If you are a small medium business and you are thinking of moving to Telstra’s offering of cloud based CRM Dynamics and their Microsoft Office 365 suite of applications, I would seriously think twice about their offering if our experience is anything to go by.
The first thing Telstra executives wanted to do when we signed up for a five licence package was charge a credit card with the cost of getting the service.
Now three weeks later and after more than 40 emails and numerous calls to Telstra we still do not have our five CRM licenses up and running, in fact all we have is a cost to a credit card.
The first problem we encountered was Telstra’s inability to deliver an Outlook email service via their Office 365 service which is significantly more expensive than what US users are charged, in fact it is more expensive than what Microsoft Australia is now selling their Office 365 licences for via JB Hi Fi.
Telstra have come up with excuse after excuse, they blamed our firewalls and DNS settings despite the fact that we already had an Office 365 licence via Microsoft and not Telstra and this working perfectly.
We also have several licenses of Adobe’s cloud Creative Suite service and that too was working perfectly via our existing server infrastructure.
We also deliver content direct into retailers web sites via cloud based services.
The reason that we had to go to Telstra to get the services we required was because we had chosen to drop Salesforce for the simple reason it is expensive and lacks a lot of the features that Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM delivers.
Unfortunately Microsoft Australia have a sweet heart deal with Telstra that allows the carrier to exclusively sell the Microsoft Dynamics CRM service to small medium business in Australia and the minimum licence is five. This strategy eliminates over one million Australian businesses such as small retailers, real estate agents and small service businesses who do not want the cost of five licences a month.
This is despite the fact that it is these type of businesses that need mature CRM systems that easily interface with accounting packages and Microsoft’s Office 365.
Six days ago we were told that it would only be a matter of hours “defiantly by the end of the day” that our service would be up and running, that was Thursday of last week.
What Telstra claim in their marketing is that “Big companies have been able to afford the sophisticated CRM of Microsoft Dynamics for years. For many, it’s the secret of their CRM success”.
“Now, any sized business can afford to use this powerful platform. You’ll get sales, service and marketing all in one neat package, with options of 5GB or 30GB storage. For smaller businesses, it’s a golden chance to combine agility with ability and deliver outstanding, responsive customer service to the highest standards”
Really, maybe Telstra needs less marketing spin and more service if they are to be believed.
