Your business needs Dynamics 365 Service

This may be a bold statement, but in 30 plus years of consulting I’ve not come across a business that has never struggled and consistently has the correct answer when they are asked questions.

Fundamentally, that’s what Dynamics 365 Service does, as it allows you to log every question that comes into your business, before then defining the process and timeline for answering it in the most efficient way possible.

Questions, questions and yet more questions

What sort of questions can Service log? Well, it can cover a huge range from product or quality questions, pricing or invoice queries to formal complaints. Often, these are dealt with via a web of emails and its down to your employees to remember and respond in an acceptable timescale. If you ask your employees to quantify how much time this takes you’ll just receive a gut estimate.

With knowledge management in your organisation, you can search for articles while working on a customer's case or other records in Dynamics 365 to instantly give your customers the accurate information they crave.

Reality rather than subjective

Putting a formal system in place for talking and responding helps:

• your people to not drop any balls, however good they are
• spreads the load from your key bottlenecks to your lesser experienced
• pre-empt customers chasing you about problems, you can call them before they call you
• you understand the overhead associated with each business relationship
• get accurate continual root cause analysis on where things are going wrong and right
• judge actual performance rather than basing decisions on subjective perspectives

Overhead is inflated by inefficiency

If I were you, the question in my head would be: “What is the downside in terms of time and cost?” I’ll answer that with a question of my own: What’s by far the biggest cost your business has for administration now? It’s the people. How much more effectively do you have to make them work to pay for a Dynamics subscription? Not very is the answer, even if they are on minimum wage. It’s a truism that the most expensive resource is one that cannot work well.

Microsoft Outlook and Excel are not the right tools

Your inbox and Excel are just not the right places for list management. Its like trying to drill a hole with a screwdriver, you might achieve it, but you won’t be quick, and you’ll likely end up hurting yourself. That’s the reason you stopped using those tools for your accounting software, so why struggle on with anything else?

Using the right tool rather than making do

Does your business aspire to have world class customer service? Do you want to be at the premium level or a bottom price feeder? Quantifying your customer service will drive your organisation to continually review and improve. You’ll attract and retain the best people if they see their future as progressive rather than being an unending firefighter. The best people and the best systems will retain and attract new customers which will kick-start the circle of growth for your business.

Customer Service Dashboards will pull together all of the key information you need, so your customer service team can focus on the most important matters and complete them as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Timely communication is often the secret to success

If a customer doesn’t hear from you, they will assume you’ve forgotten them. However, providing that communication manually is immensely time consuming and the level of queries ebbs and flows. Using Service will allow you to define a target response, measure performance against it and automatically alert and escalate when somebody’s struggling.

Dynamics remains active even when everybody’s gone home. The software can send emails or texts to anyone you specify in a defined criterion without anyone so much as reaching for their laptop. In turn, updating the questioner, prompting the person fielding the question and even alerting you if they don’t respond. Knowing what is not happening can help you analyse what needs to happen in your business. Wouldn’t you like a system that helps you out?

You all work for the same business

Outlook and Excel are single user applications where only the person who uses them knows what they contain, whereas Service will ‘join up’ your organisation. With Dynamics, you can review all the activities that have happened, anytime, anywhere and be able to make an informed response without calling anyone. Every detail can be easily or automatically filed so it can be found later. Ultimately, giving you a level of evidence that can save your skin from a hostile client meeting or even an employee tribunal.

What’s the efficiency of one of your people having to phone or email someone else to get an update to find out what’s going on? Doesn’t that waste two of your people’s time? That’s assuming you don’t have to have a dreaded meeting which ramps up the pressure even more. Having a central system to check means your customer gets the answer quicker and your people have more time for strategic progress rather than operational necessity.

Why now?

Microsoft have recently launched several new attractive licencing options for Dynamics 365, so your need and our ability to provide the answer has never been closer. Call your account manager today to discuss how our standardised implementation and training packs for Dynamics 365 Service can accelerate your road to success.