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Review: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Can Help Businesses Delight Their Customers

This customer relationship management tool promotes efficient service and streamlines internal processes.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

In business, customer service and relationship management can mean the difference between bringing in new clients and losing revenue. You need it to keep customers happy.

Thankfully, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is available to help tie millions of data points and services together, track and evaluate interactions, and generally help organizations quickly ramp up and improve how they interact with their clients and customers.

Dynamics 365 Monitors Customer Interactions for a Better Experience

The Dynamics 365 platform includes an entire suite of tools, so businesses can start small and expand as needed or jump into a full-scale digital transformation. And because it’s deployed as a service, it can be installed immediately to begin collecting and analyzing data within a single day.

The star feature of Dynamics is its ability to improve customer interactions. At the most basic level, Dynamics can watch as customers navigate websites and applications, timing how long each interaction takes, watching for bottlenecks and examining drop-offs versus how many people got the service or information they wanted.

It can then help to streamline those interactions, checking later to see how much time is being saved with every new change and monitoring for new efficiencies.

DISCOVER: How Microsoft Dynamics 365 optimizes supply chain operations.

SPECIFICATIONS

PRODUCT TYPE: Customer relationship management tool
CONNECTED APPS: Works with data from almost any public or private application, database, Internet of Things network or cloud applications
CLOUD-READY: Native with Microsoft Azure, also functions in other clouds
DISTRIBUTION: As a service
LICENSE: Per user

Why a Smooth Supply Chain Yields a Good Customer Experience

While the pandemic has put a new focus on customer experiences, having a positive interaction with constituents does little good if a business can’t provide requested services or is severely hindered because of supply chain disruptions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help with that as well.

Dynamics can ingest almost any kind of data, including traditional spreadsheets, databases, photos, video, and almost anything generated by online forms or applications.

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The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted supply chains around the globe. Dynamics can’t fix a worldwide problem, but it can use data to analyze things such as the use and repair history of machines and devices being used within a business. It can then discover, for example, when a machine or part is likely to break or wear and order appropriate replacements long before they are needed.

Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to study the complex supply chains of seven large organizations to see how much Dynamics could improve operations in an era of constant disruptions. The results were impressive, even more so when combined with an IT modernization program that decommissioned legacy silos in favor of more modern or cloud-based assets.

Across the board, every organization studied experienced streamlined operations. And by analyzing IT overall, Dynamics also recommended which systems, applications and processes could be replaced to get the biggest total economic impact and which could wait until future budget cycles. That also contributed to greater ROI across the board, especially for IT assets.

Because Microsoft Dynamics 365 can ingest and analyze almost any kind of data from almost any source, its potential uses are nearly limitless. A business might initially deploy Dynamics to improve customer interactions but will easily find many more places where this powerful set of business tools can prove its value.