Introduction:

The importance of data quality is all too often overlooked within many organizations. But if more were aware of the effects of inaccurate data, this would not be the case. According to a recent Gartner report on the effects of poor data quality, the average organization loses $8.2 million annually, while 22% estimated their annual losses at $20 million and 4% estimated losses were $100 million[1].

This financial loss is compounded by the following potential impacts to your business:

-          Poor customer service

-          Inaccurate forecasting

-          Drop in Sales pipeline

-          Erroneous inventory levels

-          Loss in Sales/Revenue/Margin

Claudia Imhoff, a recognized thought leader in data analytics, states that, “Much of this loss is due to lost productivity. When we have to compensate for inaccuracies and have to work around figuring out how to deal with poor data quality – that’s a loss in productivity.”

Now what?

Now that we are aware of the potential impacts, let’s examine how to counter and prevent the maladies caused by data quality. Some industry best practices include:

Develop standards

Organizations with a high quality of data typically have standards and guidelines in place. This includes formatting, structure, completeness, consistency, etc. Develop a standard before embarking on a data cleanse campaign. The standard will not only guide the data cleansing team into identifying suspect records, but also make others aware of expectations.

Be proactive

Don’t wait for your data to become dirty -- be proactive and maintain. Creating a report or dashboard can help with visualizing the progress of your efforts. It can help you trap the “dirty” records as they come into your database. This proactive approach will also create real-time coachable opportunities for those that enter the data.

Obtain senior level support

Having senior level support can help remove the common objection. But more importantly, the senior level employees will most likely be impacted the most by inaccurate data. By having these senior level employees involved in the data quality campaign, they will have a first-hand perspective on the importance of a high level of data quality.

Start small

Pick a strategic area of the business where the data cleansing will take a smaller amount of effort, but create the greatest level of return. Once the process is shown as successful, this will hopefully create moment and support for the rest of the organization. Some may become overwhelmed if looking at the task in its entirety -- bite off a small piece to start.

Conclusion

The process of cleaning up your data will be laborious. The payday will be when you and your team arrive at the point of maintaining a handful of records daily instead of thousands of records. Information is power, but only when the information is accurate. At the end of the day, it is imperative to remember -- data is our friend!!

If you have questions about how Webfortis could assist your organization's data quality efforts, please email info@webfortis.com or click  for more information about Webfortis.

[1] http://www.melissadata.com/enews/dataadvisor/articles/062011/1.htm

Every business can benefit from implementing a CRM system. But why should you invest in one? We’ve identified seven reasons why you need CRM for your business. Read on to learn how a CRM can help take your business to the next level!

1. A Customer Left for No Reason

Breaking up is hard to do. Sometimes it seems like a customer left you for no reason. Perhaps they were even one of your top customers and you thought they would remain loyal to the end. After the initial sting fades, you need to figure out why they left. That’s where a CRM system can help. With CRM, you can analyze historical trends, monitor past communications, and even analyze sales trends. With this data, you can make improvements to your client relations and flag certain events during the customer relationship cycle, all of which are things that can help you prevent losing another customer in the future.

2. You Lost Data

Without a centralized system, it becomes very easy to lose data. Maybe an employee leaves, taking all of the knowledge and information stored in their brains with them. Maybe you can’t remember what you named a certain file. Perhaps your lost data even led to a lost customer. Data is the fuel that makes your business run, and having it centralized in an easily accessible format means a more efficient business.

3. You had Incomplete Data

Perhaps even more frustrating than losing data is having incomplete data. Imagine how amazing it would be having all of the information you need about a customer accessible at any moment. A CRM system provides extensive data storing capabilities. It also enables you to have emails centralized, which provides a complete view of your business. That way, if a key employee leaves or responsibilities shift, you have the ability to dig into past communications to ensure that your customer experience doesn’t suffer.

4. Your Sales Process Stinks

To be blunt, your sales processes may be inefficient and your sales people might just be winging it. While that may have gotten you by in the past, why not invest in a CRM system to take your organization to the next level? With CRM, your sales process will be streamlined. No more stinky sales process! Give your sales people access to all the client data they could ever need! Never forget the favorite football team of the person on the phone ever again!

5. Client Communications Aren’t Strong

How long does it take you to respond to a client question? How are your calls and emails prioritized? Better yet, do you know how your clients prefer to be communicated with? Should you pick up the phone or send a quick email? So many questions, and CRM has the answers! If you master your client communications, you create raving fans and avoid a customer leaving for no reason.

6. You Lost Revenue

Whether this comes from losing a customer, losing an upsell, or just losing a sale, this one really hurts you and your business. Nothing hurts quite like losing revenue when it’s your livelihood at stake. A CRM system can help ensure that you don’t miss out on revenue from any angle. Is there any reason better than maximizing revenue to inspire you to invest in CRM?

7. Your Competition Beat You

One of the most frustrating things that can happen to a company is when they are beat out by a competitor. What do they offer that you don’t? Did they do a better job winning over the customer during the sales process? A CRM system empowers your business to leverage the wealth of data in a smarter way to crush the competition. Think of CRM as a hardworking member of your team; ready to crush the competition!

Of course there are more than just seven reasons to implement a CRM system, but hopefully the ones we talked about today will get you inspired to look into what a CRM can do for you and your business. Ready to talk CRM? Reach out to our CRM experts today!

Happy CRM’ing!

Those who have worked with Dynamics CRM for a longer period of time will remember how the user experience delivered by the platform has evolved over time: from an Office style, data entry focused, Internet Explorer popup window application into the clean and modern Dynamics CRM 2015 application that works on any device and aims to present the maximum amount of relevant information to the user with the minimum amount of clicks. There was a time when CRM didn’t exactly seem like something that was designed with the needs of the end user in mind, but this direction changed quite drastically from the CRM Online December 2012 Service Update onwards, as Microsoft started to redesign the experiences they wanted to deliver for the users of their business applications in the new era where mobile, social and cloud were quickly becoming the most dominating forces in the world of enterprise software. Not forgetting the consumerization of IT, which had shown people that not every app used in a work context needed to look like a 90’s ERP system.

I have covered this transition in quite a bit of detail in my four part article series titled “Dynamics CRM Platform Evolution”, which I’d recommend you to read through for understanding the practical impact of moving from the “first era” of MS CRM v1-v5 onto the current era of largely CRM Online focused rapid product iterations. One of the points I raised in the article was that not all the CRM software providers in the market had chosen to follow a similar path of introducing a big bang revolution to their application. Unlike Microsoft, Salesforce.com had instead opted for an evolutionary path that had seen their application UI remain almost unchanged for the main components and layout, as depicted in the image below.

While being wildly successful in becoming the “next CRM application” after the 90’s generation of Siebel style, on-premises enterprise CRM suites had began to slide out of the limelight, Salesforce also began to receive a growing amount of criticism over the legacy that its user interface had accumulated over its history. The question of “Why doesn’t Salesforce upgrade the UI/UX of its core CRM web app?” did seem more and more valid, especially when competing products like Dynamics CRM were transforming the user experience that one could expect from a customer relationship management application. Well, finally in late August 2015, Salesforce announced that their next era of CRM UX would arrive in the form of the new Salesforce Lightning UI.

Welcome to the Future of CRM, Salesforce!

First of all, congratulations to the product team behind the Lightning UI on the launch! Pulling off a major redesign like this is bound to be a massive task and I’m sure in many ways the work has only begun now, but it’s still definitely an achievement worth celebrating. As many of you may have noticed, in my day job I work exclusively with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so whatever I write here about a competing CRM solution is not going to be 100% objective. For that I apologize, but the point of my post isn’t to bash Salesforce but rather to analyze some of the trends in CRM software in general and also reflect back a bit on what has taken place in the world of Dynamics CRM during the past few years.

But first, I need to just get something out of the way. Damn how these two apps look alike! Here’s the brand new opportunity form on Salesforce Lightning UI, a.k.a. Opportunity Workspace:

…And here’s how the opportunity form on Dynamics CRM has looked like pretty much since the 2013 version:

Notice any resemblance? Let me help you out a bit by listing the first five things that come to my mind from the Salesforce screenshot:

• Sales Path for visualizing the sales process stages and related fields, known as Business Process Flow in Dynamics CRM
• Tabs for switching between related activities and social posts, known as the Social Pane in Dynamics CRM
• Composer for adding new tasks, phone calls and events to the opportunity, which simply is an inline activity quick create form in Dynamics CRM
• Related information on Contact Roles, essentially the Stakeholders editable grid in Dynamics CRM
• Persistent four header fields at the top of the form, ditto for Dynamics CRM

Yeah, of course these both are applications for managing your typical sales opportunity information with activities and contacts, so its understandable that the concepts used in the default screens would be unlikely to radically differ from one another. Still, contrasting Lighting UI with the traditional Salesforce UI and looking at how close to the now familiar Dynamics CRM form layout, UI controls and especially the Business Process Flow feature the Salesforce product team has ended up with their design is, well… Quite remarkable in my opinion. Not a bad choice by any means, and also serves in validating the direction that Microsoft’s team took when overhauling their application’s UI a couple of years ago.

Aside from the similarity to Dynamics CRM, there are plenty of nice looking designs and features included in the Salesforce Winter ’16 release notes. Some of them are about filling the functional gaps to Dynamics CRM (list view charts known from CRM 2011 make an appearance here), others are borrowing concepts from the more recent CRM apps out there (Kanban style opportunity board used in Pipedrive, Pipeliner et al., as well as SalesFlow for Dynamics CRM), but many of the release items seem to be focused on fine tuning the application usability and removing unnecessary friction from common tasks that sales people need to perform on a daily basis. Rather than just slapping on a new field layout and updating the icons, it does seem like the user experience of Salesforce will change quite dramatically with Lightning. Of course the true UX can only be evaluated once a live version of the application is available for testing how it truly feels like to use the app, but at this point it looks like a major step forward.

The Price of Revolution

Introducing a new application user experience to new users who don’t have prior experience of the product will always be far easier than forcing it upon the existing user base. While few people would say that they don’t want a nice & easy UI, the reality is that resistance to change is always a factor when dealing with human beings. When it comes to business software especially, disruptive changes are at the very bottom of the want list for the majority of people who are responsible for ensuring that information systems deployed for managing the core business processes of their organization keep on churning out the expected results. What’s going to happen when a CRM system jumps from evolutionary releases to revolutionary changes instead?

The one important thing to keep in mind is that changes like this never take place overnight. Migrating over all the functionality that vast application platforms like Salesforce of Dynamics CRM have accumulated over time isn’t something you can get away with a single big bang release. With Microsoft there was a preview version of the new UX introduced with the Online only Polaris release, launched almost one year ahead of the actual major release of CRM 2013 (v6.0). Initially only five core entities were updated to the new “refreshed” forms, and even today the latest v7.1 still contains lots and lots of entities and menus that follow the old Ribbon based user experience. So, three years later the work isn’t even done for the Dynamics CRM product team in renewing the platform, which means that the end users and system customizers need to cope with a somewhat mixed application environment. The platform legacy becomes most apparent with the new mobile client applications that don’t support the old product architecture, resulting in features like marketing lists or connections not being available on the modern client versions. Sure, life is much, much better with the new UX, but it has also introduced some new complexities into the product.

In the case of Salesforce, the story sounds to be somewhat similar, as not every area of their platform will be Lightning enabled right from the start. The Service Cloud will not yet be updated, nor will features like forecasting, orders or person accounts. In moments like these it’s always interesting to see how companies prioritize their development efforts, as they are likely to indicate either the observed level of usage for certain features of their products, or alternatively possible future plans to scrap something old and rebuild it from the ground up. If you’re working as a consultant that advises customers on what features they should take into use or invest in developing for their CRM systems, the messages conveyed by the application vendors via the frequency of updates to certain functional areas of their products are signals you’ll most certainly take into consideration when deciding on what strategy to recommend to your client base.

With 150k customers and millions of users, it’s going to take a while before Salesforce will have safely moved each and every one into the Lightning world. In fact, based on the statement by Sara Varni, senior VP of marketing for SFDC Sales Cloud,  this milestone may never even be reached, since Salesforce will support the classic experience “indefinitely”. In the oldskool settings of on-premises servers, the way this could have been handled would be for the customers just sticking to an older version of the software and not deploying any updates. When you’re the grandaddy of SaaS platforms, things are obviously a bit different and supporting older versions will require more than just accepting support tickets for ancients releases of your software. With CRM Online, Microsoft has previously been pretty strict on getting every customer to move on to the latest version via the CDU (Customer Driven Update) program, but lately they’ve also changed their update policy to allow skipping the bi-annual releases and updating only once per year. As SaaS products become a more mature market, I bet we’ll be seeing a growing number of options for customers to choose which versions to use, which features to activate and when to schedule these changes to take place.

Universal Experiences

The way Salesforce chose to build their next generation UI is different from the path that Microsoft took. While Dynamics CRM 2013 introduced both the new web client experience as well as the “MoCA” tablet client application as separate experiences (followed by the refreshed mobile app in CRM 2015 Update 1), Salesforce decided to first build the Lightning framework for their Salesforce1 mobile app and then scale it out to the PC screens. As a result, the screenshots that we see in the Winter ’16 release notes look very much like a mobile app placed onto the screen of an iMac. While you could in theory also use the Dynamics CRM for Tablets app on a Windows 8/10 laptop, the users will certainly almost always end up choosing the Dynamics CRM web client designed for interaction with mouse & keyboard rather than touch optimized “Metro” experience.

I think this will be one of the most interesting design choices to keep an eye on when it comes to user reactions to the new Salesforce Lightning UI. Regardless of all the recent Universal Apps hype that Microsoft has been building up alongside the Windows 10 release, I’m personally not quite convinced yet that you can deliver a great UX with a single app that needs to scale from 5″ touch screens to 27″ desktop monitors. As a result, I’m also not a big proponent of the “configure once, deploy everywhere” slogan used in reference to the Dynamics CRM mobile apps, since I’d rather see CRM applications truly optimized for the device and use case in question. However, if Salesforce can pull this off with Lightning, then perhaps Microsoft has been right all along with their OS strategy and the application teams should now move faster towards unifying the client side of things.

Applification of Platforms?

When it comes to products like Dynamics CRM or Salesforce, one of the key reasons why they are being so widely deployed across enterprises today is the ability to customize them to align with the business processes specific to the customer organization. They are not only replacing legacy CRM suites but also capturing an ever larger share of the market that used to belong to custom developed business software, since using a customizable application platform delivered from the public cloud can really drive down the TCO quite significantly. But if the CRM applications are now reaching towards an even more polished user experience in performing common tasks with sales, marketing and service records, what will happen to supporting the business specific scenarios that are more unique than what pre-built application features can cover?

When Microsoft launched the Dynamics CRM 2013 version with the refreshed UI, they didn’t only add more features into the already crammed product, but rather they took away some configuration options that had been previously expected from the platform. As the saying goes about the goal of design work, “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That may very well be true when designing a product to serve a specific set of tasks, but it may not resonate so well with a toolkit used for crafting these end products. Limiting the options shown to an end users is different from limiting the options available to the designer of the final solution that the user will be exposed to.

How do such limitations show up in everyday life with the latest Dynamics CRM version? Today we have inline quick create forms for effortlessly adding activities for records, but we can no longer choose if we want to record a future phone call activity instead of a completed one. We can use an editable grid for adding line items into opportunities, quotes and orders, but we can’t configure these grids to contain those fields that the business logic would require to be recorded onto these line items. The price of added convenience for some is therefore resulting in the reduced usefulness to others. Looking at the Salesforce Winter ’16 release, it’s apparent that also here the polished UX will be come at the cost of reduced options. For example, there will be a brand new, great looking Home screen offered for sales users, but the components shown in it cannot be customized at this time.

Is there an inherent conflict between the needs of the application end user and the platform customizer? I don’t believe this is necessarily the case, but it is obvious that there are trade offs in building something that works great and building something configurable when it comes to the allocation of development resources for these software products. As the release cycles get faster and faster, the pressure for getting a new feature out there can mean there’s no time to perfect the first version into something that will meet the needs of all user groups and align with the rest of the platform functionality. The real question is, will the features be made more customizable in the subsequent releases, or will the requirements be pushed down in the backlog when the demand for more new features arises?

When discussing the user experience of applications that are not commodity services like email but highly business specific process management tools (at least when properly deployed), it’s very important to understand what the final UX really consists of. It’s not only about having the slickest UI controls for working with the data, the flashiest graphics for visualizing the sales pipeline or most creative layouts for presenting different data sources on one screen. At the end of the day, the users need to feel like they can easily accomplish the tasks they are responsible for, with the help of the application – not despite of it. Understanding what exactly those tasks are and what pieces of information are relevant to the process of their completion is something that requires careful analysis conducted at the organization deploying a new CRM solution. Failure to do this will quickly wash away any value that the software features could have potentially delivered to the organization.

As today’s CRM platforms become more and more sophisticated with the functionality and data presentation options available, the design work of those who configure the customer specific solutions also needs to be aligned with the increasing expectation levels for application usability. It’s still not rocket science, but it does require a greater attention to detail than the earlier, more primitive business applications where the UI was essentially a reflection of the data model. I’ve illustrated some of these design aspects in my 10 Tips for Designing A Great User Experience presentation, which hopefully can give an idea of how the system customizers can do their part in building CRM systems that the business users will find great value in – a Useful Experience, if you will.

The post The Irresistible Force of Great User Experience in CRM Applications appeared first on Surviving CRM.

When linking a prepayment to a sales order and the sales order is partially invoiced, the settlement for the remainder of the prepayment appears to be no longer linked.

The best practice when settling a prepayment against a Sales orders is as follows:

1.  Create Prepayment Payment Journal for $10,000

Accounts receivable > Journals > Payments > Payment journal

Select the Payment tab and mark the “Prepayment journal voucher” box

Post the Prepayment

2.  Create a Sales order and link the Prepayment

Accounts receivable > Common > Sales orders > All sales orders

The Net amount for my item is $10,000 with a quantity of 5.

To link the Prepayment, click the Invoice tab > Settle > Open transactions and Mark the box next to the Prepayment.  Click Yes when you receive the message that the transaction is a prepayment.

Close the Settlement open transaction form.

3.  Partially Invoice the Sales order. 

On the Sales order, change the Deliver now to 3 and partial invoice the sales order for the Delivery now quantity.

Post the invoice.

Click Invoice > Settle > Open transactions

Note that the remainder of the Prepayment is not settled.

Mark to settle the remaining prepayment amount

In the Sales order, change the Deliver now to the remaining 2 quantity and invoice

 If you go to the Customer > Collect tab > Settle > Closed transaction editing, you can see that the entire prepayment has been settled.

Note:  If you wish to settle the prepayment to the remaining invoiced quantity after the invoice has been posted, you must use the Customer form and then open the Open Transaction Editing form. 

A client emailed us that they couldn’t connect to their CRM 2011 on premise environment. When we tried to login it appeared that ADFS authentication wasn’t working. We logged into their front end CRM server where ADFS lives and expected to see a certificate error or something similar. It all looked good.

We then opened up the deployment manager and saw one of the weirdest CRM error messages ever. I mean in like 13 years of working with the product I have never seen it or heard of it. Searching online didn’t give us any immediate tips.

So here is what we observed and the steps we followed:

1. Both the front end and back end CRM servers were asking for a reboot to finish installing some Windows Server updates. So we figured that must be it and obliged. However, after rebooting we still couldn’t connect to CRM.

2. We then checked the Windows Update history on both machines and observed that the front end machine was on Update Rollup 17 and the back end was on UR 18. We applied update rollup 18 to the front end machine and rebooted it.

3. The error message when away and users were able to login to CRM once again.

In summary, I get the warning that one or more servers don’t have the latest update. But one or more server roles are missing and the front end server can’t find the back end server? You certainly don’t want add a new server to the deployment.

Errors

• One or more server roles are missing from this deployment.
• One or more servers in this deployment do not have the latest update.

CRM 2011 Deployment Manager One or more server roles are missing from this deployment

The post Missing CRM Server Roles – Weirdest Error Message Ever appeared first on Innovating on CRM.

Merit Solutions will be presenting two sessions at AXUG Summit next month related to Microsoft Dynamics AX Rescues. If you are attending AXUG Summit - be sure to register for these two sessions.

Warning - Your Project is At Risk!

Join us for the first part of this “AX Rescues” series as we discuss the major risks associated with Microsoft Dynamics AX enterprise projects, and how to identify the warning signs that your project is under stress. This session will lead into our next session – “Your AX Project Is At Risk – Now What?”. Enterprise Microsoft Dynamics AX projects face a number of risks and challenges due to the transformational impact they have on companies. Recently we’ve seen an increase in the number of companies who receive limited value from their investment into Microsoft Dynamics AX because the system was not implemented correctly, or hasn't been implemented at all. Project overruns, over customized systems, undocumented configurations, and inadequate change management threaten your project at every turn!

Your AX Project is At Risk - Now What?

Join us for the second part of this “AX Rescues” series as we discuss a systematic methodology for stabilizing challenged AX Projects and how to realize the Return On Investment you envisioned when you chose Microsoft Dynamics AX for your company. Be sure to also join us for the first session of this series, “Warning – Your AX Project May Be At Risk!”. Analysts like Gartner, Forrester Research, and Nucleus Research have all named Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 as a Leader in their respective ERP research reports. More than 20,000 companies worldwide use Microsoft Dynamics AX, including many global industry leaders. But you’re not convinced; you heard the success stories, saw the sales demos, and ultimately made the decision to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Since your decision, however, your project hasn’t been smooth and deep down you know something is very wrong. Learn how to turn your project around before it’s too late!

It’s Friday and this week the video subject is on something closely related to and built on top of the Dynamics CRM. USD, which stands for United States Dollars Unified Service Desk.

In the first video in our USD series, we walk you installing Dynamics CRM’s USD desktop client as well using package deployer to import USD Sample data into a CRM Online instance.

Give us your feedback, all of it: good, bad, and ugly, I’m sure we can take it. Suggest new topics either in comments or by sending your ideas to jar@crmtipoftheday.com.