Stay in the know - see your latest email interactions with customers

Sales is all about relationships and how you nurture those relationships with prospects, customers, vendors and partners. Sales people are great in converting such relationships to business opportunities. Of course, relationships are all about interactions, and the toughest part of relationship management is making sure such interactions are properly managed, tracked, recorded and converted to opportunities. Today, the majority of the sales force today is mobile and using different channels to interact with potential and existing customers,and that makes it even tougher.

To help bring email communication with potential and existing customers under control and extract as much business value as you can, Dynamics 365 for Financials and Exchange Online help you track email communication automatically. Apart from automatically logged emails, you can manually log phone calls and other types of communication with potential and existing customers using interactions.

There are two aspects of tracking email interactions your sales people are doing with potential and existing customers: Setting up email interaction logging, and using logged interactions.

Set up email interaction logging

Setting up email interaction logging is very simple. To get started just make sure you have:

-         your Exchange Online (or Office 365) administrator credentials ready

-         the email addresses of your sales people

In Financials, simply use the Set up Email Logging assisted setup guide that helps you get things set up.

The assisted setup guide is available in the Business Assistance page, which you will see when you have created your own company. Choose Customize settings to fit your needs, and then choose Set up Email Logging to get to the assisted setup for email logging.

The only thing the wizard needs in terms of required (let’s call it technical) information is the credentials of your Exchange Online administrator. Accepting the default values for the rest of the wizard’s steps will make sure email logging is properly set and working.

TIP: Email interaction logging is available in the Suite user experience. You can choose that for your company in the Company Information window. Check out this Help topic on how to do this.

Setting up email addresses on sales persons and contacts

To have Financials really focus on tracking interactions between sales people and potential and existing customers, we need 2 crucial pieces of information: the email addresses of your sales people and your contacts (potential or existing customers). This way e-mail interactions are captured that are of interest for relationship management of your business.

For more information, see Create and Manage Contacts.

Using tracked email interactions to stay in the know

As soon as you have completed the setup (both the technical and the easy part), you are all set to track email interactions and stay in the know. All you need to do to check interactions for a contact or a sales person, is to chose the contact/sales person in the relevant window, and then choose the Interactions action on the Navigate tab in the ribbon.

Any email exchange that happens between a contact and a sales person that have their email addresses defined in Financials will be logged in the list of interactions.

The Interaction Log Entries list shows all interactions that your company had with a potential or existing customer.

Simply choosing an interaction in the list and then choosing Create Opportunity will convert the interaction to an opportunity and start the opportunity management process by guiding you through a series of sales cycle stages to completion of the sale. If, on the other hand, you are interested in seeing the content of a logged email, simply choose Show Attachment.

For more on managing sales opportunities make sure to check this help topic in our documentation.