Written by Rob Young, Group Managing Director – 22nd December 2016
Are you an Office 365 Business Premium customer looking to grow your business? If so, did you know about this new tool…
What is Outlook Customer Manager?
Outlook Customer Manager – the cloud based solution designed especially for SMEs, and is now included with no additional cost within Office 365 Business Premium plans.
Getting repeat business starts with knowing your customer base well, remembering the conversations you’ve had, and offering the perfect solution to solve their business problems. Managing your customers can become challenging when you have several as well as a tight schedule to manage.
Microsoft recognises this as a common problem for many businesses, and has introduced a new Office 365 product feature called Outlook Customer Manager. This useful tool is available to Office 365 Business Premium subscribers only and makes it easier for you to track and grow your existing customer relationships.
What are the advantages of Outlook Customer Manager?
This tool gives you a complete view of each customer interaction, helps you track tasks and deals in progress, and helps automate timely reminders. You can stay on top of customer relationships right from Outlook, without the need to install anything else.
Using Outlook Customer Manager as a personal project manager
Trying to keep up with all the information and tasks from emails, meeting invites, call logs, Excel sheets, handwritten notes and other team members – often gets in the way of more important work. That’s why Outlook Customer Manager automatically organises customer information such as emails, meetings, calls, notes, files, tasks, deals and deadlines in an easy to understand timeline alongside your inbox. With all your customer information gathered in one place, you can spend less time entering data, or searching for it in various places, and more time with customers.
Automated prioritisation
Outlook Customer Manager lets you associate tasks with a contact, company or deal, and lists deals by stage, close dates, priority and amount. The system automatically presents a Focused list of your most important customers and deals.
Collaboration potential
When several colleagues talk to the same customer, it can become complicated to keep track of the communication trail. With Outlook Customer Manager, you can choose to share customer information with your team so everyone is accurately informed of developments at the same time.
Can you access Customer Manager all on the go?
Outlook Customer Manager has a mobile app (currently available on iOS only) that gives you quick access to the same customer information you’ll see at your desktop.
Getting started with Outlook Customer Manager
As of November 2016, Outlook Customer Manager is now being rolled out to Office 365 Business Premium customers, starting with those opted into First Release and continuing worldwide in the coming months. Once it has rolled out to your Office 365 account, you will see an icon for it (shown at the top of this blog) in the home tab in Outlook 2016 to get you started.
The next steps to a business CRM solution
As your business needs continue to grow, you may consider moving from Outlook Customer Manager to Dynamics 365 the complete business management platform. Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers enhanced customer information and deeper financial and customer insights.
To speak to us about your current Office 365 subscription, to upgrade to Office 365 Business Premium or to arrange a live demonstration of Microsoft Dynamics 365 please get in touch.
