provides built-in tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator and assistant to increase productivity.
• • Its flexible structure and deployment options can be tailored to meet any company’s needs.

5 areas Microsoft Dynamics 365 can improve your CRM

We’ve already mentioned the long list of benefits CRM provides. By utilising Microsoft Dynamics 365 as your customer relationship management system, you can target five areas in your business.

1. Dynamics 365 Marketing

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing focuses on improving the customer journey from beginning to end. It builds leads for your team by running multichannel campaigns such as email marketing, content, and events. It personalises the buyer experiences by customising the journey based on previous user engagement, ensuring that you’re consistently delivering targeted content in the right channels. 

The CRM’s customisable platform and simplified interface give you and your team the capability to respond quickly to sudden changes. It provides real-time data analysis about customers, allowing the team to make better business decisions based on the insight you gain from this information.

It also features integrated planning and tracking tools that can be integrated with existing apps or services you use, enabling your sales and marketing team to align their goals and develop a more streamlined process to achieve them. 

2. Dynamics 365 Sales

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, your business can utilise a modern and adaptable platform that can boost your digital selling process as well as your sales team’s productivity and performance. 

It features artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that allow you to easily track customer relationships and automate sales execution, which enables your sales team to focus on top-priority leads. It also develops a sales pipeline, highlighting relevant leads and prospects from different sources to help you develop more targeted sales strategies based on what works.

Dynamics 365 Sales maximises the digital potential of your selling journey by helping you find your ideal prospects and assisting you in the next step to take in developing customer relationships.

3. Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Increasing and maintaining customer satisfaction is key in a great CRM system and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help you stay in touch with your customers and gauge their satisfaction more accurately. 

It provides tools for agents that will allow them to resolve issues more quickly, using intelligent automation to guide them towards the best outcome while having the capability to work with existing systems within your business. This ensures that your customers can connect with you more easily across different channels, while AI service bots assist in addressing issues with data analysis and predictive care. 

Not only does this serve more of your customers efficiently, but it also empowers your customer service agents to focus on higher-priority interactions. 

Like every tool in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Customer Service also enables you to streamline your processes. It onboards new agents with in-app learning options and analyses service trends for real-time feedback. You can offer more personalised customer service based on insights from collected data such as survey feedback, discussion forums, and social listening. 

4. Dynamics 365 Field Service

Utilising Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service lets you solve problems before your customers even notice them, using the Internet of Things (IoT) to detect service-related issues. 

It reduces maintenance costs, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks such as recording work orders and scheduling and dispatching them. It also improves operational efficiency by streamlining your scheduling, inventory management, and on-site processes. 

Dynamics 365 Field Service takes note of individual customer preferences and service history so that you can provide a more personalised experience for them in the future. It also offers quick and transparent communications and tracking functionalities to keep customers connected to field agents, increasing customer trust and also service efficiency. 

5. Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation

For your CRM solution to work well, it’s important to build internal processes to benefit your own team. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation can help you and your staff optimise resources by improving your project management and increasing impactful collaborations. 

It features project planning capabilities and intuitive dashboards that can showcase your costs and revenue, allowing you to forecast resource demands and profitability. It also has real-time dashboards set to measure utilisation, ensuring that you make the most out of your most valuable resources.

Because Dynamics 365 can be integrated with Microsoft Office 365 applications, it’s much easier for your team to collaborate with each other, increasing their overall productivity. You can also simplify your current contract-signing process and discuss sign-offs and purchases with your customers through a secure portal.Customer relationship management is an important aspect of your business success, given that customers can now easily connect with the brands they love and support. If you’re looking to implement CRM solutions that guarantee results, give us a call now.