Yes! You’ll find the system can be tailored to your specific business needs. Its flexibility compares well with other similar CRMs
First of all, lets look at what Dynamics can do without any customisations
What can Dynamics do out of the box?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales was created to be an immediately deployable, comprehensive solution. So, ignoring customisations, here’s what you can expect straight after installation:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Record detailed profiles of customers, leads, and partners. Track interactions, communication histories, and link contacts to opportunities or cases.
- Sales Automation: Monitor your sales pipeline, manage opportunities, and automate stages in the sales cycle, from lead capture to deal closure.
- Marketing Tools: Deploy campaigns, manage mailing lists, and track campaign performance, ensuring you can calculate ROI and adjust your strategies.
- Service Management: Handle customer queries, complaints, or feedback efficiently with case management, knowledge bases, and service scheduling.
- Reporting and Analytics: Access pre-configured reports on sales, service, marketing, and more. Visualise data with built-in charts, graphs, and leaderboards.
- Collaboration Features: Share documents, notes, and schedules within the team. Utilise the in-built chat function to communicate in real time.
- Mobile Access: Use Dynamics on-the-go with its mobile-ready interface, allowing access to data, tasks, and communications from any device, anywhere.
This basic functionality is really useful, but you’ll soon find that you need to make changes to fit around the way you do business. However, a word of warning, it’s easy to get carried away and over-customise your system. This can create unanticipated problems
- Increased maintenance costs
- Difficult to integrate
- Upgrades can become tricky
- Training time increases
- Likelihood of bugs and errors in the system
- Tie in to your existing supplier
Evaluate each customisation you’d like and look for a compromise with the existing functionality. Sometimes less is more!
What can I customise in the system?
Fields and Forms: You can tailor-make your data entry areas. You can add fields specific to your industry or a particular form layout that streamlines your data input process.
Customer Business Processes: You can craft bespoke workflows that map directly to your established business processes. It could be lead management for sales or incident resolution in customer service, these flows make sure the CRM serves as an extension of your business’ operational guidelines.
Workflows and Logic: It’s possible to define and automate actions based on specific triggers or conditions (e.g., sending an email when a lead reaches a certain stage).
Dashboards and Reports: Visualise your data in ways that illustrate your objectives. You can make custom dashboards to highlight metrics that matter most to you, making sure your team always has a close eye on performance.
Custom Entities: Create entirely new entities (tables in a database) to store and manage data unique to your business operations.
Integration Possibilities: Dynamics can be seamlessly integrated with other systems like
- Financial software
- ERP systems
- Marketing systems
- or even bespoke internal tools your business relies on.
User Roles and Security: You’re able to define distinct user roles and permissions to ensure that team members access only the information relevant to them.
Templates and Document Generation: Create custom templates for emails, invoices, quotes, or other regularly used documents.
Mobile Customisations: Tailor the mobile version of Dynamics to highlight functionalities essential for on-the-go users.
Globalisation and Localisation: Tailor your CRM to support multiple languages or regional data formats (e.g., date, currency).
Customisation examples
Which business system areas do companies customise?
Project Management: Create tools to show project statuses in real-time. Customised dashboards showing project timelines, milestones, and potential bottlenecks.
Feedback Collection: Integration with survey tools to automatically gather and categorise customer feedback.
Event Management: Registration and attendance tracking within the CRM. Custom fields for event data like ‘Venue Capacity’ or ‘Special Requests’.
Product Inventory: Integrate with stock management systems to show real-time inventory levels.
Financial Data Integration: View invoice histories, payment statuses, or credit histories for clients. Generate financial forecasts based on past sales data and future projections.
Employee Performance: Track sales rep performances, client interactions, or closed deals.
Knowledge Base: Curate and categorise a library of resources for both internal training and client self-service.
Can I make these customisations myself?
Yes you can, but with caveats.
Microsoft Dynamics has been designed with user customisation in mind. The platform is as intuitive and versatile, allowing both technical users and those less technically inclined to make customisations on their own.
Here’s what you can expect if you want to DIY:
User-Friendly Interface: With its drag-and-drop functionality and clear visual cues, Dynamics makes the process of tweaking fields, forms, and dashboards easy.
Guided Tutorials: The CRM comes with tutorials and guides. Whether you’re looking to adjust a workflow or integrate a new platform, step-by-step guidance is at your fingertips.
Community Support: The Dynamics user community is huge and active. There are forums, webinars, and online workshops offering insights, troubleshooting tips, and best practices.
Further customisations: If there’s a more specialist customisation or integration you’re after, or if you simply prefer expert handling, you should contact your developer. They can guide you through the process, assist with complex adjustments, or do the whole job for you! You’ll almost certainly need expert help with complex integrations and workflows. If you have a support contract, check two things
- Are customisations included?
- If I make my own customisations, can I get support on them?
Good luck with your customisations!
This knowledge should help you be confident about what you can expect to customise in Dynamics and help you to be better informed when speaking to a supplier.
