I don’t recall when I arrived at this conclusion, but over the course my twenty-five years serving the CRM industry across all horizontal practices, and within many industries, I have come to a realization about the enterprise disciplines and their attitude towards CRM.  Every department has a completely different attitude towards CRM – while customer service loves CRM, the sales teams only tolerate it and the marketing team hates it.  The three entirely different attitudes dictate three approaches to CRM from inside your business.  And all three of these business-driving stakeholder groups must be at the table in support of your CRM strategy and execution. Let’s take a look at each of these attitudes in detail:

Half of all retailers plan to spend more on CRM software in 2017.

Dynamics 365, the next generation of intelligent business applications, is here.

Do you wonder what customers think of you and your brand? Are you concerned about how your product is being accepted across the globe? Do you often worry about meeting (or not meeting) customer expectations? If the answer to any of the above questions is a yes, then Social Engagement is for you! Microsoft Dynamics CRM's Social Engagement feature enables your sales, service, and marketing teams to leverage cutting edge social tools and build positive and long standing relationships with customers. With Social Engagement, you can connect with customers, analysts, and critics on social media and gain crucial insights into your brand. According to a survey by Capterra, despite the growth of Social CRM, people still want more, and the most desired CRM features are social media monitoring capabilities (25%) and the ability to pull in prospect information from social media (24%). Let's look at some of the other amazing things you can do with Social Engagement:

An estimated $41 billion is lost every year due to poor customer service. One bad experience can cause otherwise loyal and repeat customers to look elsewhere, ultimately impacting your bottom line. 

That’s why it’s imperative for your business to fully utilize its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Instead of using it solely as a transactional database, your CRM can be used to form a genuine relationship with your customers.

You work hard to provide excellent customer service to increase customer satisfaction, drive loyalty, and retain lifetime customers. Getting to know your customers a little better can go a long way. It helps to build relationships and inculcate a sense of loyalty to your brand. Some companies are still trying to deliver customer service with multiple systems that are causing less than ideal customer service experiences.  According to Blake Morgan in her recent article in Forbes, “today agents are plagued with system overload.

There are many questions you must ask when preparing to choose a CRM software. Leadership must find a proper balance between stakeholders and departments in order to make sure priorities are accounted for and pressing needs are met. You may even question the efficacy of investing in a CRM system, especially if your business has seemingly been “doing fine” without one. However, research by Kate Leggett at Forrester demonstrates the true potential of CRM software. ROI for CRM software is so compelling that the majority of organizations now make them their central customer portal. Furthermore, CRM software improves customer experiences and increases customer loyalty – a feat that many businesses struggle to achieve. That being said, regardless of the reasons behind investing in a CRM, there are numerous considerations to take into account before deciding on a specific CRM system.

Globalization has led to a surge in the number of remote workers across a variety of industries. As more employees work from field locations, around-the-clock connectivity and access to business critical information is becoming all the more essential to carry out tasks to make crucial, data-driven decisions. While mobile solutions help enterprises stay connected with their on-site sales teams, there is always the problem of low or no connectivity in extremely remote locations. Such a situation impedes business processes, restricting remote employees from efficiently doing their jobs and completing tasks.

CRM has transformed the way people interact with businesses; communication has become more intelligent and has enabled customers to have richer interactions with brands. Customer service is now a key brand differentiator and lies at the epicenter of every company’s core strategy. Many customers today prefer to resolve product and service issues on their own, through self-service portals, making meeting customer demands more challenging than ever. So, it has become imperative that customer service agents are equipped with the best tools and technology that enable quick resolution of complex issues and foster customer satisfaction.

CRM systems help sales, marketing, and service professionals manage their customers better. But imagine if you could also proactively predict customer trends, identify patterns, and deliver services in a personalized manner. With customer analytics, that’s now possible. Customer analytics enables you to gain important and actionable insights into trends and design and implement a range of customer service enhancement initiatives across the organization. By tracking customer behavior and improving operating margins, you can identify high-impact opportunities and restructure operations to improve visibility across all touchpoints. Additionally, you can define a framework to manage customer-centric metrics that reinforces your organizations’ brand value proposition. Unfortunately, a paltry 15 percent of organizations use analytics to drive objectives. How do you leverage analytics to deliver a personalized, predictive, and proactive experience?