I’ve often read about “Customer Experience”, a relatively new Dynamics 365 product from Microsoft. At first I couldn’t even figure out what it was. As it is often the case, there is a lot of nonsense being spread, especially by people in the acquisition sector who have no idea about and confuse CRM and ERP.

Microsoft is known for renaming products. What do marketing and product management think or want to achieve? Who knows it. It has been confusing customers since many years, also anyone who deals with MS products. At some point they will rename Windows or Word or Excel.

Microsoft CRM, i.e. Customer Relationship Management from MS: It was known by that name for a long time. You knew what that was. What happened to it? First it was renamed to Dynamics CRM, because the MS products are SO dynamically … whatever that means. But that was kind of ok. Then… to Dynamics 365? Yes and no. The term is used for everything, including ERP products. Actually it is the name for the “product family” as MS calls it. CRM became D365 Sales, D365 Marketing, D365 Customer Service (CS), all CRM systems with different feature weightings.

Now there is also the so-called “Customer Engagement” or CE for short. What is that? A mixture of D365 Sales, D365 Marketing, D365 Customer Service, AI stuff, etc. So a mishmash that can do everything, more or less. The jack-of-all-trades, just think of Sharepoint. That’s something like that too. Somehow anything can happen and nothing will happen. But again, that’s what you need. Why all this? To compete with Salesforce. Does it work? Who knows.

Addition: The ERP products are D365 Business Central (formerly Navision or Dynamics Nav), D365 Finance & Operations (formerly Axapta, Dynamics AX). The latter is available in 2 versions: D365 Finance and D365 SCM … and 2 other versions. Why multiple ERP products? No idea. There are also more, there is Great Planes (GP) too. But that has already been abandoned. Well, SAP also has several ERP systems running. So whatever.

If you would like to find out more about it, just get in touch.

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