Introduction to managing customers in Dynamics 365

Managing customers in Dynamics 365

Account and contact records store much of the information that you and your teams collect from your customers.

You store data about companies you do business with and accounts. Similar to Microsoft Office, Outlook, or other email programs you store data about the people you know and work with and contexts.

Usually, an account has more than one contact associated with it, especially when you’re working with large companies with many departments or locations. You can deal with several people to manage the account.

Creating customer accounts

If you work mostly with other companies, you’ll probably want to use accounts to keep track of them. You track details about your business dealings to include activities, stakeholders, decision-makers and also track things such as open service cases or pending sales opportunities.

An account typically represents a company or an organisation. It could be thought of as a vendor, business partner, organisation, distributor, or even a reseller.

Keep in mind that some organisations may use the account record to represent a family unit, for example, the Smith family could then have various members of the family edit as context to the account.

Context is used to store data and activities associated with the individual person. An organisation using accounts within Microsoft Dynamics 365, might decide to associate with one or more contexts with an account.