Building customer relationships through relevant and unified personal experiences

Building customer relationships through relevant and unified personal experiences

by | Feb 11, 2021 | Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Retail used to look different. It was local; it was a relationship. But new technology brought change. Trains opened the door for the Sears catalog, offering a wide array of products to distant customers. Henry Ford’s automobile led to suburbanization, malls, and department stores, changing the face of retail. And now, enabled by digital technology and the internet, customers can leverage the convenience and rapid delivery of e-commerce. Each of these innovations improved the shopping experience by offering access to more goods while reducing friction, but there was a cost to each of these changes: the relationship between a customer and retailer became more distant.

While the way people buy has changed, their desire to have a relationship with retailers has not. More than half of customers say they prefer buying from local stores (51.5 percent) verses big retailers (48.5 percent), and this trend has only been accelerated by the pandemic, with nearly 20 percent of adults saying they will support more small businesses as a result of the pandemic. (GWI, Core survey data, 20201.) At the same time, we’re seeing record growth in e-commerce (United States Census, 2020), suggesting that what customers really want is the best of both worlds: the variety and convenience of e-commerce with the personal relationships of local retail. This presents a new challenge for modern retailers: how do they build relationships with customersdelivering the unique and personalized experiences they wantat scale?

To accomplish this, retailers must rely on modern commerce platforms, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, that provide the data they need to understand their customers and the tools to deliver personalized and unified customer experiences.

Understanding customers through unified data

Building relationships with customers starts with understanding customers. In the past, customers have built relationships with brandsthrough social media, online purchases, in-store visits, and interactions with support staffbut these relationships have been one-sided. While the customer remembered each interaction due to siloed data and systems, retailers had little visibility into the customer’s history with the brand. They didn’t know the last time a customer interacted with them or for what. From the customer’s perspective, this experience can feel like every interaction with a brand is the first interaction.

For better or worse, customers want brands to act like people; like a friend who owns a local shop. They want to have an ongoing relationship with a brand, not one that resets at every touchpoint. When they interact with a new sales associate or support agent, they expect that individual to understand the context of their existing relationship with the brand. They want a continuous conversation, not fragmented, one-off discussions.

Delivering connected experiences across channels begins with unified data; however, nearly 50 percent of retail decision-makers lack unified customer data and real-time insights needed to drive these types of experiences. Recognizing these challenges, 47 percent are focused on improving analytics capabilities, including cross-channel analytics, to better turn customer data into insights. (Forrester Consulting, The Digital Imperative, 2021.)

“If you’re able to gauge customer lifetime value and find out who your best customers areand locate other customers like themit opens up tremendous possibilities for targeting them with more meaningful messaging,”Sashi Kommineni, Director of Enterprise Analytics, Chipotle Mexican Grill

Microsoft Dynamic 365 solutions enable retailers to aggregate customer data across every customer touchpoint, enabling retailers and their employees to see a customer’s history with a brand. In doing so, they can provide continuity in the relationship between a customer and brand, giving employees the essential information to make each conversation a continuation of the lastthe way a true relationship with a peer would evolve.

From unified data to unified experiences

When building customer relationships, unifying data is the first step. The second step is leveraging that data to improve customer experiences. To do this, modern retailers must consider their offering in the context of the digital era. When a customer engages with a retailer, they aren’t just buying “goods” and “services,” they are investing in the end-to-end experience of discovering, purchasing, procuring, and using the product. The “product” is the sum of every interaction a customer has with a brand. Accordingly, retailers must design every customer touchpoint with the same detail and care they do their productsbecause to the customer, they’re one and the same.

“We are driving efficiencies in our warehouse, trialing new fulfilment models, and unlocking deeper insights into customer experiences faster than ever before.”Matt Keays, Chief Information Officer, Michael Hill

Retailers must not only consider every touchpoint individually; they must also consider the holistic experience for the customer. Many retailers understand this need, with 83 percent of retail and CPG decision-makers agreeing that delivering a connected and unified experience to customers is vital to their business success. (Forrester Consulting, The Digital Imperative, 2021.) No matter the platformwhether in-store or onlinecustomers should have a consistent and continuous experience

Creating personalization at scale

Beyond creating unified experiences, retailers must create personalized experiences. The benefits of creating personalized experiences are clear. Personalization increases the number of items purchased by 110 percent, increases average order value by 40 percent, and increases net promoter scores by 20 percent. (BCG, Business Impact of Personalization in Retail Study, 2019.)

There are still many challenges in providing this level of personalization to customers. Forty-two percent of retailers said an inability to track targeted customers through the entire journey inhibited their ability to implement and grow personalization strategies, while 35 percent cited challenges attributing marketing performance to individual programs, campaigns, and channels. (NRF, The State of Retailing Online, 2019.) Over three-quarters (76 percent) of retailers cite improving digital commerce capabilities as the most urgent business priority, with 52 percent expecting better personalization as a result. (Forrester Consulting, The Digital Imperative, 2021.)

“We are well ahead of where we thought we would be, our ability to engage meaningfully with customers using real-time data has increased exponentially because we use cutting-edge Dynamics 365 technology.” Emmett Vallender, Chief Operating Officer, Citt

While many leverage personalization onlinesuch as personalized recommendations in an email (67 percent)far fewer connected the dots across channels, with only 9 percent of retailers including in-store clienteling solutions for store associates as part of their personalization strategy. (NRF, The State of Retailing Online, 2019.) For companies to build strong relationships with customers, they need to think beyond personalized experiences to create personal experiences. Where personalization is a targeting exercise, creating personal experiences requires greater data unification and a deeper level of insight and intelligence.

How to get started

Dynamics 365 Commerce makes it possible for retailers to deliver unified, personalized, and seamless shopping experiences. Combined with native support for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers. By providing frictionless and consistent engagement across online and offline channels, consumer facing organizations can build strong, personal relationships with their customers at scale.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce today or contact us to request a demo or speak to a specialist.

1These data points are from GlobalWebIndex’s GWI Core dataset. The data points were analyzed from responses to two survey questions: 1. Typically, which of the following would you rather do? Buy from big retailers (48.5%) OR Buy from local retailers (51.5%). 2. After the outbreak is over, how do you anticipate your shopping behaviors will change? Buy more from local retailers (19.8%).

The post Building customer relationships through relevant and unified personal experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

How Microsoft is training veterans for careers in tech

How Microsoft is training veterans for careers in tech

by | Feb 11, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

According to the US Government Accountability Office, about 200,000 members of the military transition to civilian life every year.1 The question is, how do we help them make the move to civilian employment and life, so they can enhance and leverage their skills for tomorrow’s competitive job market?  


 


Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) gives veterans a launch pad into the modern workforce that builds on their military skills, experience, and strengths – both soft and hard – with a wide variety of technical training and professional development. It’s a 17-week program that prepares veterans for high-demand careers in cloud development or cloud administration.


 


MSSA graduates get the opportunity to interview for a full-time job at Microsoft or one of our over 600 hiring partners, including some of the world’s most well-known and prestigious technology firms. The program provides a centralized training hub focused on preparing service members – often before their discharge – to transition seamlessly from the military to a solid career path.


 


New veterans might be surprised by how well their skills and experiences align with what most private sector employers are looking for, especially with technology. Veterans are uniquely qualified for some of the most in-demand and under-filled roles – and often already have the security clearances companies need. MSSA offers technical training, leveraging Microsoft instructor-led training courses and Microsoft Certification, to skill individuals with in-demand specialties such as cloud computing. It enables graduates to align their training with skills in demand, custom-fitting themselves to the roles they desire – either while still on active duty or after discharge. As a MSSA graduate and current Microsoft data center technician lead, Darren Braun explains, “I’m fortunate that the military has this MSSA program, because I was able to take time on my active-duty contract to do something about the next steps in my life.”


 


DarrenBraun_MSSA_Quote.png


 


A faster track to a better career: Lauren’s story


Lauren Capers’ military skillset makes her an excellent candidate for a range of technology or engineering firms. Over six years in the U.S. Army, she trained and worked as a helicopter mechanic; then transferred to specialize in electronic warfare. She loved her time in the Army and felt she was leaving with great skills for a successful career. While going to college for computer science, Lauren found work as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service until her husband told her about MSSA. That’s when she made the decision to enroll. It was a choice that changed and accelerated her career trajectory.


 


Lauren had already been out of the service for two years when she tested and was accepted for MSSA. Once in the program, she became fascinated with Microsoft Azure and the vast possibilities of cloud computing. She focused on particular server and networking skills, taking the tests for such topics as Windows Server, storage, networking, and others. Through her studies and work she also earned a number of Microsoft Certifications including the Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals and the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate. These certifications enabled her to focus on building skills needed to be successful in a role and begin her career at Microsoft as an Azure Support Engineer.


 


Lauren soon learned that the initiative-taking, limit-pushing, and leadership she’d developed in the military was extremely useful at Microsoft. As she puts it, “MSSA gives you the tools and tells you what you need to do to succeed. Then it’s up to you to push your skills to the limit.” With that attitude and her MSSA training, she’s found a new level of freedom at Microsoft that was enhanced by both her time in service and her experience with MSSA.


 


 


LaurenCapers_MSSA_Quote.png


 


Developing skills beyond technology: Darren’s story


Darren Braun, the Iowa-based data center tech lead received both technology training and soft skills from his MSSA experience. He discovered the program while still on active duty as a U.S. Marine, and enrolled before discharge to prepare for the transition.


 


Like Lauren, Darren came out of the military with years of leadership experience and training. As a satellite communications technician, he had worked on a number of systems – his career being defined by increasing responsibility and trust from his colleagues. While in the Marines, Darren had gained a confident engineer’s outlook that he could fill any role in the field. Now, as a former Marine in the world of private enterprise, he brings a valuable, fresh perspective to any team, making a direct impact on projects and culture.


 


Darren found himself drawn to cybersecurity as a specialty in MSSA, but with his background in communications, he also had strong technology knowledge and interest. As he says, “I was kind of in the middle.” He had IT experience, but it was more hardware-based than in networking. This broader field of knowledge and experience gave him a number of options for specialization, from which he chose the IT path that led him to his current position as data center lead tech.


 


Having made a choice he was excited about, Darren realized he had some work to do on his professional life skills. While on active duty, he wore his uniform and never had to think about what to wear in an office setting. He never had to worry about paying bills or how to write a compelling resume. Through MSSA, Darren developed these soft skills and learned how to market himself most effectively to companies that receive thousands of applications a day. Mentorship was key to helping Darren develop these kinds of life skills. These lessons have greatly contributed to his success.


 


“At the end of the day,” says Darren, “no one is going to care for you more than you care for yourself. And that was something that my mentors always drove on me.” In addition to expanding on his skillset through MSSA, he also learned to be strategic about how he expanded it; to be mindful about how he went about the learning, what steps he took, and how to ensure impact against his goals. For that, Microsoft Learn is an excellent resource throughout the learning journey.


 


It’s largely because of this holistic transition process with MSSA (and his considerable personal qualities) that Darren is, at 23 years old, one of the youngest data center leaders – not only in his region – but in the Americas region as well. He credits MSSA for this achievement, “I would 100% say that if I didn’t join the MSSA, I would not be in the same position that I’m in now.”


 


Transforming skills for post-military success


Since its inception seven years ago, MSSA has been highly successful, with a 90% completion rate.2 Those graduates have gone on to successful careers as software engineers, sales support, and service engineers just to name the top three. Even as COVID-19 hit in 2020, the MSSA program has been able to find opportunities within the pandemic by making remote classes a more central part of the program – opening it up to participants from Seattle to Italy to Okinawa.


 


Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA) is one of many ways Microsoft is helping a diverse population find more rewarding and successful careers. Explore our other tools, strategies, and resources for education and advancement at Microsoft Learn.


 


Related posts:


˃   Deepening our investment in the military community: Why we’re fully funding Microsoft Software and Systems Academy


˃   Staying resilient with continuous learning


˃   Level up with Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate


 


Source: 1GAO, “Transitioning Servicemembers: Information on Military Employment Assistance Centers”, June 2019

How to use Parse JSON action in Power Automate

How to use Parse JSON action in Power Automate

by | Feb 11, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

We can see a a lot of JSON in our Power Automate flow run history, and if you wonder, how you can parse JSON to make Dynamic Content (which is selectable) out of it so you can more easily make use of an object, then this post is made for you.


 


If you want to know what exactly is JSON and what you need to know about it, please read this great article by Bob German in the Microsoft 365 PnP Community at TechCommunity or watch this cool video by April Dunnam first, I will just wait here for you.


a little use case


Back again? Cool. Now that you know what JSON is, here is a little use case. Let’s say we wanted to post a random item from a SharePoint list to twitter each day using Power Automate. This is a screenshot of my list:


 

 

parsejson-SPList.png


 


and this is the overview of the flow that we are going to build:


 

parsejson-overview-flow.png


Trigger


First things first, our trigger needs to be the Recurrence trigger, in which we specify, in which rhythm this flow shall run.


SharePoint Get Items


Now our flow needs to get all items from the list that we want to randomly pick one item from.


Compose


We need to do some magic so we get a random item, I used the following expression for that:


 

 


body(‘Get_items’)?[‘value’][rand(1,length(body(‘Get_items’)?[‘value’]))]


We use the rand() expression to get a random list item from that list. The arguments inside of the expression 1,length(body(‘Get_items’)?[‘value’]) mean that our flow needs to pick a random number between 1 and (as this value could change over time) the amount of list items (which is expressed by our length(body(‘Get_items’)?[‘value’]))expression. The output of this Compose action will reflect a random list item.


Parse JSON


Now to the interesting part of this flow: We want to exactly post this random list item but we if we look into our Dynamic Content, it gives us only content from the Get items action, but that is before we get a random list item, and as we do’t want to tweet ALL list items, this isn’t a good idea. How do we solve this now? Well, we parse JSON, which means that we turn the code into objects again and those objects are then reflected in the Dynamic Content in Power Automate.


Before we add the Parse JSON action, we need to find out, WHICH JSON we need to parse. As already mentioned, we can see the JSON code in our run history, which is why we save our unfinished flow and let it run. Then we open the run history, and have a look at the Outputs of the Compose action and copy everything inside of that box.


 

parsejson-history.png


Now we edit our flow again, add the Parse JSON action, add the Outputs from our Compose Action as Inputs to that action and click the Generate from sample button. We will now paste the copied JSON into the Insert a sample JSON Payload box and click Done. What we did with that is telling the flow which objects it needs to parse. If we now look at this action, we can see the JSON inside of our Parse JSON action, but all values from the run history are replaced by placeholders: “string” (if it was text), “boolean” (if it was a yes/no), etc.


 

 


Now that this action knows what to parse, we can proceed with the next action


Send a tweet


We can now see a lot of new Dynamic Content which comes from our Parse JSON action.


 

 


We can now select all values we need in that tweet, plus some more or less generic hashtags (Pro’s will add hashtags into a dedicated column in SharePoint.) If we now save and run our flow, it will first GET all items from the list, then identify a random list element and send out a tweet with the Title and URL auf exactly that list item.


 

parsejson-twitter.png


Conclusion & What’s next?


The Parse JSON action can help you turn Outputs from previous actions into Dynamic Content which you can then use in your flow. I’d love to know what you do with Parse JSON, let me know!


 


If you are now hungry because of recipes in the list: ThatKitchenPrincess.com

First published on m365princess.com

EXO V2 PowerShell module is now Generally Available on Linux & macOS

by | Feb 11, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

At Microsoft Ignite 2020, we announced the preview of support for Linux and Windows PowerShell Core  in Exchange Online management using EXO V2 Module. Today, we are delighted to announce general availability of this feature along with the support for macOS.


Officially supported distribution of Linux is Ubuntu versions 18.04 or above. For macOS, supported versions are Mojave, Catalina & Big Sur. Read more in the detailed release notes here.


In addition to cross platform support, we added support for longer session timeouts in interactive scripting scenarios. The module is now more secure with real time policy and security enforcement in all interactive cases with the help of Continuous Access Evaluation provided by Azure AD.


Version 2.0.4 of EXO V2 module is available at PowerShell Gallery and we recommend all Exchange Admins start using this version of the module. Read more about how to install or update EXO V2 module here.


The Exchange Online Admin Team

Achy fakey heart

Achy fakey heart

by | Feb 11, 2021 | Security

This article was originally posted by the FTC. See the original article here.

You’ve heard of romance scams. But do you know how they happen? They start when scammers create fake profiles on dating apps or social media. Then, those scammers strike up a relationship with their targets and work to build trust. Sometime later, they make up a story and ask for money.

So how do you spot a romance scammer? Here are some things to watch for:

  • Any love interest who asks you to give them money on a gift card, by money transfer, or cryptocurrency is a scammer. Period.
  • Romance scammers profess love quickly. They might say they can’t meet you because they’re overseas for business or military service — but, during the pandemic, they might just say they’re locked down.
  • Romance scammers might try to lure you off the dating site.
  • Scammers will find a reason to ask you for money — maybe to buy a phone card to keep chatting, maybe to help with a “medical emergency,” or maybe something else. 
  • Romance scammers sometimes build interesting dating profiles. But try a reverse-image search of the profile pictures. Are any photos associated with another name, or with details that don’t match up? That’s just more proof that it’s a scam.

If you’ve spotted any of these signs of a scam, tell the online dating app or social media platform right away. And then tell the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov

Share these graphics with your family, friends, and social networks. You probably know someone who could use the reminder.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.