Item: Microsoft Dynamics 365
Rating: 9
Author: Marty Adler

Overall Satisfaction

Pros and Cons

Pros

Dynamics CRM Online helps provide a view of business development opportunity, activity and cross sale across the firm.
Dynamics CRM Online helps business units manage relationships better to support communications and touches.
Dynamics CRM is providing our delivery teams with insights to vet opportunities and provide proper resource and budget.
Users appreciate the close integration with Outlook and are just beginning to realize the 2013 version's app integration with tablets.

Cons

Onboard reporting and charts/dashboards can be limited and could still use some enhancement to improve design, usability, and visualization of data.
CRM Online inherently comes with concerns about data location, security and at times performance lags. Database backup for online is a challenge.
While integration is tight and users appreciate it, Outlook Client can be buggy and can affect Outlook performance at times.
CRM Online alleviates the need to deal with MSFT enterprise agreements, but if you go with On Prem or Hosted, EA's are a pain to navigate and even MSFT has problems with them.

Return on Investment

Better, aggregated method of data capture for the firm's client and sales info.
More efficient for email campaign management tied to contacts.
Has enhanced corporate reporting for pipeline and forecast across the firm.

Familiarity and ease of use for users and integration with business apps they utilize daily, not to mention the corporate investment in the Microsoft stack including O365 and SharePoint. CRM 2013 is really nice and Microsoft has added some great features to make it more social for the firm's knowledge share, even easier to use, and especially for the roll-up view sales executives crave. The Dynamics CRM mobile roll out will only enhance the experience for all users and execs who depend on the data.

Likelihood to Recommend

All pretty obvious, but so important: get the organization's buy-in before buying (or at least a star business unit to start with), make sure you have at least one executive stakeholder involved and actively engaged, include users in the design and roll out, provide helpful training, tips and on demand support, and work with the entire team to come up with ways to utilize the dashboards and reporting, because that's what everyone really wants out of CRM (plus the insights will drive the importance of accurate data). CRM adoption is obviously quite dependent on the culture, process and expectations of the entire organization.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

As said many times before..."CRM is a journey" and Dynamics CRM is a nice way to take it...

Software Version

Modules Used