The Microsoft Dynamics team have recently released the CRM 2015 Release Preview Guide. This details the changes coming in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (2015 Update), Microsoft Social Listening and Microsoft Dynamics marketing. With the NEW products they aim to enhance Microsoft Dynamics customers’ abilities to provide outstanding customer experiences.
Guided Sales Processes
Improves on Business Process Flows allowing branching capability and helps guide sellers toward a desired outcome using automated business process and enforcing business rules across devices.
Product Families
Boost selling effectiveness with the ability to bundle products and up-sell / cross-sell related recommended products. Adds product attributes to help simplify and minimise product management.
Sales Hierarchies
Manage and report on your sales data that maps to your business.
CRM for tablets enhancements
Addition of: flexible, role tailored dashboards and analytics, personalised home pages and ability to navigate by hierarchy. Improved support for working while disconnected has also been added with offline drafts allowing users to create records offline and being able to synchronise changes when reconnected.
Case Management
Additions to the SLA feature introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 include improvements to case management by allowing agents to pause and resume SLA’s and track the time a case was on hold or awaiting customers to make sure SLA’s are met.
Microsoft Social Listening
Social media channels can be monitored and tracked in real time. Information can be acquired about products, brands and competitors from sources such as Facebook, Twitter, Videos (YouTube, etc.), Blogs and now news.
Search
Improvements to quick search make it easier and faster to find customer information
Better synchronisation between CRM and Outlook or Exchange – More types of information can now be synchronised including; assigned tasks, additional contacts and appointment attachments
NEW Outlook Configuration Wizard
The Configuration Wizard for CRM has been redesigned to make it easier to configure CRM for Outlook and also to be able to manage additional CRM organisations.
Business Rules
Improvement to Business Rules includes a much richer set of logic support to enable greater flexibility in creating Business Rules. Support for default values and behaviours has been added.
Business Process Flows
Programmatic access to active and enabled processes has now been enabled allowing action to be taken not just based on the process context, but the stage context the user is working on and currently viewing.
Calculated Fields
Users often want to know information that is the result of a calculation. Until now this would have required code to be written. Calculated fields allow a user to define formulas and conditions required for calculations on field data from within the CRM user interface without the need for writing code.
Business rules Editor Improvements
Rollup Fields
Rollup Fields can capture key business metrics at a record level from related entities. Aggregated data can also be rolled up from child records to parent records.
Field Level Security
Field level security has been extended for inbuilt fields as well as custom fields. They allow for setting user access or visibility to individual users or teams to individual fields. For example an admin can restrict the purchase price of products from being viewed by certain individuals.
Marketing
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing will also be updated and will include: a NEW Email Editor, enhanced Campaign Management Console, Integrated Social listening, NEW sales Collaboration Panel, B2B Marketing webinar integration and improved lead scoring, NEW Marketing Calendar, Click to Call from Lync and Internal Process Automation.
You can download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Release Preview Guide here.