Pros and Cons of a Dynamics CRM SMS Integration

Integrating company-wide SMS texting into Microsoft Dynamics expands customer interactions, syncing multiple customer touchpoints to customer records and full mastery over omnichannel communications. By giving team members a variety of options to connect with customers, organizations can instantly reach customers on their preferred channel, generating a flawlessly streamlined customer experience.

With over 36,000 companies reliant on Microsoft Dynamics, Dynamics CRM SMS integration is a common consideration for those looking for an enterprise-grade SMS-management platform with direct-carrier access.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SMS Integration Made Easy

Staying in-platform to communicate with customers is important to help companies reduce friction and ensure security, performance, and reliability. For the most effective Dynamics CRM SMS integration, the majority of the benefits come with a truly native SMS text messaging platform built on Microsoft’s texting capabilities.

The texting capability that Dynamics offers is fairly limited, so scaling your business without an enterprise-level 3rd party tool can be challenging. Look for a 3rd party tool that expands your capabilities with truly native texting, removing the need to switch back and forth to pop-ups or alternate windows. It isn’t just a matter of smoothing small workflow hiccups—cluttered procedures dramatically increase the likelihood of errors that costs you hard-won customer retention rates.

As 33% of customers feel most upset when made to repeat themselves, you can be sure even small glitches in your communications workflow are snowballing into a poor customer experience and lost profits.

Rightly, much is said of the importance of placing the customer at the center of your communications strategy. This can only happen when all departments and customer communications are tightly aligned, enabling your organization to cohesively engage with customers whenever and however they wish to communicate.

Interdepartmental Cohesion With Centralized Messaging

Dynamics is already designed with the needs of multiple departments in mind, making Dynamics CRM SMS integration a surefire way of dramatically boosting inter-departmental efficiency and customer-facing operations in one decisive move.

SMS integration can enhance your sales and marketing departments in a way that creates efficiency across repeatable tasks, allowing the most important aspect of their work to remain clear. The customer experiences incredibly low friction when engaging with your brand, which will immediately stand in stark contrast to many of your competitors. Most companies struggle to use their various communication mediums efficiently—those that do stand out like a beacon.

Consider the impact Dynamics CRM SMS integration has on each department, but remember that, above all, the beauty of integrated messaging is that it allows organizational goals to remain primary to each department. Marketing efforts feed straight into sales and support services, without making the customer repeat themselves because your entire team can meet them where they already are from a universal interface.

Marketing

Most SMS marketing efforts involve mass one-way texting, where efficiency is king and quality is queen. With truly native SMS texting within Dynamics, you can elevate quality while boosting efficiency, rather than see them at odds.

A native SMS platform integration is the best way to streamline the campaign details that matter most, such as:

• Faster APIs with limited bandwidth drain
• Automatic phone number validation
• Simple new-number entry
• Built-in scheduling
• Compliance protection
• Opt-In/Out and subscription management
• Support for Short Codes
• CRM integration for those needing features outside of Dynamics

As we’ll explain, any organization even approaching 1-to-millions mass texting will burn through resources at an excessive clip. There will be a middleman in the way between them and the direct carrier, needlessly chewing up costs — unless their Microsoft Dynamics CRM SMS integration goes directly through a Tier-1 carrier (instead of a bolted-on 3rd party forwarding service).

Related: Microsoft Dynamics Marketing SMS: How to Make It Better

Integrated Sales

The more integrated your communications are with Dynamics, the more relevant your marketing team’s work becomes for sales agents. They’ll have the broadest view of all communications channels, allowing them to see at a glance where a prospect most likely is in the customer’s journey.

From there, the marketing team is almost automatically handing the ball off to the sales team, which is now perfectly equipped to capitalize on the traction already gained. The most important next steps are then much easier for your sales agents, but only if they have the following enterprise-level features, made possible with true Microsoft Dynamics CRM SMS integration:

• Ability to seamlessly shift from mass texting to 1:1 dialog
• Calling APIs that support click-to-call, call forwarding, and call recording
• Multichannel messaging (calls, emails, and SMS)
• Multi-agent texting via long and short codes into a single conversation thread

Ultimate Customer Support

At any point in the customer journey, smooth and effective contact with your company is not supplemental to your marketing and sales efforts. Being the most frequent point of contact with your customer base, they carry the lion’s share of all efforts to boost customer-brand momentum.

As a result, your sales and marketing efforts are constantly being affected and, potentially, bolstered when your customer service results in higher retention rates and greater recommendations for your product. Most customers will also pay more for better service, as well.

Securing these benefits is only done with native integrations between your communications and CRM systems, which creates a powerful, reliable, and incredibly efficient customer-facing engine. The following are just several of the technical benefits that will keep you and your customers tightly synced:

• Extremely high uptime rates of 99.999%
• Fast delivery with direct carrier connection
• Automated records compilations with instant retrieval
• Team-based 2-way texting at scale, via integrated long and short code support
• Team-to-1 with threaded conversations for the fullest interdepartmental collaboration

Combined Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM SMS Integration

In addition to impeccable customer-facing communications, your internal communications will also tighten up. Everyone can more quickly get on the same page, and when Dynamics CRM SMS integration involves phone apps, the entire system can be accessed from anywhere.

All departments benefit from having more extensive KPIs and metrics tracking, which occurs when SMS and call data synchronizes with Dynamics. Compliance issues become more accurately taken care of as well, if your Dynamics integration duplicates your Opt-Out database and heeds strict ISO 9001, the standards set for Quality Management Systems relied on by even military and aerospace contractors.

Related: How Microsoft Dynamics SMS Texting Integration Works

Customer Support Dynamics Gone Wrong

Companies claiming to provide Dynamics CRM SMS integration but which are actually 3rd party vendors can be quite tricky in their marketing. Often, it boils down to what they don’t say. Many 3rd party solution providers don’t have direct carrier connections, which slows down delivery and add significant costs. Not to mention, they often don’t offer robust, enterprise-level capabilities that scale with your business

The major pain point of poor substitutions for Dynamics integration is that the “integrated” aspects amount to little more than a synchronized data connection between the client’s contact info and their own platform built without Microsoft development tools. These generic off-brands require separate windows to text when what you need is native texting from within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment, not with the vendor’s own bolted-on apps.

Integrating a contacts list is not the same thing as integrating an SMS service itself.

Your TCO increases as volume increases, essentially taxing you for scaling up.

In both scenarios, the vendor also has intimate access to your proprietary data, which is sent through their infrastructure, jeopardizing your organization’s (and your clientele’s) security.

The solution is a direct carrier connection, which removes the middleman and its associated costs, delays, and security risks.

Dynamically Integrated SMS

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SMS integration is an important piece of the interdepartmental puzzle. However, the market is flooded with watered-down options that don’t do what they say, add costs, and give little hope of expanding your capabilities in the long term.

TrueDialog has been at the forefront of advanced text-based integrations with industry-leading CRM platforms for a full decade. We also provide attentive support, where competitors leave you on your own to tighten the bolts of their patchy add-ons.

Start a free trial to experience the benefits of a true native Dynamics CRM SMS integration today, and boost your conversational dynamic today.