May 10 Blog Review

Here is a summary of the most interesting happenings this week in the world of CRM.

CustomerEffective: Everybody has bad data – People interact with data so it is not perfect. It naturally is grouped into silos and separate systems. When we try to gather this together into one system it can be very daunting. Plan to work hard to get the data clean and plan the migration. Involve a service provider and/or a data cleansing tool to assist you. Make sure you have a strategy. Don’t forget this is an on-going effort and you should consider implementing a tool to help keep your data clean in the future.

CustomerEffective: Data Types available with CRM 2011 – a nice review of the available data types and what they mean.

Dynamics World Top 100 – The Dynamics World top 100 most influential people in the world of CRM were announced. I was not on the list even though I am ranked 80^th in the world on CRM Rock Star. Maybe next Year. See the blog section to see get the link to Chris Cognetta (#49) and Leon Tribe (#55).

Electronic Arts: Social Technology But a Less Social Attitude – EA was again voted Worst Company in America. Leon Tribe discusses the COO’s thoughts on this and how this shows a bad attitude towards social listening. They have implemented Salesforce but are not using it to listen and respond to their customers.

C5: Web Resources on a Dashboard – this describes in simple, non-developers terms how to create a web resource and put it in your dashboard. The situation they describe is interesting – use a Web Resource to include your directions. Great idea! Put the instructions they need directly in front of them!

C5: Option Set Best Practices – Be careful with your option set options especially if you are working with outside vendors. When a vendor sends a managed solution with an Option Set it will contain all the Options – so if you have modified the labels on those options, they will be changed back. So it is better to delete options you don’t need and add new ones. Or at least keep very good documentation on the Label-value combinations so you can correct them when necessary.

Pandas are Terrible Investments – Not related to CRM except that it is on a consultant’s site. Still humorous.

PowerObjects: Date of an Email – Sometimes it can be confusing to look at an Email in CRM because it will say created on say 5/10/2013. Does this mean that’s when it was sent/received? Or is that just when it was tracked? Answer is when it was tracked. Look at the Actual End field. This will be the date on the actual email.

PowerObjects is good for quick, helpful tips that you can use every day. Check out their 5 Tips for Daily Work in Dynamics CRM. They also had a good blog about Migration tips for the consultants among us.

Auditing Workflows – This is a bit older but a helpful tip; use Auditing on your workflows to see who Enables/Disables them. Good idea since this is not automatically tracked.

That’s all for today folks! Have a nice weekend!