Drift's native integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers ABM-based sales motions . We know that thousands of enterprises trust Microsoft Dynamics to run their CRM systems. Drift connects your prospects to people in real time through conversation, and you can use all the information captured through your Playbooks and conversations to book more meetings and close more deals!

Billing Plan: The Dynamics integration is available on the Premium plan and above

To quickly summarize, Drift can:

• Create and update Leads in Dynamics 365 which originate in Drift.

• Create and update Contacts in Dynamics which originate in Drift.

• Send chat activity from Drift to Dynamics

What does the Dynamics integration do?

Firstly, this integration primarily sends information from Drift into Dynamics. To be more exact, let's go over what information about Dynamics objects can be written into by Drift.

Drift to Dynamics

Leads

• New leads created in Drift can create a lead record in Dynamics 365.
• Set Lead Owner based on which rep scheduled booked the meeting, last ended the conversation, or first participated.

Contacts

• New Contacts from Drift can create a contact record in Dynamics if we can find a suitable account to associate it with.
• You can choose to allow Drift to create a new contact record even if we can't find a suitable account to associate it with.
• Set Contact Owner based on which rep booked the meeting, last ended the conversation, or first participated.

By default, Drift checks for existing contacts so that can add conversation the right people records. We also give our customers the ability to always create new Dynamics records.

 Chat Activity Data 

• When a lead or contact has a conversation with you in Drift, we can add a Task to their Dynamics record
• Drift can append the full chat transcript to the contact when their conversation is closed.
• Set Activity Owner based on which teammate booked the meeting, last ended the conversation, or first participated.

 

Other Features Include:

The ability to map Drift or Custom Attributes to Dynamics Attribute Fields

Mapping is rather intuitive. As we fill attributes in Drift, we can push them over to fields in Salesforce.

In the picture below, whatever value we have for First Name will be entered into the Salesforce field First Name. 

You'll notice different field types (String, Boolean, Date, etc), be sure to match the correct field type! Drift does not support mapping attributes to check box or multi select fields.
 
NOTE:  Missing the Account Properties tab as seen in the screen shot below?  This tab won't show up if you don't have ABM on your account.  ABM is found on Enterprise accounts.

 

This example also includes a Static Value, Drift, to populate the Lead Source field in Salesforce.

Simply begin typing into a box on the Drift side to create a static value!

 

When you're done adding your field, make sure you click the blue "Update" button!

 

Minimum Requirements to Connect Dynamics and Drift

Within Drift

• Drift Premium Plan or above
• Only a teammate with Admin permissions can set up and connect this integration

Within Dynamics

• Administrator Access
• You must have the correct User Permissions required by Drift within Dynamics. If you are using a customized Security Role for the user, they must have the Business Unit scope for Read and AppendTo on Core Records/Accounts. The role must also have Create, Read, Write, Append, Assign, on the Lead, Contact and Activity objects. For further information on these user permissions, we recommend checking out the following documentation availably via Dynamics 365.
  • Microsoft Security Role Privileges 
  • Security Roles for Connected Field Service ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
• You must be the only Drift account connected to your Dynamics instance 

Head to Settings > Integrations > Dynamics. You'll be prompted to sign in with your Dynamics credentials. 

Drift needs specific permissions in order to connect. Without giving Drift these specific permissions, you are almost guaranteed to run into errors trying to connect in the next step. If you skipped past the Requirements section, we recommend reviewing them before proceeding.

Whichever profile you use to make the connection, double check that it has the correct permissions assigned. 

You'll also want to make sure you are logging in as the user you want to connect to Drift. Do not login to Dynamics as one user and switch to another user while still logged in to Dynamics.

If we have all the right permissions, Dynamics will connect! If we don't have the right permissions, we'll disconnect and display an error message.

 

Sync Settings and Configuration

The integration uses a conversation being "Closed" as a trigger to push information over to Dynamics. Make sure to utilize the Auto-Close action in Playbook goals and remember to close your agent conversations with site visitors! See the Technical flow in the next section if you are more curious about this process.

 

Note: Drift will not automatically update contacts in Dynamics. A sync must be triggered by closing a conversation first.

Head over to your Settings > Integrations > Dynamics > Sync Settings to customize exactly how Drift sends data to Dynamics.

 

Here you can set general sync settings such as setting a minimum CQL score for contacts and conversations to have before they can be synced over as well as activity settings.

Lead, Contact, and Activity Ownership

Lead ownership is determined by the following conditions:

• The team member with a scheduled meeting
• The team member the end user was last routed to
• The user who closed the conversation.

Whichever one of these condition is matched first will determine the Owner.

Advanced Sync Settings

After clicking Show Advanced Integration Settings under Sync Settings, you will be able to set the threshold for your CQL.

 

 

Mapping Users

Drift will automatically map Dynamics users to Drift if their email is the same in both systems.  If there are users in Drift who have a different email username in Dynamics, you will need to add an "override" to explicitly add a mapping. 

To do this, from the Dynamics Setup Page, select Mapped Users. Then connect the dots by selecting the correct Drift User and SF User on the left and right columns.

Only one user in Dynamics can be matched to one Drift Teammate at a time.

Technical Logic of What We Sync to Dynamics and How

Keep in mind: we will require an email address from the site visitor to sync Contacts to Dynamics. We use this as the unique identifier during the lead/contact creation process. 

Here is how the logic works when Drift is set to sync contacts and chat activity with Dynamics (shown in the image below):



If a Lead, or a Contact, already exists with this email, we will either create a Contact or update the existing Lead based on your Dynamics duplicate setup.

What You'll see in Drift and What You'll see in Dynamics

To illustrate how this integration will look and works once you've configured all your settings, here's some more details The key components are that you'll be able to see Chat Activity records as Tasks completed in Dynamics.

Drift Chat Activity in Dynamics

The Conversation in Drift activity manifests as a Task Record in Dynamics. A completed Conversation in Drift task created by our integration includes:

• Timestamps
• Agent's name
• Visitor’s name
• Visitor's email
• Link to the conversation (in app.drift.com)

If you are viewing the Accounts tab in Dynamics, you can find the Conversation in Drift in the Activity History of a record if any occurred.

If you click into the Conversation in Drift Task, then you will see something like the following:

1. Conversation Link and URL where the conversation was started from
2. Chat transcript and Timestamps, including Agent labels 
3. Date of Conversation Close

Seeing records for Contacts which you didn't want to be pushed into Dynamics from Drift? Read on to learn how to prevent visitors you determine are bad leads from being added into your Dynamics instance.

 Stop Bad Data From Being Pushed Into Dynamics 

In order to keep your Dynamics account clean, and full of the best data on your buyers and others in conversations, there is a way to make sure that your bad leads will not be pushed from Drift to Dynamics. If you mark a lead as "Unqualified", closing the conversation will then not push that user to Dynamics, even after the conversation is Closed:

That's all! To test our your connection, we suggest in marking a test visitor as a bad lead and then close the conversation. If the Dynamics Error log (available via the Dynamics integration page) you should see no lead or contact creation activity for that site visitor, even after you successfully captured their email.

Additional Support

If you're in search of further information, or have questions that haven't been answered, we suggest checking out the Dynamics support documentation, which you'll find here.