Microsoft Dynamics 365 Overview

Microsoft CRM stands for customer relationship management. It helps you grow your business by managing customer relationships, increasing sales, tracking engagements, handling and streamlining different processes in your organization.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CRM) delivers the most powerful solution via its five apps or modules: - Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, Field Service, and Project Service Automation. It is not necessary that you require all apps or modules for your business. You can choose them while creating a CRM instance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CRM) customization is a process where you add some new features or modify existing features to make it suitable for your business. You can add custom fields to CRM entities like accounts, leads, contacts etc. or you can modify sales, customer service, and other modules to create specific scenarios to meet your business needs or custom integration with non-crm tools and software programs like IoT apps, HR management software etc.

If I call Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CRM) - a mobile CRM, this would not be incorrect because everybody and everything are on the fly. Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CRM) can be accessed from anywhere using any devices. A customer service manager or somebody else in the similar or bigger position can access various reports, the current status of customer issues, and other important data in their mobile phones or laptops, even if they are away from their office. Everything will be available over the internet. They can see reporting in real-time.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (CRM) has become a hub for various innovations and integrations. It is not limited to a few modules or apps. It has made its reach to IoT devices, azure, artificial intelligence etc., which can be useful to create more flexible and powerful choice in deployment. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales helps your sales team to bring more business. Its lead generation -to-qualification process is very easy to follow. Converting leads to profitable customer accounts, opportunity management, streamlined sales process, and sales dashboard are some key features. 

Effective customer service management is very important for a successful business, which is efficiently offered by Microsoft Dynamics 365. Automatic case creation, then allocation, and then resolution keeps your customer and business happy. You can customize this module or app to suit your business needs. This can work the way you want it.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing builds strong market segment specifying customers and contacts for a CRM user to sell their products. It helps you run various campaigns, managing budgets, planning different tasks etc.

Field Service is a communication system over the internet between your customer service and dispatch teams, field agents, and customers. Tracking service locations, managing work orders and customer assets, resource management, product inventory, scheduling and dispatch, billing, analytics are some key features. You can optimize scheduling using efficient routing to reduce travel time, then use the resource skill feature to send the right agent to do the right job that matches their skill set.       

Project Service Automation helps you create project quotes, and manage projects. Creating contracts, managing resources and work hours, pricing, tracking project progress, and making projects profitable are some important features. This is useful in managing properties, engineering, architecture, travel requests etc. 

Business rules: - You can lock and hide fields. Set conditions to display errors if someone does not follow the process. If the data entered in a field does not meet your business requirement, then an error message will be displayed to the user, and they will not be allowed to save invalid data in CRM. You can select mandatory or non-mandatory field while configuring Business Rules.

Business process flow: - Visual indication of what to do next. You have just joined a customer service department where you are handling customer queries, but there are so many steps that it is difficult for a newbie to keep track of every step. Business process flow at the top of the form guides what should be done at each stage to resolve customer issues.

Charts: - System charts are created while installing Microsoft Dynamics 365, and user charts are created by users that are their personal charts can be shared with other users and teams. you can export charts as XML file, then edit to suit your business needs, and then import them into your CRM organization.

Dashboard: - Using dashboards you can display charts, lists, iframe, web resources. System dashboards come with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and user dashboards are created by users. Personal dashboards can be shared with other users and teams. 

Fields: - There are different types of fields available in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Calculated fields contain calculations and roll up fields contain an aggregate value.

Views: - They are saved queries. Personal views are created by users. Public views (a default view) are automatically created while installing CRM. System views are also automatically created while installing CRM, reserved for some unique situations.

Forms: - It is user interface that can be customized to display only those fields that are required by your organization. Main forms are used to interact with entity data. Mobile forms are used to display data in phones. Quick Create forms are used to quickly create new records. Quick View forms are used to display some additional data.

Entities: - Entities like account, contact, campaign, incident (case), lead etc. are used to manage data in Microsoft Dynamics 365. System entities are used by CRM to handle internal processes like workflows. We don't use system entities. We use business and custom entities. Business entities like account, contact, campaign etc. are already available in our CRM application. I can create custom entities to meet business needs

Business Unit: - A default business unit is called the organization or the root business unit is created while installing Microsoft Dynamics 365. All CRM users will be working within business units. You can create business units for different groups, but each business unit will have just one parent business unit.

Teams: - Teams are formed to achieve common goals in Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the members of the teams can be from the same or different business units.

Users: - CRM users like customer service representative, customer service manager, CEO, administrators, customizers etc.

Security roles: - CRM users can access only that data, which is required to do their jobs.

Field Level security: - You can stop unauthorized access to some important fields containing sensitive information.

Auditing: - You can get to know if someone made changes in CRM data, and user activity (when a user logs into CRM).

Solution: - Solutions are used to package, manage, and distribute customizations. There are two types of solutions: - managed and unmanaged. Managed solution is a completed solution, which you can distribute and install. Unmanaged solution is still under development, and cannot be distributed.