Dynamics CRM 2011 Dialog Processes - More than a Call Script

Paul Nieuwelaar, 25 September 2012

When Dialogs were first introduced with Dynamics CRM 2011, I’m sure most people labelled them as simply being just a ‘call script’ for sales teams. They appeared to be great in scenarios where you need to ask the prospect a series of questions, and then capture the responses on their lead record; but it was difficult to imagine other scenarios where Dialogs might be useful.

In this blog post I’m going to show that Dialogs are more than just a call script, by introducing a few different scenarios of how useful Dialogs can be within your Organization.

If you simply consider Dialogs as a way of capture responses from your CRM Users, rather than just from prospects or customers, then the possibilities of Dialogs are virtually endless.

Consider some of the out-of-the-box CRM functions, such as Qualifying a Lead, Merging Duplicate Records, Closing an Opportunity, or Resolving a Case. These are all automated functions that require user input before doing certain tasks. With Qualifying a Lead for example, the user selects whether to Qualify or Disqualify the Lead, and if Qualify then which records should be created (Account, Contact, Opportunity). Finally the selected records will be created, and the Lead will be deactivated.

If you wanted to change any of these out-of-the-box tasks, replacing the existing CRM functionality with a Dialog could be a good way to control how it works, or even add additional functionality to the process that would usually not be possible.

Qualifying a Lead:
With qualifying a Lead, you could automatically qualify the lead at the end of a call script if the prospect is interested; rather than forcing them to close the Dialog and then qualify the Lead. You could also add additional entities that you want created once the Lead is qualified.

Merging Records:
Another scenario could be if you wanted to merge custom entity records; which is not available out-of-the-box. You could create a dialog to facilitate this merging process, allowing the user to select 2 records, and then choose which fields from each record should be used. The duplicate record can then be deactivated directly from the Dialog. More info

The use of dialogs are really only limited by ones imagination. There are many more scenarios I could talk about (closing opportunities, resolving cases, scheduling follow-ups), but I'll leave it at that for now. I might take a closer look at some more individual scenarios in later blog posts. Hopefully that's given you some inspiration on how you can use dialogs for more than just call scripts!