What Is Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is a customer management solution for sales, customer service, and marketing teams across all business sizes and industries. It also contains solutions uniquely tailored to project operations and field service organizations.

These systems manage customer interactions and relationships, provide enriched data insights, and automate typical administration tasks.

It can be difficult to understand the different parts of the Microsoft CRM suite, how they connect to the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem, and how they help businesses like yours. But in this article, I’ll break it all down for you.

Table of Contents

• What Are the Dynamics 365 CRM Apps?
• Dynamics 365 CRM Pricing
• Benefits of a Microsoft CRM
• Dynamics 365 CRM Features
• Microsoft’s CRM History and Product Naming
• Microsoft CRM Integrations
• Implementing Dynamics 365 CRM

The Modern Dynamics CRM Apps

Microsoft’s CRM offering today consists of 5 different applications, all built on the same code base, that provide a single, comprehensive picture of customer relationships.

• Dynamics 365 Sales—the most widely used of the Dynamics 365 CRM solutions—often used by sales teams to speed up sales cycles, create flexible forecasting, and manage their customers.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service, often used by service teams to track and manage customer issues, provide enhanced knowledge bases, and modernize operations.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, often used by business analysis and marketing teams to run automated campaigns, collate business data, and engage with customers in real time.
• Dynamics 365 Project Operations, often used by project service organizations to streamline resource allocation, project planning, project control, and time tracking.
• Dynamics 365 Field Service, often used by field service teams to optimize their offsite resources and manage timelines and customer expectations.

Each of the apps in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM includes core functionality found in most CRM platforms, such as customer activity management and data insights. Microsoft offers these apps separately to provide specialized utilities for different business functions and industry types.

Dynamics 365 CRM Pricing

Most of the Microsoft’s CRM apps are licensed per user per month, although D365 Customer Insights is licensed per tenant.

For instance, Dynamics 365 Sales start from $65/user/month USD ($88.20/user/month CAD).

For full details, please see our guide to Dynamics 365 CRM license pricing.

Benefits of a Microsoft CRM

Businesses often choose the Microsoft CRM applications for two reasons:

1. Built-in adaptability to meet unique requirements.
2. Connections with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem, like Outlook, Excel, and Dynamics 365 ERP solutions.

In fact, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM lists Dynamics 365 as an industry leader. The built-in adaptability of the Dynamics 365 CRM applications allows businesses to leverage these tools to meet their own unique requirements rather than being forced to fit their business processes into rigid software rules.

The Dynamics 365 CRM apps also offer built-in connections with familiar tools in the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Outlook, Excel, and Word. This is a major draw for many companies looking to simplify staff workflows and break down data silos.

Key highlights of the value proposition for Dynamics 365 CRM also include:

• Embedded AI and workflow solutions that can automate repetitive tasks and surface hidden opportunities.
• User-friendly reporting tools that can be configured by administrators while allowing for increased flexibility at the user level.
• Expansive integration abilities with a huge range of pre-built solutions for common business needs, such as learning management systems, SMS and direct messaging, payments, data appending, and much more.
• Tailored implementations by a partner, focusing on providing the most value to end users at launch.

To fully leverage these benefits of Dynamics 365 CRM, companies engage the help of a skilled Dynamics 365 CRM partner like Encore.

Dynamics 365 CRM Features

The D365 CRM applications all share some common features, but each app provides a distinctive set of enhancements which deepen their specialization. While most competitors’ CRM solutions offer general competencies, each Dynamics 365 CRM app drills into a specific domain, offering a streamlined user experience and expansive abilities.

• Track and manage customers and users.
• Streamline sales processes with Dynamics 365 Sales and create automated yet targeted customer experiences based on their interactions with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Provide multi-channel service and support in traceable processes that speak to each customer’s individual needs with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• Automate resource planning and optimization while optimizing service and project plans with Dynamics 365 Field Service or Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Microsoft’s CRM History and Product Naming

Microsoft CRM has been a CRM leader for several years, before and after their rebranding of the solution.

Over the last few years, Dynamics 365 CRM has been renamed to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. The five D365 CRM apps—Sales, Customer Service, Customer Insights, Project Operations, and Field Service—operate on the same D365 Customer Engagement code base.

It should be noted that D365 Customer Insights used to be called Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Project Operations used to be called Project Service Automation. These name changes don’t reflect a major change in functionality.

Dynamics 365 CRM Integrations

Integrating D365 CRM with Microsoft Office 365
Native integrations with the well-known business applications provided in Microsoft Office 365 speed up user adoption and productivity. The Dynamics 365 Outlook app allows users to not only access the CRM system from within the Outlook experience, but it also allows users to track their customer communications and augment system data as it’s discovered. Connections with Excel and Word let users leverage the power of robust reporting and word processing tools. Finally, embedding Dynamics 365 CRM apps in Teams eases collaboration, especially for remote teams.

Integrating D365 CRM Apps with Each Other
Each Dynamics 365 CRM app can be used independently or in conjunction with other apps in the suite. Using them together can create a seamless user experience that begins with your marketing and sales teams at the onset of discovering a prospect, and carries that data through to your teams that deliver a service or provide informed customer support.

Integrating D365 CRM Apps with Microsoft ERP Solutions
Integrating Dynamics 365 with a Dynamics 365 ERP system like Dynamics 365 Business Central or Finance & Operations means your customer relationship, financial, and warehouse systems can share the same data. For instance, your salespeople can see if a product is in stock, and your finance team can see if Customer Service has recently spoken to that customer who is behind on their payments.

At Encore, we’ve used also Power Apps and Power Automate to give users and customers a simple data input experience which can push data directly into the CRM system and trigger necessary workflows.

Implementing D365 CRM

The true power of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions lie in their adaptability and connections ‐ they can elevate your unique processes and operations, and connect the relevant data with the rest of your business applications. For the fastest ROI, it’s important to engage with a Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM partner fluent in translating your unique business requirements into system functionality tailored to empower your team to achieve your strategic goals.

At Encore, we’ve completed over 2,000+ Dynamics implementations, including deployments of CRM applications on their own, integrations with Dynamics 365 ERP solutions, and custom development projects.

If you’re looking for technology guidance tailored to your unique situation, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to help.

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