Success with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (eBook)

Implementing Customer Relationship Management

Aaron Yetter, Justin Mathena, Hoss Hostetler (Autoren)

eBook Download: PDF

2009 | 1st ed.
XXII, 264 Seiten
Apress (Verlag)
978-1-4302-1605-6 (ISBN)

Infos

Success with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: Implementing Customer Relationship Management is aimed at readers who are interested in understanding how to successfully implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 within their projects. It is intended as an implementation roadmap for the business and technical representatives leading or engaged in a project.

The book covers the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, both in the traditional functional areas of sales, marketing, and service and as an applications framework for XRM deployments. The book demonstrates CRM best practices for design, configuration, and development. Through real-world solutions and exercises, you will be given the confidence and expertise to deliver an implementation that provides long-term success for your organization.

Aaron Yetter is a seasoned technology professional with extensive experience overseeing and implementing successful customer relationship management strategies and related business initiatives. His experience includes delivering customer-centric solutions for market leading companies across various industries, including healthcare, insurance, financial services, technology, and services. Aaron is a founder and principal of Altriva, a professional services firm based in Bellevue, Washington.

Inhalt

A table of contents is not available for this title.

Textauszug

The Value of Expanding CRM to Produce xRM Solutions (S. 27-28)

xRM solutions can be used to support custom business functions that were typically not included in the CRM implementation because of the cost and complexity of doing so. Businesses can use extensible data models and application frameworks to provide a wide variety of functionality. Take the following interesting examples that were undertaken with traditional CRM packages, and that would be very different as xRM solutions:

• Tracking details about a project sold to a customer with a related sales opportunity, potential service cases, and interaction with contacts throughout the organization. A customer may have multiple projects with unique relationships to customer information requiring a solution to manage more than a simple one-to-one structure. Solutions that provide the flexibility to support this complexity as well as the traditional CRM functions would be classified as xRM-capable.

• RMA management that tracks the products associated with a sales opportunity and service cases prior to the return and then allows the product to be added back into the inventory for sale to customers. The process is very prevalent in industries where demos or loaner models are sent into the field. This functionality has been designed with CRM applications many times over the years, but typically in a way that does not exactly meet the needs of the solution.

The challenge is tracking unique information for each product in the inventory and keeping a history of actions and activities related to the individual inventory item and the customer, service activity, and so forth. xRM solutions allow for the creation of the inventory item and the likely integration requirements to systems in manufacturing. The complexity of the relationships between information has not been well supported in CRM applications previously without a custom line-of-business development effort.

• Supporting customer satisfaction surveys associated with a specific customer, contact, and service case where the same customer and contact can respond to the survey questions for different service cases. This functionality requires a CRM solution to track many surveys for a single customer and to manage the different responses by individuals working for that customer. Also, different surveys can be defined depending on the need so the solution must be able to organize different questions and types into an active survey.

In past projects, We have seen this requirement met by custom-developed add-ons that exist outside the CRM application. With an xRM solution, these requirements can be met inside the application framework and the relationships managed similarly to other customer information. The architecture needed to support a CRM Suite that provides an application framework suitable for extensibility includes several components to be truly valuable beyond a customdeveloped application integrated with the solution.

Some of those components include an extensible data model for new entities, a web services integration approach, easy configuration of screens and workflow on top of the customized data model, and a role-based security model, to name a few. The architecture elements of a CRM-based xRM solution are suggested in Figure 1-16, along with common integration points to other business solutions.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 31.1.2009
• Zusatzinfo: XXII, 264 p.
• Verlagsort: Berkeley
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Software Entwicklung
• Schlagworte: Customer Relationship Management • Management • Marketing • Microsoft Dynamics • organization
• ISBN-10: 1-4302-1605-0 / 1430216050
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-1605-6 / 9781430216056