Microsoft software includes new communication and collaboration functionality that can help enhance customer management effectiveness. The following are example solutions and scenarios that you and your partners may find helpful in achieving more value from customer relationships.

Multiple teams and organizations play critical roles in successfully positioning new products or services for success in the market. Field sales teams, distributors, dealers, and partners (such as retailers) need to work together to generate demand through public events, online experiences, advertising campaigns, and new promotions.

Many companies struggle with the complexity of these relationships and find that how well they orchestrate these go-to-market initiatives across multiple channels impacts both the cost and the speed of their launch.

The success of their efforts, and ultimately market share and revenue, depends on how well various people and teams can work together to target the right customers with an effective and consistent message. Companies that can't rapidly educate their field sales teams, marketing teams, and partners about the important aspects of a product launch risk confusing customers with local variations of the company's product or service promise. These variations might include product features, pricing, competitive positioning, and warranty or support terms.

Without easier ways to work across geographies and organizations, businesses often launch campaigns without being able to evaluate and improve their performance until it is too late. The result is lost revenue and lost market share from failing to reach and win over the right customers.

To improve the impact of marketing campaigns and accelerate the rollout of new products and services, your company needs tools that help people to work together more effectively. This means giving them a complete view of each customer, so they can create and run better marketing campaigns.

Microsoft helps increase the impact of marketing new products or services by helping your brand managers and marketing professionals work together more securely. They can use team collaboration spaces and workflow capabilities to collaborate with field sales teams, channel and alliance partners, and customers to create, carry out, and track more effective campaigns.

Microsoft will help your organization to launch new products faster by:

• Enabling your marketing professionals to work closely with field teams and channel partners.
• Coordinating campaign and launch activities, materials, and resources.
• Helping your teams share information in a more secure, interactive working environment.

By using the right customer information and tools to collaboratively launch new products or services, your company can increase its return on marketing investments and grow market share by getting products to customers faster than ever.

Microsoft capabilities provide sales and marketing teams across geographies and organizations to share project information, such as product specifications, design data, and project schedules, through online workspaces. Field representatives can access the most updated customer information and campaign materials anytime, anywhere.

The benefits of improving how new products or services get launched include:

• Increasing consistency in new launches through better communication with your field sales teams and channel partners.
• Maximizing return on marketing investments by identifying and reaching the highest-value customers.
• Offering real-time sales support.
• Providing competitive information for your field teams and channel partners, such as how to sell against specific competitors, or what their price points and marketing strategies are.

In order to drive profitable growth and improve sales productivity, businesses must both sell to existing customers and win new business. Simplifying the process of how people work together to pursue new business opportunities is imperative.

To reach the customers with the most potential and win their business, your employees must have readily available information about what these customers want and need. During the proposal writing process, team members need a way to work collaboratively across organizational and geographical boundaries and to share vital information, like previous proposal content.

Sales professionals need a way to easily collaborate and find insightful information quickly. Expertise, however, is often spread across organizations or geographies, which prevents companies from identifying their most profitable customers and reaching out to them.

Challenges also arise when companies lack collaboration tools and workspaces, and the ability to find and share customer information. In those cases, gathering expertise and information becomes time consuming and costly.

Microsoft answers these challenges with familiar products that can help your business collaborate easily on sales proposals. These tools can help your sales professionals identify and develop new business opportunities by making it easier for them to work with colleagues, partners, and subcontractors with mutually available customer information and their collective expertise to create and deliver high-impact proposals.

Teams can use online workspaces to hold meetings with people from any location, collaborate on proposals, and quickly locate experts within the company who can provide help.

Microsoft integrated tools provide these teams with automated approval processes, digital signoffs, and a centralized repository to more securely share valuable proposal and customer information. With Microsoft technology, it's easier for information workers to manage their communication while working more effectively together to access people and information, and enrich the structured workflow process.

Your teams can simplify working together to pursue business opportunities by using Microsoft tools to:

• Identify and manage new opportunities.
• Find people, information, and expertise to accelerate and enrich proposal development.
• Improve collaboration within sales proposal teams, regardless of location.

By simplifying the process of how people work together, your company can capitalize on its resources across boundaries and increase new business opportunities. The benefits of this collaborative approach to developing new business include:

• High success rates of proposals based on easy access to both relevant material and experts across the organization, including partners.
• Shortened proposal development time through streamlined workflows and validation processes, and through meeting customer deadlines.
• A decrease in business development costs based on streamlined processes and a shorter overall proposal development time.

The challenge in pursuing a responsive customer service protocol lies in collecting pertinent information and getting the right people involved quickly. Many businesses own multiple, disparate communication tools and systems that overwhelm employees with too many sources of incoming information and make it a challenge to prioritize and take effective action. Responding to customers with "one face" is essential, as multiple handoffs or message forwarding results in customer dissatisfaction and affects customer loyalty and retention.

The business imperative is to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by enabling customer-facing individuals and teams (call center reps, account teams, field service technicians, channel partners) to identify, collaborate on, and resolve critical issues through timely access to customer information and one another.

By building a solution to answer these challenges, your company will be able to automate service processes, resolve issues quickly and accurately, and help employees find qualified service professionals to deliver value-added service to your customers. Microsoft can help you proactively measure customer satisfaction during each service interaction to better ensure long-term customer loyalty. Integrated Microsoft tools can help you manage your sales, service, and marketing relationships in a centralized repository and in document libraries. The platform spans capabilities for messaging, IM/voice, Web conferencing, collaborative workspaces, and portals to help customer service representatives to work together with individuals across boundaries.

Microsoft tools can help your organization deliver more responsive customer service, increase customer satisfaction, and detect new business opportunities by providing the capability to:

• Locate the right information and expertise rapidly.
• Resolve customer issues quickly.
• Deliver proactive customer support through open communications.

By focusing on more responsive customer service and centralizing repository data for easy access to all employees, companies can better manage their most valuable customers and increase overall customer loyalty. The benefits of this collaborative focus on customer satisfaction include:

• Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty through easy access to information that more effectively answers customer requests.
• A better understanding of customers, products, and experiences, so your customer support team can identify up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
• Recognition of more opportunities due to easy access to customer and sales data.