Calling Your Dynamics CRM Customers with Skype

Roshan Mehta, 21 January 2013

Update Rollup 12 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 includes a new feature which allows you to easily call your Leads, Contacts, and Accounts via Skype. This functionality is available for phone number fields present on both process-driven forms and system or user-defined views. Those of you that are running previous versions of CRM 2011 can utilize our “Click to Call Skype” solution found here.

Firstly, let’s take a look at the My Active Contacts view. You will notice that you can click on any of the Business Phone values in the view to quickly kick off a new Skype call with that Contact.

We can do the same from within a single Contact record by simply clicking on the Business Phone field on the process-driven form.

The Skype call feature is not available when viewing forms in classic mode. To access classic mode, click on the ellipsis on the process-driven form menu bar and click on Switch to Classic.

Notice that the Business Phone field is no longer clickable.

The next thing I want to illustrate is how the Skype functionality only works for out-of-the-box phone number fields, excluding the Fax field. I have customized the Contact form to include the Home Phone and Telephone 3 fields as well as a Custom Phone Number (single line of text) field. CRM has only recognized that the out-of-the-box fields are available for phone calls via Skype.

Note that the Custom Phone Number and Fax fields display a phone icon next to it because I have Lync 2013 installed.

This new feature will make it easier to contact your Leads, Contacts, and Accounts via Skype with only a few clicks. In my next post, we will take a look at the native integration of CRM 2011 with Bing Maps.