Microsoft Dynamics CRM Review: Is MS Dynamics 365 Any Good?

It’s the review we’ve all been waiting for: the Microsoft Dynamics CRM review. Now, it would require an encyclopedic piece to cover all the modules and tools for the entirety of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In this review, we’ll look at the modules most closely related to customer relationship management, or CRM, and these include marketing, sales and customer service, among others. But let’s not forget that one of the main selling points of Dynamics CRM is that it works wonderfully alongside Dynamics ERP. 

So to get to the bottom of the question of how good is Dynamics CRM, and is it right for me, we’re going to quickly run through some key areas of this debate. We’ll talk about the pricing plans, and go over the main uses of Dynamics.

Then, we’ll lay out a mega feature list and give a brief description of each tool. Afterwards, we’ll discuss some pros and cons of MS 365 CRM, and also go over what the online Dynamics reviews are saying. Finally, we’ll give some details as to Microsoft’s customer service for Dynamics 365 users.

Enough of all this introductory small talk, right? Let’s get down to the real conversation: What is MS Dynamics, and how good is it?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM review 2022: Is Microsoft Dynamics 365 any good?

According to this Microsoft Dynamics review, the consensus among user reviews and other review sources is that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM software is a good platform for running much of your business processes. Review sources often praise its large suite of apps, its powerful AI-driven insights, and its customizability. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has already featured in our best CRM software article, among other great CRM solutions like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Freshsales. In other articles, it’s been commonly said that Salesforce is one of the most similar business SaaS products to MS Dynamics. 

A lot of people who use Microsoft Dynamics CRM do so because they are familiar with other popular Microsoft products, like Outlook for email, Microsoft Office Word for documents and Microsoft Office Excel for spreadsheets, and even Windows. But this does not exclude people who have always preferred to do email with Gmail or work on Google Workspace.

As a CRM software, some startups and other small businesses on a budget might find it more expedient to go with a free customer relationship management system.

Unfortunately, there are few to no free CRM tools with Microsoft, and the same thing goes with the more specific Dynamics 365 modules, like sales, marketing, customer service or project management, all of which we will write about below when describing the various features.

Other sectors of a company’s structure that Dynamics offers modules for include HR, finance, supply chain management and commerce tools. Perhaps a future article will explain those in more detail as well.

Microsoft Dynamics pricing plans

First of all, how much does Microsoft Dynamics cost? Let’s first review some Microsoft Dynamics 365 prices:

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A bit of clarification regarding pricing, because who out there hates it when you can’t figure out exactly how much you want to pay or will get charged? When you subscribe to one of MS Dynamics 365’s apps, you get an initial subscription fee for that app, and often a reduced subscription fee for every subsequent qualifying Dynamics 365 app. The per user amount also applies to whether it’s the first or subsequent app. The Sales Premium package is just one cost likely because it contains the subsequent qualifying apps. For extra clarity, you can check out the Dynamics 365 licensing guide from the pricing page.

How much is Microsoft Dynamics for nonprofits?

Yes, indeed there is a special price for nonprofits and other charitable organizations that want to use Microsoft Dynamics 365. It is free for up to 5 users on the Dynamics Sales Enterprise platform. On top of that, if you still need additional seats, you get a discounted price of $23.80, which is down from $95 on the first app. 

Not only this, but some of the tools and features are useful to help with the nonprofit industry-related tasks. For example, it helps organize your affairs with donors, volunteers, government agencies and beneficiaries. There is also a rather new solution designed specifically for these organizations called Microsoft Fundraising and Engagement, which of course reminds us of the necessary overlap in skills between fundraising and sales.

In order to qualify, you must submit a form to Microsoft and give details about your organization and all of your partners and partnering organizations.

Are there any Microsoft Dynamics coupon codes or promo discount vouchers?

It seems that there are no readily available coupon codes for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. There are also no promotional vouchers or other kinds of discounts, aside from the one for nonprofits discussed above. At times, one can find coupon codes for certain CRM software through third party sites, but one should always be diligent and do their homework directly with the vendor to make sure they are valid.

Microsoft Dynamics overview: What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 & what is Microsoft Dynamics 365 used for?

To get into the nitty gritty about the question: what is MS Dynamics, let’s turn to their main modules we’ll be covering. These are customer insights, sales, marketing, customer service, and project management. 

Dynamics customer insights is used for your basic CRM functionality, that is, organizing your contacts, expanding your network, and preparing audiences that will be used by the marketing department.

Dynamics for marketing helps you design great campaigns for email and other channels, test campaigns, and gather leads for sales.

Dynamics sales is all about helping your sales team do pipeline management and notify them when a deal is at risk. Dynamics customer service is used for a variety of self-help and support rep purposes.

Dynamics project management brings things like supplies, labor, contracts, scheduling and deliverables into the bigger picture.

So what is CRM like MS Dynamics used for? Practically everything in running a business, reaching an audience, closing those deals and keeping a high level of customer satisfaction. Because in the end, it’s all about the customer experience.

Microsoft Dynamics free vs paid: what’s the difference?

There is no free version of Microsoft Dynamics 365. However, there are free trials you can do of MS 365. For example, you can try out Dynamics Sales, Service, Marketing and more for free for 30 days. 

Microsoft Dynamics modules & features list

The main features of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform are:

• Unified customer data

• Enriched profiles and sentiment analysis

• Advanced AI customer insights

• Customizable AI customer insights

• Multiple device and channel marketing

• Customer journey workflows

• Audience targeting

• Event and webinar planning

• AI content creator

• A/B testing

• Preferred communication channels

• Deal risk notification

• Sales relationship analytics and recommendations

• Pipeline management

• Sales coaching

• Self service options

• Ticket routing

• Cross team collaboration

• Real time support sentiment analysis

• Agent knowledge gap analysis

• Field Service management

• Pricing and costing 

• Standardized project templates

• Project management dashboards 

• Time tracking and expense estimation

• Service centric ERP

• Small business solutions

• Microsoft Power BI

• Dynamics 365 mobile app

• Integrations and API

1. Unified customer data

Let us begin with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. All customer relationship management apps are based on having rich customer profiles with data that includes demographics, engagement and communication histories as well info on what time of day and which kind of device they use to get in touch. With Dynamics you get a single unified dashboard of your customer, and it will synthesize and de-duplicate contact data. In other words, this ain’t your MS Excel spreadsheet.

2. Enriched profiles and sentiment analysis

Microsoft leverages artificial intelligence to make sure your CRM data is even richer than what’s superficially out there. This includes scanning third party resources to identify special interests, as well as advanced sentiment analysis to know how your customers are feeling about your offers.

3. Advanced AI customer insights

Dynamics 365 has some of the top AI-driven customer insight functionalities as a CRM solution. Out-of-the-box AI works right away to analyze customer churn, give you recommendations on the best next step to engage contacts, and analyze the total customer lifetime value. Self-service AI gives you more flexibility to do customer segmentation, as well as for doing data mapping and resolutions. 

4. Customizable AI customer insights

Microsoft gives you the power to customize its AI system. You can use this app to set up bespoke machine learning models for highly specific insights. It can also be set up with automation to do continuous profile augmentation and dig for even deeper customer revelations with the Microsoft product called Azure based on your tailored business needs.

5. Multiple device and channel marketing

Now we move on to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. Marketing needs to reach people on whichever device or system they prefer to get their brand content from. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 marketing modules, you can engage them with their preferred channel, whether this be email, mobile, web, in-person, social media or more. This also helps streamline work between the marketing department and sales or customer service too. 

6. Customer journey workflows

After you’ve mastered omnichannel communication, you can then use Dynamics marketing features to design custom customer journey workflows with marketing automation. Customer interactions can trigger events that will automatically notify the right rep as well as move the customer deeper into their journey toward sales. Triggers are built into the system and you can create new ones according to your journeys.

7. Audience targeting

Designing custom end-to-end journeys works even better once you’ve made use of Microsoft’s AI-powered audience segmenting and targeting to make sure every journey begins with the most relevant forms of engagement. This can be based on demographic metrics or behaviors. And using natural language, you can set up segments to make sure your target audience is as precise as you want. 

8. Event and webinar planning

Marketing SaaS isn’t only about outbound messaging but with Microsoft Dynamics you can organize webinars and other events to attract potential leads to your company or brand. You can use this CRM platform to improve the customer experience while nurturing contacts into becoming attendees, as well as capture more data on new contacts engaging with your event or webinar content.

9. AI content creator

With Microsoft, you don’t need to build every email marketing campaign from scratch. Aside from email templates which are a great resource to get you started, you can use their user-friendly AI to suggest content ideas for your emails, like images, offers and other dynamic content. It’s like having a smart robot editor helping you perfect your audio, visual and textual messaging.

10. A/B testing

You can’t expect to design the perfect bit of marketing content all at once. With the Microsoft CRM system there are tools to test out various ideas, most popular among them is the classic A/B testing feature, always popular for its ease of use. Here, you can try out variations of the same content on controlled groups to see which gets better responses, then run with it. What’s more, the respondents to your A/B test will also get more personalized activity based on their initial engagement with these tests.

11. Preferred communication channels

Here we enter into the realm of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft offers salespeople what they refer to as hybrid selling, meaning that like marketing, it connects sales teams with contacts over various communication channels and unifies these engagements into a single user interface. This gives salespeople intimate contact with leads at every sharepoint in the sales pipeline.

12. Deal risk notification

Automated notifications are extremely important when it comes to lead management in any CRM solution, and Microsoft Dynamics does not disappoint in this regard. Perhaps the most crucial kind of notification for salespeople is when a deal is at risk of stalling or failing. Sales reps get an automatic notification, along with suggestions for the next best step to avoid the risk of losing that deal.

13. Sales relationship analytics and recommendations

The sales process gets a major boost with MS Dynamics thanks to a series of recommendation tools which work across many touch points in the sales journey. Chief among those are automated suggestions on ways to improve the relationship a sales rep has with its accounts. It’ll analyze the health of your relationship, point to any that are poor or need attention, and offer high-level recommendations to improve them. 

14. Pipeline management

Once the initial sales and marketing engagement efforts have paid off, it’s time to pay special attention to what’s going down in the sales pipeline. Dynamics 365 Sales gets you full sales pipeline visibility of all deals at a glance as well as individual deals in progress. It will highlight weaknesses, strengths and do fluctuation forecasting. Out-of-the-box reports further cut down on time analyzing your deals and pipeline activity.

15. Sales coaching

This is one feature that sets Microsoft apart from many other CRMs and business applications: sales coaching. Salespeople can get real-time tips from coach sellers on things like customer sentiment management or how to be competitive in the market against similar products. Coaching is also useful for onboarding new sales reps, making the learning curve less steep. This set of features works inside the Microsoft ecosystem with applications like Microsoft Teams.

16. Self service options

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service module is next on our review of features. Firstly, it enables customer support departments to set up a variety of useful self service features. These include AI-driven virtual agents which can field easier questions, a user-friendly knowledge base which users can navigate on their own with natural language, and a community portal where users can ask questions and share tips among each other.

17. Ticket routing

Ticket and issue resolution works best when the user is automatically connected to the support rep best able to serve them, whether because the rep has expertise with an issue, or if that rep has a history dealing with that customer. Simple AI rules help to classify and assign customers to reps. Communication then occurs over omnichannel dashboards which bring together chat, text, voice, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DM and even WeChat.

18. Cross team collaboration

Customer support functions best when service agents can collaborate and help each other. With Dynamics CRM for support working in tandem with Microsoft Teams, this business process is made much more efficient. AI also chimes in with suggestions. Then there is good knowledge sharing from various data sources to see where similar resolutions work on different issues. The Microsoft AI can also highlight support issue trends to let reps get ahead of issues before they balloon.

19. Real time support sentiment analysis

Like with Dynamics marketing and sales, having an insider’s peek into how customers are feeling is crucial for delivering top customer support. The built-in AI tool analyzes customer sentiment in real-time and translates that into actionable tips for reps to use to keep people calm and happy when getting their problems fixed.

20. Agent knowledge gap analysis

With Dynamics for support, you get an AI tool that is constantly watching over your reps to see what help topics they are often searching for. This is a great way to identify if any rep is missing out on some key support knowledge or if they could use a refresher. From there, reps can get a handle on their areas of expertise and where they might improve their skills and knowledge.

21. Field Service management

Field service refers to the sales or support process that involves reps going out into the field to meet their customers on-premise in real life. Microsoft Dynamics Field Service helps with things like scheduling and route planning. It also gives users access to self-scheduling portals to pick ideal days and time slots for getting that service expert’s visit. Field technicians can get real-time, in-context aid and leverage remote collaboration tools. There are many more field service features here too.

22. Pricing and costing 

All your project management needs are taken care of in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations set of tools. Firstly, it helps project managers organize things like pricing and costing, even when such figures must be applicable in different geographical locations with different currencies. 

23. Standardized project templates

You can use project management tools to calculate estimates for projects at the highest level, and from there, take those estimates and plug them into ready-made templates for further automated organization. This includes breaking down your estimates, scheduling issues as well as calculating monetary values of your quotes.

24. Project management dashboards 

Integrating a project management tool with Dynamics for sales means that all project information is put onto a unified dashboard for managers. It combines sales pipeline info with details regarding supplies and deliverables. Microsoft Project also breaks down task management and scheduling while project service automation streamlines repetitive actions. 

25. Time tracking and expense estimation

AI is always on hand with recommendations and forecasting and here is no exception. This tool lets you develop reasonable and highly accurate estimates for things like task time tracking, labor needs, material purchasing and other common expenses. It also updates in real-time a comparison between planned activities and actual time spent on tasks and material usage.

26. Service centric ERP

ERP stands for enterprise resource planning and Microsoft Dynamics lets users work with the MS ERP or an external ERP system for a more holistic kind of project management. This brings into the fold other tools like accounts payable, receivable and general ledger functions, along with resource planning and supply chain management.

27. Small business solutions

While most or all of the above features are great for businesses of any size, from startups to enterprise, Microsoft Dynamics also includes a module specially tailored to the small business. Small businesses can deploy this platform from the cloud or on-premise. These tools are extremely customizable. Finally, they are perfectly suited for any device including mobile.

28. Microsoft Power BI

Power BI is not necessarily a part of Dynamics 365 but it ought to be mentioned here as Microsoft’s premier business intelligence tool. It is an advanced real-time data analysis system to provide your company with deep and invaluable insights which could apply to marketing, sales, or service. Power BI is highly visual and easy for anyone to use to set up reports and presentations.

29. Dynamics 365 mobile app

Microsoft Dynamics has mobile apps for iOS and Android. There are separate mobile apps for sales and other Dynamics modules. With sales, for example, you can join meetings, add notes, organize your scheduling and calendar, and get notifications. Other Microsoft Dynamics mobile apps include for field service, remote assistance, project timesheets, and more. 

30. Integrations and API

As is common these days, Microsoft provides its REST API for several of Dynamics 365 applications. To use these, you get reference docs on both Web API and online management API. When it comes to integrations, obviously the system works first and foremost integrating with other Microsoft business applications like Microsoft Office and Outlook. With third party integrators, you can integrate MS 365 with a variety of other apps, like Gmail, Zoho, HubSpot and Salesforce. You can also set it up with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Microsoft Dynamics pros and cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft Dynamics:

Microsoft Dynamics advantages

The benefits of Microsoft Dynamics are plenty. Firstly, when you combine all the modules, there is hardly a single tool or feature you can think of that is lacking.

Another pro to Dynamics 365 is the amazing power of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence. This applies to all sorts of functionalities, which includes its content creator for marketing campaigns, its smart contact enrichment, its suggestions for salespeople to nudge leads down the funnel and more.

Microsoft 365 has the advantage of its streamlined integrations with other Microsoft products like Office and Outlook. What’s more, this is an ideal platform if you need the combined power of CRM and ERP in one unified experience.

Microsoft Dynamics disadvantages

One of the drawbacks of Microsoft Dynamics is perhaps the fact that there are so many separate modules for things like sales, service and marketing, which means you might have to buy several subscriptions if you want a robust collection of features. This of course can stack up the costs.

Another con of Dynamics is that it can be a bit complicated to learn all the ins and outs of every tool to make sure you are leveraging their powers to the max. Other CRMs like HubSpot and Zoho are popular because of how simple their learning curves can be. Microsoft, since it is a serious professional system, requires some serious and patient onboarding time.

Microsoft Dynamics complaints & praise (from real Microsoft Dynamics customer reviews)

To be sure, Microsoft Dynamics reviews can range quite drastically from the celebratory to somewhat less than pleased. 

For example, any glowing Microsoft Dynamics 365 review will include praise for the sheer range of functionalities and possibilities that you get once you’ve fully applied the platform. This system, whether as a CRM, sales platform or anything else, is not going to let down any business that is ready to do the work when it comes to expanding their audiences and winning more customers with longer lifetime values.

A sampling of the less favorable online review sources of Dynamics can include comments regarding the time it takes and difficulty setting up the customizations. Some users have complained about syncing issues. Another common negative refrain is the complexity of some of the more advanced tools. 

If you think that this tool won’t meet your needs, don’t rush your decision and explore alternatives, such as QuickBooks. Make sure to read our QuickBooks vs Microsoft Dynamics 365 comparison and make a well-informed choice.

Review of Microsoft Dynamics support

Another thing to note is that online reviews of Microsoft Dynamics support are not one hundred percent amazing. If you need help with their sales department you’ll have to contact them by filling out a webform.

For subscribers, there are various levels of support offered for each subscription. Included in all plans are things like community forums, web and phone incident submissions, and self help portals, with 24/7 support for what they call severity cases.

You can also buy professional direct support for $11.50 per user per month with a minimum monthly fee of $180. This gets you faster response times and escalation management for business-critical incidents.

Is Microsoft Dynamics worth it? Our conclusion

So, is Microsoft Dynamics CRM worth it? The answer is yes if you have the budget to get all the modules or packages that you need and if you and your team have the time and resources to seriously learn all the tools and master their potential. MS Dynamics 365 is worth it for large companies, particularly ones with remote sales and service teams who do field work. 

You may have seen our Microsoft Dynamics vs Salesforce review, which, as mentioned above, is quite useful to parse out the differences between these two similar CRM systems. And it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with a list of the best Microsoft Dynamics alternatives, which also includes Salesforce and other popular platforms like HubSpot and Zoho. You might also be interested in Microsoft Dynamics CRM certification.

Our final Microsoft Dynamics CRM Conclusion

This is the end of our Microsoft Dynamics 365 review. We hope you found it informative and entertaining, and most importantly, useful in making the decision of whether Microsoft Dynamics is right for your business.