Moxie Partners With Microsoft to Socialize Dynamics CRM

Moxie Software announced Nov. 5 a partnership with Microsoft in which its enterprise social networking software will be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for external customer relationship management using social networking tools.

Moxie’s approach to social CRM differs from that of Yammer, a recent Microsoft acquisition, which is also being integrated with Dynamics CRM, but for internal social networking, which Yammer announced at its first-ever user conference Oct. 29.

The Moxie solution is designed for the contact center environment, where a company and its customers communicate before and after a purchase using a variety of tools, including chat, email, accessing a knowledge base and social listening, which involves monitoring consumer sentiment about the company on social media. While contact centers also take phone calls, more customers prefer those newer tools over use of the telephone, said Tom Kelly, CEO of Moxie Software.

Moxie enables CRM by connecting a contact center agent to the company’s underlying “system of record,” Kelly said, based on Dynamics CRM, with information about the customer, their purchase history, record of previous customer service calls and the like.

“From Moxie’s standpoint, [the partnership] allows us to take advantage of Dynamics and brings a tighter marketing relationship between Microsoft Dynamics and our channels,” Kelly said. “And likewise, it allows Dynamics to take advantage of our large enterprise footprint that we have in a whole range of industries where our channels are industry-leading.”

Dynamics will integrate with a Moxie platform called Spaces by Moxie, which delivers what the company calls “knowledge-base solutions” for different communications platforms, including email, chat, self-service Web pages, co-browsing and social media.

Kelly emphasizes the authority of the knowledge base that a customer or a contact center agent can access to get the correct answers to a problem quickly.

“When we talk about a knowledge base at Moxie, we talk answers,” he said. “These are authoritative answers to questions so that when … someone goes into a knowledge, base, they are going in to extract an answer that has been authorized, approved and the company is saying ‘You can take this to the bank.’”

Yammer integrates with Dynamics CRM for internal enterprise social networking so that people within an organization can use social media tools to collaborate and share ideas on a particular project.

At YamJam 2012, a Yammer user conference held in San Francisco, the Cleveland-based law firm Baker Hostetler, demonstrated how it uses Yammer for case management, in which lawyers, paralegals and others can share case information with each other, such as reviewing briefs, posting information on case precedents and more.

What Yammer and Dynamics CRM can do for internal communications, Moxie and Dynamics can do for external communications, said Kelly.