Getting Rid of the Flow Forms in Online

As you probably know there are a bunch of features in CRM Online at the moment which have not yet made it to CRM 2011 (On Premise). Some of these I am very keen to see (such as Bing map integration and Yammer integration) while others I am happy to leave in the cloud.

One of the features in the second camp are the Flow forms for COLA entities (Contacts, Opportunities, Leads and Accounts). If you have not yet played with a 30 day trial of CRM online, this is what it looks like:

We now have three columns, the ribbon is gone, as is the navigation on the left and jscript. As a glimpse of the future, it is great. As a tool for my CRM workshops, it is troublesome, especially if those workshops are for a system which is going to be on-premise. In terms of its limitations, it reminds me a little of the Absolutely Fabulous remodelled kitchen by Bettina and Max in “White Box” (‘We will bring back the stairs with Orion’).

Using a CRM Trial in the Workshops

For CRM workshops, I find a CRM demo trial invaluable. Often, many of the people telling me about how their business works have not seen CRM before or, at least, are unsure of the finer details of how it works. Having a configurable demo system during these conversations gives the future users a sense of what the system is capable of (and not capable of) and provides a palette to mix their ideas with the configuration tools available.

When you have nervous executives in a room whose reputation, career and business depend on the system being able to perform a process as least as well as their current systems, the trial system gives a level of comfort difficult to achieve without it.

Unfortunately, an online form with a completely different look, feel and functionality to its on-premise contemporary hinders these goals. So how do we go from the above form to our, more familiar, ‘classic’ form?

Form Security

Our best friend in this case is form security, which I have talked a little bit about in the past. CRM (both online and on-premise) allows you to create multiple forms and to specify which roles can access these forms.

Suddenly the issue of the new form becomes simple to solve; we simply deny access to it to all roles. To do this we need to go to Settings-Customizations (or Solutions if the configuration is part of a Solution) – Customize the System – Entities - <Entity of Choice> (in our case, the Account entity). Once here, we can expand the drop-down to reveal Forms (which is where we want to go).

You should see three forms (I have Parrot above, which is an excellent add-on, but not part of the standard CRM suite). These forms are:

• Information – Main: The ‘classic’ form
• Account – Main: The new form (unless someone has access to more than one form, in which case it changes to a 3-column ‘classic’ form)
• Information – Mobile: The configuration page for the Mobile Express form

In our case we want to remove the ‘Account’ form from being accessed by anyone. To do this we select the Account form and click ‘Assign Security Roles’. We then remove any access to this form for any role and remove it as a fallback.

The fallback is available so that if a user cannot access any form, there is at least one form they can use (the fallback option).

We then also make sure users have access to the form we want them to use. In our case, this is the Information – Main form.

Once we save and publish, we find our world has changed and the Bauhaus forms are gone and the more playful ‘George Nelson’ forms return (who would have thought I would learn about modern art while researching a blog post).

Conclusions

If, like me, you are not quite ready for the ‘modern’ style of the flow forms, you now have a way of turning them off. This is especially useful for workshops and demonstrations where the client will be using an on-premise installation with the ‘classic’ forms. Be warned though, when Orion is released, you can expect to see a lot more of the flow forms so do not think of this as a permanent form fix but more a stay of execution until On-Premise and Online are aligned.

I Made #55 in the Dynamics World Most Influential People in Dynamics Poll

http://www.dynamicsworld.co.uk/top-100/

Thanks for voting everyone :)

Electronic Arts: Social Technology But A Less Social Attitude

In case you missed it last month, The Consumerist, a consumer affairs blog, released their “Worst Company in America” poll. The same company won it last year as well. What was surprising was the company was not one of the usual suspects e.g. pharmaceutical, financial organisations or oil companies but a computer game company, specifically, Electronic Arts (EA).

The poll was online and, clearly, many of EA’s consumers occupy the same space so perhaps this explains why EA ranked so highly. However, EA recognised their online contingent a little over a year ago, when they became a ‘social enterprise’ with Salesforce (the Microsoft Xbox in the picture tickled me).

The merits of the poll and whether EA deserve this emotive accolade can be debated elsewhere, what struck me was Peter Moore’s response (the Chief Operating Officer) in the light of their social outlook. You can read it here.

Peter’s Thoughts

Peter’s response begins with the quote “The tallest trees catch the most wind.”, akin to the Australian idea of the “Tall Poppy syndrome”; those which are successful are the ones people seek to tear down. Peter explains they won the award last year for a dodgy ending to one of their games and for being misrepresented in their support of SOPA.

It seems the list of complaints has grown in twelve months because he also goes on to admit certain failings this year with the promise to do better. However, just as he trivialised the reasons for winning the award in the previous year, he vehemently denies and snipes back at other complaints. Here is his quote:

• “Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme.  It’s not.  People still want to argue about it.  We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period.
• Some claim there’s no room for Origin as a competitor to Steam.  45 million registered users are proving that wrong.
• Some people think that free-to-play games and micro-transactions are a pox on gaming.  Tens of millions more are playing and loving those games.
• We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for EA because they disagree with the choice of the cover athlete on Madden NFL. Yes, really…
• In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games.  This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.”

So Peter applies a few tools of argument here:

• Of those issues he cannot refute, he acknowledges them to take the sting out of the tail. Any time these issues are raised again, he can confirm he has already acknowledged them and move on. What was not provided is a plan outlining how they will be addressed.
• For SimCity, he simply denies the claim i.e. it is not DRM without explaining why the concerns are without foundation or the true motives for forcing solo players to be connected
• He appeals to numbers for Origin and micro-transactions
• He ends with a couple of trivial grievances so the reader is left with the thought that all of the issues are trivial

He ends off the post with some inspirational rhetoric being “committed to fixing our mistakes” and saying how they are constantly “listening to feedback from our players” (presumably with the tools put in place by Salesforce.) He ends by saying, in reference to his tree quote at the start “we remain proud and unbowed”, confusing, for me, whether things will be addressed or not.

The Problem

There are people that disagree with my position on this, such as Nic Healey of cnet. Nic is rightly impressed that Peter is responding at all and likes that he is committed to improving. I agree with this to an extent. However, the tone of Peter’s response strikes me as more Parent-Child than one of conversational equals. As a reader, the message I hear is “We have made some mistakes which we have given lip service to (and a free game) and, while you are telling us about other issues, we will ignore them because we do not consider them important or legitimate; we know best.” Arguments referencing the ‘silent majority’ do not confer respect and simply nullify the argument through fallacy. There is no way to know whether the silent majority are happy or not.

The problem is EA are hearing through their social tools but not listening. They are then telling their customers what is going to happen (and what is not going to happen) rather than conversing with them to find a solution.

Social Tools versus Social Philosophy

EA have social tools, thanks to Salesforce and Jeff Bradburn, EA’s Senior Director of Support Systems, says “The close relationships that we're building with customers (via these tools) are a real game changer.” However, winning The Consumerist poll two years in a row suggests, at least for some fraction of their customers, there is a problem. Buddy Media and Radian 6 are industry-proven tools so if the technology is not to blame, what is?

The problem lies in the culture exhibited by the COO and the associated social strategy. If you are going to reduce the barriers to communication you must be willing to engage respectfully with the people complaining. I have talked about the Cluetrain in the past and, again, we see the problems corporations face when they do not heed its warnings. My guess, given EA has won the award two years in a row, is that the COO is embodying an attitude evident in other areas of the business and it is this that is causing problems.

There is a wisdom regarding complaints that says that while your customers are complaining they still care and it is when they stop complaining that you are in trouble. Another wisdom suggests if you can turn around your harshest critics, they will become your strongest advocates. By ignoring the merits of the criticisms, EA is running the risk of disenfranchising those who use the services but are dissatisfied, sending them to competitors. Unless this attitude is addressed EA are, in my opinion, at risk of making the award three in a row.

The Similarities of Social and CRM

Just as CRM is both a technology and a philosophy, social networking is as well. It is very simple to access technology to open communication through online channels, what makes companies truly great is when they give great customer service through this and their traditional channels. Similarly, just as automating a bad process with CRM makes your company worse much quicker, using social channels to receive feedback and then dismiss it angers customers with much greater efficiency than possible without social channels.

Conclusions

I often come across prospective clients who have seen social tools built into CRM and are excited about the opportunities. It is true there is great potential in interacting with customers in near-real time through online channels. However, the question which I ask them and which always must be answered is “what is your social plan/strategy?” Without one you are doing the social equivalent of putting up a million web feedback forms and ignoring all of them. Social channels are a tool and, just like any tool, they can be used to delight customers or, as appears to the be the case with EA, they can be used to isolate customers.

Historical Operating Cashflow of Salesforce

Last month I looked at Salesforce’s end of year financials and talked about how their main source of revenue was staff handing over money for Salesforce shares. I wondered if this has always been the case and therefore thought it is worth looking at how the operating cashflow of Salesforce has changed over time.

Sources of Operating Income

The two sources I will focus on are the ‘Net income(loss)’ and the ‘Expenses related to stock-based awards’. The net income is the money made from selling services so it makes sense to look at this. The stock-based awards entry is worthwhile because it was the biggest contributor to operating income for the last financial year and for the last quarter of the last financial year. Another line item of reasonable size is the ‘Changes in assets and liabilities, net of business combinations’ but this has little consistency over the past four years and therefore tells us very little. The other significant line items refer to the loss of the value of intangible assets e.g. brand value referred to as ‘amortization’. These are not real cash transactions and, therefore, are also being left out.

Historical Trends

Here are the past four years of quarterly transactions for the two sources of operating cashflow.

The first thing that strikes me is the lack of seasonality in the quarterly figures; the trends are clear. While initially contributing roughly equally to operating cashflow, the two sources are heading on divergent paths. Income is heading south and seems to have been doing so since around 2011 Q1 (the start of 2010). Stock expenses are growing steadily and have been since net income turned into a loss, back at the start of 2011.

The Problem

Salesforce is bringing in money by telling a great story to its employees and they are literally buying it. However, sustainable companies do not consistently generate losses and borrow money from their employees to survive. Things must change. The question I have is if this is a story which has been going on for three years, what is management waiting for? Where is the evidence that they are doing anything to deliver on their promises of prosperity? Will Salesforce be the betamax of the CRM world? A product whose advocates cry was superior in every way if only it had not been outmanoeuvred by the ‘big boys’.

Given I am about to start working with a company who deals with both Dynamics CRM and Salesforce, I sincerely hope things do change. I want to work with great products and Forrester and Gartner both attest Salesforce is a great product but I am not so sure the company’s financials would make the grades in a magic quadrant comparison. As usual I will continue to monitor the financials of Saleforce in the hope things will change and, hopefully, not for the worse.

Three Limitations of Using Advanced Find

I got asked a couple of days ago if I knew of a blog which listed the limitations of using an Advanced Find query. I knew of a couple of the limitations off of the top of my head but could not find a blog summarising them. So here it is.

Outer Joins

In my opinion, other than being able to do aggregate calculations, this is the biggest limitation of Advanced Finds. So what is an ‘Outer Join’?

Let us say we have two tables in a database, the Account and Contact table. Advanced Find allows to ask questions like ‘Show me all Accounts which have a Contact whose first name is John’ or ‘Show me all Contacts where their Account is in the Mining industry’. In these cases a record exists in both tables e.g. an Account record linked to a Contact record whose name is John. This is called an ‘Inner Join query’.

However, if we ask ‘Show me all Account with no Contacts’ we cannot do it. In other words, if we ask questions where there is a record in one table and none in the other table we will find it impossible with Advanced Find. This is an ‘Outer Join query’. Other examples are reports showing neglected leads (leads with no activity for six months) which cannot be done with Advanced Find.

In the case of Accounts, Contacts and Leads, we can get around the problem using a Marketing List. In the above example, we can add all Accounts to the Marketing List and then remove those with a Contact, leaving behind the desired list. For other types of records, the only option is to have a flag field to help us. For example, we can have a ‘Contact Flag’ field on the Account which is populated when there is an active Contact associated to the Account. We can then use this flag to return ‘All Accounts with an unticked Contact Flag’, satisfying our Outer Join query.

Titles

Titles are NOT restricted to just the search entity. For example, if we are searching for all Contacts in a certain industry, we can bring in fields from the Account entity, by dropping down the entity selection when adding columns.

However, we can only go one level up. So, for example, if we want to ask ‘Show me all Appointments regarding Opportunities where the Account is in the mining industry’, we can display Appointment fields as columns and Opportunity fields as columns but we cannot browse up to the Opportunity’s associated Account and show their fields. In this case, the only workaround available is to replicate the key fields from the Account onto the Opportunity and then reference these copied-fields.

Grouping Conditions Across Entities

Let us say we want to know ‘All Accounts where the Account is in Sydney OR the Account has a Contact in Sydney’

We can write the above query but this asks for Accounts which are in Sydney AND has a Contact in Sydney. Normally we would use the ‘Group OR’ button at the top but this can only apply to conditions within the same entity and therefore we cannot group them. In this case the best we can do is run the query twice (once for the Account rule and once for the Contact rule), export to Excel and combine manually.

Conclusions

Advanced Find is one of the most powerful and accessible features of Dynamics CRM and any site not making full use of this function is missing out. Even those sites using it every day may not discover the limitations listed above. However, now you are aware of them, if you do find yourself coming up against one of them, you have some workarounds or the opportunity to rethink to see if you can gain insight through an alternative, supported, query.

Voting Has Started in the Top 100 Most Influential People in Dynamics!

It's that time of year again when I try to convince (mostly) complete strangers into voting for me in the Top 100 Most Influential People in Dynamics.

Today, you are that lucky (mostly) complete stranger. If you have felt swayed by my blog ramblings, feel free to vote by clicking the link.

http://www.dynamicsworld.co.uk/the-top-100-most-influential-people-in-microsoft-dynamics-list-for-2013-page-9/

Using Quick Campaigns for Managing Events

Here is a simple way to manage an event using Quick Campaigns in Dynamics CRM. I have implemented this, or similar, at a couple of clients where the process for the event was:

• Create an invitation list
• Call them up to see if they are coming
• Review for things like identification labels

Quick Campaigns

Probably not the most utilized feature of Dynamics CRM but a useful one none the less. Quick Campaigns allow you to take a list of Leads, Contacts or Accounts and assign an Activity to them, such as a Phone Call. We can also track the responses to these Phone Calls.

Create An Invitation List

Firstly, we need to create a list of people we are inviting to the event. We can use an Advanced Find query, pick them by hand from an existing view or use a Marketing List. In this case I will just hand-pick some Contacts. Once this is done I click the ‘Add’ tab and select Quick Campaign – For Selected Records (or For All Records On All Pages in the case of an Advanced Find). This is our invitation list and can be exported to Excel, if required.

We then set up a Phone Call for the Contacts, assigning them as we will.

Call Them Up

Going to the Marketing section and the Quick Campaigns in the navigation, we now see our event and click on the Phone Calls that have been created.

We open these up and make the calls. Once we do this, we unleash the secret potential of the Campaign Response. To be honest I never used to be a fan of Campaign Reponses; I did not find them very useful. Until I discovered this trick.

From the Phone Call, we click on ‘Promote to Response’ to create a Campaign Response.

We now have a Campaign Response record which links the Contact, the Phone Call and the Event.

Review the Responses

From the Quick Campaign we can review all responses and, again, export to Excel if required.

Conclusions

Quick Campaigns and Campaign Responses are not a widely used feature of Dynamics CRM but work nicely for simple event management. If a more complex event is being managed and pre-event tasks need to be monitored, there is the Campaign entity, which also works with Campaign Responses. If we are not planning to make Phone Calls, we can use another activity instead and, finally, for really complex processes we can apply workflows and dialogs. Enjoy.