Microsoft CRM Exposed -
Customer Service

Microsoft CRM Customer Service

The customer service module is used by organizations to manage and improve their relationships with existing customers that have requested service and support. Structured properly, it can also provide a deal of useful data back to the Product Management, Marketing and Sales teams to help facilitate improvements to product development, market positioning and sales respectively. A natural extension of the Customer Service function is the ability to assign and schedule resources in the field to diagnose and service products.

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While Sales Force Automation could be considered the strongest Microsoft CRM module and Marketing the weakest, Microsoft’s customer service offering is somewhere in the middle ranging from the weakest to some of the strongest features. One of the strengths of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the ability to define and manage service Contracts for customers linked to their Orders and to link those Contracts to service levels. Another functional strength is working calendars that can be setup for the organization as a whole or as individual calendars showing available time by resource. These can be setup to offer the standard working hours of the support team (ie. 9AM – 6PM M-F) as well as establish the days and hours of availability for each member of your support and field service teams. Combine that with the option to setup and manage a central Service Calendar and assign resources to pre-defined, effort based Service Activities based on their availability and you’ve got a solid field service and support function.

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To give you an example, you can define specific Service Activities, such as an Air Conditioning Checkup service that allows you to link the number of estimated hours and materials needed to complete that specific Service Activity. You can then create a Case and select that Service Activity and perhaps others that might be required to complete the Case. The system will then assign that Service Activity, based on availability, to various resources and schedule them on a central Service Calendar.

MS CRM also offers tools for managing a knowledge base. Designated users can create FAQ documents, Procedures, Solutions to a Problem or a general knowledge base article. Once published these can be searched and accessed by other users of the MS CRM Customer Service module. This is a common feature in most CRM solutions but Microsoft does a nice job of providing flexibility in how the knowledge base assets are created, managed and accessed. Version 4.0 also adds the ability to specify the language that articles were written so that it can be matched to the user’s language. MS CRM 4.0 also provides reporting on how often a knowledge base article is used to solve an issue.

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For all of its strengths, the MS CRM Service module lacks a few important features. For example, a customer self service portal is standard on most of the competitors products, but is not here. While the knowledge base functionality is good, the ability to search existing cases as a way to apply lessons and find resolutions is not available. MS CRM Service offer a way to define a standard resolution type, however there is no support for root cause types or root cause analysis. There is also no way to define who a Case is assigned to and escalated to. While there’s a feature that takes inbound support emails from Exchange and creates a Queue to track them, a user must manually convert them to a Case. The majority of competitors have the ability to generate Cases directly from inbound emails and track subsequent activities against that Case. Finally, there are limited analysis capabilities built into the small number of pre-packaged reports.

While this can be solved with the Report Wizard and Custom Reports and/or Dashboards, the latter two require development resources to get them done.
Free: Complete Report – Microsoft CRM Exposed

Free: Complete Report – Microsoft CRM Exposed