Wondering how to get the ROI out of your CRM software? There’s many things that will affect it. One is productivity and it’s affect on customer engagement. According to the Journal of Experimental Psychology,1 every time a user switches programs or applications, there is a 40 percent reduction in productivity. (1) What brands need is a design principle that allows organizations to manage their customer-facing activities in a single experience, with no need to export or switch, drastically reducing the time to completion and saving time by automating fundamental tasks.
How to Solve The Issues Related to Productivity and Customer Engagement: One way to solve these issues is with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016, which is their latest customer engagement solution. It has announced a comprehensive upgrade which includes:
- Advancements in intelligence
- Mobility and
- Service, with significant productivity enhancements to help businesses and workers achieve more.
The new enhancements are designed to increase productivity for organizations by providing a simple and seamless experience across their Dynamics CRM application and their employee productivity applications like email, Excel, OneDrive for Business for easier task management, an enhanced mobile experience for the worker on the go, and enriched data and analytics, all of which will be available later this calendar year.
How Does Productivity Affect Customer Engagement? Through an enhanced Excel experience within Dynamics CRM, complete with new Excel templates for various tasks, functions and scenarios, users can now efficiently toggle between functions as opposed to time-consuming and complex exporting, enabling them to augment their customer processes with simple, familiar analysis within their CRM experience.
Organizations will also have access to their documents within Dynamics CRM via integration with OneDrive for Business and new document generation capabilities. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 release also introduces Delve functionality into the application. Powered by Office Graph, Delve helps users increase productivity by surfacing key content — enabling salespeople to discover information that may help them with their opportunity or account, such as popular sales presentations and proposals.
What Needs to Be Done with Date to Turn It Into Actionable Insights? Turning data into intelligent action is a cornerstone of business transformation and productivity, and the new Dynamics CRM release includes data management and advanced analytics capabilities powered by Cortana Analytics Suite. This includes Azure Machine Learning that can enable business insights so that sales reps are able to predict their customers’ needs.
How Mobility Affects the Customer Experience Mobility is core to productivity, and the next version of Dynamics CRM will provide full offline capabilities for sales and service professionals on phones and tablets and across all major mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows). The release also introduces the ability to create task-centered mobile apps to streamline the completion of sales-related activities on the go and next-generation Cortana integration to surface core deals, accounts and activities within the personal assistant.
My POV: While we don’t always remember to connect the dots between what employees are doing and how that affects the customer experience, it’s probably one of the most important things to consider. Happy employees make happy customers. Grumpy employees turn customers off and increase attrition. And attrition is expensive in an age where products are commoditized and prices are leveled. The differeiantor? Customer Experience. Something we’ve been talking about for over 20 years. Guess I will just keep talking about it till the whole world “gets” it.
@DrNatalie, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
