My Microsoft Dynamics 365 Review
December 28, 2018

My Microsoft Dynamics 365 Review

Lukasz Kokot | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Online

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is being used across the whole Americas Division in our organization by several departments. It's being used by our customer service, sales, and marketing departments. It addressed the issue we previously had with managing our customer service tickets. Prior to implementing Dynamics in our organization, we weren't able to track our tickets or even know how many tickets each rep dealt with on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
  • Dynamics does a really good job integrating with other applications. Exchange for example-- within minutes (an admin account is required) you can integrate Dynamics with Exchange so the application can start sending out emails from any user or service/department mailbox to customers. Once Server Side Sync is set up, Dynamics can also start email ingestion without any issues. Other applications can be integrated into Dynamics this easily as well, Microsoft or not.
  • Another thing that Dynamics does very well is case management. You can use Dynamics to manage every aspect of your customer service experience without any issues. Customer service reps can create cases automatically from emails, phone calls, or create them manually and communicate with the customers without leaving the application.
  • Managing accounts is yet another thing Dynamics 365 does a really good job with. You can create custom account forms that have all the information you need for your accounts. You can also connect your accounts to contacts and stakeholders so it can be easily determined what account is associated with a specific email address or phone number.
  • Dynamics 365 mobile app requires some improvements in my opinion. The overall performance of the app can be at times sluggish (even on Wi-Fi) and the updates that need to be downloaded when the app is opened are too frequent and take too long to download.
  • With Dynamics 365 Online the back-end access is limited which makes simple tasks difficult to complete at times. With the online version, admins don’t have access to the SQL databases so finding out things such as storage allocation difficult since it requires creating a Microsoft Premier ticket, which in my opinion has room for improvement.
  • The workflows in Dynamics 365 work in a way where only one can be run at a time, so if you have configured several of them to run, say to send out several emails, they will not run in parallel. The second one will have to wait for the first one to finish before it can be executed. I think that needs improvement since the application should be able to run several workflows at the same time.
  • Dynamics 365 had the positive impact on our business by letting us implement the same business processes for customer service across all business units and brands across our Americas Division (including Canada, Mexico, and Columbia); there are over 50 business units and or brands.
  • It also let us put standards in place across all the customer service departments across the Americas Division since they all are using Dynamics 365.
  • Lastly, Dynamics 365 provided a positive return on investment by providing our sales force with the information they need when getting to a business meeting with a new or existing client (account) that previously they would need to research beforehand now can be accessed at any time on their mobile device.
While comparing Dynamics 365 to Salesforce.com we found that the two were very similar. We also found that both had pretty much the same list of available features, but the Dynamics 365 licensing was noticeably cheap than Salesforce.com. With having as large a sales force as our business does, as well as large customer service departments, it was an easy decision to pick Dynamics 365. Why spend more money for the same features?
In my opinion, a scenario where a business has a large sales force with hundreds or even thousands of accounts and sales reps that need the information to be available to them at any moment is what Dynamics 365 is well suited for. Also, when a company needs to track what the salespeople do with those accounts and opportunities is another example of something Dynamics 365 is well suited for.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Feature Ratings

Customer data management / contact management
9
Workflow management
4
Territory management
5
Opportunity management
9
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
10
Contract management
6
Quote & order management
6
Interaction tracking
9
Channel / partner relationship management
8
Case management
10
Call center management
10
Help desk management
10
Lead management
4
Email marketing
4
Task management
3
Billing and invoicing management
3
Reporting
3
Forecasting
4
Pipeline visualization
4
Customizable reports
4
Custom fields
9
Custom objects
9
Scripting environment
7
API for custom integration
9
Role-based user permissions
10
Single sign-on capability
10
Social data
7
Social engagement
8
Marketing automation
7
Compensation management
6
Mobile access
4