CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a system for organizing and managing a company’s business interactions with current and future vendors or customers. It is tightly coupled with technology to automate, organize, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. CRM can help reduce costs and increase profitability by organizing and automating business processes that nurture customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM in nutshell

MS Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management software developed by Microsoft which is targeted on enhancing the customer relationship for any organization. Out of the box, the product focuses majorly on Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service sectors. Apart from these, Microsoft has been marketing Dynamics CRM as an XRM platform and has been encouraging partners to use its proprietary (.NET based) framework to customize it. In recent years, it has also grown as an Analytics platform driven by CRM.

The CRM can be used to drive the sales productivity and marketing effectiveness for an organization. It can handle the customer support logics, provide social insights, business intelligence, and a lot of other out-of-the-box functionalities and features. As a product, Microsoft Dynamics CRM also offers full mobile support for using CRM apps on mobiles and tablets.

Offerings by Dynamics

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is offered in two categories :

CRM Online or Dynamics 365

CRM Online is a cloud-based offering of Microsoft Dynamics CRM where all the backend processes such as application servers, setups, deployments, databases and licensing are managed on Microsoft servers. CRM Online is a subscription-based offering which is preferred for organizations who may not want to manage all the technicalities involved in a CRM implementation. You can get started with setting up your system in a few days (not weeks, months or years) and access it on web via your browser.

CRM On-Premise

CRM on-premise is a more robust and easily configurable offering of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, where the CRM application and databases will be deployed on the client servers. This offering allows you to control all your databases, customizations, deployments, backups, licensing and other network and hardware setups. Generally, organizations who want to go for a customized CRM solution prefer on-premise deployment as it offers better integration and customization capabilities. From the functional standpoint, both the offerings offer similar functionalities; however, they differ significantly in terms of implementation. The differences are summarized in the following table.

Modes of accessing CRM

• Browser
• Mobiles and Tablets
• Outlook

Product versions

• Microsoft CRM 1.0
• Microsoft CRM 1.2
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016
• Microsoft Dynamics 365

Other CRM market competitors

• Salesforce.com
• Oracle
• SAP
• Sage CRM
• Sugar CRM
• NetSuite