Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Convergence 2013 Day 1 - Dynamics CRM and Netbreeze

It has been a long and eventful day at Convergence 2013 so far. The customer stories were a nice way to kick things off, and Kirill Tatarinov, President of Microsoft Business Solutions Division, did a great job of moderating and keeping the flow going.

Specifically with Dynamics CRM, there were some nice demos around Marketing Pilot and the upcoming release which supports Yammer integration. In this post though, I would like to talk a little bit about what I felt was the most exciting news so far - the acquisition of Social analytics company Netbreeze.


Before we get into Netbreeze, let me talk about the current social capabilities within the Dynamics ecosystem. The details are from a whitepaper from Microsoft titled "The Connected Enterprise" that was published last year. In the whitepaper, the closest that anything exists to social analytics is the Analytics for Twitter application provided for free by Microsoft. The app allows users to query Tweets in Excel, and allows for PowerPivot charts and graphs to be created to analyze the data. If you thought that was room to improve, looks like Microsoft agreed with you :)

So now onto Netbreeze, and details of the demo that I saw today from the Dynamics team. The demo was based off the social activity around Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The screenshot below provides a quick overview of the popularity of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and how it relates to competing products like Salesforce. The data is also broken down by a "Share of Voice" criteria - In this case, it can be by language or by channel.























Additional capabilities in Netbreeze with Dynamics CRM:

  • Customized dashboard for users -can contain trend charts, volume of mentions, tag cloud, list of influencers etc
  • Trend chart which provides a chart of trend over months - broken down by channel sources.
  • Sentiment analysis (negative or positive)- includes sentiment terms that cause the negative or positive sentiment
  • Influencers and influence quotient (the impact of the influencer)
  • Ability to respond to social channels (like twitter) from within crm/ netbreeze.
  • Native language sentiment analysis

Conclusion:
This so far is the best news at Convergence 2013, in my opinion. What makes this even better is that the good folks at Microsoft would be providing access to this add on as part of the base Dynamics CRM product - yes, you read it right - there is no additional license to purchase!

While I cannot wait to try it out myself, I do hope that they close the loop with the various social channels - for example, enable case (or lead) creation from a twitter feed of facebook post.

Thanks for reading and have fun at Convergence!

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