One Compelling Reason to Choose Dynamics365 as your CRM

I'm going to give you 1, yes just 1 compelling reason to consider Dynamics365 as your CRM. The compelling reason is Data, because without data, in particular customer data, your goal of a Customer360 is dead.

Why Data?

During the past 13 years of espousing the benefits of CRM, the number 1 benefit that I talk to and gets customers excited, is the nirvana 360-degree view of customer. The establishment (finally) of 1 single place I can go to see everything I need to about a customer in order to make me a far more effective seller, marketer or service provider. Customers get really excited about this vision and buy into it, then comes the reality check when someone in their organisation says “Sorry, you can’t store customer information there”. 

If I don’t store customer data in my CRM, what I now have is a very expensive Sales system.

I lose many of the promised speed and ease-of use advantages as well as loss of functionality in areas such as reporting, workflow, AI, next best action, etc. Straight away my return on investment is greatly diminished.

Faced with this prospect, some customers will take the approach of integrating in to on premise systems and making one or more real-time API calls to retrieve customer data. At least this way they can present a read-only view to users. Unfortunately, this adds complexity, time and a great deal of cost as it takes specialist skills and additional effort.

It also introduces potential performance issues and depending upon your CRM can require the purchase of additional “add-on” licensing such as API calls. We may need to custom build parts of the user interface.

This complexity stays with the system and increases the maintenance burden of the CRM significantly.

This is where Microsoft has a huge advantage.

Dynamics365 uses Dataverse to store data. Dataverse sits on Azure, which means it utilises all of the same security, backup, encryption, auditing, access controls and performance capabilities of Azure with the very likely added benefit of being hosted in the same country your organisation is. Dataverse is also a single tenant, the only thing that is shared is the hardware that runs the datacentre.

In many cases Azure has already been endorsed and quite possibly being used by your organisation, even highly regulated or data sensitive ones, to host and utilise customer data.  Dataverse is in Azure.

So data advantage one is Dynamics365 is in an environment that is deeply trusted, and quite possibly already being utilised by your organisation.

But there’s more to this Dataverse and by extension data story…. Let’s start with the Common Data Model.

Dataverse utilises a schema called the Microsoft Common Data Model or CDM. 

To put this in layman’s terms, all of the tables such as Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts, Leads, Case, etc. that you need in your CRM are in Dataverse.  If you are in a specific industry such as Financial Services, Microsoft provides extensions to this schema with tables such as Financial Accounts, Holdings, loans, etc.

Why is this important? Firstly, the CDM was built in conjunction with industry heavyweights, so it’s informed and an accepted standard.  Secondly, many of Microsoft’s technologies and services utilise the CDM as their standard way of storing data.

So to summarise, Dataverse uses a standard data model that is common throughout many Microsoft services. Hopefully you are starting to see the benefits of this already.

What’s even more incredible about Dataverse is that all of these other services utilise or can utilise Dataverse to read and store data: Power Automate (Workflow Automation), Power BI (Reporting and Analytics), Customer Insights (Marketing), Power Platform (Custom Business Apps and Automation) and of course Dynamics 365. I can go on, Excel…

I want to pause there for a moment and let that sink in... I publish my customer data into Dataverse and it's available to many of the Microsoft technologies I'm either already using today or could be using to make my users even more productive and effective. What's more Dataverse sits in a highly trusted and scalable environment that utilises a standard data model that is common to all of the tools and numerous other Microsoft services!

Let's put that another way; you put your customer data into Dataverse you immediately have your Customer360 in Dynamics365 AND this Customer360 is available to all those other Microsoft tools I’ve mentioned.

If you build for example a loan calculator as a PowerApp it can write data to the same place your CRM does, so you instantly have access to the same data in CRM, regardless of where that Power App was used. No costly or complex integrations or copying and pasting of data with the errors that can create.

If you use Power BI for enterprise analytics, it can read from the same place your CRM does. 

Power Automate can listen for changes to your CRM data, for example closing an opportunity and then kick-off complex workflows that can span multiple systems and then report back to the CRM via Dataverse. 

If I enrich or augment the data sitting in CRM with one of these tools then it’s instantly available to my CRM users. 

So the second data advantage Dynamics365 has is it stores and uses data stored in Dataverse, which is also common to numerous Microsoft technologies. This opens up a world of possibilities where a single common data store – Dataverse, is utilised to provide different business functions with a single, consistent set of data.

So let’s sum all of that up... 

Dynamics365 uses Dataverse. Dataverse sits in Azure. Azure is Trusted by some of the most regulated and highly sensitive organisations in the world as it provides all of the protections required to ensure data is safe and compliance is met.  Dataverse can be used by many Microsoft tools to provide business services and data enrichment beyond just CRM.

That’s not just Customer360, that’s Business360!