Introduction:
In this blog, we have covered all the significant concepts of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Many organizations across the world are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. If you wish to pursue your career in this CRM, it is advisable to have a Microsoft Dynamics certification. I hope this tutorial helped you in knowing the overview of Microsoft Dynamics.
We all know how famous Microsoft and its products are. Microsoft has been offering a wide variety of products for the development of the business world, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is one among them. In this Microsoft Dynamics CRM tutorial, we will cover the core concepts of Microsoft Dynamics. Before getting into the tutorial, it is better to understand some basic concepts to have a clear understanding of the tutorial. Let’s plunge into the details.
Technology is evolving to its best levels to make the world better than yesterday. It has been helping for the well being of every aspect of our modern Business world. The business around the world is embracing the latest technologies to sustain in this competitive world.
Companies across the world are coming up with the latest products and services to reach all corners of the customers who are in different parts of the world. The hardest part of the business is to get the customer and retain them with them for more extended periods. Customer will no longer with you if you are unable to provide the best products, and services that they are looking for.
To serve the customers better and to generate more leads by gaining customer loyalty is a challenging task. But technology is helping organizations in managing the entire customer journey, which is nothing but CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. There is a wide range of CRM’s are available in the market, and Microsoft Dynamics is one among the widely used CRM’s.
What is Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a Software package developed by Microsoft to enhance customer service and to acquire new customers. The products of the Microsoft dynamics mainly focuses on the core aspects of the business such as sales, marketing, customer service etc. It facilitates the organizations to customize the Microsoft products to deliver better performance by using its Proprietary (.NET based) framework. In recent years Microsoft Dynamics equipped with Analytics platform driven by CRM.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is enabling organizations to serve the customers in a whole new way. This CRM software helps in enhancing the sales and in creating the marketing campaigns that reach maximum customers in spite of these two it also take care of the activities such as handling customer issues, serving the customer, business intelligence, provides social insights and a lot more. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed in a flexible way to support its applications on mobile devices.
Why Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
It is one of the leading products of present CRM Providers which delivers effective and innovate CRM solutions that help in taking the organizations to the next level. It has got a unique place in the CRM world with its features and flexibility and adopted by organizations around the globe. This dynamic Platform enables the business with a wide variety of tools that take care of various aspects of business such as customer service, sales, marketing, etc. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is unique in nature because it does not require any additional software to install its applications.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM categories:
There are two types of CRM categories are provided by Microsoft.
- CRM Online
- CRM On-Premise
CRM Online:
CRM Online is a cloud service provided by the Microsoft dynamics to maintain all kind of background process associated with the organisations such as the database, licensing, maintaining application servers, deployment etc. All these things are managed by Microsoft organisation on their servers. CRM online comes under the subscription-based offering. This offering is for the companies who wish to away room the technical issues that are associated with CRM. The setup of the CRM online is very easy, and it takes very few days not weeks or months unlike others, and you can just browse it from your web servers.
CRM On-Premise:
CRM on-premise is a customizable, useful application offered by Microsoft Dynamics to deliver powerful CRM solutions for all types of business activities. It is deployed on your servers. This would require to configure your software setup such as a database, licensing, maintaining application servers, deployment, customisations, networking and hardware setup. Most of the organisations opt for the on-premise CRM because of its integration capabilities with other applications, and it is customizable to fulfil the particular needs of an organization.
If we compare the two types of CRM’s offered by Microsoft Dynamics, they both are the same from the functional point of view, but it differs from the implementation point of view.
Differences between CRM Online and CRM On-Premise
Let’s look at the differences between these two CRM’s.
Server Management:
The CRM online is been provided and managed by the Microsoft dynamics organization. They will look after the backend, and Microsoft maintains technical computations such as database and servers.
This On-Premises software is being deployed on the company servers, unlike online CRM. Databases and servers should be developed and maintained by organizations.
The time required to Setup:
It takes very less time to set up the process because the process is being maintained by the Microsoft you just need to start the process from surfing on your browser.
To set up On-Premises offering it requires technical skills and time to set up. Oe should require high technical knowledge to set up and run the CRM.
Customization capabilities:
The CRM Online is less competitive for developing customizations and to make extensions when compared to the CRM On-Premises.
The CRM On-Premises is highly capable as it is developed and maintained by the organizations whoever uses this CRM product. One can make as many extensions as possible and can craft the applications to suit their applications.
Backup and Restore Options:
The CRM online does not support manual data backup and restore capability since the database is hosted on Microsoft servers. But Microsoft take care of the data backup activity regularly.
CRM on-Premise gives you complete authorisation to handle the database. You can have regular manual data backup without any restrictions.
Data storage limitations:
The CRM online is maintained on the Microsoft servers there is a storage limit such as 5GB, 20 GB etc.
As CRM online is deployed and maintained by the organizations there are no limits for storing the data. You can store the regularly without any restrictions.
Default features;
In CRM Online comes with some free inbuilt features such as insights, analytics, social listening, etc. To have special features like CRM online, it costs some amount for the CRM On-premises.
CRM Updates:
Online CRM supports future updates automatically without any changes from the administrator
CRM On-Premises needs to be updated by the Administrator for the latest software updates.
How to Setup Microsoft Dynamics CRM account.
Step1:
To set up an account you first you need to login by clicking the below link.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/home
If you are unable to find the above link type in google as “Microsoft Dynamics CRM Free Trial”.
Step 2 :
Once you get into the website, just click the registration button and go through it and you are asked to fill the mandatory details such as name, email, language, etc. Fill all those details. You can see in the below screenshot how exactly it appears to be.
Step 3:
Click on the free trial button. This is the starting point of step 3 in the registration process as shown in the below screenshot. And fill the mandatory columns to create User Id and Password. Let’s have a look at the below screenshot to know how it looks like.
Step 4:
To process the account at the beginning, you were asked to submit the phone number, and in this step, you are invited to validate the number via an OTP. And then it moves you to step further to process the things.
Step 5:
Once you are done with the verification process. Then the below text will appear on the screen as save your User ID and passwords for future references.
With the completion of the above task, you are done with the registration process, and the next things that you need to go through are, CRM Dashboard which appears to something like below
The screenshots as mentioned above are just to give a clear idea about how it looks like, but it may change due to update for the new versions of the Microsoft Dynamics.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Functional modules;
There are three types of functionalities which are
- Marketing
- Sales
- Service management
The organization is teamwork of different departments, and each department is unique, and every department is essential for the overall development of an organisation. So this CRM is developed to satisfy the different needs of all departments of an organization. Core business areas such as sales group can use the Sales module, and the marketing department uses marketing cloud to acquire and reach a maximum number of customers.
All these three functional modules main motive is to bring new customer (sales), provide them with excellent service (service cloud), and reaching to masses (marketing).
Let’s discuss each module in detail.
Marketing module:
Marketing cloud enables the companies to grow faster than ever before, and it combines all aspects of business campaign management. Microsoft Dynamics CRM will enable your Marketing team to develop a plan by using the full potential Microsoft excel, and Power BI. It helps in designing the programs and executing them in a whole new way to reach the maximum crowd. It enables you to build the sales pipeline, and you can demonstrate the marketing investment in real-time.
Marketing modules help you in the following ways.
- Customer segmentation
- Analytics and reporting
- Data extraction and cleansing
- Campaign planning and implementation
- sales/marketing collaboration tools
- Information sharing portals
Sales module.
A sales portal is designed in such a way to gain maximum sales. It helps in managing sales and assessing potential contacts in real time and identifies real customers.
Dynamic CRM provides.
- Account and contact management
- Lead and opportunity management
- Sales forecasting
- Sales quota management
- Sales competitor analysis
- Instant access to products and services
Service Module
Service to the customers or clients plays a significant role in gaining customer loyalty and thereby achieving more customers. This service module enables the organization in providing the customers with specific services and ensures customer service representatives maintain a consistent system of support.
Microsoft Dynamics Facilitates the following service-related functionalities.
- Customer contact management
- Case and interaction management
- Incident queuing and routing
- Service scheduling
- Workflow management across teams and groups
- Knowledge base management.
- Service reporting analysis.
Entities and forms in Microsoft Dynamics CRM:
There are different entities designed to assign the specific tasks in Microsoft Dynamics. Before knowing what the various types of objects are it is better to know what is an entity.
What is an entity:
An entity is a specific field used to define the particular functionalities of a business. There are various entities created for the particular purpose in Dynamics CRM which are
- Contacts entity
- Accounts entity
- Leads entity
- Opportunities entity
- Activities entity etc.
Each CRM entity works similar to the database to hold the information of each entity. For example, a contact entity is used to record the contacts and cases entity will be used to record the cases information and so on.
You are allowed to have to types of entities one is which comes with CRM, and the other is custom entities which you need to customize it according to your business needs. Here let’s take an example, you are willing to record the databooks that your customers read, but you don’t have an inbuilt filed for recording such data. Top record this information you need to create a new field By naming it as books and relate it with the existing Contacts Entity.
Microsoft Dynamics Fields:
There are 11 types of out of box files provided by Microsoft Dynamics CRM which can be placed on forms.
1) A single line of text:
This field supports 4000 characters to store. You specify the formats as email, text, URL, text area, Ticker, Symbol, and phone. You can determine the maximum length and IME ( input method editor) mode for each of these.
2) Option Set (drop down)
It acts as a drop-down field in CRM. This stores a set of options each having a number value and label. You can have a chance here to define global option sets.
3) Two options (Radio button):
It is named as a radio button because this field provides only two opportunities for the user to choose from.
4) Image:
If an entity is named as Image filed, then it is programmed to display them for the record in the application.
5) Whole number.
This field is designed to store the details of integer values between -2,147,483,648 and 2,147,483,647. It is used to support specifying formats such as Duration, Time Zone, None and Language. You can set the maximum and minimum of values also.
6) Floating Point Number:
This stores the floating numbers between precision between 0.00 and 1,000,000,000.00. You can set the maximum and minimum values here.
7) Decimal Number;
This field store store the 10 decimal points with values ranging from -100,000,000,000.00 and 100,000,000,000.00.
8) Currency:
This field is used to store any currency values in the range of 922,337,203,685,477.0000 to 922,337,203,685,477.0000.
9) Multiple Lines of text.
This is a scrolling text box, and you can set a maximum number of characters for this field.
10) Date and Time:
This is a date related to field data in CRM. This supports two types of which are Date only, and Date and time. You can even specify the behaviour as a User local date only, and Time zone Independently.
11) Lookup.
A lookup field is used as a relationship filed. You can create a lookup field using an entity that has been designed but not yet integrated with another lookup field.
Workflow process in Microsoft Dynamics CRM:
CRM vendors provide a lot of features that will enable you to automate the business process. Drop down menus will help the organizations in creating an automating experience for any event in the system. The automated areas responses can be triggered by specific field entries, events, or even the passage of time. Here let’s discuss a sales scenario and how Microsoft Dynamics CRM will automate the process.
Sales Automation:
In a hectic life it is very challenging for the sales manager to look after or interact with every salesperson. But it makes sense when a manager is notified with the significant events happened in the system. Workflow automation simplifies this task and makes sure that nothing is overlooked. With the help of field dependent triggers, Microsoft CRM can perform the below functionalities.
Creates a trigger to notify the sales manager any time if a more than a set of a specified number of employees entered into the system.
Automatically notify particular salesperson regarding the follow up of the customer.
Notifies you if any significant changes happen into the system with the notification.
Microsoft CRM Plugins:
A plugin is defined as a custom business logic that is used to develop, integrate or go beyond the standards of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Plugins are designed to handle the events and are registered to handle the specific event on the CRM platform. To develop these plugin the languages used are C# or VB and are run is either synchronously or asynchronously.
Some cases where you are required to write plugin are
- If you wish to execute some business function like to create or update a CRM record. Writing plugins are required for updating specific fields of a record, or updating related files etc.
- Write a plugin if you want to calculate the field values dynamically when a record is opened
- If you’re going to automate the emails to your customers on certain events.
- If you want to call external servers to update or save a record.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM- WEB services:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is facilitating two essential web services that help in accessing the CRM solutions from external sources and performing standard business operations such as, create, update, delete, and find in CRM.
Let’s consider the following scenario:
You have an external .NET application, and you wish to interact with the CRM . for instance you want to insert a Contact record when a new customer is registered in your external application.
Or you wish to search records in CRM and want to display the search results in external application.
Conclusion:
The business world is highly competitive, and the organizations must move fast enough to grab the opportunity to get ahead of the competition. Microsoft Dynamics enables the organization in maintaining the core business aspects of the organization in an effective way. This CRM will help as a one-stop solution for all business related tasks.