Get the Most out of your Dynamics 365/CRM for Sales Solution (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Jess Mooney, and I am a Marketing Director for Encore Business Solutions.

So, a lot of companies who start with Dynamics 365, Dynamics CRM see value right away in the governance of their business process, and all of their data entry, and also their reporting, but over time, those things do degrade because, as the solution matures in the marketplace, so do your business processes. When you’re trying to figure out how to reconcile those two without spending time and money in an upgrade or in a re-implementation, it takes some assessment of the current system, performance tuning, other technical issues that might be slowing things down, but more importantly, your company’s business processes. And where you find ways to simplify and create a little bit more flow between departments, those types of things can create an easier user experience in your Dynamics 365 system. So, a big part of it is just finding ways to simplify it.

So, companies running Dynamics CRM, Dynamics 365 usually find out, over time, that their end users are performing duplicate tasks in CRM, so there’s different areas in CRM that they’re adding the same data. There are different processes they have to go through multiple times to basically get to the same endpoint. And all of those things can be simplified, and, of course, when that happens, it increases user adoption. The main way that that can happen is through automation, and there a lot of amazing automation tools within the native system of Dynamic 365, Dynamics CRM. Workflows, business rules, business process flow, all of those things can help govern your users’ experience, and as they put data into the system, the system itself will be pulling the user along, instead of the user pulling the system along by adding all of this data and trying to explain to the system where they are in their process.

So, speaking about a system that does evolve over time, obviously, as business processes mature, additional ones are discovered and get added into the system. When that happens, it can be very difficult for you to understand where to begin when you want to start tackling simplification or other areas, like automation. that require some focus. At that point, really looking at the perspective from your end user will have the best success rate. So, things like ride-alongs or job shadowing, where you’re not spending time telling the user how they’re going to use the system, but actually watching how they interact with it, taking notes, trying to figure out where their major pain points are and where the difficulties lie, those are the keys to really unlocking areas that become problems for end users. When you have that list, you can go back and look at things like automation and simplification from their perspective, and usually you’ll find that that informs where some processes might be a little out of tune or out of whack, and then you end up kind of going back to the beginning in that assessment phase, where you look at those bigger processes, figure out how you can refine those in a creative way so that your current system works for you, but more importantly, it works for your end user.