Customer Effective Blog

Independent Broker-Dealers Ignoring Advisors’ Tech Needs in 2010

As the race to rake in breakaway brokers continues to heat up, independent brokers are spending less on the areas of technology that matter most to independent advisors: customer relationship management (CRM) and integration.

According to new research from Aite Group, introducing broker-dealers — independent firms that clear through a separate firm — will reduce their focus on CRM software this year, despite advisors putting the improvement of such systems at the top of their priority list.

When asked to rank the business applications that were most important to their business, CRM came in just behind financial planning, with 83% of advisors stating that CRM software is important to how they do business, according to Aite. Nearly 40% said CRM is very or most important.

Nevertheless 66% of broker-dealer executives plan to cut CRM spending or put it on hold this year, according to the study. Instead, at the top of their priority list is broker workstations/advisor portals, account opening and management and direct processing.

Read More At http://www.financial-planning.com/news/CRM-Aite-Bruckenstein-2666041-1.html

Microsoft to spend $9.5 billion on research in 2010 (CRM Highlighted in Article)

Microsoft plans to spend $9.5 billion on research and development this year, which a senior executive said Thursday is more than any competitor.

The figure is $3 billion more than the next closest technology company, said Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, who gave a keynote speech on Thursday at the Cebit trade show. Much of Microsoft's investments center around "cloud" services, or online computing provided to users from hosted data centers.

"Especially in light of the tough difficult macroeconomic times that we're coming out of, we chose to really lean in and double down on our innovation," Turner said.

Turner contended that Microsoft has more cloud services than any other company, ranging from its consumer e-mail service to hosted enterprise products such as its Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) system to its Azure cloud operating system.

Read More At - http://www.businessweek.com/idg/2010-03-04/microsoft-to-spend-9-5-billion-on-research-in-2010.html

Microsoft CRM Configuration Manager

Daniel Halan, a CRM solutions architect in Sweden, has released a freeware configuration manager for Microsoft CRM.  It has some really interesting capabilities that should be useful for managing multiple environments, such as one click export of customizations between environments, and command line execution of customization import, which can be used to automatically import customzations post import.

I really like how it can force related entities to be included when you export customizations, so you avoid conflicts that can happen when you import incomplete relationships.

Read more about it and download it here

del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft CRM,Customization

Give Users an Easy Way to Control Which Contacts Sync to Outlook

Let's face it, using local data groups to define which contacts sync to Outlook isn't necessarily for everyone. While some more savvy CRM users will be fine with this, others may ask for a simple way to just "check a box" on whichever contacts they want in their Outlook. Turns out, there's a fairly simple way to accomplish this. Granted, there will still need to be a local data rule created, but the end result is a much easier method for a user to pick and choose which contacts they get in Outlook.

Here's what we need to do:

1. Create a new entity in CRM. Call it, "Sync to Outlook" for example. Uncheck the options as shown below:

   

2. Create a new N:1 (Many to One) relationship from the new entity with your new Contact entity. Be sure and leave the defaults checked as shown below so that the new entity is visible from a Contact record:

   

3. Modify the default view as well as the associated view for the new entity to include only the Contact and Owner fields
4. Change the security settings on the new entity so that users have "user" permissions:

   

5. Finally, setup a local data rule that looks like this:

   

And you're done. Now all a user must do is create a new "Sync to Outlook" record from whichever contacts he or she wants to sync to Outlook. And, by setting the permissions appropriately as described above, the user can also delete the "Sync to Outlook" records for those contacts that should no longer sync to Outlook. So, in the example below, the contact "AJ Turner" would sync down to my Outlook. Good luck, and please email me with any questions!

Disappearing Security Roles in Microsoft CRM

This is an old gotcha that I ran across recently and was surprised to find that not everyone was aware of the functionality.

A particular user was suddenly having problems logging into CRM, with a message indicating the a security role had not been assigned. Investigation revealed that in fact, the user did not have a security role assigned. As it turns out, the user's business unit had recently been changed. Whenever a user's business unit is changed, all security roles for the user are removed.

So, as a matter of practice, if you must change a user's business unit, be sure and add their security role(s) back. You'll certainly save yourself a phone call or an email, and avoid an unhappy user!

Delayed IFRAME Loading

Suppose you have a CRM form that has several IFRAMES contained in multiple tabs. Loading such a form can sometimes create a performance issue on the client browser due to the frames all loading at the same time. One such way to reduce the hit on performance would be to delay loading an IFRAME until the tab it is on is clicked and made visible.

What we’re going to do is create a function that sets the source of the IFRAME and then we’ll attach the function to the onclick event of the tab. In this example, I have an IFRAME named ‘IFRAME_myiframe’ and I have set the original url to be ‘about:blank’. I want the IFRAME to display the Bing search engine when it’s tab is displayed.

CRM 4.0 Pre-Filtering Gotcha with Union Queries

The other day I had to do a report in SSRS and it required me to do a UNION query.  In my queries I had a join to the FilteredAccount view so I could use the CRMAF_ prefix to all the report to filter on advanced find settings within CRM.  Sounds pretty simple right?  Here is what the first UNION join looked like”

      FilteredAccount AS CRMAF_FilteredAccount INNER JOIN …

So I publish my report to CRM and go to test this out from an Account Form page.  I pull the report but not all the data had been filtered?  I know I set the queries up correctly and I had don’t several other report before this way.  Wonder what might be the issue.  I ended up profiling the database to see what the actual query looked like when the report was running from CRM.  Here is what my FilteredAccount Join looked like now:

(select account0.* from FilteredAccount as account0 where (account0.accountid = N'{609BD5F9-14C3-DE11-813A-002264FA3ACA}')) as CRMAF_FilteredAccount INNER JOIN…

That looks right, but when I looked further down I noticed that the other queries in my UNION do not have the prefiltered sub-query that CRM generates for me.  I imagine using UNION queries might be too much for a basic Filter.  This will be good to know the next time I need to join lots of similar data within a report in CRM.  Looks like it might be a case for Explicit Filterering?

SQL query to retrieve you CRM 4.0 license key

Retrieving your license key from CRM can be done with a simple SQL query against the MSCRM_Config database.
select LicenseKey from ConfigSettings

I have seen other posts that suggested querying the <org>_MSCRM database with the query "select licensekey from License" but they did not return a key in my case.

 

Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM internally - "Eating the dog food"

At Customer Effective, we like to use the term “eating the dog food” almost daily to describe our attitude towards running our entire business inside the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application/ platform.  We truly have an xRM implementation in place and having used it for over 5 years, you can imagine we have developed a lot of additional functionality, enhancements, extensions, etc.  Quite often we demo our internal use of CRM to prospects and existing customers.  We have built a very robust Professional Services Automation module inside CRM to manage our projects.  We leverage the service module to manage cases, develop workflows based on case type, etc.  We use the Marketing module and take advantage of valuable third party integration with ExactTarget and Hoover’s.  We run our business based on metrics displayed in our CRM Dashboards. You probably get the point, we live, breath, eat, sleep, and dream about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  And every once and awhile we get to share our experience as we recently did with one of our marketing partners, PointClear, via our case study on the DemandGen Report website – Customer Effective Pumps Up the Pipeline

Five Resolutions Every Marketer Must Make in 2010

Guest Blog Post from our Friends at ExactTarget

At ExactTarget we are always looking for new ways to help our customers improve their online marketing programs. This year, we thought we’d start the year off as most people do, with a set of New Years Resolutions. These 5 Resolutions can help keep your marketing program fit and in shape!

ExactTarget’s new whitepaper, Five Resolutions Every Marketer Must Make in 2010, outlines the plan simply and succinctly:

1. Be helpful, not just social.

2. Engage your subscribers.

3. Treat subscribers like friends.

4. Design for your subscribers.

5. Get back to basics.

Build richer subscriber data through the integration of Email and CRM

The Five Resolutions Every Marketer Must Make in 2010 whitepaper emphasizes the importance of understanding, engaging and educating your subscribers. The more you know about your customers and prospects, the more effectively you can communicate with them.

ExactTarget’s integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets you manage and automate a wide variety of marketing campaigns that leverage information about your leads, contacts and accounts. The integration between ExactTarget and Microsoft Dynamics CRM lets you:

· Automate.  Use Email Marketing Automation capabilities and templates to create date and event-based scenarios that execute automatically.

· Extend. Extend personalized, relevant, one-to-one communications from email to the web with ExactTarget’s Landing Page functionality.

· Personalize.  Reinforce subscriber relationships with personalized emails on behalf of your Lead, Contact, and Account owners.

· Analyze. Use real-time tracking results to send follow-up messages to an engaged group of subscribers.

ExactTarget and Customer Effective partnership

We’re proud to partner with Customer Effective to deliver this integrated offering. To learn more about the integration of ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM please visit the ExactTarget Extensions Network. Customer Effective is certified in the ExactTarget for MSCRM integration. They are well positioned to help you understand how to leverage ExactTarget in your specific Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment.

Preventing Characters from being Entered in a Form Field

With CRM, we use a couple of different methods to perform data entry validation before a record is saved to the database: either form javascript, a pre-event plug-in, or some combination of both.

For data validation in “real-time” (ie, you want the validation to occur when the actual data is entered, rather than when the entire record is saved), form javascript is the way to go. Most javascript validation is perform in a field’s OnChange event, however you can utilize other events.