The Online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes a pretty nifty tool called Internet Lead Capture. This feature is really handy for companies who get lead emails from their website contact page. Below is a typical email from a website submission form:

From: administrator
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 5:49 PM
To: website_leads@yourcompany.com
Subject: New website lead

First Name:             Paul
Last Name:             Velgos
Company:               Hitachi
Business Phone:     (219) 561-7180
Email:                    pvelgos @ hitachiconsulting.com
Description:           Hi, I love Microsoft CRM

Whoever handles these frequently uses a manual process to manage them. Maybe they forward the email leads to other employees and hope the person does something with them. Or if they do track the leads they might copy and paste each line into a spreadsheet. For companies getting more than a handful of emails a day this gets to be a time consuming process and leads can fall through the cracks.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a method of automatically capturing the lead data from your website and also be able to easily track communication history and progress?  This is exactly what Internet Lead Capture does. No more copy and paste!

Internet Lead Capture is a wizard-based tool that enables you to create a website contact form, called a Landing Page, and add fields from CRM Online such as Name, Email, and Phone. When someone fills out and submits the form the information they enter gets converted into a Lead record within CRM Online and the data is automatically copied to the appropriate fields. Pretty slick.  Here’s how it works.

Selecting the Internet Lead Capture option loads the Get Started screen. In this area you can create new landing pages and view your leads. To create a new form click Create a new landing page.

This opens the Landing Pages window where you can create a lead capture page or a lead capture form. What’s the difference?

The lead capture page is hosted by Microsoft, offers a handful of color options and themes, and can be created by someone with zero technical knowledge.

The lead capture form gives you HTML code you can use to add the form to your existing website. This allows you to keep your website layout and appearance so the form looks totally seamless. 

In this example I’ll create a lead capture page by clicking the Create Page icon.

This opens the Create New Landing Page window. Here you can pick a name for your website address, page layout, and theme.

Clicking Next opens the Edit Lead Capture Page window. Here you can enter details about your company and also choose the fields you want to appear on the form. You can select from most fields that exist in the Leads entity. The default is Company Name and Last Name. I added First Name, Email, Business Phone, and Description. You can also choose which fields to make mandatory.  I chopped off some of the form because it’s a bit long but there are more options to add your company logo and privacy statement.

Then comes the Review and Confirm page that lets you see the final result and also go back to make any changes if needed. Clicking Finish brings up a page (not shown) that provides a summary and also the website address of your contact page.

When you enter the website address in your browser it displays your submission form. I filled out the form and submitted it.

When you go back to the Internet Lead Capture Get Started page there’s a link to View all leads. Here you can review the Leads and decide who to assign them to.

Once assigned they show up in the main Leads area of CRM Online. Here’s the Lead I submitted. Notice that the form data is copied to the correct fields. From here you can manage this Lead, store communication history, and determine if they’re a fit to do business with.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes a lot of tools to automate processes. This is just another small feature that can add up to some serious productivity gains.

A new demo is available for the eService Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This demo is for the Online version but functionally it should be similar to the On-Premise version.

The first few minutes cover some technical stuff but the middle section of it does a pretty good job of showing the functional process flow. Toward the end it goes back into technical configuration.

http://www.democrmonline.com/eServiceOnline/

The eService Accelerator is pretty slick. Much like the Event Management Accelerator I did a walkthrough of recently, this is another great example of the potential of CRM as an xRM platform from which to optimize your business. The concept of xRM (Anything Relationship Management) looks beyond CRM as contact management software or a sales force automation database. Again, CRM can be used for those purposes but that’s like buying one of those huge RVs to drive around the block. Get out and explore!

Think more about all of the different types of people your business and its employees interact with and the processes that are used for those interactions. Could those processes be improved? How would your customers feel about your business if you offered them the option of submitting their own service cases online instead of calling? How would providing self-service capabilities affect your costs? Yes, CRM is software but success comes with the convergence of the software with your business.

Microsoft recently released a CRM demo or healthcare titled Patient Relationship Management. It’s a nice short five minute online demo that walks through a Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation that has been tailored for healthcare organizations.

• Demo: Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Patient Relationship Management (Requires Microsoft Silverlight)
• Information: Healthcare CRM Whitepapers and Datasheets

 Patient Relationship Management, or PRM, is a nice approach. CRM has been somewhat pigeonholed because of the CRM acronym’s “Customer” emphasis. Microsoft is now positioning “xRM” where the “x” is a variable that could represent just about any type of relationship such as patients, physicians, suppliers, vendors, etc. As CRM is being utilized increasingly as an end-to-end business productivity platform and not just a sales force database, companies employing the xRM concept will realize greater value from their investments.