Buyers of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have a range of good quality SaaS software solutions available to them each with their respective strengths. Over the last month we have reviewed Salesforce, HubSpot and Sugar CRM against Microsoft Dynamics and looked at their respective strengths and weaknesses to help you gain a feel for the different options out there and what might be right for you.
Below are the reasons why we think Microsoft Dynamics is a strong contender and should seriously be considered as an option for your business.
Integration with your existing Microsoft programs
It’s likely that the people within your business are using Microsoft Office in the form of Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and Power Point. If that is the case, Microsoft Dynamics integrates well with these programs, in a native environment rather than through third party connections. The benefit for your team is that the touch points with customers are all recorded in one system and reflected for you and your team in all other Microsoft systems. For example, communications with customers in the form of e-mail sent through Dynamics are also reflected in Outlook and vice versa, giving a holistic view of the customer communication across all your Microsoft programs.
Scalability
The Microsoft Dynamics product is highly scalable as your business grows.
It can be used as a CRM system and, if you choose, upgraded with features from the Microsoft Power platform. The Power platform enables you to use tools such as Power Automate to automate certain repetitive administrative tasks typically carried out during the sales or customer management cycle, reducing the cost to serve customer. Power Apps can be installed to customise Dynamics for your users so that it performs better in alignment with your current business processes. Power BI can also be integrated to upgrade the insights you have about your customers’ behaviours and the performance of your sales and customer management teams.
There is also the potential to activate the other modules in the Dynamics suite of programs including Field Service, Marketing, Project Service, Operations, Finance, etc allowing you to expand the value that Dynamics is delivering to a broader Customer Engagement offering or even a full ERP solution across your business.
Maturity of the offering
Microsoft Dynamics is part of a mature ecosystem of Microsoft business products that perform reliably and have a mature partnership network that can be utilised to help businesses deploy Dynamics successfully. Furthermore, Dynamics benefits from the financial firepower of Microsoft who are firmly committed to its business applications offering and are investing in the product set to ensure its reliability and continuous evolution.
Cloud and security
Microsoft Dynamics is hosted in the Azure cloud platform and can be relied upon to deliver secure and reliable access to your customer information from anywhere on the globe that has access to the internet. Hosting and Data storage within the Azure platform is now incredibly cost effective by historic standards. If you are not already running your business systems from a cloud-based platform, it is worth considering the benefits of running a system from the Azure platform in terms of cost, accessibility and security benefits.
Flexibility of support partners available
When Dynamics is implemented for a business it is installed within what is called a common data model. This model has a range of functions, but the one we wish to highlight here is by building within a common data model, using Dynamics common app framework, if for whatever reason you find yourself in a position where you wish to change support partner, or carry out deployment of more features with a different partner, you are free to choose whichever partner you like. In this way you are never tied in with a partner supplier technically, giving you the freedom and flexibility to move on should you wish.
AI integration and the future benefits to your business
Microsoft see the future potential of Artificial Intelligence and are investing in this technology. They have deployed some of this investment into the Dynamics environment, bringing intelligent capabilities such as linking Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Linkedin together to put insights into the hands of sales, marketing and customer service professionals.
If you are thinking about investing in a CRM system, there are undoubted quantifiable, tangible benefits for any organisation wanting to sell products or services to customers. And the good news is that there are some very good, mature and well-functioning options on the market for businesses to choose from.
To read our previous CRM comparisons, take a look here: Salesforce, HubSpot and Sugar CRM
If you are interested in purchasing a new CRM system, upgrading your existing system, or perhaps you want to get more out of your existing implementation, we would be happy to talk to you, contact us today.
