Some (un)Intelligent design in Microsoft CRM…

It’s always a love-hate relationship with Microsoft to me.  I love the way it integrates with Outlook, Office, and the Microsoft stack of tools.  But here is a good example on their engineer’s not “getting it”.

This is a screenshot of me going into Microsoft CRM, and selecting to ”Set Regarding” an email.  First, the term “Set Regarding”.  What?  Couldn’t they use “Save to CRM” or something more intuitive for users?  I can’t begin to describe how hard that term is for us to explain to users during training.

But that’s not the worst part.  When I select the email, I hit ”Set Regarding”, and what do I see?  A complete list of Accounts, contacts, or Leads.  Shouldn’t it have automatically performed a “search” on the email addresses, found the best match, and simply limit the list to those found?  Instead I have to manually “Search” for my contact.  It could have been so much easier…  So silly…

 

We have done what we can to “automate” this type of behavior in core MS CRM.  For example, all of our customers get a script added that automatically prompts the user’s for the Regarding and Required Attendees when they create a new appointment.  This is an automated macro, and save the users plenty of time.  However, it is something that should have been in there as “default”.  Without an associated Regarding (in our case, the Regarding is always the Customer) and Contact, the data is useless to report on.

 

Although we can do this on the CRM form, the Outlook pop-up filter box does not allow us to customize it.  So, sadly, I will continue to have to first find customer “ABC”, then still run another query to find the contacts for customer “ABC”.

I found this nice one-pager of the anatomy of good landing page => Click to follow the link

Pretty interesting. I think it could apply to more than just a “landing” page.