Microsoft Transforms Customer and Business Dynamics.

When it comes to customer service management, resource planning, and managing work processes, how things are done used to be silo and not closely related. With the advent of mobility, instant gratification, and consumerisation of the ICT industry, things have started to blur, especially how customer expectations are being managed. The past few years have seen solutions appearing that are specifically designed to deal with these changes.

As businesses are facing increased pressure to transform the way they engage customers in a digitised and consumer-driven era, this begs the question – how does a business address customers who originally operate in silos and get them to engage with each other more?

For John Chan, CRM Solutions Lead, Microsoft Dynamics Asia, it’s a relationship game as customers are now dictating the manner and medium in which marketers must use to reach them and win their business and loyalty.

“What we have here is an on-going trend that is highly pervasive as it goes across all channels and operates beyond on-premise channels and processes. That means engaging services that are in place, like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and Software as a Service (SaaS), to do more,” Chan shares.

Part of this ‘engagement’ require businesses wanting to manage their personnel, clients, and the in-betweens. By doing so, these new services will be able to gather deeper insights that can be better used to do more. This includes having improved business engagements and driving up operational efficiencies.

Microsoft is set to take on a more in-depth role as it put out its new Microsoft Dynamics 2015 platform. According to Rukmani Subramanian, Chief Marketing and Operations Officer, Microsoft Malaysia, this new take on Dynamics is set to address all these pertinent areas.

“What we want to do is provide a broader and more macro view for businesses. This includes pulling analytics, engaging social touchpoints, and reaching out to different areas of interests to ensure every base is covered. This is how Microsoft manages CRM as it’s all about deploying tools that reach out and augment current processes to generate better results. This, of course, includes working with Cloud apps like Office 365,” she adds.