Manage customers
Customers are critical components to any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. A customer represents an individual or company that receives, consumes, or buys a product or service.
Three ways in which organizations might categorize customers are:
Business-to-business (B2B) - Customers are other businesses, such as a business that sells and implements telecommunication equipment to hotels.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) - Customers are individuals. These customers are businesses that you meet daily through activities, such as purchasing groceries, getting a haircut, or stopping at a favorite coffee shop.
Hybrid - Customers might be businesses or individuals. For example, an automotive repair shop has customers who are individuals. Customers go to the repair shop to get their car's oil changed, tires rotated, engines overhauled, and so on. However, in a situation where that automotive business outsources their mechanics to organizations with fleets of trucks, buses, or automobiles, they service organizations and people. Other examples might include software vendors, event centers, and insurance companies.
Dynamics 365 has two primary records to support this functionality:
Account - Represents a company or an organization that you do business with, such as a customer, vendor, partner, or reseller.
Contact - Represents a person. A contact can be a standalone person or an individual at an organization. A single account record in Dynamics 365 might contain multiple contact records.
Work with accounts
You can create account records in the Sales Hub or Sales Professional applications. To do so, go to Accounts and then select the New button.
For customers who purchased Sales Enterprise and Sales Premium, your system administrator can turn on address suggestions. When that feature is enabled, Bing Maps can fill in the account's address details for you. Address suggestion is available with contacts, accounts, and leads.
Contacts represent individuals that your organization does business with. Depending on your organization and the scenario, a contact might represent a standalone record, such as a lawyer who represents some of your customers. Alternatively, a contact might be associated with an account, such as individuals who work for a specific account.
You can create contact records in the Sales Hub or Sales Professional applications. You can create contact records manually or directly from an account record. To create an individual contact, go to Contacts and then select the New button.
When you create a contact record, only the last name is required; however, you should consider filling in data such as the first name, job title, email address, phone number, and address details.
A contact record is often associated with account records. You can associate a contact with an account in multiple ways. You can make the connection from the Account record or from the Contact record.
To make the connection from an account record, select the lookup field next to Account Name and then set it to the account that you want. You can only associate a contact with one account at a time.
To add contacts directly to account records, open the account record that you want to work with. On the Contacts sub grid, select More Options, and then choose New Contact or Add Existing Contact.
While an account might have multiple contacts, such as a purchasing agent, CEO, or president, each account typically has one main contact that serves as the main point of contact for the account. In Dynamics 365, this main point of contact is the account's primary contact. You can set any contact that's associated with an account as the primary contact. After you define a Primary Contact for an account, their phone number and email address are displayed on the account record.
One advantage of working with accounts and contacts is having a consolidated view of the activities and related records that are associated with them. For example, Sales users can view all opportunities that are currently open for an account without leaving the account record.
In Dynamics 365, all records have a Related tab. On the Related tab, you can look at all different record types that are related to the record that you're working with. After you select the Related tab, you can select the record type that you want to view. For example, after you select the Related tab and then select Opportunities, all opportunities that are associated with this account display.
For more information, see Manage your Accounts and Contacts.