CRM 2015 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog

The next wave of updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is expected to arrive before the end of the 2014 calendar year. These updates will add enhancements to sales, marketing, and customer service functionality, and will also add features to facilitate marketing and sales team collaboration.

These are just a few of the highlights of what’s coming:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Create product families: Boost selling effectiveness with the ability to bundle products and recommend related products for cross-selling/up-selling opportunities.
Use sales hierarchies: Manage and report on your sales data in a way that maps to your business. New hierarchical visualizations and roll-ups bring real-time territory and forecasting data to your fingertips.
Mobile sales improvements: Increase field sales productivity with flexible, role tailored dashboards and analytics, personalized home pages and the ability to navigate by hierarchy. This version of the tablet app also includes improved support for disconnected scenarios.
Access CRM records on the go via voice commands: Cortana is now part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM! For customers with Windows Phone 8.1, you can now use conversational voice commands to seamlessly create follow-up appointments, tasks, and phone calls; quickly find information; view your customer lists; and more. Note: This feature will be available in English only in markets where Cortana is available. Read about Cortana voice commands for CRM in the topic Take a tour of CRM for phones.
Enhanced sales processes: Guide sellers toward desired outcomes with enhanced branching logic within your sales processes. Increase impact via automation of business processes and enforcement of business rules across all devices.
Expanded case management functionality: Enable agents to provide differentiated levels of support with flexible Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Gain insight into service effectiveness with the ability to track and analyze key metrics like SLAs and thresholds.
Microsoft Social Listening availability: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers with a minimum of 10 Professional users automatically have access to Social Listening as part of their subscription at no additional charge. Customers who have an Enterprise subscription also have access to Social Listening but with no minimum user requirement. You can add Microsoft Social Listening subscriptions from the Office 365 Administrative Portal.
Microsoft Social Listening for on-premises CRM customers: With this coming release, you can now access Social Listening directly from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 – even as an on-premises customer – and may also be eligible for a discounted rate. Contact your Microsoft Dynamics partner for more information.
Improvements in CRM for Outlook: Set up CRM for Outlook quickly and easily with the completely redesigned Configuration Wizard. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 for Outlook, users can sync assigned tasks and appointment attachments. Admins can control synchronization between pairs of fields, which provides confidence about where data is coming from and how it’s shared. For more information, see Set up CRM for Outlook.
Customizable help: Personalize the user assistance by tailoring the in-product Help content to match the specifics of your Dynamics CRM implementation. You can modify what displays under the Help question-mark icon at either an entity-specific or organization-wide level. Please read Customize the Help experience.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

Sales and marketing collaboration: Strengthen your marketing and sales synergies with the new Sales Collaboration Panel, which allows sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting.
Manage multi-channel campaigns: Streamline campaign creation and improve segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B and split testing, integrated offers, and approval workflows.
Improve B2B marketing: Deepen your lead management capabilities with webinar integration and improved lead scoring, including the ability to introduce multiple lead scoring models.
Enhanced marketing resource management: Gain unprecedented visibility into your marketing plan with the new Interactive Marketing Calendar and improve collaborative marketing with Lync click-to-call and webinars.
Gain social insights within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing: Display social information collected with Microsoft Social Listening about your brand, campaigns, and more, all within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.
Additional language & geographic availability: Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is now available in Japanese and Russian, bringing the total to 12 languages and 37 countries currently supported. Find more information in the Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Translation Guide.