CRM has become a critical issue for organisations facing challenges particularly in sales, marketing and customer services. Since its introduction, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 has been able to address these requirements cost-effectively and via a solution that takes full advantage of the Microsoft platform.
According to Heath Turner, CRM director at Microsoft Gold Certified partner, IS Partners, Microsoft is now more than ever being adopted in the enterprise environment to solve dilemmas such as demonstrating marketing ROI, ensuring user adoption and identifying new revenue opportunities, for example.
"Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 successfully addressed many of these issues, offering improved sales productivity, more impactful and better planned marketing communications and proactive customer support.
"Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is extending these capabilities through a number of its feature areas. These include enhanced reporting capabilities, improved application management, faster deployment and a richer development environment. This offers implementation partners far broader scope for customisations required in specialised operational areas and in virtually any industry sector," he says.
Turner adds that the upgrade to CRM 4.0 is a simple wizard-based operation.
"A wealth of new features will make it a worthwhile consideration for many organisations. Support for multiple-languages and currencies will find appeal particularly among multinational companies, while improved platform capabilities now allow the application to run on any SMTP or POP3 mail server, and not exclusively on Microsoft Exchange."
Earlier versions of Microsoft CRM Server were a single-organisation solution. CRM 4.0 allows you to host multiple organisations in a single deployment. "This feature is a great benefit for hosted solutions or businesses that require a separation of data inside the company," Turner says.
Development processes have also been streamlined with all data stored directly in the CRM architecture. This ensures that cut-over from development to production will be significantly faster, and that ROI can be realised that much sooner, he adds.
IS Partners has for the past five months demonstrated CRM 4.0 capabilities to a number of its customers. "Interest, thus far, has been impressive, with a pilot project showing success in terms of ease of upgrading as well as feature-set improvements," says Turner.
"Customers who have been using CRM 3.0 in the past can now take their environments to the next stage with this latest release, particularly where multi-language capabilities are a key requirement."
Share
Established in 2001, IS Partners addresses the need for quality implementations of Microsoft solutions. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Business Intelligence, IS Partners specialises in empowering sales, marketing, financial and management in its customer base. This includes various industries such as retail, distribution, finance and IT.
IS Partners uses its own proven, streamlined methodology for all implementations. It also specialises in bringing bottom line value to CRM systems, providing business analysis, technical design, application architecture, implementation, training and performance tuning of CRM implementations on the Microsoft platform and Microsoft`s own CRM solution. For more information, go to www.ispartners.co.za.
Editorial contacts