Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions should extend beyond applications that capture data and manage formal processes. To increase customer loyalty and realize the potential value from CRM investments, companies need to enable people to work together to acquire, serve, and retain their most valuable customers. Today’s challenging business environment requires CRM solutions that increase technology adoption and give business teams a complete view of customer opportunities. These tools let workers take effective action on customer information to work with colleagues and partners and deliver value to customers.

Summary Unified Communication and Collaboration Customer Relationship Management Mobility

Summary Technical solutions for building customer connections are based on Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC&C) technologies within the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Windows Mobile.

Employees can use these technologies to develop more profitable customer relationships by creating better connections with colleagues, partners, suppliers, and customers. These efforts can lead to increased marketing effectiveness, sales productivity, and service responsiveness by supporting:

• • Improved coordination of marketing campaigns by brand managers, marketing professionals, and sales personnel who can work more closely with field teams and channel partners when taking new products to market.
• • Streamlined collaboration processes for sales teams that are working together to develop new business and create high-impact sales proposals that target the most profitable customers.
• • Faster and more effective resolution of customer issues by employees who can now find and work with the customer’s information or consult with an expert who can help resolve a customer’s problem.

Microsoft UC&C technologies integrate collaboration and communication tools with familiar Microsoft business applications to simplify how customer-facing people work together to deliver increased value to customers. UC&C solutions provide tools to help employees launch, sell, and support the products and services that help win new business and deliver more responsive customer service:

• Create team workspaces.
• Facilitate Web conferencing.
• Provide unified messaging capabilities.
• Enable search.
• Support workflow management.

Create Team Workspaces
Marketing and sales professionals can use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services technology to create workspaces where they can work closely with channel partners on a range of go-to-market initiatives and events. Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 with Microsoft Office Groove 2007 supports teams working across geographies and organizations regardless of connectivity. Using these products together, teams can create online or offline workspaces and share the latest product information with sales and channel partner representatives and collaborate on new programs and opportunities while on the road. If members want to use their mobile devices to join a workspace, they can because Windows Mobile supports access to customer information and documents from multiple mobile devices. Document libraries with version control and modification tracking capabilities help mitigate risks of redundant or conflicting work on the same documents when teams collaborate across time zones and geographic and corporate boundaries.

Facilitate Web Conferencing
Sales and marketing teams can use Microsoft Office Live Meeting to hold Web meetings and training events with field sales representatives and partners to coordinate joint ventures in advance of new product launches. This way, teams collaborate in real time without incurring travel costs. By using the combination of voice, data, instant messaging, application sharing, document annotations, notifications, and calendar sharing, they can communicate more efficiently and effectively. In addition, webcasts to customers about new products or offers can be set up and conducted to extend the reach of current marketing channels.

Provide Unified Messaging Capabilities
Unified messaging (UM) technology in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 provides robust, interoperable, server-based tools that integrate with desktop and mobile clients, providing sales people with access to voice, fax, and e-mail data no matter where they are located. They can even use their telephones to manage their e-mail, calendar, and personal contacts. The unified messaging capabilities of Exchange Server 2007 route voice mail and faxes directly to users’ inboxes. While on the road, people can access both voice and e-mail through any Exchange Server ActiveSync technology-enabled mobile phone. Or, they can access messages through Outlook Voice Access, which is a new capability that people with UM can use to access their Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes with analog, digital, or cellular telephones. This technology uses text-to-speech functionality to read e-mail, calendar, personal contacts, and directory information to the caller. The integrated and flexible Instant Search capability helps users locate information from any part of the inbox by using keywords or other criteria in e-mail (including attachments), calendar, contacts, or tasks.

Enable Search
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the Microsoft enterprise search solution for organizations that want to increase productivity and reduce information overload by providing their employees, partners, and customers the ability to find relevant content and customer information in a wide range of repositories and formats. With actionable search results that respect security permissions, Office SharePoint Server 2007 lets users go beyond documents and across repositories to unlock customer information, find people, and locate expertise in the enterprise to respond faster and more effectively to sales opportunities and service requests. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, search results are delivered quickly and relevance is tuned for enterprise and line-of-business data. Extend the value of CRM investments by enabling your employees to search, index, and display customer information from CRM applications, relational databases, and other structured content by using the Business Data Catalog. "People search" capabilities help find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests.

Support Workflow Management
Windows Workflow Foundation is a part of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0. It serves as a common programming model, engine, and set of tools for quickly building workflow-enabled applications on Windows. Your IT staff can use this common workflow foundation technology to build or extend diverse applications while still being able to integrate their systems and human workflows.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a complete suite of marketing, sales, and service capabilities that redefines CRM with a fast, flexible, and affordable solution while providing a familiar user experience based on Microsoft Office and Office Outlook. Microsoft Dynamics CRM embeds a suite of integrated technologies that help employees create and maintain strong customer relationships. These technologies include:

• Simplified campaign management and marketing automation.
• Easier sales force automation.
• More effective service request management.
• Extended value on CRM integration.

Simplified Campaign Management and Marketing Automation
Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers a Quick Campaign Wizard technology that simplifies sales prospecting and cultivation by providing sales and marketing professionals with a fast process for launching a campaign to a target group of customers. People can create lists for specific campaigns by using existing customer information or by importing contact information from various sources. Lists can be qualified and queried to locate accounts meeting specific criteria. Your teams can also identify and target the right customers for new products or services. Campaign-response tracking reports are generated automatically to track follow-up, attendance at events, and response to outsourced campaigns. Through integration with the sales and service components of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, managers can see the direct effect of a campaign on more profitable customer actions.

Easier Sales Force Automation
Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers a familiar Outlook experience so that people can easily and efficiently manage sales, service, and marketing business processes. This results in strengthening and expanding profitable customer relationships by converting leads to opportunities. These opportunities can be tracked throughout the sales cycle and result in more and improved opportunities to close effectively, based on available customer and supply cycle information.

This pipeline optimization uses analytical tools to provide salespeople with qualified leads and opportunities. Employees can generate quotes by using a full-featured product catalog that supports complex pricing levels, units of measure, and discounts. They can use order management features to convert quotes to orders that can be modified and saved until they are ready to be billed as invoices. Sales force management makes it possible to measure sales performance against quotas. Teams can create, manage, and distribute sales literature, and they can use direct e-mail templates to send customized e-mail to customers who share common characteristics.

More Effective Service Request Management
Microsoft Dynamics CRM promotes more efficient and effective customer interactions by helping service people respond more quickly to service issues, apply appropriate resources to service requests, and schedule and dispatch service resources in a timely manner. They can also use case management to create, assign, and manage customer service requests from a central location. With customizable workflow rules, employees can automate routing and queuing of service requests. Auto-response e-mail generates automatic responses to customer requests. With e-mail management, employees can automatically record customer communications and associate e-mail with appropriate customer records. Service scheduling makes it easy to manage service resources and to better understand resource and equipment allocation, usage, and effectiveness. The searchable knowledge base is a repository for the publishing of support articles and information. Teams can create, maintain, and update service contracts automatically.

Extended Value on CRM Integration
Microsoft Dynamics CRM can extend the value of your existing CRM investments. It can increase the adoption and use of existing applications by delivering CRM information and functionality in a familiar Outlook-based interface on the desktop with synchronization of information with Siebel and other third-party CRM applications through connector templates. People can also search across data sources for customer information and documents with Office SharePoint Server 2007 enterprise search features, using Business Data Catalog technology.

Microsoft mobility technologies are designed to address the needs of businesses of all sizes. A mobile workforce makes it possible to more effectively reach out to target markets across geographical and international boundaries. Mobile field service teams must have access to up-to-date customer and product information regardless of location. Key Microsoft mobility capabilities that keep people connected when away from their desks include:

• Network integration
• Data security
• Device usability

Network Integration
Windows Mobile 6.1 supports a wide range of innovative handheld devices, so people can combine their mobile phone, PDA, and computing platforms into a single, all-in-one device. This software platform provides users with a familiar graphical user interface (GUI), the ability to view and work with genuine Microsoft Office documents, seamless integration with Outlook and Exchange Server, and the ability to leverage important line-of-business (LOB) applications when away from the office. Exchange Server offers a single network identity and a single set of centrally managed policies, so employees can have the same view of their information and applications, with the same standards of data protection on both PCs and Windows Mobile phones. To help deploy, manage and secure Windows Mobile 6.1 devices, System Center Mobile Device Manager provides tools that allow administrators to manage thousands of devices from a single console. Mobile Device Manager also helps safeguard corporate data from unauthorized mobile device access — even if devices are lost or stolen — and reduces device management costs and complexities while helping mobile workers remain productive.

Data Security
Laptops running Windows Vista and phones running Windows Mobile include advanced security features that minimize wireless connection risks, safeguard against unauthorized access, and help reduce the risk of spam and viruses in mobile devices. In the event that laptops or devices are lost or stolen, company information will not fall into the wrong hands — with System Center Mobile Device Manager or Exchange Server 2007 SP1, administrators can remotely wipe or lock data on Windows Mobile devices.

Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) facilitates effective connectivity across platform, location, firewall boundaries, devices, and connection methods. RMS is an information protection technology that works with RMS-enabled applications to help safeguard digital information from unauthorized use. RMS helps companies to effectively manage access to critical data, depending on the rights of their employees, partners, and the public. To do so, it combines Windows Server features and developer tools. RMS also features proven security technologies, including encryption, certificates based on Extensible Rights Mark-up Language (XrML), and authentication.

Device Usability
People can use Microsoft mobility technology to collaborate in virtual environments, and to access necessary information from outside the office. With Windows Vista Sync Manager and Exchange Server direct push, the data employees need is at their fingertips on remote Windows Vista-based laptops or on their Windows Mobile phones. SharePoint Server 2007 in the Microsoft Office suite has an integrated set of user-friendly server applications people can use to access and share information at any location, taking advantage of mobility technologies such as portals, document libraries, document version controls, workflow management, and alerts. People can use applications such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office Groove 2007 to create virtual communities among remote colleagues, partners, and customers, making it easy to bring the whole team together, wherever they are. Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 exports application programming interfaces to transfer unstructured information such as audio, video, and pictures. All these applications are built on the familiar Microsoft user interface, for a consistent user experience.