Total visibility on customers
Enhanced analytics and real-time customer data make it easy to identify and prioritise opportunities, while reducing research and follow-up time for employees.
Dynamics 365 CRM
The Definitive Guide to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM
When it comes to customer relationships, Dynamics 365 CRM is built to help businesses do it faster, smarter, and at scale. Download the full guide, or read the highlights below.
Overview
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps businesses build better relationships with customers, clients, and prospects. It combines customer data, communication tools, and automation features on a single unified platform.
For businesses, this means supercharged insights into customer data, streamlined workflows, and enhanced collaboration between teams. For customers, it means better outcomes, as businesses can deliver highly personalised experiences with ease, using automation.
Dynamics 365 has capabilities that enhance customer experiences at each stage of the lifecycle and support every team involved in customer management. Whether that's nurturing leads, managing customers, optimising processes, or automating time-intensive tasks.
Why Dynamics 365
Why choose Dynamics 365 CRM?
"More for less" customer engagement
Through task automation, teams can deliver highly-personalised communications and experiences to customers at scale, without quality loss.
Low-code customisations
Customise Dynamics 365 to meet specific industry or business requirements in a self-serve manner, empowering individuals and minimising the burden on IT teams.
Microsoft integrations
Dynamics 365 CRM has robust integration capabilities with the Microsoft suite and third-party apps. Integrations with Outlook, Power Platform, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams unlock new functionalities that streamline workflows and increase efficiency.
Copilot-enabled
Embedded Copilot features can increase employee productivity and streamline business operations significantly. This includes AI-powered case, record, and workload summaries, auto-generated follow-up emails, and the ability to update CRM data from apps like Outlook and Teams.
Enhanced collaboration
Integrations allow teams to easily collaborate on workflows without ever leaving their native tool.
Core features
The core features of Dynamics 365
Sales automations and opportunity management
Track customers in the sales funnel and qualify leads automatically, with AI lead scoring and automations. Then manage those opportunities with guided selling tools to focus teams on high-value deals.
Analytics, tracking, and forecasting
Use analytics to monitor sales performance in real time. Set up dashboards with real-time data and use forecasting tools to increase visibility on business revenue, trends, and team activity.
World-class customer service toolkit
Get a 360 view of every customer interaction, from service history through to communication and preferences. Use built-in case management, enquiry routing, and knowledge bases to deliver industry-leading customer support, every time.
Next-gen automations
Streamline workloads by automating time-intensive tasks like follow-up emails, reminders, and data entry. Businesses can use time savings to focus on driving growth and revenue, instead of routine administrative tasks.
AI-powered insights
Get teams up to speed with customers faster and make data-driven decisions with ease, by using Copilot to summarise customer interactions and suggest next steps.
Customisable dashboards
Make data and KPI performance more visible across the business and between teams by creating dashboards with real-time customer data from the CRM.
Integrations
Extending CRM capabilities with integrations
There is no doubt that Dynamics 365 is powerful, even as a standalone CRM. But even more value is realised when integrating it with other Microsoft solutions (and even third-party apps). These integrations elevate the CRM from a standalone system to an end-to-end customer management platform.
Popular integrations
The most popular integrations, and the features they unlock
Microsoft 365
An integration with Microsoft 365 allows teams to collaborate in the app they "live in", whether that's Outlook, Teams, Excel, or Word. This increases employee adoption and makes updating the CRM quicker and more accessible. For example, salespeople can update CRM records directly from their Outlook inbox and service agents can collaborate directly in Teams.
Copilot
A Copilot integration with Dynamics 365 reduces manual workload and eliminates time-consuming admin. Teams can use AI to summarise customer interactions, auto-generate follow-up emails, and make data-driven decisions quickly, using AI insights based on customer data.
Business Central
Whilst Business Central has its own limited use CRM, the Dynamics 365 integration bridges the gap between customer engagement and enterprise resource planning, which speeds up quote-to-cash time and makes collaboration between sales and finance incredibly easy. Sales teams could see inventory and pricing information directly in their CRM, while finance teams could access customer history and pipeline data in Business Central.
Power Platform
Dynamics 365 integrates with the entire Power Platform (Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps) stack, meaning teams can use low-code tools to create automations, build dashboards that leverage real-time customer data, and create apps that integrate with Dynamics 365. For example, a business could automate lead-routing by creating an AI-powered workflow that employees simply monitor.
Third-party apps
Dynamics 365 integrates with most relevant third-party platforms, like Mailchimp, DocuSign, and LinkedIn. There are integrations with marketing and communications solutions too, as the CRM can track campaigns and customer outreach activities on third-party apps. This reduces the need for data entry duplication and ensures reporting is consistent and accurate.
One reporting layer
Because integrated apps share the same customer data, reporting stays consistent across sales, service, marketing and finance, without duplicating data entry.
Adoption
Modular adoption and customisation at ease
Adopting Dynamics 365 (or integrating it with existing solutions) is incredibly easy thanks to modular adoption. Through modular adoption, organisations can easily extend the capabilities of their CRM, when needed. This keeps initial costs and complexities to a minimum, while leaving room to add new features when needed.
Adoption in this way reduces time-to-value for new solutions, too. Focusing on a small set of tools for adoption makes onboarding, training, and user-adoption quicker and easier. This means that businesses can build momentum with Dynamics and generate return on investment quickly, before investing further or extending capabilities.
Modular adoption is also valuable for businesses who want to transition from legacy systems, without service interruption. They can plan their adoption roadmap well in advance without committing to a contract, allowing them to make last minute changes without incurring fees.
Every organisation has unique challenges and processes, which can evolve rapidly as the business grows. CRM tools need to be flexible enough to accommodate these changes and robust enough to meet regulatory requirements, even if processes are in flux. Dynamics 365 is highly customisable and has strong self-serve capabilities. This lightens the burden on IT teams and empowers teams to tailor the platform based on their needs.
Customisation
A few of the customisation options available
Forms and fields
Employees can create forms that capture industry or business-specific data consistently and modify them as needed.
Workflows and business rules
Businesses can customise workflows and create rules that automate repetitive tasks, such as auto-assigning leads based on pre-defined parameters or sending auto-alerts to stakeholders when a case is escalated.
Dashboards and views
Dynamics 365 makes it easy to create role-based dashboards for teams and employees. This ensures that goals are clear across the business and employees have clarity on what their contributions should be.
Option sets
Teams can define option sets based on their specific requirements to standardise data entry across all CRM users. This makes data capture more reliable and ensures reporting is consistent.
Getting started
Start your Dynamics 365 CRM journey
Businesses adopt Dynamics 365 to access an enterprise-grade solution with lower upfront fees than competitors and less implementation and maintenance work for tech teams.
They benefit from industry-leading capabilities and unique integrations that transform the CRM from a standalone solution to a wider part of an end-to-end system that drives revenue, return on investment, and business change.
While Dynamics 365 is easy to set up and maintain, to get the most value from your investment, you should speak to a specialist technology partner. They can help you extend CRM capabilities, unlock new features, and plan an effective rollout based on your business needs.
Free guide
Download the definitive guide to Dynamics 365 CRM
Get the full guide, covering what Dynamics 365 CRM is, why businesses choose it, its core features, the integrations that extend it, and how modular adoption keeps costs and complexity down.
FAQ
Dynamics 365 CRM questions we are asked most
No. Dynamics 365 is designed for modular adoption, so organisations can start with the capabilities they need and extend the CRM when required. This keeps initial costs and complexities to a minimum while leaving room to add features later.
Modular adoption reduces time-to-value, because focusing on a small set of tools makes onboarding, training and user-adoption quicker. Businesses build momentum and generate return on investment before investing further or extending capabilities.
Yes. The Business Central integration bridges the gap between customer engagement and enterprise resource planning, which speeds up quote-to-cash time. Sales teams can see inventory and pricing in their CRM, while finance teams access customer history and pipeline data in Business Central.
Yes. Modular adoption is particularly valuable for businesses transitioning from legacy systems, as they can plan their adoption roadmap well in advance and make last minute changes without incurring fees.
Embedded Copilot features deliver AI-powered case, record and workload summaries, auto-generated follow-up emails, and the ability to update CRM data from apps like Outlook and Teams, which increases productivity and streamlines operations.
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