Microsoft reveals availability timeframe for Dynamics

Microsoft has announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, as well as updates to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing services will be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2014. The new updates revolutionise the way sellers and marketers unite and collaborate by bringing outside-in insights to sales and marketing professionals so they can understand the impact of their campaigns on customers, giving them more personalised experiences. 

Source: Microsoft. Social chatter on Formula One from 26 August to 17 September 2014, powered by Microsoft Social Listening on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

According to Ray Wang, Principal Analyst, Founder and Chairman at Constellation Research, “Closing the gap between marketing and sales is required for a successful customer experience. Organisations need tools to track the customer interactions from marketing to sales and back, collaborate on leads and opportunities, and measure the metrics that matter to both sales and marketing.”

“Unlike vendors that want to separate businesses by selling them countless different clouds and solutions, we have designed Microsoft Dynamics CRM to facilitate the kind of collaboration that businesses need to thrive and grow,” said Adrian Johnston, Vice President, Dynamics, Microsoft Asia Pacific. “This means that marketers and sellers can work more closely together to engage customers, bridging the chasm between marketing, sales and service to truly deliver end-to-end experiences that customers will love.”

To break down the silos between sales and marketing, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing* introduces the new Sales Collaboration Panel, which allows sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting. The release also gives marketers the ability to streamline campaign creation and improve segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B testing, integrated offers and approval workflows. Marketers can more effectively collaborate with the click-to-call feature in Lync and easily schedule and execute webinars as part of their marketing initiatives. The new Interactive Marketing Calendar allows marketers to visualise and manage their end-to-end marketing plans. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing will also be available in Japanese.

The new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the ability to recommend products to up-sell and cross-sell across product families, improving their selling effectiveness. The new release enhances the Guided Sales Processes to help steer sellers toward desired outcomes and ensure the enforcement of business rules across all devices. New mobile sales capabilities across mobile platforms increase productivity with flexible Role Tailored dashboards and analytics, as well as personalised home pages.

To help sales, marketing and customer care professionals listen, gain insights and more effectively engage with customers across social channels, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft Social Listening earlier in July in eight Asia Pacific markets**. This new service adds the capabilities for people to analyse 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 organisation, Microsoft Social Listening will be offered as part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online professional licenses at no additional charge; on-premises customers can get Microsoft Social Listening for an incremental cost. In addition, Microsoft Social Listening has expanded to include monitoring news – making the latest breaking news and relevant stories easily accessible for all.

Microsoft is also enabling a complete range of functionality for customer service professionals. This includes the powerful self-service capabilities in the recently acquired Microsoft Parature offering, the multichannel capabilities coming in the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online update and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 for on-premises customers, including the Unified Service Desk.

In July 2014, Microsoft announced the expansion of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online in Asia Pacific markets including Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines. This brings the availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to a total of 12 markets in the region, including Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore, resulting in the general availability of the service in 59 markets.

New Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers in the region include ServCorp in Australia and Hankook Tire in Korea. In Singapore, mind development institute MindChamps will soon be deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for its business.

“With our wide-reaching and diversified businesses spanning across Asia Pacific, we needed a CRM platform that could centralise our databases, as well as support our growing operational needs,” said G Shanmuga Babu, General Manager, eCommerce, MindChamps. “We were drawn to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online as it provided us with a cloud-based productivity platform, which offers the flexibility we needed as a fast-growing institution.”

Added Johnston, “The momentum for cloud in Asia is very strong. We are seeing at least two out of three new CRM customers choose Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for their business. Together, Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online embody our vision to deliver cloud experiences users love and businesses can count on.”

More capabilities and features of the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, such as productivity improvements, automated business processes and real-time forecasting data, are detailed in the Release Preview Guide.

Hashtag: #MSDYNCRM

*Microsoft Dynamics Marketing available now in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

**Microsoft Social Listening now available in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.