The core benefit of using a CRM to work with current and potential customers is its ability to automate your marketing, sales, and other business processes. But what if you could actually use it to gather intelligence about your audience, and create more targeted outreach as a result? Traditionally, CRM and survey software are separate tools. Even if you offer your customers the ability to provide feedback about their buyers’ journey and sales experience, that feedback will likely be collected in an external solution, with little connection to the customer record within your CRM. Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer looks to change that disconnect. By integrating with your Dynamics CRM solution, it can help you not just gain information about your audience, but put that insight into action immediately using your CRM features. Keep reading for a more in-depth overview of the add-on. Understanding the Core Features At its core, Microsoft’s Voice of the Customer add-on is a survey tool. What makes it different from most others, of course, is that it’s directly integrated within a CRM. In fact, Dynamics users can build a survey, set up auto responses and workflows, and view both individual responses and analytics all within the CRM. The result is a more integrated survey experience, on both ends. Members of your audience will easily identify the survey not as a stand-alone communication, but as part of an overall communication plan in which they’re participating. On the backend, users can more easily build surveys that make sense within the communication plan, both in terms of time frame and in terms of branding. Flexible Surveys to Elevate Communication A core reason why this add-on can be so beneficial is its flexibility in creating surveys. The branding is completely customizable, complete with a progress bar across the top of each question page. These pages are designed responsively, automatically adjusting to the audience’s screen size. Meanwhile, each survey can be personalized with data piped directly in from the attached CRM. That flexibility, of course, doesn’t end at the survey design. Users can build up to 200 individual surveys, helping to create a response mechanism for every need. Each survey can include up to 250 questions, to be distributed to up to 10,000 potential respondents at any given time. Customizable Post-Survey Response and Analysis Building the survey, as described by this tutorial, is relatively straightforward within Dynamics. The tool’s true strength comes in what happens once your audience answers the questions you send them. For starters, responses to non-anonymous surveys are captured directly on each respondent’s CRM record. Next time a sales agent looks to gain information about that lead or customer, the responses can act as valuable feedback on that contact’s experience and preferences. In addition, installing the Voice of the Customer Add-on automatically creates a new section of dashboards within Dynamics that allows for effective survey reporting. Here, you can gain a quick overview of the total number of respondents, response rates, and responses to your individual questionnaires. Finally, Microsoft lets […]
As your business grows, business process automation (BPA) becomes increasingly important. While it’s relatively simple to manually manage and enter your business processes as they occur with just a few customers, the same cannot be said for a growing business managing an increasing number of both customers and processes. The key, then, is finding a software solution that allows you to automate the process. Keep reading to learn how business process automation can benefit both small and medium-sized businesses, along with the functions a reliable system should include to maximize these benefits. 6 Undeniable Benefits of Business Process Automation 1. Increased efficiency Naturally, automating your business processes will increase the efficiency with which you can run your business. If you know that a number of essential functions will be taken care of in the background, you can focus your attention on marketing and other activities that help to grow your business. As this collection of case studies shows, BPA consistently increased efficiency for businesses who embrace the concept. Everyday tasks require less human touches, which can be better focused elsewhere. 2. Reduced Labor and Time Commitment Automating your business processes will take time initially. But after the transition, it will save both the labor and the time (and, ultimately, your budget) required for these tasks. If, for example, you decide to automate your sales flow from lead to customer, your marketing and sales team can spend their time focusing on actual customer outreach instead of having to calculate lead qualifications to determine which contacts they should reach out to. 3. Customer-Centric Advantages Ultimately, thanks to the above shift in priorities, BPA helps improve your ability to reach out and interact with your customers. That, in turn, will result in greater satisfaction by your audience, who will appreciate a more personal approach that is customized to their needs. 4. Cross-Departmental Benefits Too often, BPA software like a Customer Relationship Management solution is viewed with limited scope. It is ultimately a sales tool, helping you automate and personalize your outreach. But in reality, a number of other department and areas within your business can benefit as well. Marketing automation, for example, reduces the need to send emails to new and existing leads. Software like Microsoft Dynamics CRM can also help you track HR processes, collect and sort documents, and manage orders from your suppliers. In short, it can benefit a number of departments within your growing business. 5. Consistency When relying on manual business processes, consistency is almost impossible. Each employee will work on and complete these processes a little different from the other, making it difficult to come up with a set of universal rules and guidelines that apply to everyone in the process. With BPA, that problem doesn’t exist. Every aspect of the automated process is identical to the ones preceding and following it. If you set up a singular lead scoring process, for example, each lead will be evaluated for its sales-readiness in the exact same way. Compare that to manual lead scoring, in which inexact […]
As more and more devices centrally log their information and receive remote commands, there are greater opportunities to integrate support and operations. Learn how Dynamics 365 Connected Field Service brings IoT (Internet of Things) and Field Service together to centrally monitor and dispatch field service personnel armed with integrated data from customers. Have the right people, at the right place, at the right time.
