We are not covering the general benefits and application of Customer Relationship Management to your organisation here and are just looking at the technical features and benefits of Microsoft CRM 4.0 software.
Microsoft has looked at the relatively mature CRM marketplace and focussed on three core business areas:
· Marketing for lead generation and progress monitoring of leads until the leads become opportunities and enter the sales cycle. Marketing features can also manage campaigns for marketing lists of existing customers.
· Sales automation allowing for quotations to be made on products with various different pricelists and the promotion of these through to the final order.
· Customer support for tracking support cases for customers who may be on support contracts.
· Service Scheduling for scheduling groups of resources for customer related activities such as engineering visits is fully supported.
Activities form the basic unit of workflow and are usually assigned an owner responsible for carrying it out.
The types of activities comprise:
· Tasks.
· Emails.
· Phone Calls.
· Faxes.
· Letters.
· Appointments.
· Service Activities.
· Campaign Responses.
An elaborate workflow layer has been implemented to allow for sophisticated business processes to be applied to each type of entity (without programming). A sales enquiry task, for example, could automatically escalate to the manager if not responded to within 24 hours.
Activities are integrated with the To Do list and the Calendar in Microsoft Exchange for enterprise wide resource scheduling. This is a major benefit of Microsoft CRM over other software.
CRM integration with Exchange (much improved in CRM 4.0) provides one level of integration with Microsoft Outlook. There is also a plug-in for Outlook which customises the Outlook interface to access the CRM application and control data synchronisation. This is particularly useful for organisations that are already heavy Outlook users as individual emails, tasks, contacts, and appointments can be quickly tracked in CRM. Training costs are also lower if the users are already familiar with using Outlook.
The Laptop version of the CRM Outlook Client installs a series of components allowing for the full CRM experience (on a subset of data) to take place away from the office. Full synchronisation of data occurs on joining back on to the network and clever synchronisation allows customisations to be made available on laptops together with the core CRM functionality.
Microsoft has built a very strong software framework around CRM allowing for customisations to be made by analysts who do not need to have programming expertise:
· Views onto the data and search facilities can be easily customised by the end user and exported into a spreadsheet for simple reporting.
· Workflow can be created against each type of entity to match complex business processes without programming.
· The report designer allows simple reports to be built without programming.
· Sophisticated security can be defined around Users and Business Units.
· New attributes can be easily defined for entities and forms modified.
· New entities can be created and related to existing entities.
Microsoft excels in providing developers with access to the internals of their software applications and CRM is no exception. Organisations with access to programmers can benefit from the following features:
· Existing applications can be integrated with full programmatic access to CRM with the web services software development kit.
· External web pages can be integrated onto forms with the iframe control.
· SQL Server Reporting Services reports can be integrated easily with the CRM user interface.
· Many user interface events can be controlled with plug-ins to alter the default behaviour of CRM. This behaviour can also be synchronised to the laptop client.
· Read-only access directly into the database for integration with a wide range of applications.
· Supplement workflow with code driven functionality.
· Interface with Sharepoint.
· Control the end-user experience with JavaScript programming on forms.
CRM has advanced security based around the ownership of each entity occurrence by a user. Security can be defined to allow users to keep data private or share information with their business unit or the organisation as a whole.
CRM 4.0 also introduces the idea of multi-tenancy where multiple companies (or departments) can have completely independent CRM installations running on the same hardware. This is the basis of the hosted implementation of CRM but can be useful in certain corporate situations especially as each user is licensed to access multiple CRM installations.
There are some issues with Microsoft CRM that need to be overcome for a successful implementation. Most of these arise around issues of user adoption particularly if users have already had experience of other CRM or sales software.
Microsoft have put a lot of effort into integrating Outlook with CRM and Outlook users will require a relatively small amount of training to be able to track contacts, appointments, emails and tasks in CRM. However, many users of CRM will use the application to the full and need training to understand how the application works.
Some specific problems need to be worked around with leads entity:
· Changing the format of the full name after implementation results in inconsistent records as the fullname field is only set when updating a record. This can be fixed programmatically.
· The company name must be entered against a lead even for consumer or retail marketing where there is no company.
· Leads display the fullname on the hyperlink from related records. There should be an option to specify the company name to be displayed here for B2B marketing.
The promotion of leads to opportunities during the sales cycle is one area of confusion which requires considerable thought and training to overcome. Many users are confused by having data for a customer potentially stored in many places. Relevant historical information might be stored in any of the lead, opportunity, contact, or company entities and related activities. Other software packages offer a single view of data for a prospect or customer and this complexity can cause user adoption issues in the early stages of a CRM implementation.
There can be issues where users need to use multiple email addresses to send emails or need to send or copy emails to contacts not entered into CRM. Outlook is more flexible here than the web client (although there is an option related to this in the system settings). Email templates do not have attachments and this type of email needs to be configured with workflow.
Workflow also needs careful planning and can cause user adoption issues (although this is not the fault of the software). On the one hand, workflow needs to be prototyped and tested, particularly for business critical tasks, before rolling out the implementation. On the other hand, complex workflow can bog down user acceptance and requires considerable training effort.
Contracts can be difficult to manage sometimes because they are made read-only once they have been invoiced. This makes it difficult to modify contract details or add new equipment as line items once the contract is live.
There are also some usability issues with Microsoft CRM some of which stem from it's implementation as a web client. The creation of mail merge letters and integration with Office 2007 is tighter from the Outlook client than from the web client for mail merge for example.
Another example that can bog an implementation down is the impracticality of entering large product pricelists using the user interface. At some stage in a complex implementation, programming talent will need to be hired.
Leaving aside cost implications, any organisation wishing to implement CRM which is already a heavy user of Microsoft Exchange and other Microsoft technologies and has access to business analysts to help configure the installation would be well advised to implement Microsoft CRM.
There are however several well established
competitors providing similar functionality and most are more fully featured
out-of-the-box and require less customisation effort.
A small selection is listed below together with a subjective opinion as to
their place in the CRM marketplace:
· ACT! is a great sales and marketing product for small groups of sales people. It is relatively low cost and requires few resources and many sales people are already familiar with it. It allows several databases to be defined easily and consequently is good for running individual campaigns. The software cannot cope with large numbers of users and ACT! is therefore best applied in a sales scenario perhaps with a team of less than 10 persons or where sales people work independently on separate databases.
· Goldmine has a similar history to ACT! and implemented a robust database infrastructure some time ago and is better for larger sales-oriented businesses perhaps up to 40 people.
· Salesforce.com is moving into the CRM marketplace from sales automation and is very popular in the US as a hosted system with a pay-monthly subscription. Microsoft has specifically designed many of the technical features of CRM 4.0 to compete directly against Salesforce.com.
· Accounting vendors often offer a CRM solution to complement their accounting packages and Sage is one such vendor that is strong in the CRM marketplace with Saleslogix and other packages. Note however that sometimes the integration between the CRM and Accounts software is non existent or poor, even though both come from the same vendor.
· Siebel (Oracle) and other vendors offer high end CRM implementations. Again Microsoft are specifically addressing the high end enterprises with 6,000+ seats already possible with Microsoft CRM 3.0.
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