Today’s guest blogger, CRM MVP Frank Lee, highlights a feature that he found to be very useful.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online March 2009 Service Update introduced a very nice feature called "Internet lead capture" that is very useful for most small medium businesses (SMB). It can save a lot of time by automatically capturing ANY web form entries and loading them into Microsoft CRM Online.
Here is a video about it in more details: http://www.democrmonline.com/IMWebtoLead/
We had updated our Workopia website’s Contact Us web form to utilize this new Microsoft CRM Online Internet lead capture feature. It was really easy to setup and works the very first time. It took only about 30 minutes from start to completion and now anyone that submits our Contact Us web form, the data will go directly in to our Microsoft CRM Online system. Very cool.
Some notes about setting up:
1. The Landing Pages setup wizard is very user friendly, since this is an initial release, the choices are pretty basic but should be enough to get the job done
2. There are only 32 CRM Lead fields (last name, first name, company, title, email, business phone, address, etc.) that are available for use on a landing page. Currently, it doesn’t support adding other CRM Lead fields to this list. Again this works for most landing pages
3. In case you do need to capture data that is not a direct map to any of the 32 CRM Lead fields – I would suggest picking one of the un-used 32 CRM Lead fields to capture the data and then use a CRM Workflow rule to move this field’s data to the proper CRM Lead field after it is in CRM Online
4. I would prefer the "Use your own site" option for most cases. This allows for total control of our Contact Me Request web form looks and feel. However, for a quick and simple web form to capture data, I’d suggest trying out the "Lead capture pages" option. Using this option, the web form is automatically generated and hosted by Microsoft CRM Online. Here is an example of our CRM Online Statistic FREE Download Registration web form using this option
5. I want to be email alerted whenever someone submitted our Contact Us web form, however this option is not built-in. Instead here is a good "keep it simple" work-around: we had our web site developer customized the Landing Page’s Submit button URL page with the functionality to send an email alert. Any good web administrator or programmer should know how to perform this work-around.
Cheers,