Microsoft Dynamics CRM Learning Resource Center

Getting Started - Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Definitions

• Definition - What is CRM?
  Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer information. (Source: Wikipedia.org)
  
  So the C in CRM does NOT stand for Contact? No, that's right, it stands for Customer, but typically CRM can also involve other parties you come in contact with. ...Confusing... Should the C not stand for Contact then after all?
  These are the three things that define CRM and help you differ it from simple contact management:
  
  • Customer-facing: it touches every aspect in the customer life cycle: customer acquisition, retention and value. This involves your sales, marketing and service activities.
  • Process-focused: A process oriented method ensures consistency and efficiency across the customer life cycle. For you, your business, your colleagues and every customer you come in contact with.
  • Team Oriented: collaboration is the magic word. (there is no I in team, ...neither in CRM?)
  
  
• Definition - What is Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  Microsoft CRM redefines customer relationship management with a fast, flexible, and affordable solution for driving consistent and measurable improvements in all of your customer business processes using tools and technology like Microsoft Office and Outlook that you already know and use. (Source: Microsoft)
  
  CRM is a strategy, Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps you achieve it.
  History has shown us that user acceptance is one of the most important factors for the success of a new product, process or any other service that has to be deployed. To overcome this problem, Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been built with the following three tenets in mind:
  • It works the way you do: Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a native outlook experience and integrates nicely within Microsoft Office. No need to learn a new user interface.
  • It works the way your business does: every company has its own specific products and services. This requires a system to be adaptable to your processes and not the other way around. You customize the system; the system is not customizing you.
  • It works the way IT does: Deployment, maintainability and integration should be easy. It is based on standards and does not require highly specialized or unique knowledge. Even IT should be happy with it.
  Microsoft Dynamics CRM Titan has added one more: The Power of Choice. This is driven by the three new key features:
  • Multi-Tenancy: choose where, when and how you want to use the program. From outlook, the browser or your mobile device? On premise, partner hosted or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live (Microsoft running it under the concept of the popular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) concept - Currently ONLY available in North America)
  • Multi-Lingual: Choose the language for your organization and/or for every user individually.
  • Multi-Currency: Support for multiple currencies, so you can easily manage customers from different locations.
  On top of that, you are free to change your mind at any time.
  
  

Using Dynamics CRM (end user perspective)

• Sales: increase your sales success by managing your sales life cycle. It includes Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice, and Product Catalog management.
  
  
• Marketing Automation: enhance marketing effectiveness by managing you marketing automation life cycle. Plan, manage and track your marketing campaigns from development to launch.
  
  
• Customer Service: deliver outstanding customer service by managing your service and service scheduling life cycle. This includes Contract, Case, Knowledge Base, and Queue management, Service scheduling and Scheduling administration.
  
  
• Reporting and Analytics: start treating your customer data more like customer information. Establish new business intelligence in real-time to uncover business trends and performance results.
  

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And now what? - Configuring and Customizing Dynamics CRM

• Configuration: configuration is a critical step in the deployment of your Microsoft Dynamics CRM system. It involves setting up the security roles, system-wide settings like business units and teams, products and price lists, competitors, support queues, subject hierarchy, templates and more. Some of these are required to support the full functionality of some features in the sales, marketing and service modules.
  
  
• Customization: Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a bunch of customization options. It goes from renaming and extending the out of the box entities, over adapting the user interface to creating entirely new business entities and defining relations between them. While you are doing these, don't forget to update or create new workflows so your system starts working the way your business does (and not the other way around!).

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Is that all? - Extending Dynamics CRM using .NET

• Server Programming with the Server SDK: allows you to extend the CRM functionality and integrate with other systems.
• Client Programming with the Application SDK: customizing or extend the web client or one of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM clients for Outlook.
• Extend CRM with Plug-Ins: Plug-ins allow you to define and "plug in" custom business logic at predefined locations in an entity's lifecycle.
• Workflow: Use the same Workflow as introduced with .NET 3.0 to enable your business process automation.
• Offline SDK: work with the offline SDK to customize and extend the offline capabilities of the CRM offline.

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More! More! More!!!! - Using Dynamics CRM as a Business Platform

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