Microsoft Rolls Out New Office 365 CRM App for Small Businesses
Microsoft is giving small to midsize businesses (SMBs) a new sales and marketing tool with the release of Outlook Customer Manager, a customer relationship management (CRM) application within the Microsoft Outlook email client. Available through the "Customer Manager" tab in the toolbar, Outlook Customer Manager is an automated organizational tool designed to surface emails, events, documents, tasks, and other interactions to help business users more effectively manage customer relationships.
Outlook Customer Manager essentially turns Outlook into a smart sales inbox. When you click on the tab in the Outlook 2016 toolbar, it brings up a timeline view of automatically organized sales information including calls, deadlines, deals, emails, files, meetings, notes, and tasks related to specific customers. The app exists entirely within Microsoft Office 365. According to Microsoft, the information in the timeline is gathered from email, calendar, and call log data pulled from various Office 365 apps.
The app is currently rolling out to Business Premium subscribers at no extra cost and will be generally available in early 2017. Microsoft is also working to enable full mobile access to Outlook Customer Manager, and has already released a dedicated iOS app that includes meeting information, notetaking, and mobile scanning for business cards.
What about Dynamics?Outlook Customer Manager gives SMBs a light CRM app within Microsoft's email client, but Microsoft also has a standalone CRM app in Microsoft Dynamics 365. The company has a full-blown enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution as well with Microsoft Dynamics GP, which incorporates CRM along with general ledger, sales, human resources (HR), and accounting and finance features.
How CRM is Getting Smarter Outlook Customer Manager is indicative of a larger trend around using machine learning and automated workflows to better organize and surface customer data. The new Salesforce Einstein artificial intelligence (AI) platform bakes in deep learning and predictive analytics throughout the Salesforce CRM cloud, and we've already seen other CRM players begin to implement these kinds of smart email and predictive sales analytics features as well.
The major redesign to Zoho CRM came with a new product called SalesInbox, which offers a dedicated mail client for salespeople that uses contextual CRM data to surface relevant emails. Other CRM players have also implemented similar features in the past year, with Pipedrive CRM adding smart email and Base CRM integrating intelligent sales forecasting and email sentiment analysis using predictive analytics data.
We're seeing advances in machine learning and business intelligence (BI) across a host of business use cases. Through Outlook Customer Manager, Microsoft is using this kind of data automation to make it easier for small businesses without a dedicated sales team to efficiently manage customer relationships. As we head into 2017, the role AI and data automation in CRM will only grow as businesses look for smarter, more efficient ways to manage interactions, engage leads, and convert them into loyal customers.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.