Companies need clarity, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE (Customer Engagement) can provide it, even if implementation is incremental and iterative, writes Craig Fidler, VP of Enterprise Business Applications, Microsoft Dynamics 365 at Braintree:
Economic pressure has become the backdrop to every business decision. The market shape is defined by cautious spending, unpredictable exchange rates and long evaluation cycles.
Companies want technology that offers them value and visibility, particularly into customer behaviours and preferences they can leverage to build momentum and stability.
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools offer these functionalities, but their long-term operational costs are slowing adoption.
Licensing has become an inflection point, as have AI or usage-based charges, integration, data migration and change management overheads.
These long-term operational costs are a major barrier for many organisations, especially at scale. These issues are particularly challenging for small to medium enterprises, where the lack of skilled people and the high initial investment costs are a significant barrier to entry.
This is even though well-designed CRM platforms are increasingly showing a positive and measurable impact on customer satisfaction and retention.
The problem is…there are so many CRM implementation problems.
Poor planning, technical issues, data challenges, and process mismanagement increase project complexity and cost, often resulting in a failed CRM implementation or one that is not being used to its full potential.
However, these don’t need to be part of the story your CRM tells.
It is entirely possible to build a CRM platform that’s financially sustainable and operationally relevant by adopting an incremental approach.
It’s one that Microsoft believes is both sustainable and more resilient – companies should plan their digital transformation in phases and increments so each step delivers visible business value and supports adoption rather than overwhelming teams.
This approach gives you a structure for incremental CRM adoption that allows you to carefully manage implementation, licensing and change management within your own capacity.
Instead of moving into a fully featured CRM adoption in one hefty swoop, design a clear starting point and grow from there.
Start with a core customer data model, basic sales or service processes and the interactions your teams manage every day.
This gives you a stable foundation that captures the essential customer information you need without demanding a high licensing commitment from day one. At this point, you can create a central database, consistent communication tracking and a single place where sales or service activity is recorded to create a fast and practical baseline that’s immediately useful.
Once this foundation is in place, you can expand your CRM capability in structured phases. Dynamics 365 allows you to activate additional modules as your organisation grows.
Field Service, Project Operations, Customer Insights or Marketing Automation don’t need you to undertake a complete reimplementation or a rebuild, for example, because the functionality is already in the system.
The moment you enable the appropriate licences, it’s active and just needs to be configured for your environment. This is what makes incremental CRM effective.
You are not paying for functionality you are not ready to use. You expand only when your processes, teams and budget are prepared for the next step.
This phased approach also reduces the risk of failure. Many CRM programmes collapse under the weight of their own ambition, so when you attempt to redesign every process, migrate all data and activate all modules at once, you create a level of complexity that is difficult to manage.
Incremental CRM avoids this by allowing you to scale at the pace your organisation can sustain because you configure one layer, stabilise it, build user confidence and then add the next. Each step delivers value before you move forward.
There is another benefit. Incremental CRM gives you the space to make better licensing decisions. Long-term operational cost is one of the biggest obstacles organisations face when adopting CRM because licensing is tied to user volumes and advanced feature sets.
You need to always know who actually needs access and when they need it. A phased rollout gives you the space you need to align licensing to real usage, which protects your budget.
AI adds an additional layer. You can use these tools to drive efficiencies that offset operational costs in increasingly agile ways, such as automating routine tasks, summarising interactions, generating follow-ups or supporting service agents.
Underlying all of this is the relationship you build with your CRM partner because ultimately, incremental CRM implementations work more effectively when you have a partner that understands how to build the system around your specific needs, and how to provide support when that’s also needed.
In the end, a modern CRM system should give you clarity.
An incremental approach gives you a practical path to achieving this without taking on unnecessary risks or costs because you’re building a system that grows with you, rather than a system you need to grow into.
