Today, at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, we kicked off the 2023 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a six-month rollout of new and enhanced capabilities scheduled for release between October 2023 and March 2024.

This release wave introduces hundreds of new features across Microsoft Power Platform applications, including enhanced capabilities for governance, administration, and professional development. Updates for Dynamics 365 include innovation to help employees be more productive, create exceptional customer experiences and deepen relationships, and drive meaningful growth across the business. This release also features new AI capabilities in Copilot—which more than 130,000 organizations have now experienced—that help to improve insights, save time, and enhance creativity across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.  

Tune in to the launch event, live or on-demand, for a concise overview of the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Nestlé, Kodak Alaris, Northern Trust, Centrica, Spark NZ, Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland, and Suffolk are adopting these capabilities to drive transformative changes in their businesses.

Some of the themes at the event include:

• A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
• Transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) with AI
• Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
• Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform

A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service

As a frontline for customer loyalty, service agents and field teams need access to information and insights to understand customer needs and respond appropriately. New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will help reduce time spent on common tasks, as well as introduce enhancements to the Customer Service workspace. Updates include improved inbox functionality, a redesigned voice experience, enhanced collaboration through Microsoft Teams, and integrated diagnostics for administrators—all aimed at boosting agent productivity and operational efficiency.

During the session led by Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Customer Service, we demonstrated how Copilot assists customer service and field service processes, including customer self-service, across various channels.

We also revealed how customers like Northern Trust Corporation, a leading wealth and asset management institution, can use Copilot to assist the client services team with tasks ranging from account reviews and case investigations to post-resolution wrap-ups. Northern Trust Corporation has not only gained recognition for its innovative financial services, but also for its unwavering commitment to customer service. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a steadfast component of its journey, the latest capabilities in release wave 2 can help the client service teams at Northern Trust be even more efficient, effective, and customer-focused, streamlining its workflow and enhancing its ability to provide timely and accurate support to clients. 

The session also delved deeper into the field service domain, where Centrica, a global energy services company, effectively manages its sizable workforce of 12,000 field operatives on site by harnessing the new capabilities of Dynamics 365 Field Service, streamlining processes from task assignments to issue resolution.

To learn more about release wave 2 capabilities for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, visit the release planner.

Transforming ERP with AI

The new release wave harnesses AI, automation, and analytics to help organizations drive greater operational efficiency across finance, supply chain, and operations—capabilities that enhance visibility, automate processes, extend coverage, and deliver a more integrated experience across departments.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance include the general availability of extended planning and analysis, which brings together operational and financial planning to continuously plan, act, and analyze. In addition, the general availability of business performance analytics streamlines financial reporting by centralizing data from multiple business processes and in an easy-to-use interface.

Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management include improvements in demand planning, as well as procure-to-pay processes. Copilot will now suggest actions that can help purchasing agents make better decisions in response to new and updated information that affects open purchase orders.

At the launch event, Georg Glantschnig, Vice President, AI ERP, showcased how Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland is improving its demand planning accuracy by using AI. These new features have greatly enhanced its capacity to serve more customers by precisely planning food requirements, thereby reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability through more efficient facility operations. Additionally, the process of fulfilling purchase orders has also seen a remarkable enhancement, thanks to Copilot.

We also demonstrated how New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider, Spark NZ, is transforming its finance and supply chain operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365. It can now automate many of its financial processes—including vendor invoice processing, automatic revaluation of foreign currency transactions, transaction reconciliation, billing, and complex tax calculations. Human resources can also streamline processes, from hiring to self-service vacation time requests and tracking.

See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, and Human Resources.

Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Copilot you can use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.

The new release wave introduces a variety of solutions to help marketers and sales professionals use Copilot to deepen their understanding of their target customer base, streamline engagement processes, and push the boundaries in crafting exceptional customer experiences. 

In the closing keynote session, Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience, demonstrated how Kodak Alaris, a global technology company, effectively used Copilot within Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights. Taking advantage of the new AI capabilities, it tapped into previously hidden data to target its customer base, unlocking capabilities that were once out of reach. Using Copilot, it was able to create unique personalized content to keep customers informed about its services and effortlessly establish new levels of productivity and customer connection, attracting new businesses like never before.

For more details, review the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform

Copilot in Power Platform ushers in a new era of AI-assisted low-code development. Copilot features in release wave 2 make it even easier to quickly create solutions.

At the launch event, Sangya Singh, Vice President, Power Pages, showcased how Copilot plays a vital role in democratizing development, enabling a broader audience—both citizen and professional developers—to create innovative solutions using natural language.

Through the lens of Suffolk, one of America’s largest construction companies, we demonstrated how Microsoft Power Automate helped them streamline critical material request processes, enabling teams to use Copilot in Power Automate to build flows by describing what they need.

We also showcased how Microsoft Power Apps can help Suffolk facilitate efficient coordination of construction status updates, and how the generative answers capability in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents can search industry resources for answers, reducing manual research. We also demonstrated how Microsoft Power Pages improves collaboration with multiple partners on construction projects, and how Microsoft Power BI can help Suffolk visualize safety data at construction sites across the globe, highlighting the trends, causes, and outcomes of incidents and near misses so that preventative actions can be easily identified and implemented.

In addition to enhancing daily business operations, Copilot within Microsoft Power Platform has significantly improved the governance and administrative experience, expediting the development of these applications.

Visit the Microsoft Power Platform release planner for more details.

Tune in to the Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event 

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in live or on-demand for a concise overview of the release wave.

Watch now

Watch the launch event on-demand for in-depth insights and demonstrations of the new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You can also delve into several deep-dive presentations on topics including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, responsible AI practices, and a fireside chat that explores the latest features in this release wave.

Don’t forget to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to stay informed about what’s new and on the horizon.

We also invite you to learn more about the latest AI innovation at Microsoft Ignite 2023, taking place in Seattle from November 14 through November 17, 2023, with online sessions available live and on-demand on November 15 and November 16. Register today.

The post Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event introduces wave of new AI-powered capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This post was co-authored by Caroline Dent, Senior Solutions Consultant, Velrada.

Due to fierce competition and increasing customer expectations, many organizations are looking to transform their field service operations to increase customer satisfaction, drive greater efficiency, and ensure higher service effectiveness. Digital transformation for field service operations is often focused on providing modern tools for service dispatchers who manage customer requests and create and dispatch work orders. But what about the people on the frontlines—the service technicians in the field?

Consider a utility provider with field service technicians who may work in remote areas with low network coverage or sometimes brave challenging weather conditions to support customers experiencing outages. Like any other organization, that provider needs a solution that enables it to streamline field service operations as much as possible, not only for controlling costs but also for providing the best possible experience for its customers. But when bad weather hits, it also needs a solution that ensures its field support can be productive even in extreme conditions and from the most remote locations.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, organizations with service technicians on the frontlines can help maximize productivity with AI-driven assistance and remote expert support in the flow of work. And specifically for service technicians on the frontlines, Dynamics 365 Field Service offers a comprehensive Field Service mobile app for Windows, iOS, and Android devices that provides a set of digital capabilities that extend far beyond the traditional scheduling and dispatching of work orders.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Transform your service operations

Explore Field Service

Implementing Field Service to optimize operations

As a long-term Microsoft global partner, Velrada has emerged as a pioneering force in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to empower frontline workers. With a rich history of innovation and a strong commitment to business transformation, Velrada has consistently demonstrated its expertise in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to help its customers optimize operations.

“The field service industry is undergoing a profound transformation, and at its forefront is the demand from our customers for innovative solutions that go beyond the scheduling and dispatching of jobs,”

David Conti, Product Director, Velrada

Let’s take a closer look at how organizations are empowering field service workers with more innovative solutions by deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Empowering technicians with real-time information for better service

A primary benefit of Dynamics 365 Field Service is the Field Service mobile app, available on Windows, Android, and iOS devices. Service technicians can see their workdays at a glance in Microsoft Teams, including their latest work orders. They simply click on a work order to launch the Field Service mobile app, so they can view and update work orders, customer assets, accounts, and more, no matter where they are working—even in areas with limited connectivity. This means that even during the worst weather events, workers can get real-time dispatch updates from service agents that keep them informed about the latest outages and ready to tackle challenges regardless of the weather conditions.

Using the Field Service mobile app can also help organizations like the utility provider equip field technicians with digital workstations right on their mobile devices, so they can conduct digital inspections, manage forms, and complete service checklists—everything they were previously required to do on paper, often at the end of a long work day.

Enabling efficient on-site assessments

Using the Field Service mobile app, technicians can conduct on-site assessments with unmatched efficiency. They can capture photos, record notes, provide customers with immediate estimates, and even get their sign-off by capturing their digital signature in the app. This accelerates decision-making and facilitates faster service delivery, a crucial advantage in remote and challenging locations.

Ensuring seamless inventory management

Technicians can also easily access up-to-date inventory information on their devices. This eliminates the need for cumbersome manual inventory checks and reduces delays caused by missing parts because technicians can ensure they’re well-equipped for their service calls before they leave the service center.

Prioritizing safety and compliance

The Field Service mobile app incorporates safety checklists and real-time reporting, helping to ensure compliance with safety regulations. This not only upholds safety standards but also improves the well-being of service technicians who often work under hazardous conditions, such as near high-voltage transformers or natural gas compressors.

Revolutionizing service with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and mixed reality

For many organizations, enabling service technicians on the frontlines with digital tools that help eliminate inefficient paper-based processes and ensure workers can be productive even in the most remote locations or extreme conditions is just the beginning. Conti says, “Our customers are constantly looking at ways to innovate, and our next step is to help them give technicians access to more than just transactional information by incorporating mixed reality on top of Field Service solutions.” Organizations using Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens, HoloLens 2, Android, or iOS devices to enable technicians to collaborate more efficiently by working together from different locations. This means service technicians can find and connect with technical experts working at other locations to share what they’re seeing, receive remote assistance, and quickly resolve customer issues. This is especially critical during outages that affect a large number of customers, but it can also help substantially reduce the need for on-site visits even for routine maintenance or smaller issues, resulting in improved first-time fix rates and elevated customer satisfaction. Using mixed reality in this way helps service technicians make well-informed, real-time decisions. In addition, Remote Assist call data can be securely stored in Microsoft Dataverse and accessed for future analytics on service performance.

In addition to Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Guides to attach mixed reality guides to Field Service tasks. This makes tasks like equipment maintenance more precise as service technicians can use mixed reality to overlay digital instructions onto physical machinery, which helps them perform field inspections and review the areas that require maintenance. ensuring efficient upkeep and field inspections are enhanced through annotated issue documentation, improving accuracy and record-keeping. In addition, technicians can benefit from immersive training experiences, reducing onboarding time and accelerating skill development.

Overall, the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Guides, and tools like HoloLens helps to elevate field service operations by enabling them to optimize processes and deliver unparalleled customer experiences in today’s dynamic business environment. They can empower technicians with immersive training experiences, precise equipment maintenance guidance, and real-time remote assistance. Field inspections become more accurate, data-driven decisions become the norm, and customer interactions reach new heights.

Next steps

Learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you optimize your service operations and deliver exceptional service. And read how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you accelerate service delivery, boost technician productivity, and streamline work order management with next-generation AI.

The post Enable faster, more impactful frontline services with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Every contact center wants to maintain system health with minimal usability disruptions to offer a delightful and seamless customer experience. Now, contact center managers can use Application Insights to get details about customer conversations and solve problems more easily. 

Application Insights, an extension of Azure Monitor, provides greater visibility into conversation-based operational telemetry in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This helps contact center managers keep track of the application’s health across the full conversation lifecycle.  Metrics are available starting with initiation, virtual agent engagement, routing, and assignment, through to resolution. Application Insights tracks volumes, latency, scenario success, failures, and trends at scale. In addition to facilitating proactive system monitoring, it empowers developers and IT professionals to easily identify and diagnose problematic conversations. From there, they can self-remediate where applicable or get swift support.

Connect to Application Insights

This capability enables customers to establish connectivity between their Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment and Application Insights instance. Then they can subscribe to system telemetry for a core set of conversation lifecycle events across the channels they use. When these logs are available in Application Insights, users can combine them with additional data sets to build custom dashboards. 

Application Insights in action 

Contoso Clothing, a retail giant in apparel, has recently launched their online shopping experience. With the approaching holiday season, they anticipate high volumes. Their workforce is prepared to provide a satisfying customer service experience using Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Tim is a supervisor for Contoso Clothing’s customer service division. He is responsible for the management and optimum functioning of their live chat queues. On his monitoring dashboard, Tim notices a sharp increase in conversations in the backlog, leading to longer wait times. He can see that his customer service representatives are busy with ongoing conversations. This means they are unable to receive new chats, which is leading to long wait times and low customer satisfaction. The overall conversation volumes are well within Tim’s capability, and something doesn’t seem right to him.  
 
He highlights this to Kaylee, an IT professional on his team. Kaylee has recently enabled App Insights for Contoso Clothing’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment to access conversation telemetry. This has been helping her monitor operational health as well as troubleshoot issues in real time. Based on Tim’s observation, she pulls up telemetry for all live chat conversations from the last few hours. Each conversation contains business events logged along with associated success or failure, duration, and associated metadata in Application Insights. 

While looking through anomalies and failures, she notices a high number of ‘customer disconnected’ events being logged repeatedly. Tracing these conversations, Tim and Kaylee determine that multiple chat conversations being created for the same customer within a short span of time. They see that customers are having to reinitiate a chat every time they navigate away from their app and come back to continue the conversation.  

Tim realizes the need to give customers the option to reconnect to a previous chat session. Being a business admin himself, can enable this through the Customer Service admin center in a few clicks. Using Application Insights data, Kaylee can set up auto-alerts for this scenario in case the problem happens again. Over the next few days, Tim and Kaylee see live chat wait times go down and customer satisfaction improve. They not only proactively detected the problem early but were also self-equipped to take the necessary steps to fix it and meet their customers’ needs. 

Learn more

To learn more, refer to Conversation diagnostics in Azure Application Insights (preview) – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn 

The post Use Application Insights to diagnose conversations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.