We’ve all been there. A release to the major CRM suite is on the cards, and it’s touch and go as to whether the legacy software, deployed several years ago, will sink or swim come tomorrow morning. But in this day and age, why on earth are we still worrying about software updates and the havoc they might wreak should something go wrong? Let’s face facts; nothing should go wrong and, to be honest, it is no longer acceptable in today’s technological-driven world that things do go wrong.
It’s not fair to blame the technicians who spend many hours of honest sweat and toil wrestling with a platform which is out of date. Nor is it the software’s fault (… why haven’t you purchased the upgrade?!…). But then who is to blame when things do go wrong? The management? The software provider? No, they were fast asleep when the update patch went live. So what are we left with… a “bug in the code”? That doesn’t really hold much water anymore. Mistakes happen, fine, but how long can we rely on statements like this to realise that something is about to break and about to break completely?
So with this in mind, we need to ensure that all our software solutions (especially those we need to be stable and responsive to service customers and clients) are flexible, scalable and resilient to pretty much everything thrown at them. This is where the Power Platform can help.
I’m not saying that you should rebuild your monolithic CRM applications from scratch. Nor am I suggesting that you end your contracts with major software houses and use the cash to employee Power Platform Developers and hope for the best. Why don’t we consider the best of these worlds? What do I mean? I’ve have a go…
In most organisations, each CRM platform has a front-end UI, a ‘back-end’ and, in most cases, a ‘digital’ experience which is given to customers to help them self-serve. But where is your data? That’s right, somewhere in that mythical ‘back-end’ we all refer to. The nuts and bolts of your system. Whether this is SQL (typically) or one of countless other data storage providers, data is the single most critical asset you have. This could be customer data, colleague data; you name it. Data is precious, valuable and, above-all, often the only time you know you have a customer ‘on your books’. Do you ever meet your customers in person, speak to them on the phone or even email them? Rarely, nowadays.
So, we’ve got data. That’s hunky-dory. So where do the issues arise on release-night? That’s right, it’s either the UI, digital experience or somewhere in-between these which isn’t playing ball. Someone left some erroneous code in which was meant to be a comment. Someone did this, someone did that. It’s all playground stuff. The upshot is that your software release has failed, and more often than not it’s going to be your customers who bear the brunt, having said nothing of your colleagues who have to listen to their complaints.
So what’s the solution?
Keep your data where it is. Unless there is something really wrong with how you are storing your data, why upset it? It’s not usually data storage which causes software downtime now, is it? No, it’s your on-the-top UIs or digital apps and pages which, for some reason, don’t like what you’ve done.
So why bother essentially unpicking someone else’s piece of software?
Why not tailor your colleague and customer experience to something which a) actually works, b) can be updated or changed within literally minutes with no downtime and, critically, c) can save you thousand if not millions of pounds per year?
Consider the following:
Colleague UI
This is where your staff go to handle and respond to customer queries about the product(s) or service(s) you sell. It needs to be up to date, reliable and, most of all, easy to navigate. Dynamics 365 has some pre-built offerings here, but maybe they don’t fit your organisation or even your market. Canvas apps are good, but for large organisational CRM platforms? Nah. You’ll soon run into all manner of delegation warnings.
Enter model-driven apps.
With the ability for low-code custom application development, but with support for many pro-code tools and plug-ins, you’ll be hard pressed to find a business sector or market which cannot successfully create a cracking CRM platform using model-driven apps.
(Don’t I have to use Dataverse though? You just said leave data where it is!) – yep, you do, but that’s only for consistency; you can connect Dataverse to thousands of internal and/or external data storage or warehousing platforms. SQL? Yep. How about SQL on-premises? Of course. Snowflake? Sure! Goodness, I think there would probably be a way to read data from punch-cards if you want! Virtual tables come into their own here.
Dataverse, with the right licensing, can happily cope with up to 1 billion rows of data in one table. You are not limited to how many tables you have, and it’s all safe and secure in the Microsoft Cloud. You control it. Its your data. How does that sound compared to the rack space being used in a datacentre costing you hundreds of thousands per month?
Ok, I could be swayed on the colleague UI, but we just paid £350k for a new customer servicing app. How is Power Platform any better?
Firstly, whilst I drag myself back up of the floor (£350k?!); what did you get for your £350k? Someone else built that app for you? OK. So, you can’t update it internally? What’s that? You’ve only got one of your products on your app? Why not all of them…? How does that sound like good value for money?
Canvas apps are, let’s face it, made for mobile experiences. With new modern controls and FluentUI now part and parcel of the Power Apps space, I wince when I see people demonstrate (and often remonstrate…) about how the professional app they have purchased for eye-watering sums apparently ‘blows the competition out of the water’; mate, it doesn’t.
Why didn’t you use Power Apps which you’re already, being candid, paying for? Yes, they can be packaged as applications and made available directly to download from Google Play or the App Store. Yes, they can authenticate using your current app’s authentication method. Yes, they are responsive. Yes, they can be accessed offline (can your app do this?). With the power (excuse the pun) of Microsoft’s datacentres behind it, natively, your app will likely never suffer from outages in comparison to your shiny, yet ineffective app which is slow to load, crashes and causes your customers to complain. Link in Power Virtual Agents with Omnichannel for both synchronous and asynchronous persistent chat via WhatsApp and Facebook… at the click of a few buttons. Seriously.
I could go on, but let’s start building frameworks on top of our data in-house, reduce our costs, and empower our business experts to create, themselves, user experiences that actually work, can be updated and tweaked without extra costs and watch our ratings fly.
