Convergence has always been an exciting time for us to share the latest technologies from Microsoft Dynamics. Starting this year, Convergence offers a much broader focus, transforming to become The Microsoft Conference for Business, giving attendees the opportunity to experience the full power of One Microsoft. In his keynote address today, Satya Nadella talked about the importance of culture in empowering individuals and organizations to use the latest technologies to transform their business. Dynamics CRM plays a key role in doing just that – giving companies intelligent customer engagement solutions so they can deliver customer experiences that are personalized, proactive and predictive.
Today, we are announcing the Spring ’15 release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that takes intelligent customer engagement to the next level by delivering enhancements and innovations in five key areas: Productivity, Social, Mobility, Analytics, and Knowledge.
Productivity. We are continuing to redefine the way companies look at business productivity. While every CRM vendor is trying to connect sales, service and marketing systems with their productivity tools, we are seamlessly and deeply integrating Dynamics CRM with Office 365. For example, the new release includes an immersive Excel experience, enabling a sales manager to perform ‘what if’ scenarios in Excel and update their forecasts right within CRM. We’re also creating a great experience with OneNote in CRM, making it much easier for sales teams to collaborate and share information about accounts and opportunities.
Social. We are introducing a completely reimagined social experience for companies, going beyond social listening and sentiment analysis to real social engagement. New social capabilities include a social center where your marketing, sales and service teams can monitor social topics and engage directly with social communities. We have also added social CRM capabilities so companies can create end-to-end customer engagements from social posts and teams can monitor social topics. Social analytics is also enhanced with text mining, cloud visualization and a social activity map for interactive, global and real-time visibility into social activity. Last but not least, we’ve also completely reimagined the user interface for social so that it data-rich with information at your fingertips, beautiful, intuitive, and easy to use.
Mobility. We are excited about lighting up new mobility scenarios, delivering a seamless user experience across mobile devices, including tablets and phones, in a ‘configure once, deploy everywhere’ model. Mobile users interact with the same sales processes across all mobile devices. We’ve also added a mobile SDK so you can easily extend and create your own mobile apps.
Analytics. We have delivered PowerBI Connectors for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing for out of the box integration. Sales, service and marketing professionals can analyze data with interactive dashboards and reports in Power BI, resulting in faster insights and decision-making for sales professionals.
Knowledge. The Spring ‘15 release marks the start of Parature’s integration with Dynamics CRM for knowledge management. Customer service agents will have knowledge integrated into their daily service interactions out of the box.
I’d like to share some additional news. I’m pleased to announce that the Dynamics CRM tablet app can now be securely managed through Good Technology. This solution provides a secure container for local data, secure data tunnel, and also manages secure email and web links from the Dynamics CRM tablet app. Organizations will be able to enforce central policy management such as device wipe and password management as well as enable employees to access the rich capabilities of the Dynamics CRM tablet app while enforcing corporate policies for customer data.
I am also pleased to announce today that we have acquired IP from Fusion Software that is built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform and adds “voice of the customer” capabilities to our CRM offerings. With new rule-based, multi-channel enterprise feedback management capabilities, companies will be able to include customer feedback into service, sales and marketing engagements including:
- Customer satisfaction surveys embedded into service interactions (support calls, etc.)
- Lead and opportunity qualification for sales
- Focus group and product/offer feedback in marketing
The new Spring ’15 release takes us to a new level in enabling businesses to have intelligent customer engagements– empowering them to make the most out of data to increase productivity and deliver amazing experiences to their customers. We expect the new release will be available to customers by the end of the second quarter of calendar 2015. In the meantime, we are proud to announce these new capabilities, which will be shared in today’s keynote, the CRM Roadmap session, and other sessions at Convergence 2015. If you are at the event, I encourage you to attend the CRM sessions to learn more, and also visit the CRM booth on the expo floor to let us know what you think. If you are not in Atlanta, please check out the latest on the Microsoft Dynamics site. Here’s to a great 2015 Convergence in Atlanta!
Bob Stutz
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