With so many different modules and features, understanding the full potential of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM can be overwhelming. 

Dynamics 365 customer engagement at its core is, of course, a CRM. It helps businesses to organise their interactions with customers from across various communications channels, allowing many users to keep track of past and present customer relationships. 

We all know that having a robust CRM is crucial in sectors where a lot of data can be held on customers. We also know that it is important that the data held within the CRM is easily accessible across several departments. After all a CRM, when used in the correct way, can have a huge impact on the effectiveness and productivity of employees. 

With a solid foundation of data, your CRM can do much more than store the details of your customers. But how do you maximise that data? Well, that is easy: start to look at the other features within Dynamics 365 that use the CRM to deliver operational excellence and enhance the customer experience. 

Empower with Dynamics 365 Sales

The data you have on your customers is more than a record of interactions: you can use it to generate insights for your sales team and even to increase efficiency. 

Relationships sit at the heart of any sales team. As a CRM, Dynamics 365 does a great job of helping keep a track of those relationships. However, if you add Dynamics 365 Sales to your instance of your CRM, you can unlock the full potential of your customer data and relationships: 

• You can identify leads – By drawing information from across your CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales creates a complete picture of prospects which you can use to identity leads
• Keep your people in the loop – Update information in real time, so your sales teams are always working with the most up to date info on customers and prospects
• Rich reporting to help you plan your next move – By using AI to create reports, you can build your own dashboards, highlighting recent activity and using the data to guide your team in future
• Build strong relationships – Dynamics 365 Sales now connects to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, so you can follow what your customers and prospects are doing in real time, basing conversations on information they are already sharing. Dynamics 365 Sales even suggests topics of conversation and gives insight into the relationship health and quality 
• Guide customer communications – Built into Dynamics 365 Sales is an assistant who keeps an eye on your daily actions and communications, helping you to stay on top of your day with insight cards. These provide tailored and actionable insights which can help remind you of things such as when an account has been inactive for a while, identifying email messages that are awaiting reply, alerting you when opportunities are nearing their closing dates and much more. By using the assistant, you can get a heads up on what to do when the time comes to talk to an account, ensuring that the actions you take are the ones best suited to that individual. 

This is only a smattering of the features that Dynamics 365 Sales has and the benefits it can bring. It also enables cross-selling and upselling too. 

Enable with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The customer experience is one of the most important aspects in an organisation. Whilst ensuring that you have the right people on hand to serve your customers, you can make their experience even more memorable by delivering technology that makes the lives of your people easier. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service:

• Engage with customers in whatever way they desire – The COVID-19 pandemic saw many people switch to conducting their business online and that trend is here to stay for many people. But not everyone is the same and no matter which platform the customer wants to use to contact you, you can use Dynamics 365 Customer Service’s omnichannel features to engage with customers wherever they are. 
• Use your customer data to be proactive – With the built in AI in Dynamics 365 Customer Service always working away in the background, you can use the analytics built into the CRM to identify customer trends, notice opportunities and provide insight into what your customers want with bespoke reports, dashboards and data visualisations. 
• Give your customer service teams more time to do what they do best – talk to customers – Having all the customer’s data in the one location means that no matter who they talk to and where, your agents will always have the most up to date information at hand. You can also use the AI within Dynamics 365 Sales to suggest resolutions to calls too, meaning that your employees can be more productive and spend more time talking to customers and less time on admin. 
• Let the customer self-serve – Another great feature is that you can offer self-service support to customers via virtual agents and rich knowledge base portals. Again, this is a productivity tool for your customer service teams, leaving them more time to resolve more complicated issues. 

When you bring together the right people with the right technology you can deliver the kind of customer experience that produces loyalty in your customers. 

Engage with Dynamics 365 Marketing

Sales and Marketing work hand in hand and by bringing your marketing team into Dynamics 365 Marketing they can make use of the rich data you already have in your CRM to create engaging campaigns that target existing customers and prospects. 

Reduce admin time, support your sales teams, create personalised marketing campaigns and turn prospects into customers – reaching the full potential of Dynamics 365. 

• Share data between departments – All the data that sales and customer service have on a customer is vital in marketing too. Plan and personalise campaigns around customer trends, renewal dates and much more by taking full advantage of the data within the CRM to build powerful experiences. 
• Test and learn – Take your marketing efforts to a new level by using the built in A/B testing features to make sure your messaging is right and reacting to the correct audience. 
• Launch email marketing campaigns – Because your Marketing software is part of the CRM, you can create targeted and beautiful email campaigns with the enhance email builder and deliver personalised content relevant to your customer’s needs. 
• Powerful built-in analytics – The real-time analytics you get in Dynamics 365 Marketing allows you to keep on top of campaigns and change things immediately to ensure that your marketing messages are always relevant to the customers you are targeting. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be more than a CRM

Dynamics 365 customer engagement solutions may hold the data on your customers, but as you can see, there are so many ways you can maximise that data to save money, improve productivity and even generate revenue by using many of the other tools and features built into your Dynamics 365 instance. It allows you to maximise the full potential of Dynamics 365. 

If you are keen to see how it works in real life, why not book an exploratory workshop and we’ll show you how you can get the most out of Dynamics 365? Get in touch with us to find out how.