Microsoft uses sales, marketing, and customer service to foster leads, grow the business, personalize your service, and more according to Microsoft (2020). These methods make use of the CRM concept of Customer Lifecycle in its marketing by retaining or repeated customers. In the sales factor, consumers make the purchase and bring in money by purchasing the product. Once a customer is made by purchase through marketing, the consumer is then brought into the customer service portion. Managing customer relationships begins with the acquisition and continues with development and retention (Zahay, Mason, and Schibrowsky, et al., 2009).
Microsoft Dynamics 365 focused on using the retain or repeated customers stage in the Customer Lifecycle, the data that is most important and valuable to this stage is Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a comprehensive capability for customer service and support to help in order to reduce service response times, improve case resolutions, and increase customer self-service so you can manage and exceed SLA (Painchaud, 2016). In order to keep customers satisfied and keep coming back from more first, the company must distinguish what type of consumer they have, from high potential, high value, to low value. Customers with the potential to purchase from us are called ‘High Potential’ and those who do not purchase regularly and/or do not make large purchases may be considered ‘low value.’ This group of low-value customers is often unprofitable for the firm as it costs more to service them than they yield in revenues (Zahay – Blatz, Spiller, and Marold, et al., 2020)
Microsoft uses internal data to create its customer databases by helping you manage and maintain customer relationships, track sales leads, marketing, and pipeline, and deliver actionable data according to Microsoft (2020). When it comes to the value derived from the internal data that comes in, an example would be the customer that made a purchase. The consumer’s purchase leaves a trail from beginning to end, the company then uses this for future reference in how to help the consumer and retaining that customer. For external data, the company uses the customer’s records and history to better understand their customer, this goes into helping Microsoft’s method of sales, marketing, and customer service.