Can Dynamics CRM Send Text Messages?

By default, Microsoft Dynamics enables both transactional and commercial communications straight from the inbuilt text message sender. Along with its comprehensive text-campaign manager, Dynamics is a powerful tool for not just planning CRM efforts, but implementing them. With the most streamlined native integrations, it can also manage Short Codes and Long Codes from the same window as your email, chat, and CRM data, ensuring your multichannel capabilities are totally unified.

Because Dynamics CRM text messaging is so versatile, there are a number of ways it can be done, each of which has a different impact on cost, reliability, deliverability, and security. We’ll cover the best approach organizations can take to boosting Dynamics’ SMS functionality — and why finding an experienced CRM text messaging provider is alone the most cost-effective, secure, and effective option. When two-thirds of customers say they’ll abandon a brand after a poor customer service experience, you can’t afford not to.

Dynamics CRM Text Messaging

One of the strongest points of Microsoft Dynamics is its CRM text messaging feature. It allows users to text directly within Dynamics without navigating anywhere else, but many users soon discover the feature lacks features they need and causes more administrative work than they expected.

Sales, marketing, and support teams must often juggle numerous communications channels, just as customers demand a faster and more cohesive communications experience. This puts much more communications management on the plate of system admins, many of whom are already engrossed in the tasks of converting ever-greater amounts of valuable company assets to cloud-based infrastructure.

The texting features in Dynamics are rarely enough for organizations with mature marketing, sales, and customer relationship communications, leading them to expertly built native integrations for highly refined Dynamics CRM text messaging. With an experienced provider, organizations can now manage their entire communications processes straight from under the Microsoft umbrella of native apps.

From a single pane of glass, the best CRM SMS integration will give you direct use and oversight of every communications channel you rely on, including:

• Traditional Long Codes
• Dedicated Short Codes
• Email

Additionally, a native app built with Microsoft’s own development tools will ensure all records are synced. Admins even get alerts when there is a bounced number or other data-sanitization issues.

It will also populate the Dynamics control panel with an extensive range of new reports and admin controls that are only possible with SMS integration straight into Dynamics itself. Almost none of this can be done efficiently, or even at all, using a non-native tool built with a 3rd party’s own purposes in mind.

Related: How to Send Out Mass Texts: A Guide for Businesses

The Highest ROI MS Dynamics SMS Integrations

To get the most out of your CRM and provide an omnichannel customer experience, you need an enterprise-level SMS texting solution that natively integrates with Dynamics. When the CRM and its add-ons are all enterprise-grade tools, you’ll have the ultimate custom platform designed to handle the granular details that matter most to you, along with incredible customer outreach capabilities at the broadest possible scale.

A native enterprise system is also usually much more affordable, as you’re working with vendors that have direct carrier connections to remove the middleman and all of its associated costs, message delivery and security issues. As we’ll discuss further on, such platforms often increase long-term expenses as well, with questionable text services that create disadvantageous billing procedures. They also require extra work to run properly.

With higher quality and greater affordability, a native Dynamics CRM text messaging integration vastly boosts the functionality of both communications and customer relationships because your employees are plugged into one single portal. Better still, the finest enterprise-grade business SMS platforms come with Android and iOS phone apps, providing remote connectivity that ensures your unified CRM-texting control panel goes with you anywhere.

Oversight of your entire communications and CRM operations from a single portal is more essential than ever with an increasingly remote workforce, and it vastly improves your response times — but what exactly are the key benefits?

Compatibility

Truly native applications made from the same Microsoft Development Tools as Dynamics ensure SMS messages originate directly from your CRM database, eliminating the middleman. It also makes system administration easier, as it was likely built by those with career backgrounds in systems administration.

These tools are much more feature-rich, including powerful API and system customization options that are impossible without using the same foundational building blocks used to make Microsoft Dynamics. For the same reason, a native Dynamics SMS platform further integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products and services, creating a powerful workflow all but devoid of technical issues.

Security

Rather than entrusting your private business data to a 3rd party, a native app can rely on Microsoft’s own cloud-based infrastructure. The highest-level Dynamics CRM text messaging solution should also offer data redundancy, which is crucial for Short Code opt-in/out subscription services and other legal considerations.

Greater Performance

ROI, perhaps the ultimate KPI, is also on the side of enterprise apps, which companies report generate 35% greater ROI. It’s not hard to see why, as an enterprise Dynamics CRM text messaging app makes the following important functions possible:

• Communication and CRM functionality simultaneously expanded and simplified
• Single-app access to all of your communications channels at once
• Efficient operations within your existing IT infrastructure
• Immediate scalability
• Tier-1 connectivity
• Text-enabled landlines
• Shifting from mass texting to 1:1 dialog
• Expansive reports populated with SMS data
• Constant data access, with uptime rates of up to 99.99%
• Threaded conversations between customers and multiple support agents

Ultimately, it will streamline customer communications and provide a smoother customer experience — and for your company, it creates stronger interdepartmental cohesion. Above all, you’ll both save time, costs, and administrative hassles to achieve your goals much more quickly.

When Dynamics CRM Texting Solutions Fall Short

Some vendors market the term “integration” loosely, leaving the impression their app does far more than it does. Even those features that are somewhat integrated with 3rd party CRM text messaging tools are usually limited to the contacts list, which necessitates using a separate window outside of Dynamics. This stilts your workflow and increases the chances of error — you now have two apps to update, learn, and optimize, dramatically increasing inter-platform friction (not to mention onboarding times).

Further, a sub-tier integration tool that uses its own text-forwarding service, rather than your own Tier-1 carrier, may count single messages as inbound and outbound transactions. For bulk messages, this is a complete waste of money, dramatically raising the Total Cost of Operations and delaying message receipt by up to 15 minutes.

Also, what if your info wasn’t synchronized correctly without knowing it, leading to customers being left out of the loop? If you didn’t catch the mistake before pulling the trigger on a massive 1-to-many texting campaign you had already expended resources on, you’ll have created friction for you and your audience before they have even heard of your brand.

A native app will ensure that the work you put into your marketing efforts is concentrated fully inside of Dynamics itself, not wrangling disparate apps together or making up for “small” data discrepancies. When applying efforts at an enterprise scale, every calculated move must be made while cautious of the potential for astronomical repercussions.

Because 3rd party apps require yet another vendor relationship, even SMBs suffer the consequences when their already bootstrapped labor resources are spent continually polishing their CRM text messaging tools (emphasis on the plural). Native enterprise solutions will have much better technical support services, usually from industry veterans who aren’t catching up to the latest technologies.

With some enterprise platforms costing up to 50% lower anyway, it’s obvious that organizations at any scale will immediately see greater ROIs on their time, effort, and ultimately, their customer’s satisfaction.

Related: TrueDialog Accepted to the Microsoft Power App Platform

Native SMS Integrations Done Right

Microsoft Dynamics is a powerful CRM platform, and it provides the basic foundations for in-app texting services. When optimized using a native Dynamics text messaging application with enterprise-level capabilities that pulls all your communications channels together into a unified access point, the entire platform becomes a true marvel of efficiency.

It’s all made possible by TrueDialog’s decade of experience in providing enterprise-grade communications solutions to businesses of any size. To start experiencing these benefits for yourself, don’t hesitate to request a demo— and perfect your customer engagement levels like never before.