14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s customer relationship management solution is in a very select club, the Leaders quadrant in the Gartner 2011 Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers. The Redmond company has continued to invest strongly in the development of its CRM solution, and launched Dynamics CRM 2011 and Dynamics CRM Online earlier this year.
Gartner has looked at all the products that the software giant is offering, including Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM 4.0, which it sees as been adopted mainly by companies with nontraditional needs in terms of customer service contact center environments.
“Delivering a positive experience is essential for any company to retain customers and grow its business,” revealed Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM product management.
“Microsoft Dynamics CRM, through its familiar, intelligent and connected experiences, gives customer service professionals a complete view of their clients, along with insightful and actionable guidance enabling them to deliver the best possible customer service.”
Softpedia users already know that earlier this month, the Redmond company released a new iteration of Customer Care Accelerator (CCA).
Available for download free of charge to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 customers, the Customer Care Accelerator is designed to centralize data from various, disparate sources and make it readily available in a unified interface for organizations that deliver customer care and contact center services.
Although it positioned Dynamics CRM among the market leaders for CRM customer service contact centers, Garnet also notes that there are a few areas where Microsoft needs to work in order to improve its offerings.
The software giant needs to evolve its expertise related to complex customer service contact center environments, as well better support of real-time decisions for example.
The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (SaaS) version also needs to mature, Gartner opines, especially if it’s to tailor without a fault to complex contact center environments.
At the same time, Gartner sees a range of strengths with Dynamics CRM, the first mentioned involving the intimate integration with additional Microsoft technologies, including Outlook, SharePoint and Office, an immense advantage over the competition.
Additional strengths involve:
“In 1Q11, Microsoft released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 worldwide, which contains better visual guides and workflow support, together with improved dashboards and analytical features.
The system is very flexible, and users are able to extend the product creating their own objects and workflows. It allows for a unified view into multiple systems in a single interface, and is a standard part of the CRM package.
The company offers both an on-premises and a cloud version of the product, both of which are low cost, compared with competitive offerings.”