Financial services

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Dynamics CRM for financial services

22 September 2011

Max Fatouretchi explains why Dynamics CRM is a winning solution for creating better customer connections in the financial services industry

More than 3,500 financial institutions around the globe, including Allianz, AXA, Barclays and ING, are currently using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to gain a comprehensive view of their customers.

One of the key benefits of Dynamics CRM is that it provides out-of-the-box contact management functionality to allow a bank, for example, to gain a complete 360-degree view of its customers

Max Fatouretchi, Microsoft The solution, which provides rich out-of-the-box customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, is proving popular in the financial services industry as companies using it not only achieve a rapid time-to-value compared to other solutions on the market, but they can take advantage of a full range of deployment options, and integrate and customise it rapidly, allowing them to realise increased efficiencies and improved customer satisfaction almost immediately.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is not only one of the fastest growing and most feature-rich CRM solutions on the market today, but it also delivers unique benefits that differentiate it from our major competitors, these being:

• It can be deployed either on premise (in your IT department), in the cloud through a secure hosting partner (private cloud), or through a public software as a service model (public cloud) depending upon an organisation’s individual needs and regulatory compliance requirements
• As well as being a full feature CRM solution, Dynamics CRM can also be used as a development framework. This will allow for the development and deployment of additional and potentially specialised solutions in a quick and low-cost manner. These solutions use the same scalable architecture so our customers can be confident of their performance both now and in the future
• We have an active and fast-growing partner network working with us to develop specialised solutions on top of Dynamics CRM for our key sectors – financial services being one of these. Together, these partners help to address industry-specific requirements using the comprehensive functionality built into the solution as well as providing add-on applications
• Dynamics CRM delivers a scalable and robust infrastructure and development framework. This is particularly useful for enterprise, multinational companies in the financial services sector where thousands of employees across numerous departments use the same platform
• Dynamics CRM is interoperable with the entire suite of Microsoft technologies, which means efficiencies can be driven through fast user adoption and deployment of specialised workflows and processes, reducing training costs and increasing return on investment
• Microsoft invests over US$2 billion a year alone into the development of its Microsoft Dynamics products, which means companies taking advantage of these solutions can be assured of their longevity.

One of the key benefits of Dynamics CRM is that it provides out-of-the-box contact management functionality to allow a bank, for example, to gain a complete 360-degree view of its customers. In a single screen it is possible to see the entire customer interaction history with the bank, open and pending activities, sales-related opportunities, whether the customer has responded to any current marketing campaigns, and any open and pending customer service requests.

Furthermore, the solution can capture a customer’s interests and demographic-related information so when they walk into a bank branch or phone a call centre, the bank representative who is dealing with them can pull up all the relevant information they need straight away to ensure they are offering the best service possible and capitalise on any potential sales opportunities.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is helping thousands of financial services companies to enhance productivity through process efficiency while reducing their operational costs.

Max Fatouretchi is Dynamics industry manager for the Financial Services Industry at Microsoft

This is an extract of an article that first appeared in the Autumn issue of Finance on Windows.

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