GAMIFICATION with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
The concept of GAMIFICATION has become my new area of interest in the recent days when it comes to developing and using business applications like Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
To give you a little background before getting into the technology about gamification strategy. In a nut shell, Gamification is the process of adding game elements to non-game applications.
Definition (From the Wikipedia):
Gamification is the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to encourage people to adopt them, or to influence how they are used. Gamification works by making technology more engaging.
And, according to Gartner’s report by 2015, 50% of companies will use the game elements in their business.
Any business application in the enterprise requires extensive data inputs from their users to make it a more profitable business. In order to achieve that, your users should feel engaged and motivated to use the system. Myself being a CRM consultant, I’ve always seen the problem of CRM user adoption in most organizations and with respect to that recently, I’ve written a blog post on Tips to improve CRM user adoption,
http://astutecrm.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/tips-to-improve-crm-user-adoption/
And now I was thinking how beneficial it will would be if we incorporate the concept of Gamification into CRM applications more precisely on Microsoft Dynamics CRM to drive more user adoption.
Today in most business cases, your sales people are not interested in updating/feeding the data in the CRM system. They think what value it could bring-in for them if they do so. But for the organization, it is highly imperative . So how can we create a WIN-WIN situation for both the organization and their people by using CRM. I feel that the concept of Gamification could serve the purpose. Imagine how faster and efficient the same people’s brains work when they play Farmville or WarCraft on Facebook? How much more value they could bring to the company, if they approach their work with the same interest as the game?
And this is how I envision the solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Just a small insight
For sales users, If the number of lead conversion success rates or opportunity closures for a CRM sales user is higher, their user profile is updated with a medal or a recognition which is displayed in their profile and notified to the entire Organization about the achievement.It will be a tag which the user is entitled to have until someone else supersedes him/her. Just imagine how it encourages the sales person to do more by being rewarded and recognized.
For customer support users, The user or a customer service representative who had resolved most number of customer cases and for whom the case’s success ratio is high will be rewarded and recognized.
Think of the impact it could bring-in for your CRM users if they are recognized and rewarded for their efforts. They feel valued and that will motivate them to do more.
The whole idea of this approach originated in me with my own experience in Microsoft community forums and till date it has remained a motivational factor for me in contributing to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community and got rewarded as MCC (Microsoft Community Contributor) Award for consecutive 2 years (2011 & 2012).
When I answer people’s questions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM community forums and if my answer helped them solve their problems. I will be rewarded with points and subsequently if earn more points, I will be recognized with medals, every morning even before checking my emails, my first thing would be to check my forums profile to see how my solutions helped people and the points I earned. That kept me doing more and more and I would expect the same kind of an impact it should bring for the Dynamics CRM users within the organization by using the system.
What I suggested above is just a basic idea with the intent to introduce the concept of GAMIFICATION with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to all Microsoft partners and customers across the globe to leverage the tool and incorporate game mechanics thereby creating better user adoption.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is not just a business application which helps to solve business problems and build profitable results. It is also a tool which provides you with the framework to build anything even more fantastic.
Happy GAMIFICATION with Microsoft Dynamics CRM!
Cheers,
Tips to Improve CRM User Adoption
CRM User Adoption is one of the challenging area for many organization of all sizes. Whilst the need for a CRM system in an organization is arising and organizations are planning to
implement the same, it is also highly imperative to think about making your users adopt to the system. So, I would say CRM user adoption should be thought about well in advance even before deciding on which CRM system to implement. The key here is, get your users adopted to process, the system does the rest.
I have identified few areas to be considered for a successful CRM user adoption strategy.
Identify Champions within the organization (CRM Advocates)
Every organization needs a CRM Advocate within themselves, he/she should be the go-to person for anything related to CRM. This CRM specialist should be an active member right from the initial CRM strategy design till the end so that their expertise and skills could be highly leveraged and can take the entire organization’s CRM vision in the right direction.
Demonstrate Value
Every CRM user in the organization should be aware of the value which the CRM system brings in. It should not be that the management wants them to use it, so they do. It’s better if it is the other way around. Here the CRM specialist should act as a sales person to the CRM users. Most importantly answer the WIIFM “What’s in it for me” question, then things would fall in place automatically.
In my own experience, I used to tell my people that if they are comfortable using Microsoft Outlook then they are already IN the game, then CRM would be the enabler.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM advantage,
Deliver where it is required
While the world is completely going Mobile! So do the need for your users and their CRM. Imagine how beneficial it could be if your users can access it in their IPad, IPhone, Blackberry etc. In a typical case, the sales person who gets out in the field does not feel motivated to enter the client specific information back in his desktop. With mobile CRM, he/she can enter information in their mobile device and have it tracked. Try Microsoft Dynamics CRM with no additional cost.
http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/2011/en-us/online/5.0/GS_CRM_mobility.aspx
Involve department heads in decision making
Similar to any management decisions, when you plan your CRM system it is recommended to include the head of each department in the CRM decision making process which can add more value to the system from their department’s perspective and more importantly will help us to set clear expectations from the system.
Opt for a phased implementation rather than doing all at once
Anything which goes through a gradual process is more effective and will help reap great results. Similarly, the CRM implementation process should be looked at the same way. Start smaller and grow gradually. We may have a bunch of expectations from the CRM system but it doesn’t mean that it has to be done all at once. Instead, split those into phases and implement one by one. The advantage is, better user adoption through a proper pace.
Make training plans to fit different users
Proper training plays an important role and serves as a contributing factor for successful CRM user adoption strategy. Your CRM training plan should preferably be tailor made for each set of users, not so easy but worth the time invested.
Incorporate social media with CRM
This is very interesting and I’ve talked about this in couple of my previous posts,
http://astutecrm.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/social-crm-the-technology-enabler/
http://astutecrm.wordpress.com/2011/07/03/social-crm-engaging-your-customers/
Try the GAMIFICATION approach
Think of a game linked with CRM, sounds weird? Please stay tuned!
Good luck.
Cheers,
Francis Edwin
Dynamics CRM 2011 Cross browser support – Work around
Of late, there is much anticipation from CRM users worldwide for CRM 2011 cross browser support. And the same is expected in the next major release of Dynamics CRM as per the latest statement of direction and the official blogs.
With that being said, I was surfing through the available add-on’s for Google chrome from the chrome web store and luckily I found the IE Tab add-on (for Google Chrome). That was quite striking and immediately I decided to give it a try using CRM 2011 inside chrome [IE Tab] and thankfully it rendered fine and just worked great. Every form in the browser worked great and there were no hindrances. Amazed
!
Of course, it cannot equal the native support which is expected from Microsoft but for me it was at least a preview of what we are going to see in the future releases.
More importantly, this will help you win a great deal of customer satisfaction and increase your winning ratio in the pre-sales pitch.
The same is applicable for Mozilla Firefox and IE Tab add-on for Mozilla.
Happy CRM’ing!
Cheers,
Francis Edwin
Key decisions to make before implementing CRM for your business
The CRM market is growing, businesses of all sizes have started thinking about implementing CRM in their workplace. With this started happening, it is imperative to think about some of the key decisions that needs to be made before implementing a CRM solution for your business. Contrary to the same, I thought looking through the reason for the past failures will help us to better match what was done before and to what has to be done for a successful CRM implementation.
So lately, I’ve been researching and analyzing of why majority of CRM implementations fail and below are my key findings.
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Lack of a proper CRM strategy
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Management Only – Decision making
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Lack of flexibility in the CRM tool
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Budgetary Constraints
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All at once mind set
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Lack of proper user training
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Improper Customer Data
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Lack of Continuous Improvement plans
So, here are some of the decisions that your organization may think of to overcome the stated failures above,
Define a proper CRM strategy:
As we all know that for any long-term and continuous improvement system, perfect planning is the key. Likewise for a successful CRM implementation, a proper CRM strategy is the key and stands at the root. The most important of all is that your CRM strategy should align to the organizational short-term and long-term goals.
There is a lot to be discussed on this subject alone, I’ve decided to take this in more detail in the upcoming posts. But for now, take this – Make sure your CRM strategy is properly aligned with your organizational goals – Very Crucial!
Involve End-users also in your decision making team:
On a typical CRM selection and implementation process, the decision makers are mostly CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s and I.T.Managers. But, if you ask me that is not sufficient enough, we need some fresh ideas which your top management sometimes misses out. Moreover, the End-users are the one’s who are going to use the system. So it will be high-time to involve them and get inputs for the new CRM system. Evidently, this approach will also help in increased user adoption internally.
Opt for a Flexible CRM tool:
End of the day, an effective CRM tool should be flexible enough for the end-users to gain acceptance and yield best results. Flexibility in-terms of usage (User Friendliness), finding key metrics using Dashboards, better productivity with Outlook Integration, Offline capabilities and application extension capabilities. For all these, Microsoft Dynamics CRM would be a perfect fit as it is gaining more user adoption and not far away from becoming the market leader. Very importantly, it links very well with your MS Office Applications.
Budgetary Constraints:
This is very crucial and has remained a major contributing reason for CRM implementation failures for small and medium sized businesses over time. In many cases, a strictly defined budget hardly helped and mostly surpassed the defined budget with respect to hardware/manpower and maintenance expenses. That’s where many give-up with CRM incurring only loss and leaves the management unhappy.
If you drill down to the cause of the fluctuations in the budget – Lack of proper time management and planning tops the list.
If you are a Microsoft Partner and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is your choice, the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step Methodology gives you a strategic advantage in-terms of better ROI, reduced deployment costs and risks.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (the power of choice) gives you an opportunity to look into their cloud solution CRM Online which gets you up and running in no time with an affordable price. It doesn’t mean that the On-premise version is expensive and time taking implementation process, both have their own needs and necessities (There are lot of factors to consider and decide upon in choosing the right model for your business). But maybe it is very much possible to start with an Online Model and switch to the On-Premise model whenever the need arrives.
This way, the variations in budget can be slowly waved-off.
All at once mind-set:
CRM implementation as a whole is a set of sequential process. To get the best results, one has to understand what are their primary business focuses are and thus define key metrics which has to be met by the system. Having that in mind, work on a plan to roll-out each modules in different set of phases giving you an advantage of looking into minute details which (if utilized) can increase productivity and gives you better clarity on the system-wide processes.
It is absolutely fine that your new system offers a variety of modules and feature sets and it is not necessary that it has to be implemented all at once rather take it through sequential set of phases.
Very importantly, identify and plan integrations (if any) first hand, this can save you a lot of head scratches and time during the implementation phase.
Proper user training:
Once we have the proper CRM system in place, the next major thing is user training.
As the name says its not just training the users on the available modules and show them on how to carry-out day-to-day activities by the user in the system. It’s more of sharing with them ways to effectively make use of the system. Make the training session as interactive as possible which motivates and helps the users to get the best out of it.
CRM Data:
Not the least but the best. Managing CRM data is more of a discipline and a responsibility of every individual CRM user. Moreover, CRM is all about customer analytics so it is highly important to ensure that your customer data is solid and reliable.
Imagine the productivity of your CRM system with incorrect/improper data, just like trying to reach a customer who never exist. Marketing campaigns and mail merges of no results – think of the efforts and the time wasted.
Yes, the customer data acts as a core in any CRM system thus data integrity is very vital.Data cleansing and preparing for data imports determines how successful your CRM system can turn-out to be.
Finally:
Monitor statistics and focus on continuous improvement plans:
Do you think that it’s all done once your CRM system goes live. Of course not, that is where the real success journey begins. Keeping an eye on key statistics and user productivity rate, companies should devise strategies on improving the results with the help of business intelligence tools which can lead your businesses to the next level.
A simple example would be incorporating social media with your CRM system – The next big thing for a CRM success.
Thus, CRM should be looked as a continuous improvement process/tool in any customer oriented business.
Happy CRM’ing!
Cheers,
Francis Edwin
Social CRM : Engaging your customers!
Customer engagement and collaboration is nowadays seen as a driving force for social CRM success. In this post, we will discuss on how to get the same in practice and getting the potential benefits out of it.
Business owners started investing time and efforts in listening to their customers with the help of social media tools. With that started happening it is also important for companies to start collaborating with the customers in addition to following their customer’s tweet on Twitter and activities on Facebook and Linked-In. It is about proactively reaching to your customers, being interested in them, taking suggestions/feedbacks and work-on them (the next important step towards social success) – Not so easy for big organizations as we just put-it-in-words, but still outstanding companies needs it all. It doesn’t end there, when you help solving your customers problem, possibly you can identify new opportunities with them. It is said that, business decisions based on customer feedback and insights is really where the value of social CRM comes into picture.
This opens-up the other way as well, customers connecting with each other and share brand information among themselves (Your marketing efforts simplified !). I see this as an opportunity in this competitive business world when your customers speak for your brand.
In this current internet age with the inclusion of social media tools, you can observe that your customers also spend more time online and demand support from online community resources. So it is important for any company to increase their online presence and extend their support through different channels which thereby helps you win and retain customers – Customer Retention – A new philosophy in this era.
Here, the customer is acting at the core of your business. Isn’t this real collaboration??. Isn’t this the real purpose of Social CRM??.
Happy Socializing with CRM!
Cheers,
Francis Edwin
Social CRM : The Technology Enabler
The word SOCIAL CRM has gained a lot of interest in me for the last few months and among others and grows in significance.
When we say CRM (Customer Relationship Management), we are talking about a business strategy influenced by a tool to manage customer relationships effectively.
Now I said EFFECTIVE, when I say that, In all sense that should be it and I believe a social CRM fills the customer experience gap. With CRM being social, we will be able to,
- Listen what your customers feel. Ex: Hear them tweet.
- See what your customers are up-to. Ex: Facebook Likes
- Learn which events your customers are attending and follow them. Ex: Linked-In events.
All the above will really help you to catch your customer’s nerves and helps you serve/manage them better. Result – Happy customers !
Over the years, CRM systems has evolved to a great extent and at present we are in the xRM era. Now to compliment it more, the evolution of social CRM.
As you can see a lot of companies started using Social Media as a part of their sales and marketing activities. A recent survey from the HBR (Harvard Business Review) says that,
79% of companies are using or planned to use social media and among them 58% currently use and 21% planning to incorporate in their business.
So social media awareness and its significance is growing and would it be the best chance for organizations to incorporate this with their CRM systems which goes one step ahead from managing your customers to ENGAGING them.
B2B companies are using social media to make buying decisions, now it is just a strategy away on how your sales people can get through them – A proper social CRM system, gets you there.
How Social, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is,
Social Networking Accelerator for Dynamics CRM: This accelerator was released for CRM 4.0 and had more than 5000 downloads,
http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/c8c07884-86f6-4aa4-b617-daf65daa2f80
http://crmaccelerators.codeplex.com/releases/view/29979
Social Activity Dashboard for Dynamics CRM:
InsideView and Dynamics CRM:
Vibe Social Networking for Dynamics CRM:
and plenty more to come which can make the platform even better and beneficial.
Happy CRM Socializing!
Cheers,
Francis Edwin
Dynamics CRM 2011 : Statement of Direction – My 2 Cents
With the new statement of direction released for dynamics CRM, many of us in the industry are pretty much excited about the features to be introduced in the upcoming releases and there are lot of hot discussions started happening (let me not keep-on talking about it and share you the download link) – Here you go (Windows Live-ID login required)
My Favorites (By Priority)
Cross Browser Support – What a time it would be to bring in this new (long awaited) feature which (if you ask me ) the most important differentiating factor which could take dynamics CRM a huge leap ahead from SF.com
Technically this will use HTML 5 for structuring and presenting contents and hopefully no more JavaScript webpage runtime errors.
Social Intelligence – I strongly feel that there will be no more selling (to be more specific S&M – Sales & Marketing ) without social media as you can see the world is moving towards Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In substantially and the potential benefits are seen in a matter-of-time
Micro Blogging – I assume that it is going to be much similar like Twitter with the only difference as the internet sources say that it is going to be an On-Premise offering – Curiously waiting to see what MS has in store for us!
Cross Device Support – While this feature is pretty evident, it could have been fine if we can know the support for specific devices like (IPhone, IPad etc.)
More Importantly, the new release cycles mentioned are a huge+ as there will be no more waiting for 3 years or so, instead it is going to be 2 releases per year. Isn’t it more exciting (that we are going to see new developments very often ). This clearly show Microsoft’s commitment to enhance business productivity for customers through CRM and become the market leader.
My wish list:
Lately Microsoft has acquired Skype, so… What’s In for Dynamics CRM???
We might see Skype integrated with Outlook and further simplify users experience (Just a guess 
).
Overall, the coming years with Dynamics CRM 2011 is going to be exciting for all of us and appreciate MS for the efforts. A job well done.
Cheers,
Francis Edwin
