- Businesses now have new ways of engaging their customers amidst a digitized, consumer-driven era, with the use of new-age technological tools and platforms
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management) delivers integrated and valuable solutions to allow businesses to thrive in a mobile-world, cloud-first world
KUALA LUMPUR, 27 January 2015 — Businesses today are facing increased pressure to transform the way they engage customers in a digitized, consumer-driven era. This was the topic of conversation at the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) roundtable at the Microsoft Data Frontier Summit held in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday, 22 January, which saw over 400 top-level executives discuss how to best leverage new technological tools and platforms to deliver the very best for the current generation of consumers in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world.
At the roundtable, discussions revealed that customers are now dictating the manner and medium in which marketers must use to reach them and win their business and loyalty. The changing landscape presents new challenges and opportunities for CMOs as they need to take responsibility for the customer experience, in order to drive effective campaigns and innovate along the customer journey.
These challenges, according to Rukmani Subramanian, Microsoft Malaysia’s Chief Marketing and Operations Officer, can be categorized into four different buckets – marketing analytics, marketing operations, digital marketing and customer experience – which are addressed by a suite of Microsoft products, such as the newly launched Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015.
Marketing Analytics: Transforming insights into actions
Challenges
- Connecting with customers on a personal level is critical to delivering the right marketing messages to target audiences. Marketers need a single unified view of their customers by uniting information from multiple channels and unlocking actionable insights from that data.
Opportunities
- Microsoft not only gleans business insights by consolidating information from multiple sources into a single pane of glass in an easily digestible manner, but it also democratizes such rich business intelligence by putting in the hands of every marketer through self-service tools & dashboards based on familiar technologies like Office. Our predictive and modeling services also help anticipate customers’ needs so that marketers can proactively respond to them.
Featured Technologies
- Microsoft Azure HDInsight, Excel with Power View, Power BI for Office 365, SQL Server
Marketing Operations: Creating amazing campaigns with agility
Challenges
- There is no 9-5 workday anymore. Marketers must be able to connect and collaborate on-the-go and unleash their workforce to tackle any customer project anywhere. The organization must be built to be readily responsive to customer needs.
- Marketing operations must work quickly and smoothly – with secure productivity and collaboration services – to increase marketing creativity and efficiency.
Opportunities
- Microsoft has approached the challenge of marketing operations with collaboration and communication tools that move away from individual abilities to tools that empower collective wisdom. This also allows us to work in a truly mobile work culture in which time and place do not dictate how we work, and marketers are able to move from work to life seamlessly.
Featured Technologies
- Office 365, Lync, Skype, Yammer, MDM, Project Online, Windows 8.1 devices
Digital marketing: Being in the moments that matter
Challenges
- When it comes to marketing today, every second counts, and reaching the customer with the right message at the right time is more important than ever. Marketers need to connect with customers at the moments that matter, and reach audiences along the entire customer journey – whether it’s at work, home, on-the-go, or at play. To do this, marketers need to bring their advertising to life on a wide variety of platforms, applications and devices.
Opportunities
- Microsoft delivers on flexible cloud technologies and interactive digital marketing solutions that marketers need to communicate to customers at the moments that matter.
- We offer the most comprehensive range of ad-supported services available in the market today, allowing us to reach audiences along every step of the customer journey.
- We’ve also spent the last few years building capacity for a new type of high-engagement advertising and coupling it with robust targeting to understand customer intent, needs, and behaviors.
Featured Technologies
- Microsoft Azure & Microsoft Advertising/Ad-supported services: Windows 8.1, Bing, Bing Apps, Windows Phone, Skype, Outlook.com, Xbox and Xbox Apps, MSN
Customer Experience: Innovating along the journey
Challenges
- Transforming customers into loyal brand advocates requires immersive experiences that make customer needs and interests a top priority.
- Marketing innovation needs to happen to manage customers, measure performance, and drive loyalty through every step of the customer journey.
Opportunities
- Microsoft’s CRM tools and social strategies enable marketers to drive deeper relationships with their customers. Our commitment to marketing innovation gives our customers the devices and services they need to manage customers, measure performance, and drive loyalty through every step of the customer journey.
Featured Technologies
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
To leverage these opportunities and address these challenges, marketers now have access to the newly launched Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 – designed to make marketing campaigns more effective and easier to implement by providing better insights about consumers while delivering a greater impact.
Attendees at the Microsoft Data Frontier Summit had the opportunity to learn more about the tool, which, for one, offers deeper integration with Microsoft’s productivity applications – this includes Office 365, Yammer, Lync, Skype, Sharepoint, and Power BI.
In addition, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 also features a new sales collaboration panel which enables sellers to provide input to campaign and targeting, while its interactive marketing calendar allows teams to have visibility to marketing plans, while Lync’s “Click to call” provides the ability to host or join webinars to discuss marketing campaigns. The powerful Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 is also available across all devices – whether it’s a tablet, mobile, or laptops.
John Chan, CRM Solutions Lead, Microsoft Dynamics Asia, who presented at the Summit, said, “Dynamics CRM is a critical part of Microsoft’s cloud strategy and the core solution for enabling businesses to better engage with their customers. Businesses are increasingly realizing how Dynamics CRM is helping sellers and marketers unite and collaborate to deliver a seamless customer experience, as evidenced by the growing momentum and demand around the world – including Asia Pacific – for our CRM solutions.”
He referred to several key data points to demonstrate the consistent and strong growth rate for Microsoft’s CRM business:
- Serves over 40,000 customers and 4.4 million users
- Continued growth of the business 41 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth
- More than 30% growth year-on-year for Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the Asia Pacific
- 100% growth for Dynamics CRM Online year-on-year in the Asia Pacific
- 60% of new CRM customers in the Asia Pacific chose Microsoft’s cloud-based CRM solutions
“As a productivity and platforms company, Microsoft’s passion is to enable people to thrive in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Business solutions are core to Microsoft’s delivery of digital work experiences, to transforming how people work and to reinventing business productivity. Microsoft Dynamics delivers solutions to businesses which empower them with business processes to help them better connect with their customers. It all starts with our customers, and we stand ready to help them harness the power of the cloud, to navigate an ever-changing world and to do more and achieve more – on their terms,” concluded Rukmani.