Microsoft Clarity + Dynamics CE / CRM = <3

This is the second article in my series about how to leverage Microsoft Clarity for a variety of common enterprise tools and use cases. See the other articles fomo.

Dynamics is growing like crazy

Microsoft reported that Dynamics contributed $5.8 billion in revenue for the 2023 fiscal year – which represents a 16% growth rate. That’s twice the growth rate Microsoft reported overall. Microsoft’s commitment to Copilot enhancements for CRM likely means even faster growth for Dynamics in the coming year, especially since Microsoft is offering subsidies targeting companies who currently use Salesforce.

Great opportunities are problematic when you’re flying blind

This growth driven by such a large vendor has real-world implications for Microsoft’s partner ecosystem. Whether its Sales, Field Service, Customer Service, or dozens of other specialty tools – Dynamics is a growing market that is spawning a whole industry of services and custom solutions that help organizations leverage the Dynamics CE / CRM platform to solve their real-world challenges.

There are a plethora of opportunities for Dynamics partners to add functionality, implement, customize, and train organizations through their switch from another platform. Microsoft knows this is necessary. It’s why they allow you to build and customize with Power Platform almost any way you want. It’s a big part of why they’ve gained so much market share over the last couple of years.

However, a lot of opportunity doesn’t always mean a high success rate. For many organizations, the effort and costs to adapt a CRM platform to their own needs may be prohibitive, especially if their users have gotten used to using a different platform. They must analyze their processes, compare the features of the previous tool to the features of the new tool, and decide where the humans need to change vs where the technology needs to change. Many organizations use an agile methodology for the project so they can move forward a little at a time with multiple sprints / releases that progressively improve and optimize the system, in theory.

The changes you introduce may ultimately be for the better, but there is not a one-size-fits-all approach here. You will have to adapt if and when you discover pain points. If you have no way to measure success of your implementation, data migration, and customization sprints – and / or no way to find the failures and adapt – your changes may not last long enough to see the benefits.

How do you know if the processes you trained people on are being followed?

How do you know what priorities in your implementation should be in the next sprint?

How do you know where your users are getting lost or stuck?

How do you know which parts of the system just don’t get the use you expected?

How do you get feedback without someone having to stop what they’re doing and fill out a form?

In my experience, the answers to those questions are the most consistent difference between success and failure.

Never before has it been so easy to understand what’s working and what’s not

There are not many ways to measure usage of a system like Dynamics CRM. It’s not a traditional website, so many usage tracking tools aren’t deployable and wouldn’t tell you things that are helpful in understanding the adoption of a collaborative tool. However, Microsoft Clarity is a free tool available to any Microsoft customer that provides a tracking toolset can be leveraged to monitor navigation problems, functional problems, frustration, procedure compliance, and many other usage patterns that are important to a platform owner and / or the experts that provide services to them.

Clarity Heatmaps easily highlight which sitemap items / buttons / form tabs get the most use, and which ones are just sitting there waiting for some love.

Clarity Recordings allow you to dig deeper into specific sessions where an app, entity, or custom solution is being used. You can analyze how the user got there, how they flowed through the UI of the page, and where they encountered problems. There is a lot of builtin tooling to help you skip inactivity, ask Copilot to tell you what happens in the session, jump through the timeline to relevant portions, as well as favorite and label the session to make it easier to find again later for sharing.

As you can see, Clarity is one of the best-kept secrets in the Microsoft catalog. It’s a tool that was originally designed for public-facing websites. However, Clarity is a very powerful tool that fills a big need for Dynamics platform owners and consultants. You can actually know what usage is happening in a given Dynamics environment you own or control – and analyze that data to understand how to improve your training and / or UI.

You don’t have to do things the hard way

The two hardest things about Clarity are:

1) Knowing it exists

Hopefully this article gives you a good idea of what Clarity is and how it might help. The Clarity team at Microsoft has done a very nice job documenting FAQs, compliance guidance, and predictable use cases for the tool. That being said, their documentation doesn’t specifically cover the use cases for tracking a system like Dynamics CRM. Articles like this one help show how Clarity can be a game changer for IT platform owners and consultants.

2) Getting it installed and running.

This is very similar to implementing other tools like Google Analytics. A JavaScript reference must be inserted into the site or tool you want to track.

For collaborative SaaS applications like Dynamics this is not easy. You could create your own Managed or Unmanaged Solution using Visual Studio or similar tooling, and then the solution could be deployed via native Dynamics tools.

(See How to setup Clarity manually | Microsoft Learn for a basic explanation of using a Clarity script reference and Project ID, and Create, install, and update a managed solution (Developer Guide for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (on-premises)) | Microsoft Learn for an explanation of how to create a Dynamics Managed Solution that could be used to wrap and deploy it into your environment.)

If you like what you’re seeing from Clarity, but you feel like the native installation / setup method is a bit overwhelming – you’re not alone.

VisualSP is a help system that can be deployed directly into Dynamics and / or installed as a browser extension for your employees. Once VisualSP is in place, you also have access to basic integration with Clarity that makes it very easy to track almost any web hosting platform for your organization. If your organization has a VisualSP subscription, you can request that it be paired with a free Clarity project and then choose which platforms and / or URLs you would like to track. Fill in the blank, click the button. Easy-peasy, no developers of code access needed in most cases.

We feel this is such a game changer that we offer this basic deployment with every paid subscription at no extra charge.

We also have developed help content to help you make some default settings in your Clarity project that help you protect sensitive information and make it easy to filter useful information. For example, in SharePoint projects we recommend starting with a ‘Strict’ masking mode. This is what obscures the text on the heatmaps and session replay recordings as shown in my screenshots earlier.

Once you start collecting data, you can selectively poke holes in the masking feature to show text from elements on the screen that are helpful to establish context without revealing information that could be sensitive on some pages. The effect is like what you see in the sample site below, where navigation elements, tabs, and buttons are legible in the recording – but not the contents of the form and record.

Here are some sample elements that I recommend you Mask / Unmask for Dynamics CRM. This will allow your heatmaps and session replays to show enough information for you to know what you’re looking at.

What are your thoughts? Could Clarity help you understand your Dynamics implementation and your users better?