How to Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to Manage Life Events for Financial Services Clients

Financial services firms, like every other business, are always looking for ways to strengthen their relationships with their clients as well as bring in additional assets and revenue.

When a client faces a major life event like marriage, death, birth, adoption, inheritance, and child reaching the age of maturity,  a financial services firm needs to be able to jump into action to help manage the change efficiently. In Dynamics CRM 2011, the dialog feature helps financial services companies do just that by helping to automate the process: creating a new contact record, creating an opportunity that didn't exist before and creating tasks to support that opportunity to help firms bring in additional revenue, said Shawn Tabor, senior software consultant, Tectura. Tabor was speaking at a recent online meeting of the CRM User Group, Financial Services Special Interest Group.

Dialogs provide users with the ability to create wizard-style processes inside Dynamics CRM, and with the same data awareness available in workflows but without the need for any additional development.  

At Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, Dynamics CRM product manager Craig Dewar explained that dialogs will be enhanced with new data types in the Q4 2011 Service Update.

"[Dialogs in] CRM...handle instances where you want to add a wizard or call script functionality to CRM, but without having to do any development," he said. "When you start the dialog process, a wizard-like interface is presented to you so you can make appropriate selections to run the process."

Dialogs add an information-gathering user interface on top of the traditional workflows so ...