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Dynamics CRM 4.0 Launch Highlights 'Ease-of-Use'
3/25/2008
Microsoft officially launched its latest customer relationship management (CRM) product, Dynamics CRM 4.0, last week.
At a well attended event Thursday morning in Huntington Beach, CA, Microsoft focused not on the new features or technical details of the release, but instead characterized the problems of sales teams and the use of CRM systems, which generally have been too complex for the end user.
Ironically, the event consisted mostly of technology partners and potential CRM solution customers. A show of hands indicated that few attendees were actually in sales or marketing.
The talk was led by Michael Clark, Microsoft's area general manager for the Southwest. He was joined onstage by Greg Lush, CIO of The Linc Group, who testified to use of Dynamics CRM since version 1.2, and Mark Veronda, vice president of Hitachi Consulting, which did the system integration work for The Linc Group.
There was little technical discussion about Dynamics CRM 4.0, which is designed to be easy to use by sales personnel. One feature of Dynamics CRM is that it integrates into the Microsoft Outlook e-mail environment that many salespeople already use.
CRM's Past Failures
Ideally, a customer relationship management (CRM) system is "customer focused, process driven and team oriented," Clark said. However, he noted that although CRM systems have been around for about 20 years, those systems mostly have been designed by technical people who were disconnected from business management.
He cited a 2004 report from AMR research that found that 28 percent of CRM projects failed to go live. Moreover, 33 percent of those projects had serious user adoption problems.
Clark also cited a 2005 Forrester Research report, complementing those findings. The report found that two thirds of its survey respondents were unhappy with their CRM system's ease-of-use capabilities.
Past CRM systems haven't done well in addressing the needs of the end user, Clark said. He cited a figure from Gartner -- that salespeople only spend 45 percent of their time selling -- as a reason for making a CRM easy to use. This "ease-of-use" theme might have been the principal message at the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Launch event.
"Can you train your salesperson to use one button?" Clark asked the audience. The button he was referring to was labeled, "Track in CRM," in the presentation he showed.
Later, in the question-and-answer part of the event, an audience member obliquely challenged Clark's simplicity-of-use question, saying, "There really are five or six clicks….How do people learn where to go?"
The Linc Group's Lush responded: "We say go to the contact window. Look in the upper left corner of the window -- that tells them where they are."
Veronda said that Hitachi had designed the Dynamics CRM solution for The Linc Group with the idea of keeping the system "very clean" by consolidating screens and simplifying it for users.
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