Modern businesses are faced with many challenges. Increased competition, tighter margins, and growing customer expectations – these are just a few of the hurdles they must overcome to succeed. To achieve this, UK businesses are turning to technology solutions that support better customer relationship management (CRM).
While CRMs are nothing new, recent technology advances mean that they can be used to scale operations, automate tasks, enable strategic decision-making, and much more. But not all CRMs are created equal, and in recent years, the gap between good and great CRM solutions has widened significantly. Which begs the question, what does a great CRM look like today?
In our experience, it looks like Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. It’s one of the most popular solutions on the market today, because it:
Has enterprise-grade CRM and security features, at an SME-friendly price point.
Is highly customisable and can be tailored to meet specific industry and compliance requirements.
Scales with your business, so that you can adjust usage and extend capabilities whenever needed.
To help businesses understand the value of Dynamics 365 CRM, we’re looking at the biggest benefits the solution brings.
For a single end-to-end solution, Dynamics 365 has an impressive range of features that support every major function within a business. It can drive customer service improvements, enable sales and marketing teams with automations, and facilitate decision-making with AI-powered insights.
The core everyday Dynamics 365 solution set includes:
Customer Service teams benefit from a world-class service toolkit, which makes managing customer issues and queries easier than ever. It includes automated summaries of customer interactions and records, built-in case management, enquiry routing, knowledge base recommendations, and even self-serve portals for customers.
Sales teams benefit from automations and insights that save time, allowing them to focus on high-priority deals and converting leads to sales. This includes opportunity tracking capabilities, automated lead scoring and qualification, guided selling for deals, and AI-powered forecasting.
Dynamics 365’s foundational CRM allows marketing teams to deliver marketing campaigns at scale, with less manual effort than ever before. There are powerful automations that save time, targeted messaging capabilities for personalising content, and advanced analytics & reporting for iteration and improvement over time.
Dynamics 365 integrates natively with the entire Microsoft suite, as well as most third-party apps, enabling businesses to unlock new capabilities and access end-to-end business data in real-time. This increases the return on investment from your existing Microsoft solutions as well as Dynamics 365 itself (and any new Microsoft technologies you invest in!).
As such, it’s a natural choice for many UK businesses that have already invested in solutions such as Office 365, Microsoft 365, Business Central or Power Platform. Best of all, many of these integrations are low-code or require minimal support from IT.
Some of the more common Microsoft integrations into Dynamics 365 include:
Microsoft 365 – To allow teams to collaborate in the apps they already work in, for example, by enabling salespeople to update CRM records directly from their Outlook inbox.
Copilot – To reduce time spent on repetitive manual processes and admin by automating tasks. For example, by creating automated summaries of customer interactions & internal meetings or drafting emails to customers.
Business Central – To bridge the gap between your CRM and ERP solution and enhance collaboration between sales, finance, and operations.
Power Platform – To create customised, real-time dashboards using data from multiple functions and systems.
Third-party apps – To integrate your CRM with the technologies your business values most, like DocuSign, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, and more.
Every organisation has unique challenges and processes, which Dynamics 365 can accommodate. The customisations are low code too, which empowers teams while lightening the burden on IT.
Customisation options include:
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 users. This makes data capture more reliable and ensures reporting is consistent.
Dynamics 365 benefits from modular adoption, which means that you can start with essential CRM features and add new capabilities over time.
This keeps the initial costs and complexities to a minimum and ensures businesses only pay for features they’ll actually use. But it also leaves room to grow and extend capabilities as you realise value from the solution or your requirements evolve – allowing the CRM to scale with your business.
Modular adoption can accelerate time-to-value with Dynamics 365, too. Focusing on a specific set of tools simplifies onboarding and employee training, ensuring that teams quickly benefit from the CRM and that businesses see value early on.
Finally, modular adoption is also incredibly useful for businesses that want to transition from legacy systems. It allows IT and senior leaders to plan a technology roadmap well in advance and make changes, even at the last second, without being locked into a rigid contract or incurring penalties.
If you expect your business to grow, have an existing Microsoft investment, or want to benefit from enterprise-grade CRM features at an SME-friendly price point, Dynamics 365 is the natural choice.
To discuss your current CRM setup or how Dynamics 365 would fit in your organisation, contact our expert team.