I have this question asked alot during matrix comparisons of CRM technologies as there are plenty of other solutions that exist out there to choose from, but Microsoft Dynamics CRM always is in the top choice.
So what makes Microsoft Dynamics CRM such a popular tool with it’s users? Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a complete enterprise level solution to handle not only your sales service and marketing needs, but all of your internal businesses processes. The platform integrates out of the box with the Microsoft Office suite. One of it’s best features is flexibility that allows the product to be tailored to your companies specific needs.
Integration with Microsoft Office
One of the most important aspects of customer relationship software is ease of integration with other applications that are used in the office. For example chances are that your sales team uses outlook or office 365 these days to send business related emails to and from your organizations customers. The great thing is that both of these easily integrate with CRM.
Productivity
Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows users the ability to track emails that you receive during normal day to day business, and link them easily to your contacts and accounts without leaving your business mail inbox.
The same goes with being able to integrate your appointments, manage tasks, or share other activity details like appointments with a customer with your team members.
Sales reps can even lookup most information about company accounts and contacts without ever leaving their inbox helping with productivity day to day.
Microsoft CRM is Mobile Friendly
There is a Mobile app for CRM as well that allows sales teams on the go to quickly lookup critical information with a customer such as their purchases, contracts, or recent cases on a specific product as well. All without having to pull out their full laptop out of their bookbag, or connecting through the VPN to get the information needed for a client.
The platform is easy to tailor to your needs
Most CRM’s provide a way to create fields on a form that you need to include, change the layout, or update the way information comes up when you search for it.
However, Microsoft Dynamics CRM goes way beyond that. It is an entire platform designed to allow you to tailor it exactly to your business processes. Sure there are some baked in modules that are offered straight out of the box but there is no need to try and work your processes into a CRM solution.
There are also multiple levels of customization as well from regular user to power user to developer. If you can imagine what you want then CRM can pretty much do it. I don’t say that lightly as i have worked now with the platform since version 3.0, which at the time of this post is over 15 years.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Platform is easy to integrate with
One of the key value add propositions is the ease of integration that exists in the platform, especially if you are on the Dynamics 365 platform. The capabilities of Microsoft Flow and the power stack to provide integrations from other cloud apps is growing tremendously and reshaping how we do business today and in the future.
CRM even has a great path if you have legacy data from other systems that you would like to surface to users using the CRM platform. I have built many integrations with Scribe (now Tibco), KingsWay, or even coded a simple SSIS integration with SQL to push data to and from Dynamics.
The product has built-in workflow capabilities
Easily create workflows to validate data, assist with approval processes, or to handle specific tasks in your organization the sky is the limit. You can create new records on the fly when specific actions are triggered, create notifications about important events, or help automate some of your current processes that require lots of manual entry today.
If the out of the box workflows don’t cut it, guess what… there is also options for that so you will not feel “boxed in” a CRM that you couldn’t solve for or find a work around to your use case.
Self service to your important business data
Sure, it is great to get information into your CRM, but if your users cannot figure out how to get it out that makes it really difficult to analyze. Data from CRM can be easily exported into Excel for analysis in multiple ways from static worksheets to dynamic refreshing datasets that your CLevels and executives can pivot on until their hearts are content.
There is also report writing capabilities that can be expanded upon with reporting services, and an easy way to link your CRM data directly into Microsoft’s PowerBI reporting Platform.
Incredible growth and feature expansion with every new CRM release
If you haven’t taken a look at the new Dynamics 365, the power platform, and the changes that have occurred in the release lately the you should check into Microsofts Current Release Roadmap for Dynamics CRM 365.
The velocity and value of the changes they are bringing into the marketplace is truly staggering and few companies can match the scope or breadth of the solution today.
Here are just a few things from my experiences i have witnessed using, deploying, and supporting the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. I am sure that there is more that can be stated, but these are the things that are top of mind when thinking of the value add proposition that the technology brings to organization that deploy the solution.