Today’s businesses are increasingly complex with your customers demanding more value for giving business to you. Customer service is an integral part of any business. As businesses continue to grow, customer support needs grow. There is a challenge to provide pleasant customer experience by providing exceptional service, which can cost you more than you have anticipated or budgeted for customer service.

In addition to growth issues, you may also have an issue of decreasing support revenue. The decrease in support revenue can be attributed to decreasing customer satisfaction or your customers not seeing the value in your customer service. In addition, you may not be taking advantage of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

If you have manual support processes, they can result in higher support costs due to sub-optimal use of your service resources. You may incur costs in training and recruiting if your service personnel are not happy.

Challenges related to your business might be one or more of what we have discussed or they can also be very different. We will talk about how to address these in the next few slides.

 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy that connects your customers, employees, and partners in an end-to-end process that can help you treat customers based on their value to your business in a consistent manner to meet your business objectives. This end-to-end process revolves around the customer lifecycle, reach, interest, acquisition, service, retention and potentially reacquisition. You can choose to address customer service part of the strategy and add other parts such as sales and marketing later.

The CRM strategy helps your employees analyze customer information and get to know your customers better. With knowledge of your customers you can serve them better. It also facilitates collaborating both internally and externally. Overall, a winning CRM strategy would create a customer-centric culture in your organization.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Microsoft CRM addresses the key opportunities and challenges that determine the success or failure of any CRM initiative: user adoption, business fit, and total cost of ownership. The Microsoft CRM hosted solution is built on the exact same code base as Microsoft CRM Professional Edition, providing a choice of user interface, on-line or off-line usage, flexible solutions and deployment, and the ability to migrate data as your business needs evolve.

Integration with the familiar tools users already use and the automation of everyday tasks should be key goals of any software solution. Microsoft has gone beyond the minimal level of compliance by delivering native integration with the Microsoft Office System, as well as with new wizards that help users increase productivity for sales, service, and marketing functions.