Do you use a CRM? We are guessing yes. Most likely that’s where your pipeline is maintained.

Does the invaluable discussion around an opportunity or deal happen inside the CRM. I am guessing No.  That’s your chat / IM solution.

Here is a simple solution that can leverage both these applications to ensure 360 degree communication. It can greatly enhance visibility and follow up of the pipeline opportunities and potentially increase the turnaround.

You can write a simple application to monitor your CRM system and push any interesting opportunity to the respective chat room or owner based on your business rules. This will ensure that any interesting information being captured in the CRM is surfaced on your primary communication system, maximizing the opportunity for collaboration.

In the example below I have an FX opportunity that’s just been created in the system and is worth more than a million dollars. As soon as it is saved in the CRM system, I get an alert in my chat window.

The link in the alert here provides single click access to the relevant opportunity for anyone interested in it.

As a corollary scenario, you would also want the valuable information generated while collaborating on such opportunities to get captured in your CRM system along with the context. This again can be achieved using a very simple Bot that lets you send Notes and update properties of specific objects in your CRM system.

In the illustration below, for a lost opportunity alert, user sends an update as free text from within the chat client which will automatically be added in the CRM system as an activity for the owner of the opportunity.

Here is how the text message from chat will appear in the Opportunity. Notice the highlighted activity.

So, this is a very basic integration example. However, the concept can be used to achieve far more sophisticated results and to automate workflows that can substantially improve your productivity.

Deepak Kumar MOSS, Microsoft, Unified Communications