Dr. Cedric Alford presented Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) at the KTL Solutions Users Conference in May; a short but serious demo of MDMs toolset.
“Businesses want solutions that give them market insights and the ability to deliver amazing customer experiences,” he began, and demonstrated how MDM accomplished this in a single application.
MDM delivers these capabilities by adding marketing automation functionality to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, delivering insights that will help marketers be smarter and more effectively engage with their customers. The new release builds on its marketing planning core and adds new features that include a visual campaign designer that allows marketers to design powerful marketing campaigns more intuitively and easier than ever. This enables CMOs to reach their customers more effectively across multiple channels. It also gives them new lead management and scoring capabilities, scalable email marketing that can deliver millions of messages per day, and deep marketing analytics so they can measure and improve the return on their marketing investments.
The Four Tools Are (in no particular order of importance)
- Social for Everyone
- Visualized Campaign Designer
- Personalized Customer Care
- Sales and MDM Linked
Personalized Customer Care
Customer care, an organization’s ability to support, engage and respond to the needs of customers, is an increasingly strategic part of any business. Successful organizations understand and have insight into customer needs across every channel, including the Web, social and mobile, to deliver the best customer care possible.
Microsoft Dynamics MDM enhances core case management capabilities and introduces a new Unified Service Desk, a powerful application designed for call centers that allows agents to handle multiple interactions simultaneously, increasing efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and displaying scripts to help agents provide a more personalized and effective service. The acquisition of Parature now offers customers choice in deploying customer service capabilities ranging from self-service via support portals, Facebook and Twitter to Web chat and video capabilities, all leveraging a shared knowledge base to ensure the right answer can be delivered consistently on the right channel at the right time.
This new customer care solution ensures that all organizations can effectively handle interactions in the way each customer prefers and quickly respond to that person’s needs, resulting in a smooth and more personalized experience for the customer each and every time.
Social for Everyone
The secret to any great relationship starts with the ability to listen. To help sales, marketing and customer care professionals listen, gain insights and more effectively engage with customers across social channels, Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Social Listening. This new service adds the capabilities for people to analyze and act on market intelligence from social conversations, including measuring sentiment across a wide array of social channels. It also allows users to track product, brand, competitor and campaigns globally and in real time to gain true understanding of their customers and their business across the social Web.
Breaking from industry norms, Microsoft believes that social capabilities are core to customer relationship management, so they should not be limited to an elite few at high costs. Enabling every employee within an organization, Microsoft Social Listening will be offered as part of the Microsoft Dynamics MDM professional licenses at no additional charge; on-premises customers can get Microsoft Social Listening for an incremental cost.
Delivering on its promise of rapid innovation, the release adds new functionality to help marketers be smarter, enabling them to efficiently drive and manage their marketing campaigns; help businesses engage with and care for customers in a personalized manner on virtually any device, anywhere; and enhance capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 to help businesses sell more effectively. Breaking from typical industry practice, the update also brings social listening capabilities to every sales, service and marketing professional within an organization to empower more employees with deeper insights. social listening, adds new marketing capabilities for more impact and enables businesses to deliver outstanding customer service. With this new release, we are essentially changing the CRM game.”
Visualized Campaign Designer
Marketing resource management tools allow you to streamline marketing operations by integrating planning, budgeting, and tracking across all channels, including email, digital, social, and traditional. Manage projects, digital assets, workflows, and approval processes across your team and other departments and agencies—all from a single platform.
Multichannel campaigns allow you to design your customer journey by engaging customers with personalized, multichannel campaigns. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing visual campaign designer lets you drag content to create and manage campaigns in a single window—across email, social media, events, and direct mail. Your organization can easily design, test, and launch contextual, personalized email marketing campaigns in a visual editor. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing enables marketers to test email on different devices to determine the most effective campaigns.
Sales and MDM Linked
No more silos, enough said.
Chief marketing officers (CMOs) want a marketing solution that helps them plan and execute great marketing campaigns, gives them insights into the impact of their marketing activities, and provides them with the ability to optimize marketing mix to deliver the most impact to their business. That is MDM.
Interested in learning more about our User Conference? Visit our recap page on more about our sessions to see what you missed and what you can look forward to for next year!
STEVE HAMMETT | Director of Sales
Steve graduated from University of Maryland, Baltimore, with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.), in Economics and a few years later, a Master of Science (M.S.), in Information Technology. He has helped organizations for over fifteen years to solve business problems using technology. He is well informed with all Microsoft Business Solutions and is a Solutions Certified Sales Representative. For fun he looks to the outdoors, whether water, where he is a sailor (Coast Guard certified in Costal Piloting and Navigation), a PADI certified scuba diver, and a certified Red Cross Water Safety Instructor, or land, where he is a skier, hiker and mountain biker.
