CRM 2011
Within the first few weeks at PEI, I was asked to help evaluate a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solution for our internal processes. I had worked with Salesforce.com for several years and have an understanding what a large CRM can do for an organization. I began looking into Microsoft’s CRM 2011.
I was impressed with the capabilities of CRM 2011; especially with the ability to integrate with Outlook. Salesforce.com also integrates with Outlook, but not within the application like Microsoft has done.
Some examples of how CRM 2011 can integrate with Outlook:
- The Outlook pane will present more of the CRM information, related email, appointments and tasks without opening CRM.
- If you were to get an email from a customer with a service issue you can convert the email directly to a case without having to open CRM.
- When replying to an email in Outlook, you can access a CRM email template.
- If a customer were to call with a question, you can search the CRM knowledge base and insert an article directly from Outlook.
- A salesperson can attach sales literature to any email.
- You can save an attachment directly to a sales opportunity, a case, or a campaign from Outlook.
For more details here is a demo from the Microsoft Partners Conference July of 2010 https://digitalwpc.com/Videos/AllVideos/Permalink/f9625bd7-7009-4bed-ab7a-c3fbb548d6ac
-Randy Blair, PEI
