Recent Blog Posts

Eric Souza, Director of IT for Berkshire Partners participated in a live webinar with Brad Koontz of Customer Effective. The topic was CRM for Private Equity and Souza described their CRM journey and what made them successful. Berkshire was founded...

On May 7th, Customer Effective presented the Customer Effective: Banking CRM solution to the attendees of this year’s Miser User Group Conference in Daytona Beach, FL. The Miser core processing system for banks has been around for over 30 years,...

Due to increasing regulation in the financial services industry, proprietary trading units are winding down, financial leverage is being reduced, and capital ratios and liquidity standards have been raised. The ever-increasing constriction of the aforementioned profit engines combined with higher...

I was recently looking for a potential release date for Release 8 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 ( aka Update Rollup 9 and CRM Q2 - 2012 Update) and found that the Microsoft Field Engineering team maintains a post with...

We recently upgraded a customer from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 UR7. After upgrading and applying the update, we received a Query Builder error message whenever we tried to save changes to System Settings. The detailed message said: "'Organization' entity...

I worked with Scott Durow (@ScottDurow) to develop the basics steps to implement the customization to remove the Activate/Deactivate buttons from non-administrators using his Ribbon Editor. This demonstration uses the beta version of Scott's Develop1.net Ribbon Workbench for CRM 2011.

As you’re thinking about or discussing the announced CRM cross-browser support coming in R8 (Q2 2012) be aware that there are some expectations that may or may not be realistic. If you expect users in your organization to use browsers...

For Dynamics CRM On-Premise, Microsoft SSRS-based reports can be developed either as SQL or FetchXML based reports. SQL is the more common (old-school) style of report development and is probably more familiar with CRM report developers. There are a handful...

Microsoft has released Update Rollup 8 for CRM 2011. You can download it and find specific details on this page. The release date is May 3, 2012. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29692 Update Rollup 6 must be installed prior to installing Update Rollup 8....

Up until recently my favorite feature of CRM 2011 was Connections. Thanks in part to blogs like this one from our own Joel Lindstrom and some experimenting another feature has moved into a tie for first: Dialogs. Combining the two...

When a CRM instance is provisioned, a name is created for the organization – but since that name must be unique, we often see some awkward or unmemorable names – which then show up in Outlook. – But these names...

Due to ongoing industry consolidation, occasional market turmoil, or personal drive to increase earning power, top-producing financial advisors occasionally change Broker/Dealers (B/Ds). Some go to work for another competing Wirehouse or Regional B/D in the quest for a better overall...

Customer Effective has released a new Customer Success Story highlighting the successful CRM implementation at Farm Credit Services of Illinois. Not only did Farm Credit Services of Illinios need a system that could capture and store all kinds of customer...

CEOs to Gartner: CRM is the Most Important IT Investment for the Next Five Years Two recent Gartner surveys of CEOs and CIO indicated that CRM is now a top technology priority. The CEOs who were surveyed said that CRM...

What features do you think should be added to CRM? – or what long-time feature needs to get a “little work done” to bring it up to speed? – Fortunately there’s a great way to feed that information directly into...

Since the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft has encouraged users to a 30-day free trial of CRM. And this has been successful in demonstrating key features like Outlook integration, sales productivity, analytics, service productivity, and basic marketing automation....

A troubleshooting wizard has been released to help customers help themselves to resolve errors configuring the CRM Outlook Client.

Every day it seems that CRM is changing. When CRM 2011 was released, most deployments were strictly on-premise deployments with access restricted to users on the company network or VPN. However, with the changing landscape of how people work, the...

Recently, I came across a Dow Jones Wealth Management publication entitled “Five CRM Moves You Should Make to Outpace the Market.” The e-book emphasizes how most high net worth (HNW) clients want to hear more from their financial advisor, as...