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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement: A Powerful CRM Software Solution for Medical Device Manufacturers

From navigating complex regulatory compliance requirements to managing patient, provider, and payer relationships, Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement provides medical device manufacturers with a strong and holistic CRM system.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365 CE) is an ideal solution for businesses in the medical device manufacturing industry. Its suite of powerful modules optimizes sales, customer service, field service, and marketing, ensuring seamless operations and compliance adherence across your entire Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes.

Benefits of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for Medical Device Manufacturers

Before we dig into the solutions, let’s look at some key benefits Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement has for medical device manufacturers:

1. Regulatory Compliance and Recall Readiness: Ensure adherence to FDA, ISO, and HIPAA regulations with automated documentation and audit trails, reducing compliance risks and legal issues. Additionally, Dynamics 365 automates and enhances device recall processes with workflow, auto-messaging, and call center scripts.
2. Improved Sales Performance: Shorten the sales cycle with data-driven decision-making and automation based on advanced sales analytics and insights, leading to higher revenue and profitability. You can also take advantage of additional features that help you streamline your lead processes, manage quotes and orders,
3. Enhanced Customer Experiences: Deliver proactive support and personalized engagement to your customers at every stage of the sales process to improve customer loyalty and retention. Whether you’re engaging directly with patients, providers, or payers, you can drive positive, effective interactions that streamline your business processes.
4. Greater Operational Efficiency: Integrate sales, service, and marketing for a 360-degree customer view, reducing redundancies and streamlining processes. Centralizing your operations ensures that every team member is on the same page, which empowers them to provide better customer experiences.
5. Scalability and Flexibility: Quickly adapt to market demands and regulatory changes, ensuring long-term business growth. As your business grows, your system grows without disruptions to your operations.

Let’s break down each module within D365 CE and show you how each can provide end-to-end assistance in managing customer relationships, driving sales, and providing excellent service.

Key Features of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for Medical Device Manufacturers

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement contains four main modules: Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and Customer Insights - Journeys (marketing). When combined, they provide access to a holistic CRM solution that helps you attract customers and provides them with tremendous support once you start working with them.

Let’s highlight how they can help medical device manufacturers streamline customer management processes.

Dynamics 365 Sales: Accelerate Lead-to-Revenue Cycles

Sellers must focus on their core tasks that bring in leads and drive sales. With Dynamics 365 Sales, your sales team can automate processes and use AI-driven insights to work smarter and more efficiently. Here are some features you can use:

• Lead and Opportunity Management: Track and nurture leads with AI-driven insights, ensuring that sales teams focus on high-potential opportunities. This leads to higher conversion rates and a more efficient sales pipeline.
• Automated Sales Processes: Streamline approvals, quotes, and contracts through workflows that reduce manual errors and speed up deal closures. You can also automate data input, saving valuable time on manual tasks.
• AI Capabilities: You can prompt Microsoft Copilot to pull historical customer data from your system that you can use in a pinch during sales calls. This lets your sellers provide personalized customer experiences.
• Account and Contact Management: Maintain a comprehensive view of customer interactions, helping sales teams build stronger relationships and tailor their approach based on past engagements.
• Integration with ERP Systems: Seamlessly connect with Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management or Business Central for real-time inventory and order processing data. This ensures accurate forecasting and prevents stockouts or overstocking.

Use Case:

Imagine a purchasing rep from a hospital reaches out and wants to buy something from your stock, so they fill out a form on your website. The system will take all the information they provide you (through a form, email, or phone call) and automatically set up a customer profile with all the relevant details. You can then use Copilot to input further information based on emails and meeting transcripts as you move the client along your sales cycle.

From there, sellers and support agents can quickly access vital information like what the customer wants and why they want it. This automation allows your sales team to nurture clients from start to finish.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service: Enhance Client Support and Satisfaction

Once a prospect becomes a client, you’ll want to keep them there by providing proactive and quick customer service. The Dynamics 365 Customer Service module inside of Customer Engagement allows you to do that, empowering your service team to work quickly to resolve client issues. Here are some highlights:

• Support Case Management: Efficiently track and resolve customer inquiries and complaints through automated ticketing and escalation mechanisms, improving resolution times and customer satisfaction. You can also track customer sentiment to know when it might be time to escalate the call to a manager or specialist.
• Knowledge Base: Provide self-service resources to distributors and healthcare providers, reducing the burden on customer service teams. This allows customer to resolve their issues before reaching out to your team. Knowledge bases also assist your team members, as they can search for resources to send to clients who reach out.
• Omnichannel Support: Engage customers via chat, email, phone, and social media, ensuring they receive support through their preferred communication channels.
• AI-Powered Chatbots: Automate responses to common inquiries, reducing response times, improving efficiency, and allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues.

Use Case:

Your company sells diagnostic equipment, and a customer contacts your support team for help with a mechanical issue. They fill out a support ticket form on the support page of your website with the following fields:

• Name
• Company
• Describe Your Issue
• Priority Level – Low, Medium, Critical

Once they hit the send button, a customer service agent will be notified of the new case. The system will automatically create the case and provide the form information to the agent. In this scenario, they marked the priority level as “Low”. The agent replies via email, sending the client relevant knowledge base articles to help them resolve their issue. In addition, the agent can include a link to an AI chatbot if the customer wants to begin an automated chat.

As the case moves, the client has moved past the automated chat and is now talking to a live agent. They have tried two methods of fixing the issue through knowledge-based articles, but neither works. At this point, the customer service agent can escalate the case to the field service team so an expert technician can go to the customer site and diagnose and fix the issue. Additionally, they can loop in the sales team in case the customer wants to replace the equipment. All of this communication and collaboration is centralized by an integration with Microsoft Teams and tracked in your support system against the ticket and customer record.

Dynamics 365 Field Service: Optimize On-Site Equipment Maintenance

For medical device companies that manufacture larger items requiring on-site service or maintenance, the Field Service module will empower your technicians to respond to service calls quickly and decisively. Some of the features you can use include:

• IoT-Enabled Predictive Maintenance: This feature detects and addresses device failures before they occur, reducing downtime, minimizing costs, and ensuring patient safety. It also boosts customer satisfaction, as you can address potential equipment issues proactively.
• Scheduling and Dispatch Optimization: Assign technicians based on skill, proximity, and availability, improving first-time fix rates and reducing travel costs.
• Mobile Access: Empower field technicians with real-time data, manuals, and customer history from their phones. This ensures they have all the necessary information at their fingertips.
• Work Order Management: Ensure accurate tracking and documentation of service visits, leading to improved compliance and improved customer trust.

Use Case:

As the previous use case ended with the call being escalated to the Field Service team, let’s continue with that scenario. Once the customer service rep transfers the case to the field service team, the system will create a work order and assign it to either the closest technician or a technician with specific expertise. The technician will receive a notification on their phone and can view the work order information and customer profile so they can go into the job informed.

In this scenario, the technician sees that this issue has come up multiple times in the past calendar year and appears to be tied to one part of the machine. Knowing that the customer has tried to fix it through knowledge-base articles unsuccessfully, the technician then knows what part needs to be replaced and what tools they need to do that. Once the job is done, the field service technician can input the necessary information about the job, and the system will automatically store the data and mark the work order and support case as “resolved.”

Having this information beforehand saves time on diagnostic work and allows the technician to get to work quickly, boosting customer satisfaction and speeding up response times.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys: Drive Engagement with Healthcare Providers, Patients, and Distributors

The first interaction a patient, hospital, or health care provider has with your organization is often through your marketing efforts. This could include sending emails, posting blogs, social media posts, and paid advertisements. Some of the tools in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (formerly known as Dynamics 365 Marketing) streamline those efforts so you can focus on making your marketing materials work. Here are some features:

• Personalized Campaigns: Leverage AI and segmentation for targeted outreach, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
• Event and Webinar Management: Coordinate virtual and in-person industry events, strengthening brand presence and educating key stakeholders.
• Lead Scoring and Nurturing: Identify high-potential prospects and automate follow-ups, ensuring no valuable lead is overlooked.
• Customer Journey Mapping: Understand and optimize touchpoints throughout the sales cycle, leading to a more seamless and personalized customer experience.

Use Case:

A company selling hearing technologies wants to set up different marketing streams for customers and resellers. They sell individual units or small orders to clients who buy online, and they also sell larger orders to drug stores, healthcare providers, and hearing clinics. The company can ask Copilot to segment customers based on whether they are vendors or customers.

From there, the company can create personalized marketing communications containing different promotions, information, or giveaways and set up events and webinars for clients or re-sellers. For example, if you are marketing to individual buyers, you might do a buy-one-get-50 percent off promotion or offer a discount on a customer’s first purchase. On the other hand, retailers will buy larger volumes of the product, so they might benefit from a promotion where they pay less per item the more they buy.

Additionally, the company can also segment prospective clients and target them with specific messaging that entices them to become clients. This is where the lead-scoring and nurturing aspect comes in, as the marketing team can prioritize higher-scoring leads and set up automated follow-ups to ensure that the organization maintains constant contact with them.

Ready to Implement Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement? Talk to Stoneridge!

Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is a holistic CRM solution that helps you effectively manage customers in every stage of your sales cycle. Our experts can help you implement these tools, set up the proper licensing, and empower your organization to win more deals and drive more revenue. Reach out to us today to learn more.

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