Emails. Looong cc chains. Spam.
How does your organization work with notifications? In many organizations, people get overwhelmed with emails.
Sending an email can often be the least effective way to get someone’s attention, but Outlook can hold more than a hundred people in cc, so what’s the issue?
A customer of ours, when asked why the like to notify so many people through email said; “well, we have automatic folder rules that get rid of those emails into other folders anyway!”.
With the need for collaboration across different teams, different departments, locations, countries and continents, I must have seen and used 10 different applications or more over the 20 or so years of my professional life, and I haven’t been very happy with any of them. Until now.
At Sirocco, Microsoft Teams is a central tool. We use it for video and audio conferences across our three locations around the world. My being in Dubai and often collaborating with our colleagues in Stockholm or Palo Alto, Teams is absolutely crucial for me.
If you are using Teams for chatting with your colleagues, sharing documents and collaborating around sales deals, projects or other parts of your business, why not let your CRM chat to you as well?
Using Power Automate from Microsoft, you can let Dynamics 365 update you on things that are important to you or any of your colleagues, including management.
Say for example, that your regional director wants to be kept in the loop for any Opportunity when the estimated value exceeds a certain value. The classic thing to do is ping him or her an email, which is often not very effective – many larger corporations report that managers can receive upwards of 200 or even 300 emails in a single day!
So how can we cut through the noise?
An option that we have explored lately with a few customers is using Microsoft Teams for notifications rather than email.
In the example below, I have configured a Flow in Power Automate that will:
- Trigger when an opportunity is updated in Dynamics 365
- Check if the estimated value exceeds the threshold value in USD
- If Yes – then it posts a message in our Sirocco Arabia Sales Channel
This is what I see:
And this is the flow configuration:
Since I am using Microsoft Teams to chat to our team members around the world, receiving notifications on the same platform makes a lot of sense to me.
This is our sales channel:
And in the Team channel:
