Microsoft what?

I wrote this a while ago for work as my employer has a "blogs" section on their website. I put together about ten short pieces like this to explain what I do, but decided against handing them in and thought I'd keep them for myself. Hopefully this will explain a little about what this mysterious CRM thing I keep going on about is, if you're interested.

**

When I’m asked what I do for a living I tend to tell people I’m a teacher, simply because whenever I mentioned training I ended up having to explain that I didn’t actually make people run round playing fields and do press ups, but instead I was an IT trainer. Naturally, my “teacher” response brings questions about schools, years and the National Curriculum, but that’s by the by. So, I’m an IT trainer, and after a few “oh, you’ll have to have a look at my PC for me” (thanks, but no thanks) or “oh, don’t talk to me about computers!” (sounds good to me – thanks!) quips from the asker I tell them I actually teach the higher-end stuff, and when asked what that means I name check Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“Microsoft what?” is the constant response. Surprisingly it isn’t SQL which prompts the question, as it would appear more and more people have heard of this product in some form – unless they just hear the pronunciation “sequel” and think it means some follow-up product – but CRM is the source of the bafflement.

So what is CRM? To crack the acronym, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Here’s the idea. A CRM system is essentially a database, in which you store the details of your customers as you would in a giant card index, but on top of this we can store details of every interaction we have with them, such as each letter, fax, phone call and email we send or receive. In addition, whenever you receive a new lead, or you produce a quote, order, or invoice, these are all recorded in CRM too. On top of this, should you decide to launch a marketing campaign you can use CRM as the engine for this purpose.

All very impressive, but you may be asking yourself “what’s the point?” Well, have you ever phoned a company, then had to call them back a few days later only to find they have no record of the initial call and you have to run through the whole story again? Have you received a letter from an organization, called them about it, found the sender isn’t available and it seems that nobody else knows a thing about the letter? Thanks to the fact that CRM tracks all interaction this should be a thing of the past, as if a customer record is opened everything is there to hand. On top of this, CRM offers phenomenally powerful search capabilities, so if for some reason you want to find a list of all your customers in Manchester with over 200 staff, who have bought your Superwidget product in the last six months but have yet to pay for it, and who have a fax machine but haven’t been included in a marketing campaign in the last year, you can retrieve this information in seconds without writing a single line of code.

In addition, CRM stores all of its data in a single SQL Server database, whereas many companies have separate data stores for different departments, and as a result of this nobody has a complete 360-degree view of the company, and as a result the marketing department have no idea a customer has returned their order for a thousand widgets because they had an issue with the way your organization dealt with a complaint they had relating to a previous shipment of grommets, so they happily send out a leaflet with “isn’t our grommet great? Ever thought of buying a widget?” on the front. As CRM’s data is all in one pot every division in the company can see what the others are doing, without the possibility of individuals becoming incredibly over-protective of their data, wanting to know why you need it, who you’ll give it to, a request in writing and so on.

Ah, you say, but what if I don’t want that. Well, that’s easy to address. CRM uses a clever security model which uses components called Roles. Administrators can create roles based on job functions – salesperson, for example – and permissions are granted using a five-level rights scheme, and then users are granted membership of the roles to gain access to the data they need to see. Ultimately a CRM user can only see the data we allow them to see, and we can also give them the rights to create, modify, delete etc. records via their roles.

There are several CRM products out there in the marketplace, such as Act!, Goldmine, Siebel and Salesforce to name but four, but Microsoft Dynamics CRM is currently winning awards and recognition, gaining more and more users worldwide. Above all else the Microsoft product is massively customizable, so if you want to modify an existing entity or create a new one, you can, plus the whole thing was written using .NET, so developers can extend its functionality by utilizing its fully documented web service framework, even making a completely new user interface if desired. The ultimate goal of all this flexibility is that users will be unaware they are using a piece of software, and instead they’ll feel they’re just working the way they always have, but in a much more streamlined and efficient way.