Successful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) depends on two key things in a business:
- A deeply embedded culture of the importance of excellent customer relationship management
- The right software tools to make this culture a reality in the day to day operations of a business
Why is the culture important?
It’s people who run your business. It’s people who have activities and conversations with your prospects and customers by phone call, email and face to face appointments. Each one of these activities forms part of the overall relationship between your business and your customers. Every person in your business must value the importance of recording these activities against a centralised customer record. This makes these activities available for anyone else to view and pick up on, and help to understand the overall relationship with the customer, which benefits the business as a whole.
If you can achieve this consistently, then you are establishing the cultural groundings of excellent customer relationship management.
Why are the right software tools important?
Life moves fast. Your business moves fast. The more people in your business, the faster it moves. Microsoft Outlook is a dominant tool in the business space with users spending much of their day interacting with customers and prospects using this software.
Operating a CRM culture as part of day to day operations requires the best CRM and Outlook integration there is available. This is where Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes into play. There are 3 ways users can access the software, the web browser client, the Outlook client, and the mobile client for mobile and tablet devices.
The Outlook client is a full featured CRM client that uses exactly the same database as the CRM web browser client – you can operate your full CRM functionality within Outlook. Users who love the Outlook interface never have to leave their favourite tool to access their CRM data, or record their activities. It empowers users to:
- Create and manage their phone calls, emails, appointments and tasks – all tracked against CRM records
- Access contact details, company details, opportunity information, quotes, orders, marketing information and customer service case information, all in one place
- Run their business processes, be it a sales pipeline, a project pipeline, or a helpdesk pipeline
- View their charts, reports and dashboards all within Outlook
With Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM your business benefits from the best in CRM and Outlook integration. This helps to increase user adoption rates and provides the right environment to turn you customer relationship management culture into CRM reality.
Contact us if you would like to know more about Outlook and CRM.
