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Business Support

We appreciate that CRM is a strategy across a business that evolves and changes over time, and our support is built with this firmly in mind - we aim to understand both your systems and your business, such that we can provide proactive consultancy alongside core support.

Our support is different

All too often Support is seen as a second-tier by-product from a successful (or otherwise) CRM Project, and not a crucial part to help you build user adoption and benefit from the initial outlay on CRM - we aim to do this differently, and so we instead aim to make support and ongoing partnership one of the core elements of our CRM offering.

This allows you to raise new requirements that the business may need and our team will endeavour to advise and implement the most effective solution to help deliver benefit from your CRM Solution - aiming to work the way your business does, without reinventing the wheel in terms of expensive development costs.

This concept of support aims to make us a reliable partner to your business, both by a deep understanding of your business and its requirements and by offering the best advice, support and development services available.

Because your support is different too..

Just in the way that every business has different needs for CRM, every business also has different needs for the right level of support.

To provide this, we offer a bespoke Support Provision based on our knowledge of your business requirements - split between the following core tenants or 'pillars' of how we provide support

This allows us to determine how critical each pillar is to your business and build the model for how your support will work - whether this be as a trusted 2nd Line advisor to your internal IT Team, or a completely outsourced 1st Line Support.

Account Management
  • Training
  • Planning for the future
Service Desk
  • 1st Line
  • 2nd Line
  • Knowledgebase
Technical Account Management
  • Database Management
  • Back-up and Disaster Recovery
  • Service Release
Ongoing Change / Application Support
  • Ongoing change to CRM

The Healthcheck

As part of our support proposal, we will conduct a deep dive into your CRM Solution to produce a detailed specification of how the Dynamics CRM is working for you - we can use 'the bible' on your CRM and your business so we can support you effectively.

This bible forms the basis of our support, and incorporates the following deliverables:

  • Data Dictionary, the forms and fields within your CRM
  • Catalogue of Core Screens and Entity Relationships
  • Key Workflows and Business Logic Plugins
  • Custom Screens or Portal Developments
  • Infrastructure Guide
    • Documenting the key Servers, Databases, Websites and Storage Space available for your CRM Solution.

This document then allows our Support Team to be experts within your CRM Solution, and allows us to circulate the Key Information between New Projects or Suppliers interacting with CRM - and in the event that we don't meet our high standards, gives you the flexibility to take Support Provision to another supplier or in-house with a lower cost for Knowledge Transition.

Account Management

Within every relationship, the personal touch is important, and so we aim to provide regular face time to discuss how CRM is working within the business, and allow your team to meet our team.

To deliver this we will typically allocate time each week, fortnight or month to discuss CRM face to face as part of our Account Management. This can be aimed at future-planning, an onsite drop-in workshop or structured training to help get the best use out of CRM.

This also includes provision for scoping or specifying any new extensions you may be looking to develop to extend CRM or the wider business solution further.

This helps us to build the roadmap for where you want to take CRM, and provide a face-to-face surgery for new how-to queries or issues - which in turn allows us to provide a better service.

Governance

We understand that an Agile Platform such as Dynamics CRM can quickly become uncontrolled without proper governance - particularly within a complex solution where the system can touch upon a number of different areas for Core Business Logic, Portals, Documents and Reporting.

Our Support and Ongoing Change is aimed at providing regular change and management within a well-governed framework - categorising changes by business area and technical component, and ensuring strong clear communication to Team Members and Project Stakeholders.

As part of this governance, we will also ensure that the basics are rigorously adhered to in having a good Dev ↣ UAT ↣ Live structure in place for changes and new functionality.

Not just Servicedesk

We will maintain a library of Support Tickets in our online Support Portal where you can raise new support requests or view previous requests; we supplement this by hosting a Knowledge Base of articles documented by our Support Team for common problems or suggestions.

Some of the universal articles will cover the our experience with the core technical platforms around Dynamics CRM and the Outlook Client - whilst other articles will be based from your specific customisation and configuration of CRM, aiming to translate common problems into a Knowledgebase for your business, as an extension to the earlier bible by providing a bank of articles and fixes to common issues.

Alongside this bank of tickets and how-to articles, we maintain support for the common day to day aspects of User Management, Configuring Security and System Settings.

Our core business is Dynamics CRM, and as such our Service Desk and Portal is based on CRM to allow us to track activities and emails as we progress and resolve tickets.

The Nuts and Bolts

Behind every CRM system is a number of supporting technologies that can be kept up to date and finely tuned to improve the performance and reliability of your Dynamics CRM System.

As part of the maintenance aspect of our support, we will look at:

  • Ensuring Databases are finely tuned to prevent unlimited growth and poor performance
  • Service Packs and new version updates from Microsoft and other 3rd parties are scheduled and installed.
  • Maintaining overnight tasks or data integrations that help drive the business.
  • Ensure Regular Backup is taking place and is available should the worst happen

These actions, whilst unglamorous, are often overlooked but can be crucial to keep CRM running reliably and performing as quickly as the underlying infrastructure will allow.

Application Support - Managed Evolution

We appreciate that any good CRM Solution changes and evolves with the business that it supports - as such our Support Proposal is aimed at developing ongoing access to the best customisation and development resource to accommodate ongoing change and gain the best benefit from your initial investment.

Alongside this bank of tickets and how-to articles, we maintain support for the common day to day aspects of User Management, Configuring Security and System Settings.

This allows us to schedule regular development to keep pace with business change for a number of areas, seen below.

New Fields and Screens
Using business rules, calculated fields and roll-up fields where suitable to best unleash functionality in CRM
Bespoke report development
Amending and creating new SSRS reports to suit business requirements. Scheduling reports to be automatically delivered by Email.
Wokflow modifications or additions
Fine-tune workflows or launch new processes to help connect your teams or customers.
Plugin development for custom Business logic
Tweak, change, or add business logic to better fit the business.
Portal changes
Allow regular, small change to your portal to keep this current.
Integration mappings
Allow regular integration mappings to be adjusted when required.

The Roadmap

As final part of our proposal, our support and account management team will maintain a roadmap for CRM within your business, aimed at tracking business benefits against the original investment, identifying key deliverables, training and changes due for release.

This keeps CRM as an ongoing strategy across the business to keep a cycle of continuous improvement, both in the system itself but more importantly in measuring the success of the Change Management that CRM has been designed to help.

When it comes to managing CRM and ongoing Support, we really know how to get the very best from CRM, and how to turnaround prior failing deployments, so if this sounds like we could be of benefit to you then please do not hesitate to drop us a call or contact us now.

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  • "Paul has made a real difference to how my team of 24 people record and store valuable customer data and sales opportunities. Highly recommended."

    James, Operations Director

  • "Understanding your business allows us to advise when to implement aspects of CRM and, likewise, when not to."

    Paul McQuillan, Managing Director

  • "Dynamics 365 and CRMCS have made a real lasting difference to our business, allowing us to replace older systems that were holding back our performance."

    Grahame, Chief Operating Officer

  • "James worked well with us to help connect CRM with Outlook and relate how this might benefit our team using CRM for Property Care."

    Natalie, Property Care Supervisor

  • "Matt was really good with helping us run User Testing on the new Compliance Module of our CRM System."

    Tom, Compliance Administrator

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CRM Consultancy
61 Oxford Street
Manchester
M1 6EQ

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