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A solid knowledge of your customers is vital to succeed in today’s modern information driven business world. Small businesses are widely considered to provide a better customer service because the decision makers are closer to their clients than in much larger companies. Managing customer relations has grown increasingly complicated as market forces and trends change at a much faster rate than in the past, and with the internet revolution, that is set to continue and accelerate.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition is designed to work with other Microsoft applications such as Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, Outlook, Word, Excel and Publisher. Working together, the Microsoft Dynamics Suite greatly helps your staff to build closer customer relationships and achieve new levels of productivity and profitability.

Here are 5 ways Microsoft Dynamics Suite can help your small business save time and money:

1. Centralize all your customer information

Microsoft Dynamics Suite captures all customer contact information from your sales, marketing and support sections of your business and houses the information in a central repository. Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 provides instant access to whoever needs the information, wherever they are and when they need it. This reduces costs by minimizing non-productive time wasted, increases profitability by maximizing cross-selling opportunities and enhances customer relations with a more personalized approach from all staff in contact with customers.

2. Protect your customer information

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has built-in security features to ensure your customer information is protected and kept confidential. Employees are only given access to that information on a customer that is required for the role they need to perform. By combining Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 with Small Business Server, a powerful firewall is provided that allows mobile employees and remote locations to have secure and enhanced access to customer information while out of the office. The ability for mobile and remote workers to access customer information out of the office allows them to continue to be supported and productive as well as spend more time where they need to be – with customers and prospects.

3. Integrate with Microsoft Office Outlook

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has been designed with Outlook in mind, and can be enabled to let your employees work directly from their Outlook email client. This close integration with Outlook and other Microsoft applications such as Word and Excel means that all staff with client contact can look up customer information, manage email communications, arrange appointments, record customer and prospect contacts from within Outlook and share this across the business with the Microsoft Dynamics Suite. This makes staff more productive, generating greater revenues and reducing time wastage dealing with administrative customer affairs.

4. Tailor Microsoft Dynamics Suite to your small business

The Microsoft Dynamics Suite contains a configuration wizard so you can tailor the customer relationship software solution to meet the particular needs of your business. You can customize and modify forms, construct your own data entry fields and arrange how information is to be presented while an intuitive engine allows for automation of repetitive tasks. An alert system raises flags when you need to perform a task so nothing need ever fall down between the cracks.

Microsoft Dynamics Suite is an out-of-the-box solution that is quickly and cheaply implemented while maintenance costs are also minimal. The Microsoft Dynamics Suite is also scaleable to meet the future demands of your business with additional features that can be added as and when the need arises.

5. Fast and simple implementation gets you up and running quickly

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 has a very fast and simple set-up to speed up productivity and profitability, this minimizes business disruption. For existing users of Microsoft Office applications, the customer relationship software solution is readily adopted by your staff as it has been designed to look and feel like all other Office applications so use is intuitive.
This minimizes the costs of implementation and user adoption while at the same time increases productivity with minimal business disruption and faster adoption by employees.

Originally posted 2009-11-13 12:52:06.

Customer Relationship Management software effectively implemented, provides business owners and management with an extremely powerful tool for bringing the front-office functions of sales, marketing and customer support together and working far more effectively as a combined team.

Many businesses think wrongly that a CRM solution is only for enterprise class concerns with large check books when in fact software providers such as Microsoft offer scaleable versions for all company sizes. Microsoft Dynamics Software has evolved from their enterprise class Great Plains software however versions have been developed and aimed specifically at the small and mid-range business market.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 allows businesses to respond to the growing challenges in the modern business environment by bringing client and prospect information into a central repository, organizing the information and allowing users throughout the business to access the data when they need it. Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 delivers the ability to manage the customer relationship throughout the entire sales cycle from initial enquiry in response to a marketing or sales campaign, through to pre-sales meetings, the actual sale and post sale issues such as delivery and repeat ordering.

Microsoft Dynamics software empowers every decision maker in your business to satisfy customer demands by providing the most up-to-date and accurate client information they need when they need it and ensure that the history of the relationship is encapsulated for all to share. Decision makers in this context need not necessarily be management but a customer service representative with a customer on the telephone asking about an order or information on your other products. All staff in contact with prospects and customers will be able to see at a glance what is happening with a particular account and in customer relations, knowledge is power. Customer relationship software provides everyone in your business with the ability to demonstrate an outstanding level of customer service not possible by traditional reporting methods.

The ability to integrate a customer relationship software solution with existing applications already employed by your business allows for the transfer of information between your word processor and spreadsheet applications and the CRM. Microsoft CRM software has been specifically designed with Microsoft Outlook and Office in mind, and allows a seamless user experience. Mobile workers reliant upon email are able to access Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 via their Outlook client, while marketing and sales campaigns can use data imported from the Dynamics Suite directly into Microsoft Word and Excel applications for marketing campaigns and mail shots.

If your business has several office and site locations, it is still possible to implement a customer relationship software solution across the whole company. Microsoft Dynamics v3.0 is well adapted to be delivered to remote locations via Microsoft Terminal Services, Citrix and other “thin client” solutions. An example is where a business has a central warehousing facility in Detroit with sales offices in New York, San Francisco and Chicago and they all are able to utilise the customer relationship software solution almost in real-time.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 benefits your business by saving time and costs, minimizing non-productive activity while maximizing sales revenue by ensuring that sales leads are followed up and do not get lost or “fall between the cracks”, while customer retention is improved by enhancing customer relations and service.