Unveiling the hidden features of Dynamics 365 that can transform your customer relationship management processes.
In today’s rapidly changing business world, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become an invaluable tool for organizations looking to enhance customer interactions, streamline processes, and boost overall efficiency. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM has quickly become one of the most popular systems on the market. In fact, over 80% of Fortune 500 companies rely on the platform to streamline their customer relationship management processes.
The platform, while renowned for its robust features, holds several under-the-radar capabilities that can significantly impact businesses. Below, we’ll discuss how these hidden gems can revolutionize the way businesses operate and interact with their customers.
1. Enhanced Email Engagement
Beyond the standard contact management and sales pipeline tracking, Dynamics 365 CRM offers advanced email engagement features that often go overlooked. Put simply, the solution enables users to track emails, measure customer interactions, and analyze engagement email metrics. This provides organizations with valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors. With this information, businesses can tailor their communication strategies and foster stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers.
2. AI-Driven Insights and Predictive Analytics
One of the lesser-known strengths of Dynamics 365 CRM is its integration of artificial intelligence (AI) for predictive analytics. By leveraging AI algorithms, the CRM system can analyze historical data to predict customer trends, identify potential opportunities, and even forecast sales outcomes. This capability enables businesses to make more informed decisions based on data-driven insights, ultimately driving more successful and strategic initiatives.
3. Social Selling and Integration
In the age of social media dominance, Dynamics 365 CRM goes beyond traditional customer interactions by integrating social selling capabilities. Businesses can monitor social media platforms directly within the CRM interface, allowing for real-time engagement and analysis. This not only strengthens customer connections, but also provides a holistic view of customer interactions across various channels, helping organizations stay ahead of their competitors.
Dynamics 365 and Outlook Integration
To illustrate the power of Dynamics 365 integration capabilities, let's look at how the platform integrates with Outlook. The integration essentially creates powerful synergy between customer relationship management and email communication. This not only enhances productivity, but also fosters collaboration across the enterprise. Additional benefits of the integration include:
Unified view of customer interactions
Effortless email tracking
Calendar synchronization
Streamlined task management
Enhanced email templates
Improved user adoption
4. “Voice of the Customer” Feedback
Dynamics 365 CRM includes a robust “Voice of the Customer” feature, allowing businesses to create and send out surveys directly from the CRM platform. This under-the-radar capability enables organizations to gather feedback, measure customer satisfaction, and identify areas for improvement. The seamless integration of survey responses into the CRM system ensures that customer insights are readily available for analysis and action.
5. Document Generation and Automation
Efficient document generation and automation are overlooked, but Dynamics 365 excels in this aspect. Users can create templates for standard documents, such as quotes, proposals, and contracts, automating the generation process. This not only saves time but also ensures consistency in communication. The ability to merge CRM data into these templates streamlines the document creation workflow, enhancing professionalism and reducing errors.
6. Customized Views
Creating customized views is a powerful feature within Dynamics 365 CRM. This feature allows users to tailor the CRM interface to match their specific needs. Whether it’s designing views for sales opportunities, customer service cases, or marketing campaigns, the ability to customize and share views enhances user experience and ensures that teams can focus on the information most relevant to their roles. This flexibility increases productivity and a more user-friendly CRM environment.
Creating Views in Dynamics 365
To take advantage of the customized views in Dynamics 365, let’s review how to create a new view and edit an existing view.
To create a new view, follow the steps below:
From a list view for a specific entity, on the command bar, select ‘New System View’.
In the ‘View Properties’ box, input a name for the view. You can also provide a description for the view if desired.
Close the properties dialog box and select one of the following options:
Choose and configure columns
Edit filter criteria
Configure sorting
Once finished, select ‘Save and Close’.
Finally, select ‘Publish All Customizations’.
To edit a view, follow these steps:
Open solution explorer. In the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement app, select Settings > Settings > Customizations > Customize the System.
Under ‘Components’, expand ‘Entities’, and then expand the entity you want.
Select ‘Views’.
Double-click on the view you want to edit.
To change the name or description, select ‘View Properties’.
Choose from the following options:
Choose and configure columns
Edit filter criteria
Configure sorting
Once done, select ‘Save and Close’.
Finally, ‘Publish All Customizations’.
Unlock the Power of Dynamics 365 with JourneyTEAM
While the basic functionalities of Dynamics 365 CRM are well known, it’s essential to explore the platform’s hidden capabilities—especially considering they can elevate your business operations. Improving customer relationships, encouraging data-driven decision-making, and increasing business efficiency is only the beginning of what the solution can offer
To help you take full advantage of the platform’s features, there’s JourneyTEAM. Our team of experts can help you tailor the solution to fit your specific needs and business goals. Additionally, we’ll ensure you’re aware of all the hidden capabilities of the platform.
Said Kaie Leavitt, CRM Specialist at JourneyTEAM, “With such a wide range of features in Dynamics 365, it’s easy to forget some of the most beneficial. Personal views empower users to create their own custom queries and share them with others in the system, which helps users easily drill down to just the data they’re interested in seeing. Dynamics and Outlook can be integrated to show your users the most recent interactions they have had with a customer. Both of these features can be used to boost user adoption by providing a more personalized interface that meets their needs.”