Change Police • June 29, 2022

Managing Change in Dynamics 365

Change management is an important and, most often, difficult component of business operations. Changes, both large and small, inevitably occur for all business, and getting employees to accept and work with those changes is crucial to continued success.

When it comes to CRM, a platform that should be continuously evolving with your processes, the decision to implement, upgrade or extend is often met with pessimism. But why?

A CRM platform, implemented correctly, should have a broad scope of impact on any business. CRM should influence everyone from sales staff and marketers to administrators and even members of management. For this reason, pushback from many different areas of a business can be expected, yet generating employee buy-in to the concept of a new CRM system is crucial. 

Managing change correctly, whether it is a new system or adapting to new processes, will ultimately determine the success of that change. So how can businesses ensure a good ROI whilst keeping a happy and pro-active user base?

Encourage early adopters with product champion involvement

 Identify a CRM champion. A high-level staff member who has been involved with the implementation from the start - to help employees accept the changeover to a new system. The champion can provide company-wide support, training and consistency to often dis-engaged staff.

This comprehensive approach means more employees will be reached and have their view of the new CRM platform changed for the better.

Ongoing support is critical

 Early adoption issues are often challenged during implementation stage however, in our experience, we find that user resistance is often at its peak during CRM go live. Staff members tend to find unexpected challenges due to lack of involvement or training, the scope of new skills they're supposed to develop can be intimidating with a combination of this seen to cause low adoption figures.

Businesses have too proactively combat this by offering supplemental training and troubleshooting for staff. By having this option offered on an on-demand basis, businesses can boost compliance and help employees understand the best practices for utilising the new CRM system.

With this in mind, Hyphen8 have created a Change Management solution for CRM that will provide a mechanism for ongoing end user feedback and change management requests. The solution provides a transparent process for all end users to see stages within the change management lifecycle, making the end user feel more in control.

It also provides administrators with a manageable, easy to user process for request management.

The process takes on a few simple steps:



It is important for the change request process to be in a familiar, user friendly interface to ensure consistency throughout. Users do not want to jump from system to system. For this reason, the Hyphen8 Change Management solution has been built within Microsoft Dynamics CRM

New Advanced Find Tutorial

By Nathan Williams • November 2, 2022
Advanced Find has changed - is it for the better?!

Dynamics 365 - SmartStart Case Study

By PAR002_123 • September 2, 2022
Dynamics CRM/365 has grown in complexity and functionality, to rival market leading CRM platforms and become one of the most popular CRM offerings on the market. A complex platform of deep functional properties, a business can often be forgiven if the immediate assumption leans towards a more enterprise product. The following is a recent statement of work for a SME focused, fully implemented Dynamics 365 solution in just 6 days - with customer satisfaction AND user adoption very high. It would be great to discuss any comments, questions or feedback if you have experienced this approach previous and why it was a success/failure. Project Scope, Effort & Costs CUSTOMER X have taken a 6 day SmartStart option with Clear Aim Consulting that will look to implement, customise and launch a Dynamics 365 environment, customised to CUSTOMER X , based on the following: SmartStart for CUSTOMER X Ltd. Collaborative analysis of requirements, installation of core CRM application - 1 day Sales, Marketing or Customer Service process configuration (subject to scope), including security setup - 2 days Reporting, Analytics and Automation (subject to scope)- 1 day System Administrator, End User Training & Go Live (remote support) - 2 days £3,600 + vat The Scope of the project is focused on sales processes with contact management, lead and opportunity tracking and communication management, via Outlook integration, the main drivers. The purpose of SmartStart is a managed, rapid implementation of Dynamics 365, we aim to have this solution analysed, configured and implemented within 2-3 weeks from commencement date. Current high level start date proposed is X. The SmartStart package is strictly “time & materials” however, based on initial communications we do not foresee any additional time required to implement the current scope of phase 1.

Why does you business need a CRM System?

By CRM Guru • July 25, 2022
CRM systems are used by organisations to track and manage customer interactions and data. It can also help you identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. By using CRM, you can improve customer engagement, which will lead to increased brand loyalty and customer retention. A well-functioning CRM system is essential for businesses that want to improve customer engagement and build a strong brand. To ensure that the data in your CRM system is clean and accurate, use data cleaning tools. Data cleaning tools are designed to remove duplicates and inaccuracies from your database, so you can make more informed decisions about your customers and prospects. An empowered brand image is one that is strong and recognizable. Customers feel positive about the brand and are likely to recommend it to others. An empowered brand image is built on trust and customer engagement. CRM can play a role in helping to build an empowered brand image by improving customer interactions, communication, and trends. Ultimately, CRM can help to build a strong, recognizable brand that customers feel positive about. The goal of data cleaning is to improve the quality of data in a database by identifying and correcting errors. This can be done manually or through the use of automated software tools. Data cleaning is often used in preparation for data mining or other types of data analysis. Data cleaning tools are an essential part of maintaining a clean and accurate CRM system. By using data cleaning tools, you can improve the quality of your customer data, reduce duplicates, and enhance customer relationships. Data cleaning tools can help you: Improving data quality by using Data cleaning tools can help you identify and correct errors in your customer data, so you can make more informed decisions about your customers. Improve customer communication by reducing duplicates and inaccuracies in your data Enhance your customer segmentation by identifying and removing inaccuracies in your data Improve your customer profiling by identifying and correcting inaccuracies in your data Increase the accuracy of your marketing campaigns by removing duplicates and inaccuracies from your data. Save time and money: this can help you save time and money by reducing the need for manual data entry and correcting errors in your customer data. Improve your sales forecasting by identifying and correcting inaccuracies in your data. And more! Duplicate data is one of the biggest problems facing businesses today. It’s estimated that duplicate data costs businesses billions of dollars every year. Data cleaning tools can help you remove the amount of duplicate data in your database, so you can save money and improve your business operations. Inaccurate data is another big problem for businesses. It can lead to poor customer communication, incorrect segmentation, and inaccurate marketing campaigns. Data cleansing tools can help you improve the accuracy of your data, so you can avoid these problems and improve your business. If you’re looking for a way to improve your customer relationships, reduce costs, and improve your business operations, consider data cleaning tools. They can help you clean up your data and improve your bottom line.  Briefly, The benefits of using data cleaning tools are numerous, but the bottom line is that they can help you improve your business in a number of ways. If you’re looking for a way to improve your customer relationships, increase sales and conversions, and improve your ROI, data cleaning tools are a great option to consider.

Why Dynamics Roll-up Fields are Undervalued!

By CRM Beast Mode • June 29, 2022
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, and generally the platform, comes with some wonderful, under-utilised functionality. Only recently have our customers started to scratch the surface with calculated and roll-up fields to assist in reporting and analytics. The following examples show scenarios for event management and event value as well as account management and customer value. Event Management: In the above example, the customer are using roll-up and calculated fields to analyse the value of the campaign, from Lead and Opportunity relationships and response management based on the Event Response relationship. From this the customer can deduce how much revenue the event has generated, the cost of the event versus the revenue and manage capacity versus attendee numbers. Account Management: The above example, rolled up on an account record, calculated from related opportunities, shows account managers or business development managers the accurate, up to date financial information about that customer. This has allowed the customer to make quick, informed decisions about their customers as well as identify the more valuable customers to the business. Using roll-up or calculated fields allows for a greater confidence in data and can only help you with key business decisions. Leveraging the filter and hierarchy options within the calculations will allow for complex and rich roll-ups and are available for all different scenarios from administration to sales & marketing. Let us know your examples of where Dynamics roll-up or calculated fields have benefited your business!