Liquid Thought, Microsoft to showcase Microsoft CRM at Customer Management World Africa 2006

The latest version of Microsoft CRM, the world's fastest-growing customer relationship management system since its launch in 2003, will be on show at Customer Management World Africa from 6 to 10 March.

"It's the first truly user-friendly CRM system on the market," says Roger Strain of Liquid Thought, Microsoft's CRM Partner of the Year for 2005.

"It recognises that people interact with customers every day, but not necessarily all day, and that CRM needs to be part of the daily workflow, not an additional task to manage. It's exceptionally well integrated with Outlook; a single click enables users to track e-mail, contacts and tasks in CRM, for example."

Strain says demand for the product has been exceptionally strong since its launch in South Africa early in 2004. "It's ideally suited to small and medium-sized businesses, but we've done implementations for everything from three users to 2 500 users," he says.

Liquid Thought recently completed the biggest Microsoft CRM implementation in Africa for a leading international audit firm, enabling 2 500 users across the company to track relationships between consultants and their clients, as well as relationships between clients.

"Consulting companies aren't usually thought of as having a need for CRM systems, but in fact they have a sales function like everyone else," says Strain. "Our users at the audit firm particularly liked the fact that everything happens in Outlook, which most people use heavily."

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Strain says Microsoft CRM is well suited to call centres and customer management as well as sales automation. "Pfizer is using it as their standard application through Africa and the Middle East, for customer service call centres as well as marketing," he says. "Some companies are even using it as a core operational system. At Old Mutual's Celestis Broker Services, for example, Microsoft CRM is their main tool for tracking and serving over 3 500 independent brokers. They offer a range of services from practice consulting to tech support."

Marichell Terblanche, channel manager for Microsoft CRM in SA, says this diversity of customers points to another major benefit of Microsoft CRM: "It's the most customisable CRM system ever. It already incorporates a large number of drag-and-drop fields - the interface is identical to Outlook's - and being .NET based it's very easy for independent software vendors to create add-ons and plug-ins, or to write specific functionality."

Strain adds that this ease of use also applies to upgrades. "Version 3 came out in late December and we've already upgraded the bulk of our clients. Every single one took less than a day to implement."

Liquid Thought, a black empowered company, was one of the first Microsoft CRM partners in South Africa and was the top partner for 2005. "We have a lot of experience of implementations at all levels of complexity," says Strain, "and a range of complementary services including mobile enablement, so companies can take full advantage of Microsoft CRM's mobile capabilities."