Tag: service

The Social CRM that came to be: from 2010 to 2020

Last week I came across an article on LinkedIn, where someone was saying “the time for Social CRM is upon us, thanks to COVID-19 changing the customers’ behaviour, and here’s a CRM system that you should use for managing it” (I’m paraphrasing). What caught my eye in the text was the references to the writings of Paul Greenberg, the semi-official godfather of CRM, in the 4th (and last) edition of his bible “CRM at the Speed of Light”. Released back in late 2009, the 700 page worth of content are probablt too much for anyone but the most hardcore CRM fans to consume at this point, but Paul’s blog post “Time to Put A Stake in The Ground on Social CRM” certainly is worth revisiting even in 2020.

Of course those who have followed Paul’s writings over the years may remember that he made the decision in 2013 to drop the “Social” from Social CRM and just call it CRM once again. The reasoning behind it was just as sound as was the original text laying out the definition of SCRM. I want to emphasize that I don’t consider the era of Social CRM from 2008 to 2013 to be a mistake of any sort. What I did find a bit awkward is the idea of selling any suite of software as the platform for “Social CRM” in 2020, since what Paul Greenberg wrote already back in 2009 for his Stake in the Ground article is still very much valid:

“When you look at the SCRM applications out there – there are no actual SCRM suites, no matter what the claims of any company on either the CRM or social tools side. What you do have are effective and important applications that increase the ability of employees to interact with customers – though they are not tools that facilitate the actual interaction. You also have the integration of social media and community building tools with traditional CRM tools which are providing effective combinations which are leading toward SCRM. I want to emphasize. These are all good tools. They are worthy of any company’s consideration. There is just no SCRM suite out there – as of yet or in the near future. Which doesn’t matter one iota.”

In the same vein as you can’t simply “do CRM” by just deploying a CRM software suite while skipping the strategy part and business process implementation, Social CRM was never about waiting for a version of your CRM suite to arrive that included the missing social module. This is not a radical piece of insight by any means but rather common sense – something that needs to be stated also on a technical blog like mine every now & then.

What actually inspired me to start writing this article about Social CRM is the image that I saw in my Timehop stream yesterday morning. For those who don’t know, Timehop is a service that creates a bucket of digital memories from the same date X years ago and delivers it as a push notification on your smartphone every day (I wish the still did the email digest but that’s another rant). 10 years ago I was attending the Microsoft Convergence conference in Atlanta and attending a session called “Deriving Value from Social Networks”, delivered by Nikhil Hasija from MS and Paul Greenberg from… well, you know Paul already. The picture I had grabbed from the session was this #Customer #SCRM Stack slide:

Not just that, I actually wrote a review about the session in my blog that used to be called Surviving CRM. With the whole Social CRM topic fresh in my mind I needed to go and revisit my notes from a decade ago, to gain some perspective on what the world looked like back then and what I was expecting to see from technology vendors like Microsoft on this social front.

The early 2010s were a time of Social CRM technology acquisition spree. If you want proof, the company that published this infograph on the Social CRM Arms Race between Oracle and Salesforce in June 2012 (which I referenced in my later blog posts) had actually found itself to be part of Salesforce only one year later – after having first been acquired by ExactTarget. Microsoft was late to the game and playing with a considerably lower stack of chips than these two. In hindsight, it may have been wise to not pour in all of their money into this one table, since it’s hard to say if the ROI has truly been there for any of the large tech corporations that were chasing the elusive Social CRM suite at the time. Still, MS naturally had to take part in the game, which is depicted in this 2012 slide on how the Dynamics team perceived the role of Social in their product strategy:

Viewed through the lenses of a MSFT ecosytem player like myself, here are some of my own observations on how their strategy eventually played out in different areas of Social CRM.

Social network data streams

The big data from public social feeds like Twitter and Facebook was at one time considered to be so critical for your SCRM product offering that Microsoft went out and bought a company called Netbreeze in 2013 that had built a system to harvest social posts and produce nice looking analytics on top of it. Initially named as Microsoft Social Listening and then Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE), the service was offered to basically all Dynamics CRM Online customers for free. This unfortunately meant most of them didn’t actually perceived it as a serious business tool, which I’d imagine also affected the product development budget in a negative way, leading to a vicious cycle.

In the beginning of 2019 Microsoft announced it was going to shut down MSE, and at the same time launched a preview of a new service called Dynamics 365 Market Insights. Then a year later also Market Insights was discontinued, with the message that some of the capabilities will find new homes in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights or Microsoft Bing industry updates. One thing to keep in mind is that the actual social data streams of Twitter and Facebook had already been removed from the scope of the product before that, so the statement doesn’t necessarily cover those ever making a return.

After making investments in both acquisitions as well as product development over the past 8 years, Microsoft has now effectively made an exit from the business of social listening and social engagement. Partner solutions from the likes of Sprinklr, Orlo or Hootsuite are now offered as the systems to use for social media management with their integrations to Dynamics 365 apps. Entities like Social Profile and Social Activity remain in the Common Data Model schema, but I’m not sure if there’s any service feeding data into them after MSE is gone.

I don’t believe for a moment that Microsoft would not be seeing value in the data itself, rather I think they are aligning themselves behind a much more realistic strategy now. Building upon the strength of Azure data platfrom, Microsoft’s Customer Data Platform is in a position to make them a leader in CDP rather than a follower in social data processing. This is much better in line with how Satya Nadella has been transforming MS from their early OS monopoly roots into a team player for the cloud, seeking to create value via new connections in the global network of people and technology, rather than trying to (immediately) bring down their competitors.

Social selling

While there is far more data in the social media firehose of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc., the one source that everyone in the B2B business of CRM have always had their eyes on is LinkedIn. It is their API that was the foundation of so many early Social CRM tools like Nimble back in the 2010 era. LinkedIn’s decision to lock out these smaller CRM providers in their 2014 “LinkedOut” API restrictions put an end to the era where building a sales app of your own on top of a database from someone else had seemed like a good idea.

Undoubtedly the biggest move that Microsoft has ever made in the social field was the 2016 acuisition of LinkedIn for $26 billion (note that this was already during the Nadella reign). As this deal was reportedly a competition between Salesforce and MS, it was only natural that the initial assumptions were for this new data source to light up in the Dynamics products and change the game of B2B CRM forever.

It hasn’t happened yet. What we’ve seen so far on the Dynamics 365 side has been mostly just the Microsoft Relationship Sales offering that embeds content from LinkedIn into the UI of Dynamics. Sure, there’s a bit more to it on the functional side, but it still closelt resembles the LinkedIn Sales Navigator that Paul Greenberg has always hated, calling it “a faux middleware to get access to the LinkedIn data”. In the standard Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise app, there still isn’t even a LinkedIn profile card available yet for contacts, whereas Outlook on the web shows one. All in all we’re still surprisingly close to what the social selling story for Dynamics CRM was back in 2013.

Instead of using LinkedIn as a weapon in the battle for CRM supremacy, Microsoft appears to have chosen to play the long game – and also to play it safe. I belive the major driver behind this approach has been the hightened attention on privacy. Back in 2010, there wasn’t a widespread awareness yet on the potential privacy issues that the global social networks have introduced into our lives. Today pretty much everyone has heard what the NSA had been doing with their social data archives, as well as how Cambridge Analytica gamed the election systems with the help of Facebook social profile/network data and ad targeting. We’ve seen GDPR come into effect in the EU, forcing companies from around the world to pay attention to their policies and procedures around customer data handling.

The real strategic value from LinkedIn isn’t in the straightforward enablement of social selling via offering data to users of a CRM system, rather it is in the “professional graph” that Microsoft can build when combining this with signals from its own services like Office 365. Yes, in the end it will help both Microsoft and its customers to sell more products and services in the digital world, of course. It’s just going to be more AI driven than the original visions from a decade ago, with MS keeping the network data closer to itself and the faceless algorithms that are crunching the big data to deliver smart recommendations to the app users.

Social customer service

As mentioned, acquisitions were a popular path for CRM giants to build up capabilities to match the new social customer era in the early 2010s. Customer service was an area where Microsoft originally attempted to bring the self-service capabilities of online knowledge bases and Facebook page embeds into their CRM suite by acquiring a company called Parature. We hardly even saw that product in the European market before it was discontinued, in favor of a long & winding internal feature development path to build a foundation on top of which the customer organizations could build their service processes (often still requiring plenty of custom code). While SaaS products like Zendesk weren’t necessarily customizable enough for enterprise needs, what they did was show a level of modern customer service experiences that seemed very difficult to reach when building up from a traditional CRM system design to be used behind corporate firewalls.

That’s ultimately what was always weighing down a product like MS CRM in the Social CRM race: it was designed to be an internal system. Exposing the data to the outside world meant that you had to re-think the system architecture in a major way. Sure, there were visionaries already back in Convergence 2010 like Adxstudio that powered the portal accelerators for CRM Online. Later MS decided to acquire the company and today that technology also powers the Power Apps Portals aimed at citizen developers, to quickly build self-service interfaces to access line of business data via responsive web interfaces.

Omnichannel has been a big investment area for Dynamics 365 in the past few years. While still working on their own web chat, co-browsing and call/video technology for the public web, Microsoft partnered with CafeX to offer a stop-gap solution to allow live online support experiences on their Portals. The recent updates to Omnichannel are now finally bringing also non-MS channels into play, with support for WhatsApp discussions (via Twilio), Twitter, WeChat and LINE. The modern Azure-based architecture of Microsoft Teams provides a solid foundation for future expansion of messaging functionality. You could say that after a slow start and a few side steps, the social customer service story has developed into a promising direction.

Social events

The backchannel of physical events that takes place in social media, under specific hashtags, was a big new phenomenon back in 2010. It was around that time when I started to actively follow and curate content from conferences around the world, from the comfort of my own home, armed with just a set of Twitter streams on my Tweetdeck client. Actual live streams of the sessions were still very rare, but the community around MS Business Applications strated to come together precisely because of the key role of individuals in spreading the word on what was being presented on the live stage.

As it just happens, 2010 was the year of the ash cloud, which stopped a significant slice of all air traffic globally and forced conference attendees like me to look for alternative routes to get to the venue from the other side of the globe:

10 years ago flights were grounded only on one side of the planet, due to the ash cloud. Compared to #COVID19, those were actually pretty fun times, as there was a way around it all. Today we're grounded indefinitely and there's nothing anyone can do about it😕 pic.twitter.com/vW516wrrWr
— Jukka Niiranen mstdn.social/@jukkan (@jukkan) April 17, 2020

Looking back at what a single volcano did in 2010, it was a tiny little blip compared to the COVID19 pandemic we are facing right now. In trying to adjust to the new reality of a world full of coronavirus, Microsoft has announced to go digital-only with its own events for at least the end of June 2021. While I belive this is the right move for them to make, I also belive Microsoft will take this as an opportunity to build up their own technical capabilities for running virtual events and offering social engagement channels around them. This would surely be a very welcome direction for Microsoft’s customers, since these capabilities haven’t progressed as much from the year 2010 as you could have expected. Let’s look at a few key elements that could use bigger investments:

Webinars. Those who participate in the MS partner ecosystem events may well have run into the ON24 webinar platform. It also happens to be the only supported webinar provider for Dynamics 365 Marketing today. To give you an example of the event attendee experience for ON24, let’s just say that the little red icon you see in the Slides window below belongs back to 2010, not this current decade that the rest of us are living in…

Event recordings. Microsoft does run a service called Stream that’s included in Office 365 (Microsoft 365) subscriptions, but it doesn’t allow sharing videos with anyone outside of your tenant. Not even guest accounts that can sign into the Microsoft Teams teams are allowed to view event recordings from Stream. Since this limitation has been around for over two years already, I suspect we’re not very close yet on Stream becoming a real competitor for the public video sharing services like YouTube or Vimeo and their community features.

Slides. Together with their LinkedIn acquistion, Microsoft became the owner of SlideShare. While initially it would seem like an obvious “better together” story to have the makers of PowerPoint united with the leading social platform for sharing slides, this has obviously not been an area that MS has prioritized. In fact, the SlideShare service seems to have been abandoned years ago already. Instead of developing new features, even old useful ones are now being stripped away. You can no longer sign up for a company account, as this option has been silently removed, so our new company had to give up on the idea of distributing our webinar slides on a MS hosted service and instead just publish them as PDFs on our WordPress site.

Social apps ecosystem

The Social CRM movement was all about putting the customer in control of the conversation with the company, thus leading to an inevitable growth in the number of different services and digital touchpoints where the interaction would take place. Therefore it was no longer possible for companies to build a “one perfect system” to govern all the relevant processes and messages, rather the CRM systems had to become more compatibile with the outside world and the various services where the conversation took place. In practice you needed to support an ecosystem of apps and service providers to partner with one another and to offer connectors between the data sources and targets.

The technical infrastructure in 2010 wasn’t ready for this at all yet. Back in Convergence 2010 it was the first major event where the upcoming solution framework in Dynamics CRM 2011 was being presented. This mechanism was going to allow apps from different providers to be plugged on top of the common platform (and also unplugged) without the work traditionally required from a systems integrator that managed the CRM system. The CRM Online service launched globally on the following year would also heavily depend on this new modular model of extending the CRM capabilities with integrations to new cloud services without disrupting the core business processes that were relying on this system of record.

In 2010 the Apple App Store had already been around for a couple of years and this model was envisioned to become the new standard for also how business software capabilities were distributed in the near future. Out of all pieces in the puzzle for Social CRM technology, the inability to build a viable marketplace for ISVs from also outside the immediate MS ecosystem was perhaps the biggeset stumbling block for Microsoft. What was launched as Dynamics Marketplace in 2010 became pretty much all that there would ever be: a random listing of solutions and service providers that did very little to help customers in discovering the right building blocks for the latest social technologies and services for their CRM systems.

This part of the journey has been incredibly long, but on the technical side of things we’re still moving along. The solution framework that was being previewed for XRM in 2010 is being developed to support the whole range of new Power Platform services in 2020 that now share the same foundation. It’s pretty wild that the low-code tools being offered to citizen developers across all corners of organizations are now riding along in the same freight train that originally consisted of only the sales, marketing and services cars of CRM.

This is representative of a larger movement that I think has also changed how CRM and social channels are coming together these days. Moving most of the core CRM systems into the cloud for modern organizations has made them far more accessible to social data, even without tightly coupled integrations via packaged apps. Technologies like Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate (Flow) have lowered the barrier for connecting systems together and thus made the sales, marketing and service departments a lot more agile in adopting and integrating with new social tools. In a way, the need for an SCRM suite to be built by a big tech corporation has somewhat diminished as a result of this, because customer organizations are now better equipped in assembling their own unique toolkits for engaging in social channels while connecting to their systems of record.

“One more thing”

Ah, nothing takes you back in time to the days of early Social CRM like that iconic phrase from a certain tech company’s keynotes… Anyway, to close off this exploration into the days gone by, here’s one more gem that Timehop delivered to me from 10 years ago:

For once I can say “I told you so”! Now, this particular tweet was surely about providing the customers to the option to change the visual branding of their system, but in retrospect it almost looks like if Microsoft themselves wanted to break free from the cages of the CRM acronym already way back then. Splitting the Dynamics 365 suite into separate apps and stopping the use of the term CRM was a controversial move back in 2016, which appears to have only accelerated the juggling of product brand names at MS in the past few years.

The convenience of having an established acronym to describe what you’re doing is definitely very tempting for us lazy human beings, and attaching terms like “Social” into it must seem like the easiest way to explain something new while still holding on to all the old stuff. In the end, though, Social CRM became the everyday reality through routes we might not have expected to travel – and we stopped calling it both “Social” and – on the technical platform side – “CRM”. Or did we?

April 27, 2020
New Team Member apps for Dynamics 365

In the 2020 Release Wave 1 release plan documentation we saw that Microsoft is finally going to bring technical licensing enforcement for Dynamics 365 Team Members into the platform. By launching specific App Modules designed to be used with the cheap Team Member license as well as building the mechanism for controlling which Service Plan entitles the users to access which App Modules, there will now be a clear line for what is and isn’t possible right within the system.

That’s how it is in theory. What about in practice? Let’s explore the Early Access features launched for 2020 Release Wave 1 on February 3rd and see how these App Modules are implemented.

Sales Team Member app

Since Sales is by far the most common business process that CRM systems built on Dynamics 365 Online are managing, let’s start from the dedicated Team Member App Module for this scenario. The pre-release documentation isn’t very extensive yet, but from there we can get the basic intention of this new app:

“At a high level, users with the Team Member license can perform the following tasks in the Sales Team Member app: 1) Customer management: work with accounts and contacts. 2) Lead and opportunity management: see leads or opportunities linked with accounts or contacts, or see other sales-related data. 3) Add activities, such as notes.”

Upon launching the app, we’re greeted with a familiar experience that looks like Dynamics 365 Sales, only it’s simplified to contain just 5 menu items in the sitemap: Activities, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities. If the dashboards menu was also included here, the app would resemble the kind of CRM system that most small organizations or teams actually need in real life.

If we’re using the app with the full access rights granted by a powerful security role like system administrator then there isn’t much that the Sales Team Member app stops us from doing. For example, creating or editing accounts is one of the rights that has been stripped away from the Team Member license, yet the app would happily show us a “New” button for adding accounts via this App Module. The secret lies in the Sales Team Member security role that comes with the solution. A view of the privileges for core entities looks like this:

Wow, that’s quite restricted indeed! Assigning only this role the users wouldn’t even permit viewing activities from anyone else, nor leads, or adding contacts. Let’s get back to the customization options later, but this is indeed in line with the description of what Microsoft intended the offer with the standard Sales Team Member app.

Customer Service Team Member app

The second experience is for Customer Service – but not in the way that you’d traditionally see the Customer Service App of Dynamics 365 being leveraged for assisting external customers. This Team Member app is intended for scenarios where the app users is actually the customer being served:

“With the entry-level Team Member license, you can now address self-service support scenarios for your employees using the new Customer Service Team Member app module. Employees can create cases for their problems, such as laptop issues, HR queries, and administrative needs, and interact with agents through the commenting feature. They can also search the knowledge base for solutions pertaining to their problems.”

Unlike the Sales Team Member App, this App Module isn’t installed by default. That’s probably a good thing, since I’d imagine the majority of Dynamics 365 customers are not using it as an internal helpdesk – although it definitely is a perfectly sensible scenario. If that’s what you’re doing, then the CS Team Member solution installation will need to be started from the Dynamics 365 Admin Center.

If we look at the same case record via the full form in the Customer Service Hub App Module, we’ll see quite a stark difference. The solution package for the Team Member app appears to contain a web resource called Incident_teammember_library.js that modifies the behavior of the case form in many ways, such as hiding the Business Process Flow, replacing the standard Resolve Case dialog with a much more streamlined version and who knows what else. The Command Bar also contains far less functionality than it normally would.

An interesting feature of the Customer Service Team Member app is the use of a default account that you can configure for the organization. The cases created via the Team Member app will automatically be linked to this account as the customer. The requirement for having either an account or contact as the customer has been a part of the MS CRM data model since day one, which has traditionally made the internal helpdesk scenarios quite tricky to implement – if the customers actually are users of Dynamics 365. Without any further documentation, I’m not quite sure what Microsoft’s vision has been for this new feature in the Customer Service Team Member app, since it looks like there isn’t any linkage to the internal customer (user) now in the case data model. If a person who provides helpdesk services would now assign the case to himself to work on, where’s the reference to the actual person who was in need of assistance?

The other available menu in the Team Member app sitemap, Knowledge Search, isn’t a reference to any entity but rather presents a dedicated UI for browsing published Knowledge Articles. Well, browsing isn’t maybe the right term, since the only option here is free text search for keywords, which will then return a list of articles if matches are found.

It’s good to keep in mind that certain features of Model-driven Apps in Dynamics 365 aren’t yet App Module aware – meaning they’ll be presented in the UI the same way regardless of which specific app the user has launched. Recent and Pinned items will contain data not included in the App Module, Advanced Find will show all entities that are visible to the user’s security role, the Assistant and (deprecated) Task Flow buttons will always be there in the top Nav Bar. Still, the core experience of App Modules can be restricted down to a limited subset of features, as demonstrated by these Team Member apps. When moving from legacy web client to Unified Interface, these type of targeted experiences definitely are something worth pursuing, rather than the oldskool CRM monoliths that contain a hundred and one items in the navigation.

Customizing the App Modules

Now that we know what comes out of the box for Team Member users, many customers will surely be asking what to do with the functionality in their CRM systems that isn’t represented in these standard App Modules. To understand the commercial boundaries better, let’s have a look at what the latest February 2020 licensing guide has to say about the rights of Team Members. We’ll start from Appendix A and the table that describes use rights for Team Members in Customer Engagement apps. (Yes, even though Microsoft product documentation says the term “Customer Engagement” is no longer used for online products, the licensing team hasn’t yet come up with a new term to replace CE in the licensing guide.)

To start off, Team Members still have the right to read all Dynamics 365 application data. Therefore every single entity you could possibly include within the Sitemap of an App Module could in theory be brought in there. Of course you would have to ensure via the security roles that no creation or modification of those records would be allowed. Also the reporting and dashboards features are explicitly stated as being available for Team Members, on page 11 of the licensing guide.

As for custom entities, we see that there are also edit/actions rights, but we have a “15 max” restriction in the table. What does that mean? The answers are given in Appendix D: Custom Entities.

We see that for a given app scenario, Team Members can create and modify records for up to 15 custom entities – per app. Where the lines are a bit blurry is the statement that this usage should “fit predefined Team Member scenarios”. As long as these custom entities are related to sales or customer service processes, I guess you’re on the safe side to add them to the standard Team Member App Modules that soon will be the only way for users with Team Member licenses to access Dynamics 365 – once the enforcement for first-party vs. custom apps is enabled in April 2020. Again, keep in mind that read rights are included for any entity, so the 15 custom entity limit couldn’t ever be technically enforced on the App Module level, based on how I interpret the licensing terms.

What if you really need to do more than what the Team Member license would allow? What if you’re building apps for your unique business processes that aren’t covered by any first party app in the Dynamics 365 suite of products? Then you should explore the possibilities of Power Platform and its licensing model. Power Apps Per User Plan is the platform SKU that Team Member never was intended to be. If you’d map all the current and future workloads that Power Apps could take over in your organization’s business applications portfolio, the value is likely to be much higher than what the customization of these Team Member apps could ever deliver.

Read more
Microsoft has published new documentation on Dynamics 365 Team Members license that outlines the user experience for accessing the App Modules, as well as the customization restrictions.

February 7, 2020
Everything as a Service – Not Just Your CRM

Spring is in the air, at least if the Dynamics CRM 2016 Spring Wave announcement is anything to go by. It’s pretty amazing that only 2 days after we were given the 2016 update for our CRM Online environment there’s already the next batch of updates to pay attention to. Now here I was thinking about spending some time experimenting with the new v8.0 functionality like the Interactive Service Hub or Knowledge Articles and OH, LOOK, A NEW RELEASE WAS ANNOUNCED! (Welcome to my goldfish bowl…)

Another thing that further contributes to the growing inability to concentrate on just a single CRM version at a time is that, well, there aren’t really any proper versions anymore. Sure, there are still official announcements regarding the major (Fall) and minor (Spring) releases, but it’s not like there would be a single point in time when the product bits become available for you to download. To a certain extent they still do, for the type of software that’s shipped as bits on MSDN, but if you’ve been working with Dynamics CRM for a while you might have found yourself thinking “all the fun stuff’s in the cloud”. I certainly have, and I don’t even see anything wrong with this, because pulling off this type of continuously updated application delivery is in practice only really feasible for customers when it’s consumed purely as a service.

By the time the CRM 2016 version became generally available, as in new CRM Online trial orgs were provisioned with v8.0, there was a slight feeling of “meh” when you discovered that most of the coolest new features touted in the Release Preview Guide were actually not yet there. No Mobile Offline, no Voice of the Customer surveys, no Relevance Search, no External Party Access… Many of the features being developed didn’t appear to have made the release train of v8.0 and were instead moved to what seemed like a Plan B, meaning rolling them out in limited Previews rather than the big fanfare of the GA. This would have been quite controversial back in the days of “one release every three years”, but these days it’s not really such a big source of concern at the end of the day, because there is no “gold master” disc to signify an RTM product anymore.

Recently Microsoft released an official Roadmap site for Dynamics CRM, which may be a small step for content management but a giant leap for the release policy around the CRM product. Following on the footsteps of many other MSFT product teams, like Office 365, this further moves Dynamics CRM into the service delivery model as the traditional product versioning gets pushed behind the scenes and the application functionality is brought to the forefront. Yes, the sysadmin will still need to be aware of the specific release that his or her CRM Online instance is running on, but from a business perspective this is becoming less and less relevant. New things will arrive in a continuous stream and the decisions for how to deploy a particular application functionality and what actions are needed for ensuring user adoption is an ongoing task for the persons in charge of making their workforce more productive and building customer facing processes that meet or exceed their ever going demands.

I guess it’s fair to say the world of CRM software reflects the bigger picture of how we the individuals are also operating when it comes to acquiring the things we desire: as a service. Instead of making big upfront investments in gaining the full possession of physical goods or property, our consumption patterns are increasingly leaning towards making a few clicks in an electronic environment and gaining access to the missing piece that will fulfill the needs we’ve identified. Our magic wands with wireless connectivity can be used to conjure up pretty much anything that you can imagine via a “buy now” button somewhere, almost at the exact moment you’ve thought of it. The end product may still be a physical package that gets delivered to your door, but the experience that the customer receives from your company is increasingly being evaluated against not how well the physical gizmo has been crafted but rather how well the various interactions around the customer lifecycle stages of information acquisition, financial transaction and ownership/service consumption are in line with the expectations that the customer had when he or she embarked on this journey. (more…)

March 6, 2016
CRM 2013 SP1: Case Creation and Routing – The Details

In my previous post about the new functionality included in CRM 2013 SP1 / Spring ’14 release I laid out the big picture of how case creation and routing rules relate to cases and queues in Dynamics CRM. Now it’s time to take a more detailed look at how you would actually configure these rules to automate your case creation process. There are a few limitations that it’s good to be aware of before you jump into applying these new tools in your service management scenarios.

Case Creation Rules

As illustrated in the big picture of queue and case management in my previous article, Case Creation Rules are specific to a single queue. Also, you can only have one Case Creation Rule per queue – per channel. It is nevertheless a 1:N relationship between queues and rules, since a queue can have a Case Creation Rule both for email and social activities (the latter of which are not yet leveraged in this release). The Command Bar buttons on the updated queue form, labelled “Email To Case Settings” and “Social To Case Settings”, take you to the respective rule record.

The Case Creation Rule form allows you to configure predefined conditions for case creation. Emails from unknown senders can be filtered away from case creation. Also the existence of a valid entitlement for the sender (contact) or the senders company (parent account) can be used as a filter. Finally, email related to an already resolved case can be set to generate a new case record, with a configurable “quarantine” time period. So, if you resolve a case today and the customer replies “thanks for your help”, this probably shouldn’t generate a new case, but a reply sent after 3 days to the same email thread might warrant opening up a whole new case record.

That’s all the conditions you can apply for the automatic case creation. There’s an additional entity called Case Creation Rule Item that’s found in the “Specify Case Details” subgrid. What this feature allows you to do is specify a condition on the activity record (email or social activity) and set values for the newly created case’s fields. As an example, if the email subject contains word X, you could populate the case subject lookup field with value Y. So, you can’t use these Rule Items to determine whether a case will be created or not, but you can pass along some variables from the originating activity.

The entity fields you can access in the Conditions box are limited to those directly related to the email (or social) activity. There is however one welcome exception and that is the Senders Account. This means that when the email is coming from a known contact, there’s a way to reach into the fields of the account related to the contact (related to the activity), to check variables like relationship status, customer category or other important pieces of information in a B2B service scenario. (more…)

June 3, 2014
CRM 2013 SP1: Case Creation and Routing – The Big Picture

The latest Dynamics CRM Online Spring ’14 release is now rolling out to existing and new customers (starting from the US data centers) and the on-premises equivalent of CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 ~~will soon follow~~ is now available from MS Download Center (here’s the KB article for more details about SP1). The quickest way to check if your CRM Online organization is already updated to the latest release is on the About screen, accessible via the gear icon in the top right corner. If your version reads 6.1.0.575 (or 6.1.anything) then you’ve got the Spring ’14 release available and you can proceed to the Install Product Updates menu to enable the new features.

This release, previously known by the codename “Leo”, focuses on enhancing the service management capabilities of Dynamics CRM. There’s a great “What’s New” page on CRM Customer Center that provides a detailed listing of the new features launched now, including an eBook of the changes in service management. Instead of repeating all of this information, I’ll try and provide an overview of how the features align with one another and specifically how they could be applied in real world scenarios for managing incoming service cases from customers.

Enhancements in Case Creation and Queues

I guess we’ll still need to first list the new options we need to be aware of when configuring the service module in CRM 2013 SP1 to handle emails and cases via queues. First off, there is now support for server side synchronization of emails (and other activities) between CRM Online and Exchange Online, without having to use the old Email Router technology (no support for hybrid deployments, though). Then there’s a new feature called Case Creation Rule that allows you to automatically convert an email message or a social activity record placed in a queue into a new case record. Finally, we have Routing Rules that can be leveraged for moving items into queues.

The following is my own interpretation of how these three areas are aligned in CRM 2013 Spring ´14 Update / Service Pack 1. The picture illustrates how an email message from the customer would flow through the system automatically based on the configuration of the aforementioned features. It also includes a few bullet points about the supported actions for each component. (Feel free to click on the image to view a bigger version that won’t stress your eyes so much.)

When going through the Leo release features I found it a bit challenging to get a clear view of the logical order in which the different functional areas found under the new Service Management settings menu should be applied. Also the relationships between them and the restrictions imposed on the number of records was something I only learned through trial and error. Hopefully this illustration makes it easier to identify the roles of case creation rules and case routing rules in the new release.

Rules vs. Workflows & Plugins

Looking at the picture, someone who has previously configured Dynamics CRM to be used in an email, queue and case based support process will surely find many familiar actions from the list. At the end of the day, pretty much everything here has already been possible with previous CRM versions. With those you just needed to leverage the workflow engine in the CRM platform to configure the case creation and routing activities. So, what’s really new here and why has Microsoft built this into the latest product release?

Behind the scenes, what the case creation and routing rules do is they create the workflow processes for you. This can be seen from the release documentation where the administrator of those rules is reminded about the requirement to have sufficient security roles for performing the corresponding actions via workflows. So, taking a very simplistic view, you could think of these new features available in the Service Management as a dedicated UI for configuring common process automation actions for customer service scenarios.

There’s definitely value in having these new features available right inside the core product. In previous versions, it has been far from trivial to build the necessary functionality for frequently encountered requirements, such as “email to case”. Several ISV add-ons have been developed to deliver such functionality and system customizers have surely spent a ton of time pushing the CRM workflow editor to its limits in an effort to automate the common tasks that a service organization would need to perform when managing cases in Dynamics CRM. Now there’s a new standard way to implement these processes via a method that is fully supported by Microsoft, which in turn will lead to far more customers taking a serious look at these case management capabilities in their business application platform.

It’s important to keep in mind that these new features don’t replace any of the existing CRM platform functionality. They offer a default method to configure common features, but they will not cover every possible scenario that you’ll come across in real life implementation scenarios. That means you can still use workflows and plugins to extend the process automation for service case management. For example, while a case creation rule provides the possibility to set an auto response email to be sent to the customer upon case creation, there’s nothing stopping you from doing this via familiar workflow process if more complex business logic is needed than what the new Service Management UI in CRM makes available.

In the next blog post I will take a more detailed look at how the case creation and routing features can be leveraged in practice, so stay tuned!

May 24, 2014
Accessing “Special” Activity Data with CRM Report Wizard

Sometimes a data model that is perfectly valid on a logical level does not enable the system end users to actually leverage the data stored in it. One example of such a design is the way Microsoft Dynamics CRM handles the information collected on the standard (uncustomizable) dialog windows used in the case resolution and opportunity close processes. While the information collected here would often be valuable for managing the business process and analyzing the results (“what information was provided to the customer while closing the case?” or “why did exactly we end up losing this opportunity?”), it cannot be easily accessed in a way that would show data from more than a single record at a time.

This is due to the fact that the case resolution and opportunity close information is not recorded onto the actual business entity itself but rather onto a related activity. There are specific activity types for both of these processes that get created once a user clicks OK on the respective dialog for setting the business record status as closed. This makes sense if we think about the lifecycle of a record like case or opportunity, since the closure is not necessarily a permanent end state. The user can reactivate a case or reopen an opportunity and continue working on it if the circumstances and the business process guidelines dictate this to be the correct route of action, in which case there will eventually be more than one close activity for the business record. The data model therefore needs to support a 1:N relationship between these entities, which is why the design of the out-of-the-box business processes in Dynamics CRM is justified.

The unfortunate side effect of this design is that the system cannot easily produce views of closed cases with both the question and answer information, as these are stored on separate entities. It is equally difficult to view and analyze information regarding won or lost opportunities, as any comments entered by the opportunity owner during the closure event are not available on the opportunity record itself. What makes the situation even more unfortunate is that the Advanced Find UI does not surface these “special” activity types and make them available for custom views, so even extracting the data from the system for ad-hoc analysis in Excel sheets is not directly possible.

One approach that I often recommend to customers is to develop additional business logic that will store the information about the latest case resolution or opportunity close onto custom fields on the case/opportunity entity. I’ve also written a blog article earlier about how ISV tools like North52 Business Process Activities (formerly known as Formula Manager) can be used for building a no-code customization to better leverage case resolution data. This of course will not cover any records created prior to deploying the customization, so accessing historical information is still a challenge.

Reporting on Case Resolution Data

As always, by developing a custom SQL Server Reporting Services report you could access almost any data in CRM and present it exactly the way you want. You’ll need to use Visual Studio and know a thing or two about how to develop SSRS reports for CRM if you take this approach. In the standard user interface of Dynamics CRM there is only the Report Wizard feature available, which in many cases offers quite limited options for designing reports that would go beyond what the inline charts in CRM views can do. This Wizard was originally introduced back in CRM 4.0 when there was no charting or dashboard capability included in Dynamics CRM yet. Once CRM 2011 brought in these new visualization options, the Report Wizard was pretty much abandoned in terms of new functionality development, so today it remains sitting there in its 2007 outfit and looking a bit outdated as a result.

One of the lesser known qualities of the Report Wizard is that you can actually access certain entities and fields with it that are off limits to Advanced Find. This comes in quite handy when dealing with a scenario like the one I described earlier. So, let me show you how to build a Report Wizard report that will provide you better access to case resolution data.

When creating a new report and choosing Report Wizard as the type, you’ll first be taken into a dialog window where you can choose 2 entities that you’re allowed to use in the report. By selecting Activities as the primary record type we’re presented with a list of possible related record types that includes also the “hidden” entities like Opportunity Close or Case Resolution. For our purposes, let’s select the resolutions.

Now we get to the filter criteria screen. Let’s say that we want to build a report on the billable time information recorded into the case resolution entity. We’ll only be interested in resolved cases and case resolutions that contain data in the Time Spent field (this is where the billable time field data in the case resolution dialog gets stored in). (more…)

April 9, 2014
What’s on the 2014 Roadmap for Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

The annual festivities of the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence event in the US have now been completed for the year 2014. This means that the outline for upcoming releases in this calendar year have also been presented to the 12K attendees in Atlanta as well as anyone watching the sessions via Virtual Convergence. The following roadmap slide shown at the event tells us the big picture: it’s going to be a busy year for Dynamics CRM!

OK, so if the first “swim lane” in the CRM Roadmap schedule is titled “CRM”, then what’s with all the other lanes then and how do these non-CRM items relate to the Dynamics CRM roadmap? Well, here’s the thing: this ain’t the CRM you used to know. It’s no longer that IIS application you used to install on your own little Windows server along with a SQL database and maybe a client component in Outlook. It’s now a suite of services that cover not just your internal processes and tools for your employees but also a wealth of external touch points where your customers will also encounter your CRM system, be it directly or indirectly. Oh, and naturally most of it lives in the cloud, because that’s also where your customers are.

Of course customer relationship management has never been about just that single CRM database where you keep your own contact records, but now it has become very obvious that also Microsoft’s offering in the field of CRM has grown way beyond that. Following on the footsteps of Oracle and Salesforce.com, the acquisition and integration of a growing number of tools to complement the traditional core Dynamics CRM platform means the future CRM product will be much more modular, as opposed to the earlier “one app & license for everybody” approach. Let’s go through each of these lanes in the CRM roadmap and look at what was announced for them at Convergence 2014, starting from the most familiar one: “CRM”.

CRM

After last fall’s release of the new Dynamics CRM 2013 major version (code name Orion), you might have been lead to believe that there wouldn’t be so much happening with the core platform this year, at least in the on-premises world. The earlier communication from Microsoft indicated that the plan was to introduce a new release for CRM Online twice a year and roll out an on-prem version once a year. The code names for these releases were also shared: Leo in Q2 2014 and Vega in Q4, one year after CRM 2013 RTM.

This is no longer true. But wait! It’s not an R8 style cancellation but rather a positive piece of news. The Q2 2014 release Leo will be for both CRM Online and on-premises customers, as will Vega. It doesn’t mean all the features will be identical across deployment models but it does promise to deliver new functionality also to customers who are running CRM on their own servers. What exactly will be the delivery mechanism (Update Rollups were supposed to be clear of any new features) or how the official naming convention for different versions will evolve is not yet clear, but currently Microsoft is referring to this as the Dynamics CRM Spring Wave. Partners will have a training blitz session for this wave on April 8th/9th, so expect to see more details made public after this.

The functional changes in Leo will focus on the service module of CRM. New features showcased in the Convergence sessions included SLA management with a timer control available on the case form, merging cases and linking parent/child cases, entitlement management, email to case automation and improvements in the queue feature usability. Considering how much these new features alter the case entity functionality and configuration options, it would have surely been quite difficult to continue supporting two different feature levels if Leo would have in fact been Online only. For callcenter scenarios the new Unified Service Desk (USD) will offer functionality similar to what has previously been delivered via components like the Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) or User Interface Integration (UII). Expect to see also other feature enhancements or tools released as a part of Leo that will not be customer service specific, as well as new capabilities for CRM Online subscription management.

The contents of the Vega release had not really been disclosed prior to Convergence 2014. As this release is still further away in the future the details are not yet as clear as for Leo, but a number of very interesting enhancements to the core Dynamics CRM product were shown on the CRM roadmap slides. Calculated fields will finally be available without writing custom code, via a graphical editor with intellisense support. Business Process Flows (BF) will be enhanced with support for branching processes. On the UI side we can expect to see built-in capability for visualizing account hierarchies. These three features all address very common scenarios that Dynamics CRM customers require in their system implementations, so it’s great to see them introduced as configurable features that a system customizer can leverage right out of the box.

Social

Remember when Microsoft bought NetBreeze one year ago? Their service has now been integrated into the Redmond product portfolio and carries the name Microsoft Social Listening. Last month it was announced that Microsoft Social Listening will be offered as part of the CRM Online Professional licenses at no additional charge, whereas on-premises customers can get it for an incremental cost. This “incremental cost” was later specified to be $20 per user per month for CRM Professional CAL holders. So, while it’s not free for everyone, the pricing is still in line with Microsoft’s previous announcements of wanting to “democratize social” and integrate it as just another channel into their CRM product. (more…)

March 9, 2014
Bringing Customer Service Back to CRM with Parature

In case you missed the big news last week, Microsoft has acquired a company called Parature. Similar to the two marketing related service providers MS has bought earlier, Marketing Pilot and Netbreeze, this latest acquisition is intended for expanding the footprint of Dynamics CRM on the customer service side.

It’s been no secret that this was the next area where Microsoft was looking to build up some new capabilities for Dynamics CRM. Thinking about the existing feature set for customer service scenarios in the product, we basically haven’t had any significant enhancements to the service module since CRM 3.0. Sure, the recent platform enhancements on the process automation and UI side can be leveraged in customer service as well, but in terms of specific out-of-the-box functionality that would be aimed at helpdesk scenarios, it’s been pretty quiet so far. Case management and queues for email routing have been very useful features for many organizations using Dynamics CRM. Service scheduling and knowledge base articles… well, not so much.

The world around CRM software has changed quite a bit from 2005 when CRM 3.0 came out. Not only have online service portals and support content websites become incredibly affordable for any company to set up via cloud based services like Zendesk, but the customers of those companies have also been given a whole range of independent social channels to reach out to one another. These days the customers are in charge of the conversation, which means that if you don’t offer a forum for them to submit feedback and questions, they’ll just set one up for your brand on GetSatisfaction on their own. Regardless of how many 1-to-1 contact points you offer them, they’ll still go and share their frustration over on public channels like Twitter.

This is obviously not a world where back-office applications like traditional CRM systems that mainly offer features to your employees instead of the end customers provide a very comprehensive solution for customer service management. Sure, integrating with the customer account details, managing the support ticket process and collecting information about past interactions are all essential components of customer service in the new world, too, but they are becoming relatively less and less significant factors in the processes needed for delivering great customer experiences. When the customers no longer pick up the phone to call you when they have a problem but rather use it to search for answers on their own, call center automation software isn’t the area you should primarily be looking to invest in.

Integrating the customer facing components of modern online customer service solutions to the internal CRM systems has been the way to build systems that are up for the challenge presented by the age of the social customer. While system integration is a natural part of any CRM implementation project, requiring each organization to come up with their own solution of how to put the pieces together isn’t perhaps the most effective way forward. For example, Parature had already launched their integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online back in 2009, but how many people were actually aware of it? I might have stumbled across Parature a few times before, but they certainly didn’t occupy a space on my top-of-the-mind list for possible solutions to suggest to companies using Dynamics CRM. Merging these services into Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM offering is certainly going to expose them to a potential customer audience of a completely different scale. (more…)

January 12, 2014
No-code Customizations with North52 Formula Manager, Part 3: Case Resolutions

In the previous articles (part 1 and part 2) we’ve explored how the North52 Formula Manager can be utilized in automating steps related to the sales process. This time we’ll be looking at a scenario related to service management, in an effort to make it easier to share knowledge and report on the resolutions of cases recorded in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database.

Cases vs. Case Resolutions

In theory it should be pretty straightforward how you work with a case record: they are support tickets that are initially open (active) when you create them and eventually they end up getting closed as either resolved (service was provided) or cancelled (duplicate ticket, customer never replied etc.).

The point where complexity raises its ugly head is how the resolution process works: instead of entering the case resolution details onto the case record itself, the user is presented with a window that creates a Case Resolution activity underneath the parent case. While this is a perfectly valid design in terms of the nature of the interactions, as there could be situations where the case gets re-opened and resolved again (thus being a 1:N relationship with the case), it does make it more complicated to work with the resolution data later on.

For example, say you’d want to study the resolved cases by using a view of the case records. In that view you can see the case subject, owner, status and other standard fields, but there’s no information visible on what the actual resolution to the case was. “Ok, so I’ll need to customize the view and show columns from a related record. That’s not too difficult, now is it?” Unfortunately that’s not going to work, because the information we’re interested in resides on the N side of the relationship. Since there can be several case resolutions for a single case, no columns from this entity can be displayed in a case view. So, we can’t construct a nice Q&A list that the service reps could leverage in scanning for similar cases on a new question from a customer. We can only see the problem, not the resolution.

You could build a view of case resolutions, the child entity in this relationship, but that’s not very convenient either. Although case resolution is an entity of its own, it’s not actually available in Advanced Find to directly build queries on. It is possible to access a list of case resolutions by crafting a view of activities with that specific type, but you’ll still be limited to only the generic activity fields. As an example, the field Billable Time (Time Spent) cannot be accessed in a view, which makes it rather difficult to report on this data entered as a part of the service process.

Using a Formula to Replicate the Case Resolution Fields on the Case Form

Luckily Dynamics CRM is a flexible platform that allows you to develop new business logic to fulfill the requirements for your service process. In this situation, if we could simply have the Resolve Case dialog fields copied over to the parent case, this would solve the aforementioned problems. So, how to proceed then?

If we want to alter the default behavior or the service entities, we should first have a look at the workflow process capabilities of Dynamics CRM to see if can configure a workflow rule that is triggered when the case resolution is created. This time we won’t get very far with that idea, though, as neither the case resolution nor the activity entity can be used as a workflow trigger. Fair enough, we’ll then need to come up with a lower level solution to meet this requirement. Assuming we have access to a .NET developer who knows the Dynamics CRM SDK, creating a custom plug-in to copy the fields to the case record would be a worthy option to consider. Since the title of this post promised “no-code customizations”, let’s instead look at how we could achieve the same functionality with the Formula Manager.

First we need a place to host the case resolution data of course, so let’s add three custom fields on the case entity: Resolution (text field), Resolution Description (multiple lines) and Time Spent (whole number with duration format). On the case form they can be put into a section of their own and set as disabled, since the user shouldn’t directly update them. Then we’ll create the three formulas that will populate these fields with corresponding values from the case resolution entity.

We’ll be using a formula of the type “Save – To Parent” and attach it to the create event of the case resolution entity. As our target (parent) entity we can select case, but notice that you’ll actually need to specify the relationship field value first before you’re able switch the value in the target entity field. Let’s take the Resolution Description field we just created as the target property. The formula itself in this case will be very simple, since all we need is a value directly from the source entity. We can use the source entity tree visible in the bottom left corner of the screen to browse through the available fields or just type in directly the value [incidentresolution.description].

The other two fields will get an identical treatment, which means we can click on the Clone Formula button on the ribbon and create two copies of the original formula. Just update the target property field and select a new source field value into the formula description window accordingly. After we’re done, we can publish the formulas and try them out by resolving an existing case.

After we’ve entered the details into the Resolve Case dialog fields and clicked OK, our formula will update the underlying case form in real time to reflect the same values presented directly on the resolved case record. Unlike asynchronous workflow processes, the formulas can perform their tasks right in front of the user, which makes the user experience more consistent.

Making Use of the Resolution Data

Now that the fields are available on the case entity, we still need to ensure that the user actually has access to them through all the necessary routes. First we should of course include them into the Resolved Cases view we talked about earlier.

Seeing the resolution field contents directly in the view is a great improvement, but an even more important feature is to enable the users to search for this information. You see, one of the peculiar default settings of Dynamics CRM is that the Quick Find view for case entities only covers active (open) cases. (more…)

July 4, 2013