CRM describes the technologies and business processes focused on the points of contact between a company and its customers. CRM is designed to provide executives with a detailed view of their customers, with the goal of optimizing customer experience and enabling the business to build deeper and more-profitable customer relationships.
Companies and institutions of all sizes—including governments, universities, and nonprofit organizations—use CRM solutions to help them cut costs, improve services and maximize customer satisfaction. CRM solutions apply to a broad range of industries and vertical markets, including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, hospitality, and professional services such as legal, engineering, and accounting. Businesses worldwide have come to understand the value CRM technology has to offer, and they're looking to solution providers to help them gain competitive advantage from their CRM solutions.
Planet, in conjunction with Microsoft, designed and developed a solution that integrated MOSS 2007 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Planet and Microsoft deployed Microsoft CRM 3.0 and leveraged the out-of-the-box functionality to organize, store and track contact information, applications, productions, past communications, tasks, calendars and other business critical information. Next, CRM views were created in order to meet the various details that would be required to support an Executive Dashboard View. Planet developers then customized the CRM list web parts currently only available for SharePoint Server 2003 to allow them to function with MOSS 2007. These web parts, along with customized development, were leveraged in order to provide a dynamic, real-time Executive Dashboard.
A SharePoint Document Library was created for each customer and then linked to the Microsoft CRM system so that it can be launched directly from CRM 3.0.
Finally, a custom Business Data Catalog was created so that an integrated search of MOSS, Portals, Document Libraries, CRM data and CRM data that is not part of the of the box CRM Search (including tasks, email, calendar, contacts, notes etc) can be performed directly from the same search application.