Microsoft Dynamics CRM is on an amazing track record! Microsoft has concluded a strong fiscal year with great growth and influence. Also Microsoft has maintained its Market Leadership too! While the recognition and accolades are nice, what gets me most excited is the impact we are making on our customers – particularly in the area of productivity.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 is designed to allow customer-facing personnel to effectively manage their daily activities with a single experience.
Microsoft has enabled this with the following new capabilities:-
1) An enhanced Excel experience within CRM, including new Excel templates to automate many core tasks. This helps our customers across the board but particularly in the sales as it allows them to do things like calculate commissions or manage a sales forecast. They get analysis and insights directly in their sales processes, without the need to export or switch – just easy toggling to reduce countless steps and eliminate the complexity.
2) The next generation of our CRM app for outlook enables people to track emails, add contacts from within an email or even create new records to track emails through the browser on PC, Mac or mobile browser on a phone.
3) Delve functionality to surface trending content that is most relevant to what a person is working on and what is trending around them. For example, Delve might show popular presentations or proposals to help our customers with their opportunity or account.
4) Contextual documents across SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Office 365 Groups for any CRM record. Our customers can now seamlessly open various Office apps within CRM or the CRM mobile app. We’re making it easy for people to open a document in the CRM app using different application on various devices like Microsoft PowerPoint for iPad or Microsoft Word for iPhone. After reviewing the document, they can return back to the CRM app simply by just tapping on the “back” button.
5) Personalized sales documents based on CRM data are now easier to build with Document Generation. People no longer need to manually extract CRM data for documents such as account summaries, quotes/orders/invoices, product sheets in Word. Automation of this core sales task is another way we’re saving people time.
6) Next generation Cortana integration. Microsoft is taking Cortana integration to the next level by embedding sales activities, accounts and opportunities into Cortana to surface what’s most relevant to salespeople at any time – across both personal and professional sources.
Beyond this, Microsoft is investing in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Social Engagement. The SMS Marketing is being added as one of the marketing channel to the multi-channel campaigns, increasing the sources and sentiment languages for social, and introducing the concept of Intelligent Social with social selling, automated triage and adaptive sentiment.
