Dynamics 365 Portal: Role in Different Industries

“How do I streamline my legal operations?” “I misplaced that client’s documents.” “I am so tired of checking up on clients for their appointments.”

Does it sound similar? These are the common challenges that businesses like yours face often. Hence, technologies have come up with unique solutions. We have auto-reminders to avoid no showups, CRM to manage customer data, digital documents to avoid paperwork and misplacing, etc. 

But too many solutions don’t sound satisfying, right? That’s when the portal comes into the picture. 

A portal is a gateway, in other terms, a webpage or website that provides access to other sites. It offers a centralized platform with all the functionalities required to manage the entire business flow. It gives limited access to users based on their roles. It means your database is totally safe. The best advantage is that you can develop a custom solution with the help of a custom portal development company.

Looking at the stats and trends from 2018, 88 percent of US respondents expect a brand to have a self-service portal. 80 percent of sales are made by involving distributors and partners, which makes collaboration platforms a necessity. 

Taking all this into account, let’s see how a Dynamics 365 Portal can help you keep up with the trends in the nonprofit, legal, real estate, and IT industries. 

Nonprofit Industry: Challenges and Solution

With people becoming smart, more tax-exempt organizations are emerging to fulfill one or the other cause. Currently, there are 1.6 million registered nonprofits in the US. No wonder nonprofits have to compete to find the right volunteers, financial assistance, retain and engage donors, organize internal and external processes, and sustain. They have to make these strategic decisions while keeping the organization's goal in mind. 

On top of that, they have to handle other operations such as:

• Create donors pipeline and track them individually 
• Calculate the total of annual funds or capital campaign for fiscal year
• Manage tasks and deadlines
• Know the status of mass marketing campaigns
• Manage volunteers, members, and events
• Track the donor information
• Create new campaigns
• Conduct meetings and seminars

Working on spreadsheets and Rolodexes may not help them transform donor data into meaningful interactions. 

A Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portal has a solution for all of the above processes for any organizational size. They can customize their database specifically for their organization's mission, terminology, and business process.

Here are the functionalities it offers for nonprofits:

• Centralized Information: to store data in one place which can be easily viewed, managed and updated by more than one team member.
• User Management: keep track of the audience and record audience activities such as events they’ve attended and campaigns they signed up for.  
• Donor Management: track donors’ past donations along with the donation details, including a history, recurring donations, upcoming and ongoing campaigns, funds invested, and more. 
• Volunteer Management: onboard volunteers, manage their profiles, timesheets, task scheduling, etc. View their allocated tasks and their availability. 
• Automated Fund Transfer scheduling: give customers the option to choose their preferred payment method. 
• Knowledgebase: provide resources to keep members, volunteers, and others updated with the latest information such as campaigns, events, etc.

Apart from this, Dynamics 365 portal also offers general features such as: 

• Secure Access
• Calendar
• Live Chat
• Dashboard
• Receipt Management

 You can learn about nonprofit management in detail here. 

Real Estate: Challenges and Solution

Unlike other industries, real estate has a traditional approach where agents and brokers work independently. However, buying, selling, and renting affect us daily. It covers the important part of our expenditure. 

Since digitalization took over, the major players are rethinking to bring in new technologies and innovations. 90 percent of home searches begin with online searches. 41 percent look online as a first step to buying property, while 91 percent of realtors use social media platforms. 

As a result, property businesses use a real-estate portal to automate manual intervention. Here are the benefits of using property portals.

• Ability to deliver reliable information: with the knowledge base and web search tools to find relevant information based on the queries.    
• Offer marketing services: with the help of data and analytics to understand user behavior and offer solutions, they would be interested in.  
• Massive Database: to provide buyers and sellers with a huge number of options.   
• 24*7 services: help customers resolve their queries with chatbots, knowledge base, live chat, etc. 
• Location-based services: combine user data and market trends to offer personalized services.
• Centralized solution: manage all operations from one place. You can track agents, brokers, and customers' every activity. Store and manage all the documents in the portal. Customers can pay directly via a portal, etc. 
• Customization features: users can customize the data and layout at their convenience. They can decide what articles or news they would like to view on the news feed, and so on.  

If you bring in the Dynamics 365 portal for the real estate industry, you can experience all these benefits for real. Here are the real-estate specific features that you can add to the Dynamics 365 portal:

• Extensive listing
• Data management
• Property categorization
• Legal documentation
• Entity management
• Multi-channel communication 
• Geo-location
• Tour scheduling
• Analytics and Reporting
• Personalization 

You can also customize the Dynamics 365 portal and add your unique features. Let’s look at how it benefits the legal industry. 

Legal: Challenges and Solution

If you’re in a legal industry, you might be thinking - why would I need a digital solution when I have to deal with matters and courts physically?

Legal portal solutions help you manage other daily activities at once. You can eliminate manual workflows, improve team collaboration, and ensure no data is misplaced or manipulated.

Having it is essential as it lets you focus more on the client’s case rather than tedious administrative tasks. Here are the benefits it offers:

• It helps you offer better services to the clients. 
• It helps you stay organized.
• You can access and read reports anytime.
• You can manage all the documents in one place systematically. 
• Save your time from searching data, files, etc.
• It helps you be up-to-date with information even in remote locations. 

A Dynamics 365 portal is a one-stop solution to all the legal industry challenges - security, customer expectations, technological solutions, increased competition, pandemic, manual operations, miscommunication, and more. 

It offers features such as: 

• Role-based access to limit user access. If you have some confidential data that you don’t want your juniors to access, this is what you need. 
• Self-service; you, your team, and your clients will have a separate log-in space to manage activities, data, and more. 
• Automated workflows to send personalized welcome emails to clients. You can even send inquiry forms and FAQs and request feedback. This reduces manual efforts and helps you stay ahead of the competition.
• A centralized solution that manages all the operations in one place.
• Case management includes case filing systems, workflows, database research, file attachment, third-party integrations, and more. 
• Data sync and internal chat options to help internal team members communicate with clients and share documents and other confidential information. 
• Quick information search to enable you to search through clients’ files within seconds.
• Client onboarding with digital documents to get rid of the manual paperwork. 
• 24*7 information available so that everyone can access data and work from home anytime from any corner of the world.  

Plus, you can take advantage of deadline management, data security and backups, integrations and customizations.   

IT: Challenges and Solution

Where on one side the IT sector is booming, on the other side, work from home is becoming a hurdle. It’s difficult for staff and supervisors to accustom to the new communication, management, and collaboration methods. It also hinders the IT team’s work as it is difficult to provide solutions virtually without understanding the actual cause of the system failure. 

Shifting to a virtual environment is a challenge, and it can delay the projects to an extent. But what if you had an organized solution that could help you manage everything in one place? 

Dynamics 365 portal will work simply like your project management software that everyone in the team is accustomed to. However, it won't be limited to projects. The IT industry can use it for HR operations, IT issues, payroll, task management, event management, communication, collaboration, and more.  

They can have separate modules for each department or functionality with a well-categorized knowledge base. Say IT module that consists of case deflection, ticket generation, query management, etc. Customers can select services, request services, manage queries themselves with a knowledge base, track their service status, and live chat with agents.

Consultants can add and update customer details, manage the record of their services, and get a holistic view of all the queries that they have to handle in a centralized place. 

Additionally, you can customize Dynamics 365 portal to automate the workflow, i.e., when a query or ticket is generated, it’s automatically assigned to the relevant person. You can then modify them based on their work routine.

You can also add task management modules to know about your team’s performance. Payroll and leaves will allow your team to manage their leave count and working hours themselves. They won’t have to ask HR all the time. 

For internal communication and collaboration, you can further integrate in-house chat features, document management to save and share documents safely. Role-based access can limit user access, ensuring data security. A community forum for the internal team and customers will be an added advantage. It will improve communication in the internal team.  

Customers can share their ideas and find solutions to a great extent, reducing the IT team’s workload. 

There’s a lot more a Dynamics 365 portal can do for IT and other industries out there. You can customize it as per your business requirements, and that’s the most effective way to improve productivity and streamline operations.

Conclusion

Dynamics 365 Portal is like clay. You can mold it in whatever shape you want with customization. Its capabilities and integration with MS suite further make it a top-notch solution to drive customer engagement. Since it is device agnostic, businesses can operate from anywhere and perform every action from any device.