The Role of E-Commerce in Your Dynamics 365 CE Solution

MSDW recently hosted a new CRM Community Call to shed light on the latest thinking in Dynamics 365 CE solution success. This month’s event, sponsored by Aha Apps, posed the question: how do you position your eCommerce operation for growth by integrating with ERP and CRM? 

Satish Reddy from Aha Apps and Naveen Reddy from Dynamics eShop led the call and discussed the challenges Dynamics customers face in bridging the gap between eCommerce, D365 systems, and other business systems.

A lack of accurate and current information can blind sales and service teams, forcing them to waste time manually reentering data. The result is poor customer experience and frequent missed opportunities. Poor coordination between systems imposes burdens on other parts of an organization, from sales and service teams to IT. For instance, increased IT complexity means it takes much longer for analytical reports to generate.

“When systems are not integrated well, the salespeople have to turn to IT. IT has a lot more to do on their plate. But when you do have these systems talking to each other properly, it’s much easier to get the intelligence and the sales,” said Satish Reddy. “We work with companies that have ever changing needs because of new product lines. They need to enable sales people to sell differently. And such companies have a lot of requirements,” he added.

Naveen Reddy explained some examples of well-orchestrated Dynamics 365 capabilities in action with Dynamics eShop’s customers. In an example from the food industry, the company does truck-based selling and self-service. A salesperson puts in initial information about customer’s trucks into the CRM and then push that data to ERP. Real-time populating of data means that customers can only make certain purchases based on guidelines put in-place in Business Central. 

“[With this approach] salespeople are equipped to upsell or do more services for the customer. We are basically connecting everything together, from the initial contacting to getting the lead,” Satish said.