Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration can be a complex issue for companies. After all, the basic Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform offers a broad spectrum of tools to drive marketing, sales, and customer service. It even has tools specifically designed to support field service companies by creating work orders for calls and allowing technicians to access customer records remotely.
Evolving dramatically since its inception to support far greater functionality, capability, accessibility, and scalability. The latest iteration of Microsoft Dynamics 365 handles everything from lead generation to insight delivery, so why should a company shop around for integration software?
The answer to this is incredibly simple. By selecting the right integrations for the Dynamics 365 platform, you can make it even better!
Depending on the specific market focus, customer base, and business objectives of your organization, you can supercharge your CRM in critical areas with strategically chosen integrated tools. But it is quite easy to become overwhelmed with the sheer depth and scope of the CRM Microsoft integration options currently available.
The following list of the top integrations for Microsoft CRM can help you narrow your search. Each is designed to boost the power of the standard Dynamics 365 platform in highly targeted and strategic ways.
Office 365
You likely already have Microsoft Office 365 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, or any number of other valuable digital office tools. But did you know that it is quite easy to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365? By aligning your basic office productivity platform with your CRM platform, you can centralize data management, enhance collaboration, and generate results-oriented insights. This integration can allow you to easily add customer details to Word documents, export customer purchases to Excel spreadsheets, and schedule customer contact through Outlook tasks. Furthermore, you can significantly decrease data entry errors by accessing CRM data within Office rather than Dynamics 365.
Power BI
While customer relationship management and business intelligence software often perform many of the same functions, they differ significantly in terms of their fundamental focuses and goals. Business intelligence (BI) goes well beyond customer data to track a wide range of business patterns and trends that affect overall performance. The interactive data visualization tool Power BI can create charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams that depict all types of operational and administrative data, but it supports particular functionality when paired with Microsoft CRM. Drawing on advanced data-analysis tools and AI capabilities, it can create helpful visual representations of data for extraordinary report delivery.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
While automation plays a vital role in all the top integrations on this list, few tools have the extreme automation versatility of HubSpot Marketing Hub. This incredible platform allows you to automatically synchronize all aspects of your marketing outreach, performing a variety of routine tasks to leave your marketing team free to tackle more important tasks. HubSpot Marketing Hub can perform a broad range of lead nurturing/scoring, web intelligence, email marking, and event management activities in conjunction with your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform.
ProRM Fast Start
There is certainly no shortage of digital project management tools on the market today, but few handle the basics of project management more elegantly than ProRM Fast Start. Integrating seamlessly, it adds time/expense tracking, Gantt charts, and other valuable augmentations directly into the Microsoft Dynamics 365 user interface. If you want to give your CRM project management abilities a gentle boost, ProRM Fast Start is worth investigating.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Although it is part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite and is available for free as part of a standard Dynamics 365 subscription, Dynamics 365 Project Operations is a separate application that you must choose to integrate within the larger Dynamics 365 platform. Offering comprehensive and robust support, this application can manage all stages and facets of project development, execution, and evaluation, from resource allocation and expense management to time tracking and invoice billing. Employing customized templates at all stages of project development, Dynamics 365 Project Operations has the potential to shorten project cycles significantly.
Yammer
If you want to further the communication functionality of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM platform, you may want to give Yammer a try. Whether you want to streamline connections among internal team members or with any number of entire external teams, Yammer promises to make the exchange of thoughts and information amazingly easy. By integrating Yammer into Dynamics 365, you can establish a central interface for all CRM-related conversations. You can also easily share and collaboratively edit documents through Yammer.
OneNote
Another signature Microsoft application, OneNote is a fantastically handy way to virtually scribble a quick note. In fact, this app is far better than a standard pen and pad because it allows you to consolidate all of your notes in one place, store them permanently, and easily retrieve them whenever they are needed. When you integrate OneNote into your Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, you can attach notes to each customer lead and established customer and make them instantly accessible on all CRM team devices.
RingCentral
A technology that connects voice calls over the internet rather than a standard phone line, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) is incredibly useful in the world of customer service. In fact, VoIP pop-ups have become a preferred method of offering person-to-person customer service on corporate websites across all industries and market sectors. And because customer service is an incredibly important part of quality customer relationship management, it is vital to integrate these pop-ups within your CRM platform. Supporting both audio and video calls, RingCentral is one of the best VoIP pop-up tools that is fully compatible with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
In Conclusion
Different organizations are bound to have different CRM focuses and goals. While the best Microsoft CRM tool will always be in the eye of the beholder, the short list above is a great place to start looking for the average company. By selecting the integrations that will generate the most value, you can begin building an “a la carte” platform that meets your unique wants and needs specifically.
