Are you tired of constantly searching for the same knowledge articles in Dynamics 365 Customer Service? Say goodbye to wasting precious time and hello to the new favorite feature! 

We are excited to announce a new knowledge management feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Service that allows you to mark knowledge articles as favorites. 

With this new feature, you can easily save up to 50 knowledge articles that you frequently use as favorites. This allows you to access them quickly while you’re working on a case, without having to search for them every time. 

To use this feature, your administrator will need to enable it and provide privileges to specific roles. Once enabled, you can easily mark an article as a favorite by selecting the heart icon next to it in the search results. 

Using your favorite knowledge articles

When administrators enable favorites, agents can 

• Select an article from the list of search results. 
• Click on the favorite (heart) icon to add the article to your favorites. 
• Remove an article from the favorites list by clearing the favorite (heart) icon. 

All of your saved articles will appear in the My favorites tab. You can access this tab from various places within the app, including the app side pane, standalone search control, form-embedded control, and the reference pane. 

The best part? The article you last marked as a favorite will appear first in your list of favorites. When you delete an article, it will no longer appear on your favorites list. Additionally, your favorite articles are saved in the language in which you viewed them when you marked them as a favorite. If you view a translated version of a favorite article, it won’t appear as a favorite. Also, when a favorite article has multiple versions, the new version appears as a favorite and replaces the earlier version. 

If you’re using the Customer Service workspace or Omnichannel for Customer Service, selecting a favorite article will open it in an app tab. 

We hope this feature makes it easier to access the knowledge articles you use most in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

To learn more about enabling and using favorites, read the documentation:

• Configure Dataverse search for your environment
• Search knowledge articles

The post Get quick access to your most-used knowledge articles appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Have you tried migrating your Dynamics 365 Human Resources (D365 HR) environment yet? We announced in early December the general availability (GA) release of the automated tooling, for the lift and shift migration of your standalone Human Resources environment.  

Albert Einstein said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change” and that is how we feel about the merged and improved Human Resources on the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations infrastructure.  

As part of the infrastructure merge, all capabilities of the Human Resources application have been made available in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (Finance and Operations) environments. Customers can migrate their Human Resources environments using the migration tooling that is available in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS). They can also optionally merge their data with their existing  Finance and Operations environment. 

Benefits of migrating to the merged infrastructure 

Did you know that we were able to close approximately twenty-five ideas with over 500+ votes as a result of leveraging the existing platform functionality on the Finance infrastructure? Moving to new infrastructure can help you with the following:  

• You get one set of human resources capabilities within Dynamics 365 including: 
  • All the previous capabilities and enhancements on the standalone Human Resources application are now in the merged Human Resources.  
  • All the new functionalities that have been added since August 2022, which includes enhancements in Personnel management, Leave and Absence management, Benefits managements, Learning management, Dual-write enhancements, Resource management integration, Process automation, etc.   

• All planned roadmap functionality will only be available in the merged Human Resources environments on the Finance infrastructure.

• The extensibility options and the experience is improved through Dynamics and the Finance and Operations platform ecosystem including:
  • Enhanced Power Platform capabilities 
  • Consistent platform maintenance including: deployment, updates, Application Lifecycle Management, Lifecycle Services, Geographic availability, etc.  

Customer Experience 

We have had many customers complete their sandbox and production migrations successfully on the Finance and Operations platform.  Additionally, we have had a number of customers merge (consolidate) their Human Resources production environment with an existing Finance and Operations environment.  

One of our customers, TecAlliance, migrated their global implementation of their standalone Human Resources environments (used in 22 countries), using the automated migration tooling, in a very short span.  Here’s what they had to say about their experience:

“We were able to migrate to the Finance and Operations infrastructure seamlessly; after intensive testing, we encountered only one bug and were able to get it resolved very quickly. From the initial implementation of Dynamics 365 Human Resources to the migration of Human Resources on to the new infrastructure, it took less than 12 months thanks to the amazing support from Microsoft.” 

-TecAlliance

Call to Action 

Migrate your standalone Human Resources environment to the Finance and Operations infrastructure using the automated tooling available in LCS.   

If you have complexities around integrations and/or working to merge or consolidate with another Finance and Operations application, we recommend working with your Dynamics partner to determine the right approach.  We also recommend working with your designated Solution Architect if you are part of the FastTrack or the ACE program.  

Learn more:  

• To learn more about the infrastructure merge here  
• For detailed information on new capabilities in Human Resources, see Release plans: 2022 Release Wave 2, 2023 Release Wave 1 
• Join the Human Resource Customers and Partners Yammer group for collaboration, feedback and to stay informed on product related announcements.  

The post Migrating your Human Resources environment!  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sequences in Dynamics 365 Sales is a valuable sales engagement tool for businesses looking to drive efficiency via standardized sales processes. When sellers engage with sequences, it’s important to understand if they are supporting the process effectively. This is where sequence insights come into play.

Sequence insights provide data on the performance of sequences and their steps. Businesses can use sequence insights to review and analyze the effectiveness of their current sequences by identifying bottlenecks, and take corrective measures. Also, they can update the wait times and steps to ensure that the overall process is efficient and working as intended.

Additionally, sequence insights can help businesses identify best practices that are working well across the sales team. By analyzing data on successful sales sequences, businesses can identify common patterns and strategies that are driving success.

Reporting and insights are available at two levels:

• Sequence level analytics that provide aggregate data for the entire sequence.
• Step level analytics that provide data for the selected step.

Let’s take a quick tour to see how you can use them to optimize and improve sequences.

Gain insights with sequence reporting

First up is the “Sales Acceleration Report” (available to sales managers/operations role only). Here, a dashboard is available to review how sequences are performing all-up:

You can review all sequences together for a team-wide view or set filters to select specific sequences for performance evaluation. Not only do you get common success measures such as conversion rate and opportunity to win ratio, but you also get success rates of each sequence, along with distribution of “status” for different customer segments.

This report and the view are optimized for business level analysis and when needed, drill down to a few selected sequences.  

You can also get an all-up summary report at the sequences page that provides a list view of all sequences. There you will find the “Sequence stats” tab that shows progress of each active sequence in terms of % completion for connected records, success rates, and average duration. This is a great view for operational excellence to keep an eye on sequences whose execution or success rate is out of the ordinary.

Improve efficiency with sequence insights

You can get even more insights at a sequence and step level. For this, open the desired active sequence. You will see sequence insights and analytics right away the sequence itself is shown as a Sankey graph where each line shows how many records (leads, opportunities, etc.) were processed through the part of the sequence.

This is a quick and easy way to check overall performance of the sequence and spot points in the sequences where a larger than expected number of records is getting stuck or leaving the sequence.

Select the starting step of the sequence to get additional insights for it. Things to look for in this view:

1. Is there a particular stage in the sequence where the amount of incoming volume significantly surpasses the number of qualified records that move on to the next stage? This is a common occurrence if a step is designed to filter out unqualified prospects. However, it’s not necessarily expected in other steps. By examining the report, you can identify these drop-off points and conduct a deeper analysis. This will help you determine why most customers are not progressing past this stage, and whether the drop-off rate is in line with expectations.
2. Is the average number of days for completing this sequence within the expected range? If not, you can use step level insights to diagnose where most of the time is spent, and to identify what improvements are needed.
3. Review disconnection reasons for any abnormality (e.g., are sellers disconnecting sequences at a high rate?).

Deep dive for more analytics

Analytics is not limited to overall sequence only you can select any step in the sequence and get detailed insights to understand how sellers are executing that step. Here is an example for the sending email step:

Email insights (and insights for other communication steps) are focused on measuring engagement did the prospect receive the message, open it, and interact with its content?

All step level insights include details of their execution status. For example, how many records have completed this step, how many are in progress, or how many skipped, along with numbers and reasons for disconnection (e.g., manually disconnected, record inactivated, etc.). Finally, the “time taken” information is presented as a histogram this view is great as it quickly lets you figure out averages as well as outlier buckets.

Things to look for in a step analytics:

1. Are the average time taken for completing the sequence and the completion rate within the expected ranges?
2. Are there any steps that are outliers for disconnections or “in-progress”?
3. If steps are about communicating with customers (e.g., email, phone call), are prospects engaging as expected?

Record level information

If you need to see progress for any specific record, navigate to the “Connected ” tab (e.g., “Connected leads” if the sequence is for leads). You will see a list of all connected records and their progress in terms of steps completed, current step, days elapsed and which salesperson owns this record. This view enables you to quickly spot any outliers (e.g., records that are taking longer than others or a salesperson seems blocked on a step and requires assistance).

Final thoughts

Sequences can be an efficient and straightforward sales engagement tool for businesses that seek to provide guidance to their sales representatives. By incorporating automation (e.g., automated emails), sequences can reduce manual effort, making the sales process more streamlined and effective. Furthermore, with our new sequence insights, sales managers and operations teams can better understand how sequences are working for their sellers, including the identification of bottlenecks within the process. This data can be used to benchmark overall sequence execution velocity and success rates, allowing for more informed decision-making and ultimately improving the sales process.

Next steps

Don’t have Dynamics 365 Sales yet? Try it out now: Sales Overview Dynamics Sales Solutions | Microsoft Dynamics 365

Learn more about sequences and how to create them:
Sequences in sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn

Explore our getting started templates to quickly create sequences and try them for yourself:
Sequence templates | Microsoft Learn

Learn more about sequence analytics:
View and understand sales acceleration reporting | Microsoft Learn
Understand the sequence stats page | Microsoft Learn

The post Improve Sales process efficiency using sequence insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.