What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement CE

What is Customer Engagement CE ?

Introduction

Many companies do not have the necessary Insights into the data that really matters and often experience almost panic re-actionery responses to challenges as and when they arise.

Do you find that your customer service team is wasting valuable time looking for the vital information when responding to customer service calls?
Do you have confidence that you have the right systems and resources in place to respond to all customer service scenarios, including the unexpected?
What are the systems and processes in place to offer the most effective fix?

If the above questions sound all too familiar, this is where having the right customer engagement solution in place will ensure that you offer a first-class end to end customer service experience – and how Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) will enable you to do just that!

What is Microsoft Dynamics Customer Engagement CE?

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement CE or also referred to as CE or CRM, is a customer relationship management business solution that helps you greatly enhance the marketing capabilities for your business, increase sales and provide a customer service excellence experience across your end-to-end business.

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement CE brings together all the CRM capabilities and functionality into a single platform to help build lasting customer relationships. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) unifies Microsoft Dynamics for Sales, Customer Insights & Marketing, Customer Service, Field Service and Project Operations. This single unified platform enables you to enhance your organisational efficiencies by simplifying and streamlining business processes and consolidating the end-to-end customer journey and interactions in one single platform and providing a 360 view across all your customers.

What are the Key Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement CE?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE improves the group-wide collaboration and the streamlining of communication with customers and is one of the leading Sales Force Automation CRM Solutions in the market. (Garter Report 2023).

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 – Customer Engagement CE you get powerful features including:

Sales: The Sales module empowers sales teams with the tools to manage leads, opportunities, and customer interactions effectively. It provides insights into customer preferences and buying behaviours, enabling sales teams to engage in personalised and timely interactions – and delivering higher sales conversion rates.
Customer Service: With the Customer Service module, organisations can deliver exceptional customer experiences. It enables efficient case management, tracking, and knowledge base management, ensuring that customer enquiries are resolved promptly and consistently across multiple communication channels.
Field Service: This module optimises field service operations by enabling businesses to schedule, dispatch, and track field technicians. It includes features for work order management, resource allocation, and real-time updates, enhancing service delivery and customer satisfaction.
Customer Insights (now incorporating real-time marketing)
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data– this is now Microsoft’s customer data platform (CDP) that helps deliver personalised customer experiences.
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys– this helps elevate the customer experiences, allowing you to orchestrate personalised journeys across all touchpoints to build lasting relationships and customer loyalty and retention.
Project Automation: This module facilitates project planning, resource management, and progress tracking. It enables collaboration among project teams, monitors project timelines, and ensures that resources are allocated efficiently to meet all project objectives.

How D365 Customer Engagement CE is Beneficial?

An effective customer relationship management tool enables the automation of multiple tasks, providing deep and meaningful Insights which greatly enhance the overall customer service experience.

An effective Customer Engagement CE solution should enable you to optimise and seamlessly connect your sales, marketing, and service functions.

Align sales and marketing – Sales and marketing modules can work together to help you better understand a customer’s needs and address those needs through the right marketing channels.

Examples of how effective Sales & Marketing can work include:

Knowing when and how to connect with Buyers – Connecting with buyers at the right time and through their preferred channels.
Knowing the right customer updates and when to deliver – Determining what types of messages to send to customers and when to deliver them.
Effective lead nurture – Prioritising and nurturing the right leads, enabling a seamless marketing to sales hand-over.

Increase sales productivity – Having the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software in place enables your sales team to identify and prioritise the right leads and deliver insights as and when your sales teams engage with customers across the priority touch-points.

Effective Customer Engagement enables Sales team to:

Predict future sales and budgets and enable effective future planning
Enable your sales teams to streamline and automate end to end sales processes – from initial lead creation to sale conversion & close.
Centralised Customer Data capture so that all Sales stakeholders have access to the real-time sales data which matters.
Sales Solutions on the Go – this provides your sales team the flexibility to work remotely or on the go and easy access to the meaningful data and Insights across all devices regardless of location.

Building lasting customer relationships – By integrating customer service and sales enables you to easily identify and predict your customers’ needs and requirements and enhances the buyer experience.

Having an effective Customer Service & Sales Solution enables you to:

Access real-time customer journey insights so you can plan and prepare for customer demands and expectations.
Provide always-on access to your teams and customers across multiple devices.
Provide access for your customers to self-service portals to enable them to be in control of their own data and get the help and assistance as and when the need it.

Get a 360 View of your Customers – End to end customer insights enable for better and lasting customer relationships.

360 view of customer history & interactions
Drives Customer retention and loyalty
Creates further business opportunities and new leads.

Use a common platform – CRM takes disparate customer relationship software functions and brings them all together for seamless management. Other common CRM benefits are:

Customisable dashboards that offer up-to-date business intelligence reporting and analysis.
Centralised customer data, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud.
Easily accommodate and enable company performance, growth and expansion
Easy & flexible integration with other familiar Microsoft solutions.

Do to know your Customers? – The more you know your customer’s likes, dislikes and preferences, the more likely you are to increase customer loyalty and retention. Giving your teams the necessary visibility into your customers will give you a competitive edge.

By having the customer at the centre of your business enabled by CRM CE Solutions such as Dynamics 365 will help you to:

Deliver Personalised customer updates according to their unique needs
Set up ongoing alerts for all stakeholders which shows the end-to-end interactions with customer activities.
Get to know your customer communication preferences whether email, social, phone or text.

Customer portals – Self-service customer portals enable customers to be in control of their data, learn more about the CRM CE product information and enables them to monitor and track their account activity. Customer portals enhances customer engagement and experiences.

Customers can easily create and review requests – Whether for support or order updates and fulfilment, you can quickly and easily set up your client portal to enable your customers get quick and easy answers and access to key information and progress updates and outcomes.
Your customers can take ownership of the data – You can enable your customers to take charge of updating their own information which supports for more accurate and timely data.
Automated contact forms – previously Contact form information might have got dropped into a database and waiting on staff to access it as and when needed. You can now automate the contact form process for quick customer response turn-around as well as initiating the lead nurture campaign process.

Implementing your D365 Customer Engagement CE Solution

Below are some of the key considerations when commencing your D365 Customer Engagement CE Project.

Start with the all-important question – Why we need a Customer Engagement CE Solution? – you need to align your D365 technology investment to your company’s wider strategic business vision and objectives.
Identify the most critical objectives – know and fully understand all the requirements and complexities of your D365 project and what the end solution will deliver.
Understand the features of Dynamics 365 CE – it is critical to fully check out the overall solution’s functionality and capability prior to the project implementation.
Having the right Project Team – create an effective multi-functional team to help you prepare and deliver on the implementation project milestones.
Process Audits – creating clearly documented processes and procedures around the project execution is key to saving time and resourcing to meet all project time-frames.
User Training – having an effective training programs & support is key to driving user adoption and tailored to meet all user needs.
End to End User Adoption – ensure every line of business and users are embracing and adopting the entire D365 CE platform.
Project Implementation Success KPIs – understand the project budget’s long-term viability, stakeholder commitment, resourcing, and time-frames.

What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement CE?

Conclusion

The core capabilities available in Dynamics 365 CRM Customer Engagement applications ensure that you have a consistent work experience regardless of the task you’re doing. From the sales and Customer Insights (Marketing) applications that are designed to help identify prospects and turn them into long lasting customer relationships, to applications designed to help customer service, field service, project operations and more.

Simply Dynamics are one of the leading Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners in Ireland – where we help our customer get access to the best in class Customer Engagement tools with Dynamics 365 CRM to enable you to fully engage your customers across all aspects of the business and deliver a truly exceptional customer engagement experience.

Need help with any CRM Projects? Our Dynamics 365 Solution Specialists are here to help!

Contact Us Now or Book Your Free D365 Consultation Here

Summary