We explore how to streamline business processes using Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, focusing on the tools and strategies to enhance efficiency and productivity. We’ll provide a brief guide for using Microsoft’s Business Process Catalogue, a helpful resource for optimizing workflows across various 365 apps and services.
Modern customers expect smooth, reliable, effective customer service. They also expect it now — or, in many cases, yesterday. The best way to meet this need is by streamlining your business processes. In this way, you can deliver excellent results faster with higher levels of accuracy, and with many systems, you can even create mechanisms to gradually improve your quality of service.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, you get a powerful tool for boosting efficiency and productivity when interacting with customers and meeting their needs. By implementing the solutions below, your organization can achieve greater operational effectiveness and ensure your processes are aligned with your strategic goals.
Understanding Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement consists of applications built to help companies manage their relationships with customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It also integrates a range of modules and functions, such as marketing, field service processes, and sales. This can unify your customer service operation by tying together a wide range of experiences.
As a result, you can provide more personalized experiences for each customer while simultaneously enabling your team to respond to requests faster.
With 365 CE, you also gain the ability to automate workflows. As you investigate how to streamline business processes with Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, these automations should be a primary focal point. They empower your customer service team — and those in marketing and other departments — to design automations that make their daily tasks much faster and improve the accuracy with which they work.
Dynamics 365 CE also features sales and finance integrations. By incorporating data from these departments into your customer service processes, you can see correlations between sales and financial performance and customer service. You can also design automated workflows that use data from sales and finance to facilitate customer service activities.
For example, suppose you want to increase the frequency with which your company reaches out to high-value customers when monthly revenue dips beneath a certain level. By taking advantage of 365 CE’s financial integrations, you can design a workflow that automatically generates customer contact lists when your sales drop beneath X amount.
In this way, your customer outreach team doesn’t have to comb through long lists of contacts to identify which clients to pursue. They get all of the customer contact and purchase information they need automatically.
One of the most effective ways to take full advantage of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement features is by using it with Microsoft Business Process Catalog for 365. Here’s how.
Using Microsoft’s Business Process Catalog
Microsoft’s Business Process Catalog consists of a library of predesigned business processes you can customize according to your needs. Microsoft designed the Catalog to assist organizations with implementing best practices that improve efficiency. Also, since the Catalog enables repeatable, dependable workflows, it introduces greater consistency to your operations.
To take advantage of the Business Process Catalog, start by identifying the ID that best matches the process you’re trying to optimize.
For example, let’s say you want to streamline getting a prospect and providing them with a quote. In that case, you would refer to Catalog ID #85, prospect to quote overview.
ID 85 consists of a sequence of steps you use to find leads, provide them with quotes, and then follow up. In other words, the system gives you preestablished best practices that can serve as a framework for lead generation, quoting, and customer relationship management operations. ID 86 includes the following steps:
- Define the sales strategy
- Run marketing campaigns
- Identify and qualify leads
- Pursue opportunities
- Estimate and quote sales
- Manage customer relationships
By using the Catalog’s systems as frameworks, you make sure your process includes steps and tools that work without leaving out essential components that may be easy to overlook. To illustrate, it can be easy to conflate the process of qualifying leads and pursuing opportunities. A salesperson may identify a high-quality, hop on the phone, and give them a call.
But you have to make sure the kind of interaction they have, the content they share, the questions they ask, and other interaction details support an accurate quote and effective sale. By following the frameworks in the Business Process Catalog, you systemize processes that may otherwise get glazed over.
In this way, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, when combined with Microsoft’s Business Process Catalog, improves your business processes. Specifically, it streamlines the work of your customer engagement teams so they can focus more on people instead of getting bogged down by clunky or complex business processes.
How the Business Process Catalogue Improves Internal Processes
You improve the quality, efficiency, and consistency of your operations by using the Business Process Catalog. Here’s how.
Consistency
Standardization is the heart of the Dynamics 365 CE tool. With a standardized set of processes, you ensure that no matter who’s executing a task, they do it well and without skipping any crucial steps. This way, you can drastically reduce errors and create workflows that are easy to follow and repeat.
For example, you can include a step that prompts a sales associate to gather marketing collateral before reaching out to a prospect. Your collateral library may include PowerPoints, videos, and infographics that explain or demonstrate concepts with which customers may struggle. By including this step in your sales process, you ensure that every lead gets exposed to the same helpful information before deciding.
This standardizes both the steps each associate takes and your prospects’ experiences. Also, if certain pieces of collateral work better than others, you can identify what makes them so effective and then replicate those features in the future.
Saving Time
It takes considerable time for a team member or manager to design workflows from scratch. Sometimes, they may spend more time figuring out the next step than setting up the action items for that phase. However, with Microsoft’s Business Process Catalog, you can use premade, effective processes. After making a few tweaks to suit your use case, you’re ready to go.
For instance, creating an estimate can take several hours, especially if you have to do it manually and from scratch. But with the Business Process Catalog, you can use prebuilt estimate templates, adjust them to meet your business use case, and then provide these to everyone on your team.
For example, every estimate may need to include a flat rate for performing work and an hourly rate for change orders. You can set up each flat and hourly rate ahead of time and plug them into the workflow. Each sales associate can simply select the tasks that need to be performed and the appropriate change order rate for that job. In a matter of minutes, the estimate is ready for the customer.
Scalability
Scaling up is a challenge when you haven’t already established effective workflows. Each new employee has to learn what to do from scratch — or they have to set up their own systems, which can erode consistency and quality. On the other hand, by combining 365 CE and Microsoft’s Business Process Catalog, you can build systems that you can easily replicate with new employees.
Not only does this speed up onboarding new team members, but it also closes knowledge gaps that can cause frustration and inefficiencies. For example, in many companies, you may need to revise quotes after the fact, especially if the scope of work changes. Your workflow can include triggers that tell salespeople when to revise a quote based on factors such as adding extra tasks to the job.
For instance, a customer may appreciate getting a quote that’s slightly higher but includes additional work instead of worrying about an additional task and adding more and more expensive change order hours every day. By incorporating a system for flagging quote revisions, you save customers from agonizing over how much they spend on more complicated jobs.
Start Streamlining Customer Relationship Operations With 365 CE Now
When you combine Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement with the Microsoft Business Process Catalog, you can take advantage of automated, more accurate workflows that save time and improve your quality of services. At the same time, by integrating sales and finance, you give your team members the power to make decisions that benefit the bigger financial picture.By implementing these solutions, your organization can achieve greater operational effectiveness and ensure your processes are aligned with your strategic goals.
The prebuilt processes in Microsoft’s Business Process Catalog give you customizable systems that introduce best practices into your workflows. In the end, you get more consistent, higher quality customer engagement processes, and happier clients that keep coming back.
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