Which Option is Best For Optimising Your MS Dynamics CRM/365 System?
If you’re the one in charge of keeping Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 in check in your organisation, you’ll be aware that you’ve got so many other applications working alongside the systems, whether it’s a marketing automation system or something else. Optimising all systems to work as a cohesive engine is key to business growth and productivity. So when taking into account that you need to have solid datasets and integrated views of customers, what becomes the right approach for Dynamics CRM and your other systems? What is the best path for your business in bringing it all together? Should you consolidate, migrate, or integrate? We take a look at all these options.
Consolidate
What we mean by consolidation is the growing trend of excerpting data from Dynamics and other applications and putting it into a 3rd party data warehouse for business intelligence and unified analytics. A lot of the time users to both integrate and consolidate, as those two approaches complement each other.
When we talk about a consolidated data set, we mean the actionable insights (SQL or any BI tool of choice for reporting) that teams can derive from reports while still keeping the systems and applications adopted throughout the organisation.
If you’re questioning whether to consolidate, the question boils down to weighing the positive impact it could bring to your organisation compared to the work needed to support it. You’ll need to anticipate issues that will inevitably arise. They’ll be centred around stakeholder management and process rather than be of a technical nature. You’ll need to make sure that there’s a clear idea of which reports need to come out of the applications and which reports need to come out of the consolidated data view.
So, what could the positive impacts be? For one it starts with what your organisation would and could do with an all-round 360 degree view of clients by having consolidated activity data in Dynamics CRM and other applications. Marketing will then be better equipped to retain new clients, support personnel will make loyal clients more successful, and sales people can bring better deals across the finish line thanks to object relationships being mapped and record being merged and normalised in a cloud data warehouse.
Customers will in theory also start receiving a more cohesive experience because of the CRM data that works in tandem with data from your other systems. Consolidating data will also benefit compliance initiatives like GDPR by ensuring that records are available through a central, trusted resource while still allowing applications to continue to do what they’re supposed to do.
Consolidating data is a lot easier to do now than previously. Thanks to a new range of tools, collecting, cleaning, and organising datasets no longer has to be done manually. Admins and analysts will save a lot of time as data pipelines are automated.
Migrate
By migrating data and applications to MS Dynamics CRM, it would allow the system to take over a range of business areas such as: Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Retail, and more. If you’re taking into account migrating, then you’ll need to make sure that you ask yourself if users will have success using certain Dynamics modules, before turning off applications (i.e Hubspot, Marketo, etc.). You’ll also need to ask yourself if it’s going to be hard for them to start using a new application for their function? These are only a couple of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself.
Only consider the technical aspects of migrating applications to MS Dynamics after you’ve considered all these business questions. It’s very important to not forget that projects of this nature will need a lot of resources and time. It’s imperative that you allow time for data migration, change management, testing, and training as well as optimisation and quality assurance. Glitches are highly likely, so make sure you are prepared for them. Moving such a hefty amount of data record is very tricky- even the best admins will be hoping for the best when testing it out.
Integrate
Creating a connection between MS Dynamics and the applications that you can’t give up because they’re just too good, can increase efficiency and streamline processes. You could drastically enhance your overall application performance by integrating Dynamics with other systems. If integrating, you can optimise different areas while keeping them aligned.
If you integrate MS Dynamics with a marketing automation system, you’ll be able to see a better collaboration between sales and marketing. Sales will have better visibility of pivotal data about prospective clients before contacting, and marketing will be in a better position to transfer qualified prospective clients to sales faster.
A strong integration strategy will account for which of the applications generate the best and most reliable reports because users will have reports from multiple applications and they’ll need to trust their data. If you’re the administrator, then you’ll need to be critically sure that users will be confident enough to act on the data received, rather than spend time debating whether it is accurate.
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