Connect Outlook Customer Manager to other business application using Microsoft Flow
Published Jul 24 2017 11:37 AM 8,784 Views
Microsoft

Get all your customer information into one place – in your Outlook inbox

Outlook Customer Manager provides you with the ability to automatically organize all your customer information together – from Outlook, Exchange and Office 365. But your may have customer information in some other places – e.g. you may be managing customers lists in MailChimp to send them marketing campaigns, using Zendesk to solve support tickets, or working in FreshBooks to send invoices. With Outlook Customer manager you now have the opportunity to bring all your customer data into one place – your Outlook inbox.

 

Automatically create a business contact, whenever it is created somewhere else

One issue in keeping up to date information on customers is that you have them listed in a lot of different places. For example if you add a contact to MailChimp, you also want to see them in Outlook Customer Manager, since they may send you an email later. With Flow you can create a simple workflow, which every time you add a new member to a list in MailChimp adds it to Outlook Customer Manager. You can enable similar scenarios with SharePoint, FreshDesk and FreshBooks templates we've created in Flow.

 

Setting up a flow in Microsoft Flow for MailChimp and Outlook Customer ManagerSetting up a flow in Microsoft Flow for MailChimp and Outlook Customer Manager

 

Get your data from your website into on place

Outlook Customer Manager lets you manage business contacts, but also a lot more information about them – so let's look at a more complex scenario. Say you own an interior design studio. And a lot of your customers find you through online search and reach your webpage. You want to make it easy for them to contact you and ideally provide their details, so you can have an informed response to their inquires.

 

To enable this, you have a form on your website where visitors can enter information, which will be saved some where. Ideally that exact same information entered into the web form will be automatically added to your customer relationship management system. With Microsoft Flow, this can be done in a few quick steps in Outlook Customer Manager. Let's see how this works. 

 

Set up a Trigger - Whenever a form is submitted on my website

One of the services available in Microsoft Flow is Typeform. Typeform allows you to create sophisticated web forms, which you can publish on your website. Using Typeform you can create a form, which includes fields, such as name,  email address, company, request, budget and timeframe. You can publish that form on your website. We will set the submission of this web form as a trigger in Flow. So anytime someone submits an entry, Flow will be notified about it. 

 

Create an Action - Create a new contact, company, deal and activity in Outlook Customer Manager 

Once Flow knows that your customer has submitted information, it can act on it and update your Outlook Customer Manager. From the name and email address, it can create a new business contact. Using the company name, it can create and link the company. It can create deal, link it to the business contact and fill in the request as name, the budget as amount and the timeframe as close date. Last but not least it can create a new activity, which shows up on the timeline of the contact it created.

Setting up a flow in Microsoft Flow for Typeform and Outlook Customer ManagerSetting up a flow in Microsoft Flow for Typeform and Outlook Customer Manager

It is easy to get all your customer information in one place – in your Outlook inbox. Start with one of the Flow templates we've created for Outlook Customer Manager or simply create one of your own. 

 

Also see our support page on Microsoft Flow integration.

8 Comments
Bronze Contributor

Any updates on when this will be available to E3 customers? 

Microsoft

No updates at this point. Sorry. We are working on it though.

Copper Contributor

I hope that someone will correct me and tell me that I'm wrong but, after hours of support calls, Outlook Customer Manager simply does not work.  Don't waste even a minute to explore this tool.  It simply is broken and nothing more then in a development version, full of bugs and problems and completely unuseable in it's current state.

 

Please, please, someone tell me that they have it working, sharing and syncronizing between multiple computers and multiple users.

 

Frank

Microsoft

@Frank Byl sorry for the inconveniences. Yes, we do have users where it works. That being sad, we do have issues, which we are fixing right now especially with sharing. Hope to have your issues fixed soon.

Steel Contributor

Nice scenario for Microsoft Flow.

 

Copy some information from one service to other servce, is cause of mistake.

I'm using copy new schedule information from our Office 365 to partner's Office 365 by Microsoft Flow. 

 

Regards,

Yoshihiro Kawabata

Copper Contributor

Is there any documentation on connecting to OCM via outlook rest endpoint?

ie:

https://outlook.office.com/api/v2.0/me

Copper Contributor
Miriam Ney
 Miriam Ney 
 Monday
Hi,  no there is not. Tasks and contacts being used in OCM are the same as you can get through the Exchange rest endpoints. And some of the customization on top of the entities is using extended properties, which can be reached using available APIs.  Hope that helps a little. Thanks, Miriam
 
@Miriam Ney, How can developers use these endpoints if the custom extended properties are not documented? 
Copper Contributor

Hi is there a easy way to have mail chimp online registrations update Outlook customer manager and vice versa? 

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‎Feb 26 2019 02:04 PM
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