Microsoft has released what it calls the most comprehensive version of Dynamics CRM ever, with key advancements on the fronts of analytics, mobility and customer engagement. Here are the key details from an official blog post on the announcement:
We’re bringing all Microsoft has to offer in productivity and intelligence into a single experience. We’re bringing the advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities of the Cortana Analytics Suite to preview our first intelligent, adaptive processes for sales, customer service and social:
Intelligent selling with cross-sell recommendations so sales reps can predict which products and services a customer will need during the sales cycle.
Intelligent customer service with knowledge articles recommendations to empower service agents with answers to questions so they can more effectively resolve customer cases and solve problems on the spot.
Intelligent social with machine learning capabilities powering sentiment analysis, as well as the ability to process significant streams of data to detect social posts that are most likely to be customer service cases or new leads.
Intelligent collaboration with Delve functionality to surface trending content that is most relevant to what a person is working on.
In addition, we are also delivering significant enhancements in productivity, mobility and customer service:
Productivity – Capabilities in CRM 2016 are seamlessly embedded into productivity tools, including Office 365. In CRM 2016, we’ve enhanced the CRM app for Outlook, delivered templates for our immersive Excel experience, simplified the creation of personalized sales documents in Word and enabled seamless access to contextual CRM documents across SharePoint, Office 365 Groups and OneDrive for Business.
Mobility – CRM 2016 features full offline mobile capabilities for phones and tablets, the ability to create task-based mobile apps, Mobile Application Management with Microsoft Intune and next generation Cortana integration that surfaces CRM data for key sales activities, accounts and deals, and mobile marketing with SMS capabilities available with Dynamics Marketing in four countries.
Unified Service – CRM 2016 delivers a single, unified solution for Customer Service across self-service, agent assisted service and field service. Building on the integration of Parature knowledge management in spring 2015, we now have a new role driven agent experience with the Interactive Service Hub, native Knowledge Management, surveys to capture voice of the customer and field service capabilities with our recent acquisition of FieldOne.
CRM 2016 is available in 130 markets in on-premises or in cloud form, with support for 44 languages, according to Microsoft.
The Bottom Line
Many commentators have argued that CRM is a dying application category. But the reality is more that CRM has changed from a system of record to a system of engagement, something reflected at length in Microsoft's development priorities for Dynamics CRM 2016.
Overall, the release should make for interesting competitive enterprise sales cycles with Salesforce in coming months, given how many new features Microsoft will have to tout along with Dynamics CRM's long-standing benefits of tight integration with Office and the option to run it either on-premises or in the cloud.
Of course, just which features Dynamics CRM customers—existing and new ones—will depend on the type of subscriptions they choose. The Dynamics CRM price list is quite a bit longer than in past years, making the task of an apples-to-apples comparison with Salesforce on pricing and features more difficult.