Marketing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - ClickDimensions Blog

Creative application of a multi-page ClickDimensions survey

The customer team at ClickDimensions has a very tight process in place for bringing on new customers, training them and monitoring their satisfaction. Part of this process is a multi-page survey that is sent out after a new customer's training is complete. The survey takes advantage of our survey designer's ability to have custom formatting. Let's take a look…

The goal of the survey is to have a page for each phase of the onboarding process. The onboarding phases are Welcome, Install, Train and Succeed as depicted in the flow graphic below…

The survey uses different versions of this graphic on each page. For example, page 1 looks like this…

And page 2 looks like this and so on. Note how the graphic changes on each page to depict the onboarding phase related to that page…

This is implemented using the HTML and page break components in the ClickDimensions survey designer…

Page break components cause the survey to be divided into multiple pages while the HTML components can be used to simply upload and insert an image as shown below…

On each page there is an HTML component with a different version of the onboarding graphic. By the final page the survey respondent sees this…

Cool, eh? Happy marketing!

The ClickDimensions survey report

If you are a regular user of the ClickDimensions survey feature you may have noticed that we recently added a new survey report. When you open any Posted Survey record in Microsoft CRM you will see the survey report button on the Posted Survey record's ribbon menu…

Clicking the button runs the new survey report which gives you a bar graph of each questions responses as well as the response percentages and response counts…

Of course, since we store all our survey response data in your Microsoft CRM you can also use CRM's advanced find, charts and dashboards to report on the data as we did in this example blog post.

New features in the ClickDimensions block editor

We have just added several new features to our block editor. If you are not familiar with the block editor you may read more about it at http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2012/02/the-clickdimensions-block-editor-is-now-available-to-all-customers.html.

The new features are:

• New layouts for extended columns
• New block for view as an HTML page (top of the email)
• New block for unsubscribe link (bottom of the email)

Let's first look at the new layouts. When you click the layout button on the block editor screen you will notice two new layouts…

Using either of the new layouts you are able to create a single column to span the email body…

To the right or left of this column you can add as many individual blocks as you want to have even more layout flexibility.

Moving on to the view as a web page and unsubscribe block features, when you click the page menu option on the block editor you will see two new options; add microsite block and add unsubscribe block…

Clicking the 'add microsite block' option will add a new 'view as a web page' block at the top of the email…

Clicking the 'add unsubscribe block' option will add a new unsubscribe block at the bottom of the email…

Introducing the ClickDimensions custom HTML editor

For those of you that are more advanced with HTML and email design we have created a new custom HTML editor that allows you to place your own HTML into your email templates. This is useful for those of you that use an outside program like Dreamweaver or notepad to build your own HTML. This new editor will not modify the HTML you have created in any way.

Let's take a look. From the ClickDimensions email template entity you will see the new value 'simple' in the Editor Type field…

When you select this value and save the template you will see our new custom HTML editor appear…

You may open this editor in full screen mode using the full screen button on the email template record's ribbon menu. From here you can past in any HTML you have created and you can rest assured that it will not be altered in any way…

The buttons on the editor will allow you to insert the HTML for images, the 'view as a web page' link, and the unsubscribe link. You are also able to test how your email will appear in different email clients using the inbox preview feature. You may also use the preview tab to quickly see how your HTML will render…

Note that this new custom HTML editor is designed for more advanced email designers. The rest of us will be better off using the drop dead simple block editor or our traditional freestyle editor.

Congratulations, Gareth Tucker, First to Achieve "ClickDimensions Certified" Status

Congratulations to Gareth Tucker, the first CRM professional to achieve the status of ClickDimensions Certified!

Of the certification, Gareth says: “I was motivated to learn ClickDimensions after doing a little research on Email Marketing solutions for MSCRM for my blog. ClickDimensions stood out as the most integrated of the solutions and it's ease of use intrigued me. I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon learning the product and then capped that off with CD's web training. The certification is a nice addition to my CV.”

Gareth is an experienced CRM pro who has been selling, architecting and delivering enterprise Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions since 2005, and is the author of a widely-read CRM blog. He has been recognized by Microsoft with a Rising Star award, and his New Zealand team has earned three CRM Partner of the Year awards from Microsoft.

Want to become ClickDimensions Certified? Sign up for our regular web training and complete all three courses in order to qualify to take the ClickDimensions exam.

Is it Live, or is it Memorex? (or, "How fast is your CRM moving?")

Some of our younger readers may not get this reference, but for a certain generation of Americans, the picture to the left immediately calls to mind the catch phrase for Memorex, who in the 1980s manufactured audio cassette tapes that they promised would deliver live performance-like sound experiences.

The image was iconic, and came to mind recently when comparing the performance of CRM for several different users. Some of them were not exactly getting that “wind-blown hair” effect while seated in front of their workstations and navigating around CRM. Other users didn’t notice any slowdowns in performance, and were cruising along with their sunglasses pressed against their faces and their derrieres firmly in their leather and chrome chairs.

Fortunately, Microsoft released a little diagnostic tool late last year that may have slipped past your notice and which can help to quickly identify the cause of these different experiences: a browser diagnostic page that runs some speed tests from your browser to your CRM.

The page is accessible in your browser by adding ‘/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx’ after your CRM address. (It’s available in CRM Online and for CRM 2011 on-premise deployments with Update Rollup 4 or later).

Navigating to this page in your browser and clicking the “Run” button will collect some browser data and test out a few important things:

1. Latency: This is a measure of how long it takes data to travel from CRM to your browser. You could have the fastest internet connection in the world, directly connected to your CRM server by a fiber optic cable, but if your CRM server is in Newfoundland and you’re in Tierra del Fuego, you might experience slow performance due to the distance that data has to travel. If your CRM is on-premise, your latency might be very minimal, whereas, if you use CRM Online or your CRM server is in another office, your latency can be a factor depending on the distance between you and the CRM server.
2. Bandwidth: What type of speed are you really getting with your internet connection? (Maybe you need to have a few words with your ISP about that “ultra-fast broadband” they sold you?)
3. JavaScript benchmarks: This is a key factor if your CRM is heavily customized and uses lots of script on the forms. (Some ClickDimensions forms make use of javascript, so this is a measure that is of particular interest to us.) These JavaScript measurements tell you how fast your browser is able to interpret, transform, and execute JavaScript. There are a lot of factors that can impact your browser’s handling of JavaScript:
   - Which version is your browser? IE9 is quite a bit faster than IE8 in JavaScript rendering
   - What security settings are configured in the browser?
   - Do you have any security plugins like antivirus software that scan everything in your browser?
   - Do you have any third-party toolbars or browser “helpers”? (These often intercept all traffic to your browser before it is displayed and can be a big culprit in browser performance, not to mention data security).

Some of these measurements are easier to understand when you compare them with other people’s results. If you don’t have a colleague in Tierra del Fuego who can run this diagnostic at the same time as you, you might get a rough idea of how your browser performance for CRM compares by having a look at the screenshot above, as well as some of these links to others who have blogged about this diag tool:

• MSCRM Bing’d
• Dynamics CRM in the Field
• Webfortis
• Zero2Ten

Measure customer satisfaction with surveys and a survey KPI dashboard

At ClickDimensions we really care about the happiness of our customers. We care so much that we survey our customers regularly and expose the results of these surveys on a dashboard for all employees to see. We survey on three levels. Here they are from top to bottom:

• Overall satisfaction with ClickDimensions: We use the Net Promoter Score methodology to measure this by asking how likely a customer is to recommend us
• Satisfaction with our onboarding process: We survey customers after the onboarding process to get their fresh reactions to how they felt we did
• Satisfaction with individual support and training interactions: We send a survey at the completion of each case and training engagement

In each of our surveys we are asking the customer to rate us on various dimensions using a scale of 1 to 10. Because we are using the ClickDimensions survey tool all data is capture inside CRM entities so we can build views, charts and dashboards with it. Bringing all this information together we have built a dashboard that shows us overall customer satisfaction at a glance.

The data behind this survey is fed by several surveys. Below is our post-training onboarding survey where customers can tell us how we did in each phase of the on boarding process. Starting with the first page of the survey…

To the final page…

It is very helpful to look at our dashboard and see how we are doing in support, training, onboarding and overall satisfaction. The chart below in the dashboard shows that we're getting good reviews on the knowledge, responsiveness and timeliness of our Marketing Success Managers (trainers). Our dashboard has similar graphs for tech support, net promoter and overall satisfaction.

So, with Microsoft CRM and ClickDimensions, there is no reason to wonder what your customers think of you.

Creating a reusable email template with the block editor and clone feature

Since we released our block editor in January we have used it exclusively to create our monthly newsletter. Since our newsletter has common elements from month to month we're going to create a template we can use going forward to expedite the creation of the newsletter. We start by opening the latest newsletter template and using the clone button to make a copy of it…

Now, we'll rename the copy to indicate that it is a template…

Next we'll clear the content from the blocks that were specific to the newsletter we cloned. And, we'll leave the common elements like the header, footer, borders, colors and the subscription preferences section…

This leaves us with a skeleton template that we can start from for our next newsletter…

When we're ready to make our next newsletter we'll simply clone this template and then add content to the blank blocks. Of course, we'll be able to add new blocks or remove the blocks we have to change the structure…

That's it! We saved time and made sure our look and feel will be consistent from one mailing to the next. Happy marketing!

ClickDimensions welcomes Nick Waverek

Click Dimensions is excited to welcome Nick Waverek in the role of Partner Account Manager.

Nick joins us from SHI, an Enterprise IT Provider, and Microsoft FY11 LAR of the Year, where he was responsible for sales, marketing, and management of hardware brokerage and software licensing solutions, partner relationships, and client operations. Prior to SHI, Nick was a Dynamics CRM Consultant for a MSFT Gold Partner in Minneapolis where he specialized in marketing process planning and was an early adopter of the ClickDimensions solution. He also operated his own consultancy architecting and implementing a wide variety of online productivity and SAAS based sales/marketing technologies.

Nick is a graduate of the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas, with a B.A. in Public Relations and Marketing Communications. Nick is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist. He holds his MCP in Designing and Managing Volume Licensing Solutions for Large Enterprises, along with multiple accreditations within CRM, BPOS, Office365, Google Apps, and VMware.

After living in multiple locations including California, Hawaii, North Carolina, and 8 years in Japan, Nick and his wife are happy to be back with family in the Midwest and call Fargo, ND home. Outside of work, he enjoys hunting, fishing, biking, and his Labrador Retriever Sophia.

ClickDimensions welcomes Shantel Schumacher

ClickDimensions is pleased to welcome Shantel Schumacher in the role of Partner Account Manager. Shantel is based in Fargo, ND and has a Bachelor's of Science degree from North Dakota State University with a major in Mass Communications and a minor in Business Administration.

Shantel has been working with Microsoft for the past five years as a Partner Account Manager. She has extensive experience in the Commercial and Public Sector space with Microsoft Dynamics and Platform channel partners. She brings with her over 10 years of sales and management experience.