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One of the most compelling reasons CRM buyers are attracted to Dynamics CRM is convenience of integration with Outlook. Being able to keep a history of customer communications including emails and appointments is a basic requirement of anyone looking for a CRM, but it’s difficult for other platforms to achieve elegantly and seamlessly.
It makes complete sense that Microsoft, being the author of both Outlook and Dynamics is going to execute on this integration of email, calendar and customer records more intelligently and with greater depth
Other CRM solutions that claim to have email integration will often require the user to send emails and appointments via the CRM interface for them to be tracked and visible in the CRM. This is basically just a connection to Exchange to send emails – not a true Outlook integration. And what a pain! Who wants to send client related emails via one platform (the CRM) and other emails via Outlook?
If you think that’s not a big deal for your employees, think again. A slightly annoying thing, repeated a thousand times, becomes a gigantic pain in the backside. Every time we gain a customer who is migrating from another CRM platform, the number one reason is this frustration – irritated employees who hate to track emails and end up not doing it at all. An empty or incomplete customer record is no use to anyone.
Productive employees need to have the right tools for the job. Familiar tools.
People send emails from Outlook. People make appointments in Outlook. It’s like second nature. Outlook has been the leading email client for a very long time now – even your Nan can use it. Let them use Outlook for email and appointments and let the integration take care of the rest.
There have been various iterations of the CRM and Outlook integration. Microsoft is currently phasing out a ‘client side’ Outlook plugin in favour of a ‘server side’ application. We won’t talk too much about the plugin – because it will probably be superseded by the time you read this article.
Here’s a summary of the things you can do with the integration of Dynamics and Outlook – ranging from basic to bombastic.
1. Track an email or appointment against a client record
Do it while you’re writing it, when you’re about to send it, or after it’s sent. Track received emails the same way. Click the Dynamics 365 icon, find the related record in the list of suggestions, click Track. Easy.
You can track the email against the Contact, the Organisation, an Opportunity, and Order – which record is the most relevant.
Flick over to the CRM record – it’s right there, in its entirety in the list of Activities.
2. Create new CRM records from Outlook
When you go to track an email in Outlook, you might find that one or a few of the recipients, aren’t yet contacts in your CRM. You know this, because the CRM tells you that they don’t yet exist as a record in CRM and prompts you.
Create the CRM contact (or Lead record) right there from Outlook. The integration pulls through your customized CRM form so you’re capturing all of your required fields (unique to your business).
3. Create activities from an email – Tasks, appointments, phone calls
While you’re tracking the email, create any follow-up activities relating to that email or client.
You can create a task which will appear against the record in CRM as well as in your list of tasks in Outlook (or the list of the person you’ve assigned it to). In the same way, create an Appointment which will also appear in both places. Or create a phone call record to remind you to make a follow-up phone call.
4. Track emails in CRM simply by dragging into an Outlook folder
This is a great feature if you’re already in the habit of creating separate Outlook folders for each client. Say you’re working on a sales Opportunity for Jones and Co, simply create an Outlook folder for Jones and Co, set up the mapping rules in CRM – ie. Instruct which CRM record (Organisation, Opportunity, Order) to track the folder against. From then on, every time you drag a received or sent email into that Outlook folder it will be tracked and visible in CRM, like magic.
5. Use email templates for frequent emails
Say you send the same (or similar) emails to clients at different stages of the sales cycle. You can create these as email templates in CRM. Just by creating a new email, setting what the email is regarding, you can see the templates available depending on the record you’re tracking it against. For example, if the record is an Order, it will bring up all of the templates used for Orders.
With a click your email is populated with the template text which can be edited if required and then sent –tracked in CRM at the same time.
This is really just a taste of how easy life can be when your business applications are capable of talking to each other. And it’s only going to get better and smarter. We’re excited by some of the developments coming down the track from Microsoft, making CRM smarter and more interactive with their other products.
Activating the integration for every CRM user literally takes us minutes. We basically turn it on, check your other settings, push it out to the users and you’re off.
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“Just shut-up and do it” and other phrases you’ll need when you have a CRM
You won’t read this in any change management text book. It’s not taught in MBA courses. It’s a little irreverent, but it’s a healthy dose of the truth.
I’ve written other articles about the importance of gaining buy-in from users when going through the process of planning and implementing your CRM. I’ve also written about listening to the user’s seemingly small complaints and acting on them to find a fix – after all little annoyances can seem big when you’re repeating them over and over.
This is all true and valid. But what if there isn’t anything in it for the individual user to use the system consistently and properly – no immediate upside and no obvious downside?
Clearly, any task we ask our users to do in CRM has an ultimate purpose. Sometimes that purpose is downstream and invisible to the person expected to update CRM. Purposes like:
– To produce accurate management reporting from which important decisions can be made.
– To have clean customer information so Marketing don’t embarrass the company by sending emails to ‘Dear ***no first name on form***,’.
– The dispatch team in the warehouse having this crazy obsession with mailing product to valid and deliverable addresses.
– Ensuring automations and workflows are triggered for actioning downstream – so others can do their jobs too.
It would be nice to think that pointing out these impacts would suddenly make everyone motivated to do the right thing and keep on top of their CRM updates. But alas, people are people and will often focus on the big, visible tasks of their role – the things that will bite them immediately if they don’t do them.
While CRM is capable of all sorts of automations that remove some reliance on people to update records, there’s some things that will always require good old manual data entry.
When you implement a CRM it’s usually because your previous method of managing customer information was not working too well. If you came from a world where all your staff needed to do is add a row in a spreadsheet, they may be feeling like things take longer now that you have CRM. Yes, that’s sometimes the case, but remember the good reasons why you needed a CRM in the first place. There are benefits to your business that are being realised through those extra keystrokes.
So, what do you do to make sure it gets done. There’s no deep philosophical answer to this. There comes a point when you just have to say, “Just shut-up and do it because it’s your job”. It’s the grown-up version of “Because I’m the Mummy, and I said so”.
It’s not that you need to treat your people like children, but as it is with encouraging any behaviour, repetitive messaging, constant supervision and negative consequences can sometimes be the only way to make sure consistent updates are made in CRM.
At Beyond CRM, we’re a business too and we use CRM like our business depends on it – because it does. We are by no means immune from these human struggles.
We’re constantly reminding and cajoling to get our team to update CRM. Yes, we check up on the team routinely and audit that records reflect the current state. Are your emails tracked to the CRM record? Is the Order process reflecting the right stage? Is there a record of that phone call? Has that support case been logged? And if not, why not?
This is how we make sure our customer service doesn’t slip and tasks don’t fall through the cracks. It’s how we get good reporting and make informed decisions at a management level.
Some businesses we’ve worked with, use a stick approach. If the sales people don’t enter their Opportunities into CRM and the sale converts, they don’t pay commission on the sale. They live by the catch cry “If it’s not in CRM it didn’t happen”.
Harsh? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely. After all, it’s critical that the business has accurate pipeline reporting and reliable data on opportunity conversion rates to plan for the future. But it’s also critical for sales people that they get paid. They’re funny like that.
This isn’t meant to depress you. A CRM, used properly, is a vital tool for any business. The naked truth is that it takes constant effort (from everyone) to make sure you’re getting the best value out of your investment. The only other option is to not have a CRM at all – and that’s a thought too dreadful to imagine.
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You’ve invested effort and dollars in getting a CRM into your business, so now you have to make it worth your while and extract maximum value. The opportunities are there for the taking.
You might not want to hear this, but your CRM is never finished – there’s always more you could be doing especially when you’re working with a versatile solution like Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
Here are our top 6 ways to make sure you’re extracting the best value from your CRM investment.
1. Get everyone using it … and happy about it
Sounds obvious but the number one reason why CRM implementations are perceived to fail is a lack of user adoption. This often has nothing to do with the technology itself and more to do with human nature.
A new CRM ultimately means change – doing things differently. If ‘different’, doesn’t equal ‘better’ in the minds of your team, you’ll meet resistance. So how to do you get everyone on board? Putting in CRM isn’t about getting the staff to enter in data so management can get a report – you have to make it worthwhile for the team. Think about it from the team’s perspective as they will be thinking WIIFM – “what’s in it for me?”.
So hopefully, you’ve already involved key users upfront in the design of your solution. Listen to those who will be using the system – learn how the best of them would like to do everyday tasks and aim to make your CRM customisations suit the way they need to work – maybe solve some of the grumbles they’ve had in the past. This goes a long way to creating buy in.
Once implemented, it’s great to have a CRM champion in the business. This person should be your ‘super-user’ who can help people out when they need it. They should also have a keen ear to listen out for ways the system could be improved. Seemingly tiny things, like fields not listed in a logical order, can drive people nuts but are so easily fixed. So, fix them and keep them happy.
2. Learn from your data
Over time, as your team follow your processes consistently and complete the required data, you’re building up a gold mine of information you can use. That’s actually the whole point – so start using it.
For example, by consistently recording the competitor on lost sales opportunities, you can see trends and act on them. Where are the emerging competitive threats that you hadn’t noticed before? Who are you winning against more often lately? What’s changed in your competitor’s product set, distribution channels or behaviours that could be driving the trends?
Take the opportunity to look deeper at the clues in your CRM. Do you have bottlenecks in your processes? Is it taking longer than you expected for sales or orders to transition through your process stages? Investigate, learn, change and improve.
Get better open rates and responses on your emails to your customer base by applying and recording segmentation. All it takes is a field on a form in your CRM. A simple drop down can record what segment each customer belongs to – grouping similar customers together. Then you can tailor your communications to each segment and only send them information or offers that are relevant to them. The more relevant your communications are perceived to be, the better the result.
3.Collect the data you need – start NOW
Over time, you’ll trip over pieces of data that you’d love to have and wish you’d thought of earlier. If you’re not collecting the data you need, now is the best time to start. An extra field is cheap and easy to implement so there are no excuses for not collecting the information you need for decision making.
Remember, if you don’t collect it, you can’t use it. If information is valuable and necessary, consider making it a mandatory field when records are created. Even if you already have a CRM full of existing records, it’s not too late. If you implement a new mandatory field, once an existing record is opened, any new mandatory fields need to be completed before it can be saved. So over time, you’re updating the records with the information you need.
There are also some easy ways to go back and complete bulk updates of records or to complete new fields on old records using familiar tools like Excel. Just ask and we’ll show you how or do it for you.
4. Integrate
One of the main reasons for investing in Customer Relationship Management software is to have all of your relevant customer information in the one place. Some important information required to complete the picture might (and rightly so) come from other systems. That’s where integrations come in.
The most basic but also the most powerful of integrations is the standard integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Outlook. It’s seamless – you can even do a lot of CRM functions in Outlook itself. Tracking email communication against the client record in CRM is so easy, and helps build a complete record of your interactions in one place.
If you’re not using this native integration to its full potential, you’re really missing out. On top of this, you really should make sure you’ve got your CRM and SharePoint working together. All of your customer documents can be neatly stored in SharePoint and accessible from CRM.
There’s no end to the third party integrations we can initiate between your CRM and other systems you use. Some are simple plug-ins we can install, some are larger projects requiring custom development.
For example, if you’re using Mail Chimp, you can integrate this with your CRM using a third-party plugin. It’s so cheap – you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.
Other very common integrations we’re asked about are with finance systems. It’s ultimately very handy to have your CRM and finance system share information. It helps your CRM to be a complete customer record, by including summarised financial information, like billing, or by removing double handling of customer data by having CRM update Finance with change of address.
Xero is the most commonly used finance systems by small and medium businesses and we’ve done the groundwork to be able to integrate Xero with your CRM Online. Just ask us for a quote.
5. Customise your reports and dashboards
There are thousands of ways to configure reports and dashboards in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
You can customise system views and dashboards for everyone to use and get value from, but the real power is creating your own personal ones just for you.
You can do this without affecting anyone else, and live in your own CRM nirvana with the information that is important to you, at your fingertips. Create your own personal dashboards around the metrics you’re measured on or that help you to do your job efficiently. If you think someone else would benefit from your handiwork you can share it with them.
We come across businesses all the time who have been living with the standard pre-built dashboards and views for years, even though they no longer suit everyone. After a while they’re just ignored. This is such a wasted opportunity considering that configuring reports, views and dashboards is so easy. There’s so much flexibility and there’s no excuse for just making do.
No two businesses are the same and the standard dashboards and views that are in your CRM should just be treated as examples. Take the time to think about the data you have, who needs to use it and for what purpose, and the best way to present it. Chances are, you can have exactly what you need with a bit of thought and basic configuration.
6. Don’t stop improving and adapting
Change is happening all around you. New staff, changing management, changing mix of customers or products, competitors entering and leaving the market and processes updated. So your CRM needs to catch up and stay relevant.
Sometimes, change can sneak up on you. Little changes cause people to adapt and find workarounds and then get used to doing things that way. This doesn’t mean they’re being efficient – just tolerant.
Consider this insidious effect of inefficient tolerance by way of example.
A new product is being trialled, so you start off getting sales people to use a ‘write-in’ product rather than adding it to the product database and price list. The product gets more popular and permanent, but people are still using the ‘write-in’ method a year later – and doing it inconsistently – different variations of product names and prices. Pretty soon, ‘write-ins’ become the norm for other products – the new sales staff have gotten used to doing it this way now. Your sales reporting ‘by product’ starts to show changes in product mix. ‘Write-in’ products are now 20% of your sales and proportionately some of your traditional price list products appear to be not doing so well. Is this really reflective of performance? Who knows?
This is an example of how a lack of discipline around ensuring your CRM reflects change, can make your CRM fall into disrepair. Your CRM is there is to support your processes and maintain consistency. This is essential so you can trust what your dashboards and reports are telling you and make good decisions.
We could talk all day about the potential for CRM to be the engine room of your business. The key message here is that your CRM should never stagnate. You invested in it for a reason, so keep investing effort in making sure it supports your people and processes.