WHAT’S NEW IN MICROSOFT DYNAMICS® CRM 2016?

Microsoft continues to make good on its commitment to twice yearly updates with the most recent releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 (in the last quarter of 2015) and most recently the Spring Wave released May 2016.

Key investments in these releases have addressed the full range of CRM functionality including Sales, Marketing and Service Delivery. Existing functionality has been enhanced and major new functionality such as portals, and project management has been introduced.

In this document Tisski outlines the most important new functionality and more importantly what it means for our clients and their organisations.

SALESThe way customers interact with businesses has fundamentally changed. Your customers today are mobile, connected through social media and in pretty much all cases, they will research online before engaging with suppliers and making buying decisions.

New options are available and the amount of information available increases by the day. This sounds like a good thing and probably is but it can also lead to buyer dis-satisfaction – for example how many times have you sat on a train (or plane) and wondered whether the person next to you paid far less for their ticket?

More than ever customers are looking for trusted advisers and the two most recent released of CRM are aimed to help sales professionals become just that. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 helps sales professionals become trusted advisors, enabling them to stay productive and prioritising their time so that they engage at the right time with customers in more relevant and meaningful ways.

Let’s run through some of the things that make this possible.

Enhanced CRM App for Outlook: Microsoft Dynamics CRM already gives sales teams rich CRM capabilities from within Outlook. In this release Microsoft makes it even easier to stay productive and provide the right information in the right context to your contacts by surfacing contextual information from Dynamics CRM right within your inbox. The CRM App for Outlook makes it easier to track emails, add contacts or create new records.

Excel Integration: This is a massive enhancement for CRM, the traditional Excel integration in CRM was okay but now Sales team productivity can be increased radically by providing the ability for sales people to now analyse CRM data using Excel, directly within Dynamics CRM.

Without the need to waste time switching between applications, sales people can now view sales data in familiar Excel templates, perform what-if analyses, and upload changes to Dynamics CRM. Added support for tablets and phone apps also means you can now export and analyse data in Excel on mobile devices.

Easy Document Generation: You’ve probably been looking for this for a long-time. The old-style of mail-merge within CRM was a little awkward at best but now with one click you can now easily generate a document from Dynamics CRM using pre-defined Word and Excel templates. Authors can manage and create templates using a wizard like flows to build custom Word and Excel templates. You can also generate documents on the go with Tablets – so you can literally be in a meeting and generate a quote on your ipdad/Surface, save it as a pdf and email to the customer right there.

Information Discovery: Through integration with Microsoft Delve, information comes to you proactively, by surfacing trending documents and information your colleagues are working on. Delve helps you discover new content and connections, helping to enhance a richer team collaboration experience.

Spring Wave Update for Sales TeamsIn order to increase sales productivity even further the Spring Wave update also introduces these new features:

Guided User Navigation: An in-app experience delivers live, interactive and scenario based guided tasks and sidebars that are personalised to the user’s context, making onboarding new users quick and easy to drive business user productivity.

Power BI Sales Content Pack Enhancements: This release includes an improved out-of-the-box reporting pack for sales managers. Analyse sales performance, sales pipeline, team performance and lead pipeline with detailed charts and metrics. Dashboards and key metrics include Win Rate, Average Deal Size, New Leads, Conversion Rate and top performers. Drill into detail and slice data into different dimensions, such as sales territory, industry or owner.

Take a 30-Day free trialTisski knows without question that Microsoft Dynamics CRM does deliver on all of its promises for enterprises of all shapes and sizes, and that’s why we offer our 30 day free trial. To experience first-hand how Microsoft Dynamics CRM can improve productivity and increase revenue for your business, sign up at www.tisski.com or call the team on 0247 771 2050

MARKETINGFor marketeers with serious marketing management requirements, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is a great optional addition, enabling your marketing team to manage their entire operations from planning and budgeting through to execution and reporting.

Marketers can also leverage the power of Microsoft Office 365 and Power BI to measure performance and with the 2016 release the following new features were also introduced:

SMS Marketing: Marketers can now create powerful SMS campaigns, extending the channels available for both inbound and outbound communication with customers. SMS Marketing includes the ability to configure campaigns, manage opt-in and opt-out preferences and track SMS campaign performance.

Email Marketing: Building on enhancements in Dynamics Marketing 2015, the latest version goes further in creating a richer and easier experience for marketers to create, manage and deliver high volume HTML emails.

Spring Wave Update for Marketing TeamsMicrosoft Dynamics Marketing enhancements continue to strengthen the best integrated marketing management system available. Spring Wave features include:

Digital asset management: Securely store, collaborate, publish and distribute marketing documents. Now users can include file metadata for easier search and retrieval of marketing documents managed across teams.

Email editor improvements: The graphical drag-and-drop email editor in Spring Wave will provide an extended set of column layouts, enabling teams to create more versatile email designs that incorporate multiple column layouts with varying widths and styles.

List segmentation based on email behaviour: Marketers can create dynamic contact lists for new campaigns, based on their email interaction history. Example campaigns might include prospects who recently read one your emails, prospects who read your last three emails or prospects who haven’t opened your recent emails.

SERVICEIn an increasingly commoditised world, the way you do things matters as much (or more) than what you do, so organisations look to customer engagement and experience as key routes to competitive differentiation.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 goes further to help you provide a more personalised service to your customers, giving them a choice of services delivered the way the custom wants.

Modern, configurable user look and feel supports agents in more easily navigating information so that they can provide faster, more effective solutions to customers.

Key features found in Dynamics CRM 2016 include the following:

Voice of Customer: A new survey system that enables you to design and distribute customer questionnaires. When a customer completes a survey (on a phone, tablet or computer), rules in Dynamics CRM can trigger follow-up actions. Responses are stored against a customer’s CRM record, so teams can see the customer’s history as they sell or resolve a service case. This is powerful new functionality that empowers marketing departments to connect with their customers and ensure that insights gained are integrated with existing

information in CRM. Of course it can also be used alongside service delivery to check customer satisfaction and identify any shortfall in service delivery.

Interactive Service Hub: This is a completely new modern and intuitive end user experience for customer service roles and includes a range of user dashboards to make it simpler for agents to act on their workload. Data streams can include information on user activities, service cases and queues. Interactive charts provide a visual snapshot of key metrics and workload for both managers and end users.

Service Intelligence: An interactive Power BI dashboard provides customer service managers with an aggregate view of customer service performance. See below for further enhancements to the Power BI dashboard coming in the Spring Wave.

Improved Knowledge Management: Creating a single source of information has never been easier. A new content editor helps keep teams knowledge articles approved and up to date.

External Party Access: Allow external parties such as employees, customers and partners to access CRM data with the right level of permissions via customer or partner portals.

Spring Wave Update for Service TeamsThe Spring Wave introduced major new functionality for Service delivery:

Field Service delivers advanced scheduling, inventory tracking and asset management for service depots, in-field specialists fulfilling work orders and providing work orders across multiple sites under complex service agreements.

Project Service is an end-to-end solution that empowers organisations to deliver professional service engagements on time and within budget. Project Service helps you to estimate, quote and contract work; plan and assign resources; enable team collaboration; and capture time, expense and progress data for real-time insights and accurate invoicing.

Self-Service Portals is available as an add-on offering, bringing you configurable self-service portals that use modern web standards and responsive design for use on desktop, tablet or mobile devices. Out-of-the-box portal solutions include customer self-service portals, employee portals, as well as community portals that leverage peer-to-peer subject matter experts to help grow the catalogue of knowledge base articles.

Power BI Service Manager content pack. The Spring Wave release includes an out-of-the-box content pack for customer service managers. Analyse service performance, incoming cases, and team activities in detailed charts and metrics. Key metrics cleanly presented in an interactive dashboard include Average Handling Time, CSAT score, % of SLA met and Resolved Cases.

Did you know?Tisski is a Microsoft Partner with a Gold Competency in Customer Relationship Management. To achieve the gold standard Tisski has to commit to continually investing in training so that our team stays up-to-date with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In addition, our clients have to regularly confirm with Microsoft that they are happy with the work we’ve done for them.

SOCIALA socially connected world means that interactions with your customers now happen anywhere, anytime. Microsoft Social Engagement gives your teams powerful social tools that help them connect and engage on social media within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Marketing or with the stand-alone app.

Microsoft Social Engagement enables your sales, marketing and service teams to listen, analyse and drive engagement. You can find insights about your brand, products, and services, to gain a true understanding of the sentiment about your business. Now available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 are the following features:

Social Listening and Social Analytics. In addition to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube and News, you can now search online forums and RSS feeds for discussions about your industry, brand, product or service.

Social CRM. From social interactions, create CRM actions such as opportunities or service cases based on social posts.

Social Centre. Publish tweets and Facebook posts – including rich multimedia content – from within the application.

Social Intelligence. Role-tailored views help your teams uncover leads or service cases hidden within social media channels, helping you to understand the buzz around your products, services, customers and markets.

Spring Wave Update for SocialWith the power of Azure Machine Learning, organisations have access to increasingly powerful tools that can analyse sentiment and identify customer intention. Spring Wave enhancements to Microsoft Social Engagement include:

Richer listening capabilities: Users will now be able to listen for posts and comments from Instagram, and monitor specific Instagram accounts. Geolocation reporting will extend to Instagram, Facebook and online forums.

Tags, intentions and sentiment intelligence: Increase team efficiency and responsiveness by automatically detecting intention in social media posts, such as information requests. Automated detection learns over time, based on the specific needs of your organisation and its customers.

Social CRM automation: Automatically link social posts to CRM entities. Combined with intention analysis, this can be used to automate a triage process. For example, your organisation can automatically identify and route customer service issues found via social media, creating a case for your service department to act upon.

MOBILEMicrosoft Dynamics CRM 2016 helps you stay connected and productive while on the go. Now, users get a seamless user experience across mobile devices, including tablets and phones. Mobile Management ensures mobile productivity is available to your teams, within a secure environment, even if you have a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy.

Offline mobile support: Users can now create, change and delete records even when there is interruption in connectivity. With a seamless user experience when switching between online (connected) and offline mode, your teams can remain productive, whatever the connection.

Task based experiences: Without the distraction of working across related CRM records, users can focus on a specific task on their mobile device, bringing together contextual information to be able to complete the task.

Document management: Now users can bring the ability to view documents in context of opportunities, cases or other CRM entities. Users can seamlessly open various Microsoft Office document stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business from within the CRM mobile apps.

WHY TISSKI TO KICK-START YOUR CRM PROJECT?Microsoft is committed to their vision of delivering intelligent customer engagement, helping organisations like yours deliver amazing customer experiences profitably.

Tisski can help your organisation understand the technology options available and ensure you get maximum benefit from your investments in CRM and Office 365.

No matter how powerful and intelligent technology becomes, Tisski recongises that supporting your people to do their job well must always come first. That’s why Tisski employs consultants with strong financial and operational backgrounds, who understand how to leverage technology by using a strong dose of common sense. By taking a pragmatic approach, Tisski can ensure that your teams feel comfortable using Microsoft technology, in supportive ways that genuinely improve their productivity and effectiveness.

Get started today. To discover how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 could help your organisation, your customers and your people, contact the Tisski team today.

T. 0247 771 2050 W. www.tisski.com E. info@tisski.com