Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - Applications

Vlad Arabajiev, 16 November 2011

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Applications Course covers the following topics:

• Marketing Automation Applications
• Sales Applications
• Service Management Applications
• Service Scheduling Applications

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This course focuses on getting users comfortable with using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in their organization. Anyone in a business can sit this training from front end users, service schedulers, administrators, office managers, and CEOs in order to gain a foundational understanding of the application functionality.

Marketing Automation Applications

This particular topic really helped me in identifying and measuring our marketing campaigns successfulness. MS Dynamics CRM 2011 utilizes Marketing lists, Marketing Campaigns, Quick Campaigns and Campaign Templates. I was able to identify, execute and replicate effective marketing initiatives across sales channels.

I learnt to use various tools to analyse and report on marketing information:

• Lists, views and charts
• Sales Reports
• Custom Reports
• Advanced Find
• Charts and Dashboards                                                         **

Sales Applications

From this module I came to realize that there is not a specified rigid process that needs to be followed in tracking sales. Depending on your organizational needs you can use the framework provided to build custom sales processes. I particularly enjoy working with leads i.e. potential sales. A really cool feature of Dynamics CRM 2011 is that once you have entered details for a lead, if successful this lead is qualified and can be converted to an opportunity. The newly created opportunity is automatically filled with all the previously entered details for the lead which can potentially save a lot of time when dealing with a number of records.

Service Management

There are three fundamental record types which are used by organizations. They are Cases, the Knowledge Base and the Subject Tree. The most interesting section in this module for me was working with cases which I found to be straight forward. The feature that I came to use the most was automatically routing cases to an appropriate queue or service representative based on the criteria we had specified earlier.

I realized that working with cases allowed me to better capture customer inquiries and consequently provide more accurate feedback and support which resulted in better customer service and improved customer relationship.

Service Scheduling Applications

This module is also quite interesting and proves to be very beneficial, especially when you need to allocate your organizations resources efficiently. My favourite way of doing so was by creating Resource Groups which are groups of Resources with similar skill sets or capabilities. Resource Selection Rules are also very cool and important feature because these specify which groups of resources are required for a particular service.

I enjoyed the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Applications module and the opportunity to customize the framework. There are a number of processes on how to achieve a task and the beauty is that almost everything is customizable to suit your organization’s needs. This module allows users for both services and/or product oriented companies to tailor the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to best fit to their internal processes.

I would encourage anyone to play around with the system which is the best way to learn how to use and become efficient at it. Start with creating leads and qualifying them to an Account, Contact and Opportunity and then proceed to creating Marketing Lists, Marketing Campaigns and set up some Goals.

Recently I sat the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Applications Exam MB2-868 , what I found is that although I had done quite a bit of studying from the textbooks and utilized the E-Learning provided by Microsoft, the questions in this exam were based on real life situations where experience counts the most.  

*Image 1 from: http://www.crm-reviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/crmsphere1.jpg
**Image 2 from: http://penrodcrm.com/wp-content/themes/dl-theme/videos/demo-crm-2011.png