Reimagining Customer Relationship Management: Microsoft

As customers are more informed and better connected than ever, it has become increasingly important for CIOs to redefine the way they engage customers. And to be able to do that, CIOs need a strong CRM system. At the CIO Year Ahead 2014  program, executives from Microsoft discussed the benefits of its Dynamics CRM offering.   Peter Gartenberg, general manager EPG (India), Microsoft, opened the discussion stating that one of the biggest barriers to successful CRM implementations has been a lack of user adoption. “At Microsoft, we don’t believe in overloading our applications with features. It’s about keeping it simple and getting users into the system,” he said.  “The typical user does not want to learn. We do not believe in implementing something that requires any formal training.” One of the attractive features of the offering, according to Gartenberg, is the promise of fast deployments.  “Speed is important. You cannot wait for a year to implement something. This is why we urge users to try out the cloud version which does not require you to make any provisioning. You can get off the ground much faster.” Samik Roy, director and country head, Microsoft Dynamics, pointed out that thanks to social media, customer touch points have increased. “How do you integrate data originating from different platforms, like mobile and social media, and provide meaningful information to the sales force—that’s been our quest at Microsoft.” And Dynamics CRM helps organizations achieve that, he said. One of the features of Dynamics CRM is that it is horizontal. “We rely on our partner community to build vertical customizations on top of it, to make the offering the best possible fit for the business needs of the enterprise,” he said.  Vijay Ramachandran, IDG; Peter Gartenberg and Samik Roy from Microsoft discussed how the CRM landscape is changing.