Every business need to interact with their customers daily to fulfill their different requirements, whether it is for providing them sales, service support, or to inform them about a new product. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application plays a key role here. Microsoft CRM 2011 is a product that comes in this category. It is a product from the Microsoft Dynamics family, which is a collection of ERP and CRM applications developed by Microsoft. The Microsoft Dynamics family includes the following products:

Microsoft Dynamics AX, GP, NAV, and SL come in the ERP category and Microsoft CRM 2011 comes in the CRM category. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product is used to manage critical business processes. It includes different modules which help us to manage our different business requirements like finance and budget planning, project, human resources, IT, and supply chain management.

Microsoft CRM 2011 helps businesses to manage their daily activities related to sales, marketing, and service. It helps a business to retain its existing customers as well as to get new customers. Let's take an example of a bike service center. A service center can use Microsoft CRM 2011 to improve their service efficiency using different Microsoft CRM 2011 features. For example, they can use Microsoft CRM 2011 accounts to store their client information with bike service details. They can also create custom entities if required to store service details, and automate the process of service schedules. E-mail activity can be used to send reminders to clients once their service is due. The bike service center can also use the marketing module in Microsoft CRM 2011 to improve marketing process results, by automating their marketing campaign regarding bike service camps and capturing its response. In the same way, the service module in Microsoft CRM 2011 can be used by the service center to provide customer service support. The beauty of Microsoft CRM 2011 is to provide the customer with an interface that is already familiar to them. Everyone has had some experience of Microsoft software, and the interfaces used are standardized. It also provides out-of-box (OOB) integration with Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Its conceptual ribbon provides easy navigation to Microsoft CRM 2011 records and commands, which help end users to easily adopt this product after some basic training.

Microsoft CRM 2011 provides rich BI support. We can quickly create a dashboard to monitor our business performance and share it with other users easily. We can use different OOB reports to monitor our sales process. We can also create custom SSRS reports or FetchXML if required, to fill our complex reporting requirements. Custom SSRS reports can be deployed in Microsoft CRM 2011 on-premise deployment whereas FetchXML reports are supported by online as well as on-premises deployment.

Microsoft CRM 2011 is a highly customizable and extendable product. If you are a developer and have knowledge of .NET and JavaScript, you can easily extend Microsoft CRM's functionality. Microsoft CRM 2011 facilitates server-side-code plugins to implement complex business logic. We can also use Microsoft CRM 2011 as a platform to develop any business-specific application. It provides a set of features that are used by any traditional application, such as inbuilt security, workflow support to automate business processes, rich user interface, or the OOB report wizard to create rich BI reports. It also provides you with different personalization options to customize your workplace.