CRM 2016 is here and it’s full of new enhancements! One of my favorites is the advances in the solutioning capabilities of CRM to allow for Managed Solution Patches. This new feature allows for a more granular approach when building solutions and deploying patches.  This feature can be incredibly useful when you want to deploy only a subset of your customizations, without introducing all of the fixes and enhancements that may be included in the solution.

This topic builds on my blog titled CRM Selective Components, so make sure to check it out.

Are you ready to build a Patch?

Select your Solution and Click Clone a Patch

You now have a patch that has a similar name to the parent solution, but is properly versioned to show that it is a patch. You can clone as many patches as you like.

You can now customize this patch, then export and deploy as needed. Keep in mind that the latest release of the parent solution must be deployed to your target system before you can deploy a patch.

It’s important to note that you cannot export the parent solution until all of the patches are merged back onto into the parent.

After you’ve built and tested all of your patches, you can now merge them into the original parent solution by clicking Clone Solution.

The patches disappear, and the solution version is incremented. You are now free to export the parent solution.

Dig into the parent solution. You should see all of the patches’ customizations are now merged.

Beringer Associates a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and CRM for Distribution. We also provide expert Managed IT Services, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Cloud Based Computing and Unified Communication Systems.

by Beringer Associates

The post What’s New in CRM 2016 – Managed Solution Patches appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

There was a time when leads and opportunities were managed within Excel sheets, or by using simple contact management software. Sales teams reacted to customer demands and worked from a set of scripts that helped direct them to what they needed.

“The bulk of B2B purchasing decisions take place
before a customer contacts a supplier.”

Today’s customers are much more empowered. According to Harvard Business Review, a Corporate Executive Board study showed the bulk of all B2B purchasing decisions – 60 percent in some cases– took place before the buyer even contacted a potential seller for a conversation.

Customers do their research and expect personalized and efficient learning and purchasing experiences, which naturally prompts the question: How can sales be more proactive and deliver this?

The role of the modern CRM platform

Enter the modern CRM solution. Ideally, it will provide:

• Centralized customer data: Dealing with huge amounts of customer data is like drinking from a firehose. CRM should make it easy to locate and retrieve items such as customers’ histories and other critical information for sales, marketing and service professionals.
• Faster customer service: A CRM such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM can streamline the process of responding to customer requests and issues. It supports a unified help desk view, enabling consistent, accurate responses that do not require you to go hunting through folders and documents to find the information you need.
• Extensibility platform: Your CRM shouldn’t be an island. The right CRM acts as an integration platform to enable all your individual front office solutions to work together from one database, as well as integrate with financial solutions and Office 365. Additionally, out-of-the-box customizability in a CRM solution makes it easy to track a wide range of business relationships and processes without having to break the bank on integrations.
• Deep insights and customer awareness: Being proactive is important in building relationships with customers. For instance, CRM can allow you to segment your customers based on a growing understanding of them, and shed light on how effective your messaging and positioning is, i.e., how many people are opening the messages and how many of those get converted to actual sales.
• The right deployment model for you: Some solutions only offer cloud-based deployment, but Dynamics CRM gives you the full range of options. You can utilize CRM Online as SaaS, bundled with Office 365 for a relatively low cost, purchase Dynamics CRM and have it hosted in Azure or a private cloud, or run the solution entirely on-premise.

All of these capabilities go far beyond what a sales team could do with a bunch of spreadsheets or a legacy application. Now, Dynamics CRM further improves customer satisfaction with comprehensive field service management included, enabling customer and field service reps to provide consistent and personalized service, whether on the phone or onsite.

CRM may be implemented or upgraded in response to a variety of challenges, ranging from lost sales opportunities to poor segmentation of customer contacts (which results in poorly targeted messages). No matter the reason for making the change, it pays to make sure that you have the best possible guidance along the way.

Choosing the right CRM partner ensures that you get a CRM solution perfectly equipped for your organization and its strategy.

By Turnkey Technologies, Inc. - Award-winning Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP Partner based in St. Louis, Missouri.

The post The Role of the Modern CRM Platform – Loyalty and the Customer Experience appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

Today's post was written by Neil Erickson, Development Principal at Sonoma Partners.

As a firm that specializes in CRM consulting, we are proponents of using the technology we sell in our own processes. 

When upgrading to Dynamics CRM 2015 we went through the effort of moving to new hardware for both the CRM servers and SQL server. We decided that it was time to implement SQL AlwaysOn for redundancy.  A year later when it was time to upgrade one of our systems to CRM 2016, we elected for an in-place upgrade since both Windows and SQL remained up to date.

The upgrade process was going along without issue until the following error occurred:

System.Exception: Action Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.SetReadCommittedSnapshotIsolation failed. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: The operation cannot be performed on database "Grapevine_MSCRM" because it is involved in a database mirroring session or an availability group. Some operations are not allowed on a database that is participating in a database mirroring session or in an availability group.

Upon reading the exception, my first thought was that we would need to completely undo the availability group and then rebuild it once the upgrade was complete.  Due to the size of the database, I expected that this could add an additional two hours to the upgrade process. 

Luckily, this process was not as lengthy as I imagined.  It was possible to go in and remove it from the Availability Group and have the upgrade process retry the action.

This leaves the database running on what was the Primary Replica, and in the restoring state on the secondary.

Primary:

Secondary:

Once the upgrade finishes you can add the database back to the availability group. Because the secondary is still in restoring mode, it will simply catch up the changes. This takes considerably less time than a full backup and restore cycle, and it can be accomplished by selecting “Join Only” for your initial data synchronization preference.

The evolution of Microsoft Dynamics CRM into a component of Microsoft Dynamics 365 not only makes good sense – it offers a strong signal of what complete digital transformation means for business.

Recently, Microsoft announced Dynamics CRM (cloud platform) and ERP products would be rolled into an integrated cloud product Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In essence, it expands business capabilities of the CRM and makes it more flexible for further development by Microsoft and ISVs.

5 Key benefits of Microsoft 365

• Brings greater built-in insights, predictive intelligence and workflow automation to CRM users.
• Integrates with Office 365 platforms.
• Create more of a one-platform opportunity with all-encompassing business tools
• Creates and environment where Microsoft can change and upgrade products with ease, with all tools accessing a cloud environment
• Allows customers to specifically pick integrated tools that best benefit their business

Microsoft has steadily been increasing the capabilities of Dynamics CRM and this development means bringing better business intelligence – including predictive intelligence – to business units in a one-platform development.

It’s all part of Microsoft’s vision to develop complete digital transformation for business, social and personal spheres.

“And let’s be clear – digital transformation won’t happen with another bolted-on cloud app or a giant implementation of monolithic and closed business application packages that take half a decade to customize and deploy, and another for employees to begrudgingly learn how to use,” wrote Microsoft Satya Nadella in a LinkedIn post written during Microsoft’s recent World Partners Conference held in Toronto.

It also becomes quite clear a repeatable and an all-encompassing business process that can be built in Dynamics CRM and later this fall extended with Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives any company or industry a greater chance at market success.

It’s all about data these days. And it takes a sophisticated model like this to handle everything everyone needs to know for best success in an ultra-competitive marketplace.

Rick is a Dynamics CRM MVP with expertise in sales process design, social selling and CRM strategies. Rick has been involved in the CRM industry since 1990 as a company founder, senior executive, reseller, industry association board member, educator consultant and professional speaker. He is the creator of the Full Contact Selling (FCS) methodology for Dynamics CRM. He can be reached at rickm@fullcontactselling.com

In the professional services business, cash is king. Increase billable hours and reduce collection time for a winning cash flow combination.

The challenge

A regional accounting firm had lower utilization and slower collections than industry averages. Looking for the root of the problems, they identified inconsistent scheduling practices among their accountants and inefficient billing processes.

The solution

Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated with Office 365, the firm implemented centralized scheduling. Either online, or by calling a central number, clients have access to their accountant’s available hours to schedule time instantly. The utilization of the firm has soared while allowing the accountants to design their own schedule.

To accelerate collections, at the end of each session the accountant enters the time and services delivered for each client. The information is automatically routed to Microsoft Dynamics GP for billing. Invoices are sent out the same day, eliminating billing lag.

How customers are amazed

Going to the accountant may not be fun for anyone, but customers appreciate how easy it is to schedule. And receiving their bill so quickly gives them confidence that the firm clearly appreciates the time value of money.

Download the full eBook www.crmsoftwareblog.com/amazing to find out 16 more amazing customer experiences businesses are delivering today with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

by CRM Software Blog Editors, Find a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner by Industry/Location

The post Accounting Firm Simplifies Scheduling and Accelerates Billing – 17 Amazing Customer Experiences With Dynamics CRM appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

I speak with executives, upper management, middle management, etc. who report the sheer number of meetings they are having to review KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) with their teams.  They know there has to be a better way to manage “the numbers” versus using spreadsheets and having hour long weekly meetings.  Management also wants their sales staff selling and not completing administrative work.

What is the answer?  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 and Dashboards.  Below I will highlight a few Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Dashboard components.  While looking at these components please keep in mind that your sales staff is only entering data within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016.  Since the data is entered then it can be reported on via dashboards and standard reports.

Sales Pipeline

Every sales person wants to know how healthy their pipeline is and what deals or Opportunities to focus on.  Below is a standard 4 stage pipeline.  The pipeline can be fully customized to meet your needs.

Four Stage Pipeline

Since our sales staff are entering Opportunities into Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 those Opportunities are surfaced via a Sales Pipeline.  The Sales Pipeline offers full drilldown capabilities.  You can get very granular and see what Opportunities need to be focused on.

Here we illustrate the same Sales Pipeline, but in this view we are looking at all the Opportunities that make up the Sales Pipeline.

Individual Opportunities within Pipeline

From a sales perspective, maybe what is most important is to view what Opportunities are anticipated to close this month.  With the drilldown capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 we only need to click on the bottom of the Sales Pipeline and view that information by Estimated Close Date.  By selecting the month we want to view in the bar chart, we can see what Opportunities are anticipated to close for the month.

Opportunities by Close Month

Click here to visit our website to continue reading about the other two KPI view's in Dynamics CRM.

To learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Dynamics GP, and Microsoft Office 365, please contact Kevin Brown at kbrown@hbs.net or (920) 687-4124.

By Kevin Brown, Heartland Business Systems/Avastone Technologies LLC, Microsoft Dynamics CRM& Dynamics GP Partner - Fox Valley, Milwaukee, Chicago

The post Three KPI Views in Microsoft Dynamics CRM appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

With the web portal capabilities in CRM 2016 Spring Wave, you can extend CRM to the web to deliver exceptional customer service and increase customer engagement and satisfaction. With the community portal, you can enable peer-to-peer interactions between experts in the community, subject matter experts within an organization, and internal and external users. Communities organically grow the catalog of available knowledge from knowledge base articles, forums, and blogs.

Integration with Dynamics CRM provides the flexibility to automate business processes based on information originating from web portal that gets tracked in CRM. For example, you can use the SLA functionality to enable automated case creation in CRM if a forum thread has not been answered for 10 days (or if the forum thread size increases beyond a certain limit while it is still unanswered). This can help ensure that you are addressing all customer queries wherein a peer-to-peer interaction is unable to resolve it in a timely way.

Following are the steps using which you can enable this scenario:

Step 1: Enable Forum Thread entity for SLA

Navigate to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System, and then enable the flag “Enable for SLA” on the Forum Thread entity as shown in the below screenshot.

Step 2: Create SLA KPI

Before creating SLA for a custom entity, you must ensure that you have created SLA KPI(s) for the custom entity. This can be done by creating a look up field with target record type set to SLA KPI Instance entity.

Create a new lookup field “Forum Thread Answered (SLA KPI)” (with target record type set to SLA KPI Instance) on the Forum Thread entity after navigating to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System. This SLA KPI will be used to ensure that a forum thread gets answered on time. You may take a look at the below screenshot for reference.

Step 3: Mark Forum Thread and Form Thread Type entity fields as Searchable

Mark the field “Answered?” of entity “Forum Thread” as searchable as shown in the below screenshot.

Mark the field “Requires Answer” of entity “Forum Thread Type” as searchable as shown in the below screenshot.

Step 4: Create a field to check case creation on Forum Thread

Create a new lookup field “Case Created?” with type set to “Two Options” as shown in the below screenshot. This field can be used to check if a case was already created for a forum thread (to avoid creating duplicate records).

Step 5: Create a field to track associated forum thread on case

Create a new lookup field “Forum Thread” with Target Record Type set to “Forum Thread” as shown in the below screenshot. This is used to set the forum thread reference on the case that got created. You must publish customizations after you create this field.

Note: You can optionally use create a quick view form on forum thread entity, and show more information from the forum thread on the case form using this quick view form.

Step 6: Create an SLA

Navigate to Settings -> Service Management -> Service Level Agreements, and click on New to create a new SLA on Forum Thread entity.

Specify the general SLA information as in the screenshot below, and Save the record.

Create a new SLA Item in the SLA Details section to create a case if the post count in a forum thread (that requires an answer) exceeds or is equal to 5 posts, and a case hasn’t been created already.

You can use the following Applicable When condition for this:

Set the success criteria to check if the forum thread has been marked as answered.

Ensure that the failure after and warn after are set to 0 minutes. This will ensure that the case gets created as soon as the post count reaches 5.

Add a failure action to create a new case. Update the case title, customer, description, forum thread reference using dynamics values as shown below.

Add another failure action to update the forum thread record to set the field “Case Created?” to Yes. This will ensure that no multiple cases get created for the same forum thread using this SLA (when it gets re-evaluated).

You can add more failure actions e.g. Send an Email to the Community Manager regarding the case that gets created, etc.

From the SLA record form, add another SLA Item to create a case if a forum thread (that requires an answer) remains unanswered for 10 days.

You can use the following Applicable When condition for this:

Set the success criteria to check if the forum thread has been marked as answered.

Ensure that the failure after is set to 10 days. This will ensure that the case gets created only if the forum thread has not been marked as answered for 10 days after it got created. You can set warn after to 0 minutes.

Add failure actions as specified for the earlier created SLA Item.

Save the SLA record, and activate it. Make sure that you click on Set as Default to ensure that the SLA gets applied to all forum threads that get created in the organization.

This completes the setup of this scenario wherein case creation can be automated using SLA if forum threads do not get answered on time, or if the forum thread size increases beyond a certain limit.

Cheers!

Hemant Raj

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most important phrases in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry - or at least it should be.

In today's financial world CRM should be linked with the following mission:"Gain a competitive advantage by identifying, attracting, and retaining profitable clients."

Financial institutions today are facing the same challenge today as 15 years ago. Management is still trying to figure out "how do we obtain a complete picture (a 360-degree view) of our customers that is consistent throughout all contact points of the company?"

Why is this challenge always a top priority for the BFSI industry? The answer is that it leads to a better bottom line.

...

read more

According to IDC, there are nearly 200 million mobile workers in North and Latin America.  That’s a lot of people.  Could they benefit from location-based services? Do all of them need location-based app on their mobile device?  As you might expect, at Badger we ask ourselves this sometimes.  While all of these people probably have some use for location-based technology, there are a few traits that we think make someone a great candidate for a location-based app.

1. The worker drives profit for the business.  They either generate revenue (usually salespeople) or they generate meaningful cost, such as fuel or time.  With salespeople, many times achieving just one more sale in a year can more than justify the cost of a location app.  For service workers, a couple hundred unnecessary miles driven in a month or a few wasted hours can justify the cost of a location app that prevents such inefficiency.
2. They make several stops per day at distributed locations.  Once you get above a few stops per day at irregular destinations, you’ve essentially surpassed the ability of the human brain to easily keep track of everything.  An optimal decision about where to go when becomes unlikely or impossible.  In industries and jobs where people make frequent visits, such as some types of medical device and pharmaceutical sales or consumer product distribution, a location-based app becomes hugely valuable.
3. They carry a mobile device.  This may seem obvious, but if the mobile worker isn’t carrying the hardware, then the software can’t help them.  Business customers either need to give their workers mobile devices or they need to have a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy so that the worker can leverage location technology.

If someone fits all three of the above criteria, they may be a good candidate for a location-based app.  The best way to figure that out is to dip the toe in the water to see if it actually creates value or not – usually by trying it out with a few people to see if it moves their key metrics or not (such as number of customer visits per week or points serviced per week).  If it doesn’t move the metrics, then it probably isn’t providing value.  But if it does move the metrics, it can be a good way to unlock value.

About Badger Maps

Badger Maps provides integrating mapping for customer service and sales to improve planning, routing andscheduling. Badger increases closed deals by taking the pain out of the sales process. More appointments, more deals, save time, save gas. See your customers on a map, generate new leads, optimize your driving route. Take the hassle out of outside sales. www.badgermapping.com

The post A location based app, but why? appeared first on goERPcloud.

Legend tells of a renowned warrior whose Dynamics CRM skills were far greater than any other... Could it be you?

The CRMUG live Black Belt training series is a structured program for administrating, configuring and adapting Dynamics CRM. In martial arts, a Back Belt is someone who has steadily increased their knowledge and skills to become an expert. Become that expert!

This virtual training series is a progression of live, instructor-led classes and on-demand materials, targeted towards system administrators and super users that need to manage a Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment.

Click the classes below to register for each progressive class individually or click here to save and register for the entire series at once! Each training level builds on top of the previous to mix theory and real world, hands-on practice.

• Blue Belt - Beginner
  July 28 | 1:00 PM | Instructor: Chris Bradley
• Purple Belt - Intermediate
  August 4 | 1:00 PM | Instructor: Ashley Kleeman
• Brown Belt- Advanced
  August 18 | 1:00 PM | Instructor: Josh Coker
• Black Belt - Expert
  August 25 | 10:00 AM | Instructor: Jason Earnshaw

Mastering Microsoft Dynamics CRM is easier than you think with the Black Belt training series from CRMUG Academy.

Enroll today!

Contact Academy Director Rich Beliveau at Rich@crmug.com with any questions. 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Dynamics CRM User Group (CRMUG) is an independent community focused on end-user education, training and networking. CRMUG is recognized by Microsoft as the official user group for Dynamics CRM.

CRMUG Academy brings instructor-led training right to you through your laptop or tablet! Our expert-led courses are offered in two formats: live and on-demand. Find what works for you and your schedule, then watch yourself succeed.