Enabling insights for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online: Getting the most out of your CRM investment.

By - September 24, 2014

The most successful sales, marketing and customer service organizations effectively manage their relationships in order to better serve their customers. One way these relationships can be better leveraged is with more complete market intelligence. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is one such way to empower your people with these insights.

New in Dynamics CRM 2013 is a feature intuitively named Insights. Customers who are licensed for the Dynamics CRM Online Professional edition now have a slick integration with the InsideView product. Enabling this feature will provide you with a 360 degree view of your leads, contacts, opportunities and accounts – crucial for developing and maintaining relationships while staying contextually aware and educated about your clientele. This means finding more leads, winning more deals, retaining customers and ultimately accelerating CRM adoption.

Insights does the heavy lifting for you — thousands of data points, profiles and aggregations, providing data enrichments resulting in the latest news, social happenings and highlights about an entity delivered to your virtual doorstep. Your CRM instance or even your email address become powerful analytics tools through the use of Insights. Market data for each person or organization will be populated from InsideView’s data aggregation engine, embedded into your Dynamics CRM user interface (UI) via a new HTML widget on your applicable forms.

This features is not deployed by default but the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Insights Installation Instructions will get you started. You may also download the CRM Insights Admin Guide for an official guide from Microsoft.

In summary, Insights for Dynamics CRM is a powerful tool that you can leverage to better supply your sales, service and marketing organizations with the information and tools they need to succeed. When coupled with Dynamics CRM Online, it can be a strong enabler for your business.

In recap:

  • Insights is free only for Dynamics CRM Professional licensed users
  • Insights is designed for a Dynamics CRM Online instance
  • It is not deployed by default, but you can add this functionality to your CRM Online instance using the instructions above
  • For on-premise customers, learn more about your InsideView options. While this solution lacks the look and feel of Dynamics CRM, it offers the same functionality

In my next blog, I’ll write more about the benefits of this tool and take a deeper dive into the functionality.  You can also learn more about social CRM topics via our Dynamics CRM Pros blog.  If you found this information helpful or have any questions, please let me know in comments.

By: Charles Webb – Colorado Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner

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