As I prepare for the MB2-713 certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales) I am creating revision notes that I’m publishing as a series of blog posts.

In this post I will look at social engagement. (At a high level to introduce the concepts needed for the MB2-713 exam.)

By social engagement we mean engaging with customers via multiple social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and many others. In many situations social media has changed or is changing the way people communicate with organisations. Customers are more informed and obtaining that information from varied sources. Purchasing decisions are often influenced by discussions online.

The Microsoft Engagement application used with Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows companies to monitor key accounts, gain insight into competitors and be alerted to purchasing “signals”. Service / customer care concerns can also be identified. This information can then be used to help companies better react to customer need.

In addition, fresh leads may be generated from the various social sources.

The Microsoft Engagement application supports more than 20 languages and Azure machine learning also helps it adapt / evolve to learn new words. (and even emoticons!)

Key benefits of social engagement include;

• Listening, listen everywhere to understand how people really feel about the company and its products. And to appreciate how you compare to competitors.
• Analyse sentiment, determine your share of the “voice” across social channel and understand who you key influencers are.
• Drive engagement, foster conversations about your products / brand and gain insight to influence sales and marketing strategy.

Key features of social engagement include;

• Social listening, listen to what people are saying in 20 languages across Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Videos, news and custom RSS sources. Know who your key influencers are and stay informed with alerts on trending topics.

• Intelligent Social, gain insights using rich analytics including share of voice, location and tag cloud visualizations. Keywords are evaluated to determine if sentiment is positive, negative or neutral. And automatically understand the intention of social posts and route then as cases or leads as required.

• Social Engagement, improves social media presence by engaging with social communities. Creates an end to end customer experience by creating CRM entities from social posts. (Including cases, leads and even custom entities.) Or simply reply to posts directly from the Social Engagement hub.

• Social CRM, adds social data into CRM or Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. Allows you to integrate social interactions into the end to end customer experience.

The Social Engagement hub provides a rich user interface to allow users to see information on sentiment, trending key words (etc) by source, language geographical area (etc). You can even “zoom in” on individual posts / tweets and reply directly in the hub. Or convert these interactions into leads or cases within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

I hope this introduction into social engagement has given you a flavour for its capabilities and an appreciation of the topics that might come up in the MB2-713 certification.

Next time I will start to look at lead management, including the role of the lead and opportunity entities.