In dealing with today’s Customer Engagement solutions, previously known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Microsoft has made a bold push to be one of the leading options available. With all the advancements and buzz about Customer Engagement, more companies are exploring options of migrating their existing data from older inefficient systems. Here, we are going to explore some of the reasons why your planning should be focused on migrating to Dynamics 365.
Money Talks
You’ve probably heard the idiom “money talks” before and it is based in truth. Money is very persuasive, and many decisions are made based on what can be afforded. With Dynamics 365 you are getting a cost-effective solution that provides the benefit of being scalable and flexible.
First you have a mix of applications, which you can choose from to build the solution you need. Whether you’re working in Sales, Marketing, Service, Field Service (maintenance and repair by field technicians), Project Service Automation (project management), or Operations (accounting, sales order processing, inventory management and more), you can add the components you need and ignore the ones you don’t. The applications start at $95 per user per month and go up to $210 for the full suite of applications. All of the applications come with PowerApps, a tool that allows you to build your own custom internet and mobile apps, and Microsoft Flow, which helps you to build workflows across various applications (such as creating a case in Service when a tweet references your support team).
Additionally, the Sales application might be a little more expensive and expansive than what a small business, who has just grown beyond basic spreadsheets, needs. For this there is the Sales Professional version. This includes the core sales components and even cases to provide minimal support for $65 per user per month.
You might also have users who aren’t active day-to-day users of the application you need, but they need to be able to access the software as a manager to review what’s going on or for reporting purposes. In this circumstance you don’t want to pay the cost of a standard license, so Microsoft created the Team license at $8 per user per month, which adds to the flexibility of your solution. To round it out with scalability is the benefit of being able to add or remove licenses as you need them each month. This way you are only paying for what you are using.
Maintenance
Another benefit of migrating to Dynamics 365 is application maintenance. With any on-premise solution you are on the version installed until you make the effort to plan, test, and implement an upgrade to a newer release. With Dynamics 365 all of this and more is covered for you. By hosting your solution Microsoft takes on the responsibility of keeping your environment up to speed with the newest features and patches.
Twice a year they have two major releases giving you the newest functionality as well as monthly service updates that provide the latest security patches. Some people might be concerned with this as Dynamics integrates with numerous third-party applications. These people believe a “forced” upgrade would break that integration, or that the release coincides with a busy season where there is no room for the system to be down.
To prevent this, Microsoft provides notice of when their major releases are and allows you to schedule them for a timeframe that better suits your organization and additionally allows you to defer the upgrade for a period of time in order for you and the third-party to test for and resolve any issues that might occur as a result of the upgrade.
Easy-to-Use
With Microsoft as the company behind Dynamics 365, there are definitely benefits with using any of the applications. Many people have used various Microsoft products throughout their life and tend to be familiar with the Microsoft Suite especially the look, feel, layout, and navigation of those products.
Since people are more comfortable with things they already know, the Dynamics 365 applications are user-friendly and developed in the Microsoft style. Additionally, you have the benefit of a streamlined environment. Dynamics 365 integrates with the Office Suite seamlessly.
With the Dynamics 365 application for Outlook, users are able to track emails they receive as activities in Dynamics 365. It also integrates tasks and appointments. Data within Dynamics 365 can be easily exported to Excel to be analyzed or in dynamic spreadsheets that can be used in reporting and refreshed with Dynamics 365 data without additional exports.
Reporting can be expanded further by pulling your data into Power BI to give you even better analytics. What’s more is that the dashboards you build in Power BI can be brought back into Dynamics 365 so you don’t need to hop around between applications to review your business information.
Microsoft made the move to purchase LinkedIn back in 2016 and you can bet that they made sure their Customer Engagement application was able to connect with it to help users cultivate a more personalized and meaningful integration with buyers.
Discounts
Although there are many more great reasons you should migrate to Dynamics 365, the last we will cover is for those who are on an older or on-premise version of Dynamics CRM, GP, AX, or NAV. If you are a current customer in good standing (you are paying annual maintenance as part of an Enhancement Plan or are participating in Software Assurance for one of the previously mentioned applications) you are eligible for a 40% discount on any license you purchase between now and the November 1, 2019 cutoff. After that point there will still be an incentive discount, but it will be reduced to 15%.
To learn more about Dynamics 365 and what would fit your individual company’s needs, contact our Account Managers at KTL Solutions. Want your system to do something specific? Need an app built for your organization? KTL Solutions has the right mix of experience and innovation to turn what you need into a reality.
