Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.
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Microsoft Dynamics 365
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a CRM providing sales, marketing, and service functionality. It is offered as SaaS and on-premise. Dynamics 365 is part of the larger Dynamics suite of business intelligence and ERP products.
Braze is a fantastic tool if you're looking to build a large number of CRM journeys using complex canvas structures and maximising use of customer data to segment and personalise. There are numerous tools to ensure each channel is maximising impact and engagement. Braze offers great features for testing, managing message frequency and control groups and using dynamic attributes and liquid code. If you're looking to limit your use to single-send campaigns with no or few automations, I don't think this is the right tool. From my experience, many Braze users also use external tools for analytics rather than Braze's native analytics.
Provides our company access to manage and customize the folds tailored to our needs. We needed to have certain paragraphs on certain paperwork per customer. MD 365 has those options to customize where needed and remove when not. The system is easy to navigate, and training can be done in a matter of days, even without prior knowledge of the system or similar systems.
Canvas feature has been really good for creating customer journey paths and long-term messaging campaigns.
They have been addressing feature requests to continue to improve the Canvas feature. One of the simplest but most-handy features is allowing Delay steps wait for a very specific date on a calendar -- so you can plan seasonal campaigns or when you have evergreen-style drip campaigns it allows for avoiding public holidays/etc.
The catalog feature provides a lot of use-cases and flexibility for personalizing comms or customizing comms for whitelabeled versions of our standard comms (for our B2B2C scenarios).
We use the catalog as a repository of our B2B2C brand info, messaging customization - it basically allows us to offer a whitelabeled configurable version of our optimized automated in-life comms in the branding of our b2b customers.
Best to use for AP - like in our organization, there are plenty of AP bills, so with Dynamics, we can quickly enter the same into the Excel utility, which means CSV-based upload, and then we can easily upload the same to the software. It's a time saver.
Best for Bank reconciliation - MS Dynamics makes Bank reconciliation easy. Banks can easily sync with software and easily get reconciled.
Generating invoices to customers and directly sending them to their inbox is easy with this software.
Enabling GIF/videos to be directly uploaded on to Braze's platform
Easier way of creating canvases; right now it is too complex for someone new who is starting off in the company to understand what things do and where things are
Ability to track duplicate user profiles within the entire audience segment
Automated deduplicating email addresses/phone numbers in each targeting segment; right now it's done manually after extracting csv files
Small learning curve, obviously. You won't figure this out in a day, a week, or even a month. But given time, you can learn to be an expert. Or you can always get a consultant or hire in somebody. But learning the tool isn't out of the questions by any means.
Licensing can be confusing at times and isn't cheap, but it is cheaper than Salesforce. Plus no additional fees for data calls to better integrate your D365 CE data with other systems.
The Classic user interface left a bit to be desired, but now with the much-improved Unified Interface, the web client and the mobile client look the same, much more modern, and have more flexibility and power behind them for customizers as well.
We are on a mission for an omnichannel experience for our customers and are already making good progress with Braze able to fully support and optimise this
CRM has allowed us to keep all of our data in one place that is easy for all users within the company to view. I came into the company after they had been using CRM for about 4 years. They have all said that since we have used this it has helped us control work processes better, it has allowed us to be able to track things so much better, and has been something that has helped unite many processes that used to be all over the place. We are currently using CRM 4.0 and are planning on upgrading in the next 18 months to the 2011 version. Support for 4.0 is almost all but dried up. Understandably so. Some of the customization we have done, and a plugins we use, are now contained within the 2011 version so we are looking forward to that upgrade. We use an email marketing company as well, and they primarily support the 2011 version, but their product connects and is integrated within CRM. This is a great benefit as well so that all of our marketing information can be contained in one location.
It is an easy-to-understand platform, thanks to its design and accessibility. You can, for example, easily find any users and their data, check exact volumes of segments, follow the history of messages sent, and create reports. We can connect Braze with other platforms for analysis or email design (Snowflake, Hightouch, Stripo...).
The usability is easily adopted for users familiar with other Microsoft products. Dynamics 365 has several interfaces that cross over browsers and tablets. These multiple interfaces will be phased out and updated to a single unified interface eventually to provide the same usability across all devices. The backend configurations is slowly improving with the introduction of PowerApps compared to pre-D365 Online versions
Very responsive and helpful on simple questions, but not great other than that. They do not have a way for the customer/user to escalate a ticket. You have to contact your rep and in some cases, they don't respond within 24 hours so you have no idea if they have escalated it. There is no phone number for an urgent issue - you have to rely on email
Our partner, Ledgeview Partners has been FANTASTIC to work with. They are always timely in their response and have taken time to understand our business and our specific needs. We've made a lot of advanced customizations and they have been a great help in making those updates.
We used a data warehouse to house our data, and our IT team and implementation vendor worked diligently ahead of time to construct idea implementation plans. Out of millions of records- we had less than a dozen errors, which is remarkable. My major insight is simply having a group of completely devoted individuals working towards your goal who fully understand the desired outcome. Focused resources for implementation season are critical to success.
Braze is just the best one when it comes to aesthetics and usability, which matter when you're working every day, making complex or even simple changes to highly contextual campaigns for multiple stakeholders. Even without following tutorials, you just get it instantly and start crafting journeys very quickly. And they continue to keep adding new features at a rapid pace, so credit where it's due.
Microsoft Dynamics was part of a system overhaul for a local school, and we looked at many products. If we had used it for a company with low turnover, then it might have been more feasible. They needed something a new person could learn quickly, someone who might also be learning marketing terms at the same time - especially if there is nobody to train the individual now expected to know the system. Similar issues occurred with all of these programs (we called it being too big for their britches), and one of the bigger things we liked was that it is more compatible with MS Office products in both technical and visual appeal. If you have a steady employees who use a CRM consistently, low turnover, and those who are very familiar with Office products, Dynamics would be the smartest option for you. Unfortunately, this was just not true for the school environment
On our purchase, I'd been interrogated about our usage. Our needs are met by Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is simple to use. With so much data and information available, we must ensure that it is presented correctly to managers. Due to a lack of use, we don't have to spend as much money on Salesforce.
My company's preferred program right now is Microsoft Dynamics 365. We use it to keep track of customers and important sales metrics in a streamlined manner. Anyone familiar with CRMs will find the tool extremely useful. Considering that we have a good turnover, this product will be used for its basic segments. As a result, there are few chances of error with Microsoft dynamics because it is so easy to use. Many options for recording data on these leads are available. It meets our needs and pays off.
For those without a centralized, all in one solution for major HR, Finance and other departments, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has vastly improved employee time utilization and profit.
Migrating clients from on-premise to the cloud has reaped benefits including better security, no unscheduled downtime and frequent updates to functionality.
Those transferring from cheaper solutions have lost money in the aim to be better integrated with other Microsoft products and AI they don't really utilize.
