#crm2015 crm microsoftdynamicscrm cloud

[zylgwyn-lucas]

Latest release for Spring 2015 of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

We are proud to announce the latest general availability for spring 2015 worldwide of Dynamics CRM. It seems that this news get everyone exciting.

This update lights up new opportunity for all the CRM customers to enhance their business productivity with CRM. Microsoft continues to unlock more potential with solutions that work seamlessly together, improving tools that familiar to most of the preferred users and preferred sales professional’s user.

First release we would like to announce is the updated contextual customer information tools, as follows:

CRM App for Outlook

What it means for existing users & sales professionals? Your sales team is now able to create sales records directly from Outlook and to see relevant, contextual information such as sales activities, cases, and opportunities for the email sender and recipients.

Embedded OneNote

Other good news for the Sales professional. They can now create and view notes containing text, photos, voice, spreadsheets, and free – form drawings, all within Account, Opportunity, or any other record that currently been working on.

Analysis Function in Excel

Perform analysis in Excel directly within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. User can switch between applications during a task work outside CRM application.

Marketing

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketing is an integrated marketing management solution for marketing day to day operation starts from planning to execution across all preferred channels.

Marketing team is able to scale their multiple marketing activities across different channels with this application. It brings together sales and marketing for effective collaboration and better visibility in both activities that deliver competitive edge in business operation of a company.

The latest update for this particular segment is mainly around campaign and lead management. Here are few highlights:

Email Marketing & Lead Management

Create better quality leads list with double opt – in option and contact duplication feature in the Dynamics Marketing CRM. Furthermore, preferred marketing user can now use advance lead scoring modelling and analysis within the CRM environment. Together, marketers can create clean list and bring more relevancy into their marketing campaign.

Campaign Management

Improved segmentation feature using lead – based queries for marketing contacts. And they enable task sync (it’s customisable field in CRM)

Watch a video showcase about more awesome features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Marketing such as Email Tracking, Office365 Groups, Document Management, Social Media Listening and other capabilities here.

[zylgwyn-lucas]

Insider’s Guide to Managing Service Level Agreements with Dynamics CRM 2015

How do you as a business manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs)? How can you utilise Dynamics CRM to manage multiple SLAs against a Case and monitor the performance against them? This post will discuss the ins and outs of setting up and working with SLAs from a business perspective.

Dynamics CRM 2015 provides the ability to manage Sales activity, Marketing activity and Service Activity. This post will focus on Service activity with a customer and specifically related to creating and managing SLAs.

An SLA or Service Level Agreement determines the level of service you will provide your customers. A level of service can be dependent on a number of factors including but not limited to:

-          Whether the Customer is entitled to service via an entitlement. An entitlement could be a something you sell or is included in a product offering i.e. you get 9-5 service with a response time of 8 hours

-          Based on an attribute of the customer i.e. high value customers get x service level and low value customers get y service level

-          Based on an attribute on the Case i.e. if the Priority or Severity is high then provide x level of service

-          Different channels of communications could drive a different level of service i.e. a post on Twitter could require a response in under 30 mins, whereby a response via email requires a response in 4 hours

-          Based on any other attribute related to the Case or associated records i.e. Customer details, product details etc.

As an organisation, you want to measure your levels of service to ensure that you are performing well against them and ideally meeting them. If you are not meeting them you want to be able to monitor why you are not i.e. is a particular team or user, or customer type or product type that is the issue.

Dynamics CRM 2015 enables you to both create multiple SLAs aligned to any attribute, channel or entitlement and monitor through views and charts on how you are performing against them.

Types of SLAs

Dynamics CRM 2015, provides for 2 SLA types as below:

-          Standard – standard SLAs were introduced as part of the CRM 2013 – Q2 2014 Spring release (Leo). They required a number of manual steps to get working, for example including in the warning actions updating the SLA status field appropriately, so that the timer field can behave as expected.

-          Enhanced – enhanced SLAs were introduced with the CRM 2015 release and removed some of the manual processes of the standard and introduced a number of new enhanced features.

Creating an Enhanced SLA

To create an enhanced SLA you need to have first created your customer calendar schedules if applicable so that they can be selected as part of the SLA definition.

You should consider the following before creating SLAs:

-          If a customer does not have an entitlement what default SLAs should be applied? Only one default SLA can exist in the system, so all general SLA business rules will need to be included in the default SLA.

-          Should the SLA dates be calculated off the created or modified date?

-          Do we allow SLAs to be paused and if so what statuses are permitted?

-          How will my SLAs be structured? I.e. by product, by customer segment, by customer value, by type of case, by entitlement type, by priority / severity. It is crucial to have consistency of rules so that you and your customers understand how they applied.

-          What should happen if an SLA is nearing the warning time or failure time, what processes should be initiated on failure for example and does it depend on the type of SLA?