In today’s unpredictable market conditions, companies are looking to do more with less, and delivering exceptional customer experiences is necessary to both acquire new customers and retain and increase the lifetime value of existing customers. Faced with a larger set of choices, customers expect the companies they do business with to know them, anticipate their needs, and deliver personalized interactions. To earn their loyalty, it’s critical that every interaction, digital or in person, exceeds their expectations. 

To win against their competitors, companies need to deeply understand their customers, personalize every interaction pre-sale and post-sale, and use data and AI to deliver proactive and continuous value to win the hearts and minds of their customers. Marketers and sellers must work closely together as a single unit to deliver experiences where every interaction builds upon the last. Marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals are being tasked with orchestrating these experiences seamlessly across every department, for both new and existing customers, and are being asked to do this with even fewer resources.

At Microsoft, we aspire to empower every company to create amazing experiences for their customers that translate into business success. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, companies can orchestrate real-time, end-to-end journeys designed by business users. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can use all its data as an enterprise asset and get insights that can be actioned across the customer’s lifecycle. AI assists every step of the way, so employees can be more efficient and have more time to focus on the things they really want to do. Companies can:

• Gain deep insights into their customers to deliver relevant interactions.
• Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences.
• Unify sales and marketing teams to accelerate the pipeline.

Discover how 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you delight your customers while increasing your team’s efficiency. Let’s look at some of the features in this wave that I am most excited about.

Gain insights into your customers to deliver relevant interactions

Understanding your customers is key to delivering relevant interactions that drive engagement and loyalty. The use of generative AI empowers companies to understand customers like never before. While analyzing vast amount of data previously required deep knowledge of the data and took time to prepare, thanks to Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can now get insights faster and more easily by using natural language. Marketers, sellers, and data analysts can ask questions in simple everyday words to explore, analyze, and instantly understand their customerssegment sizes, preferences, and new insights to uplevel every interaction.

While Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables the speed of getting to insights, these insights are only as good as the quality of the underlying data. That is why users can now better understand data quality with an overall data quality grade to unlock better insights. AI analyzes the imported data and makes suggestions on which out-of-the-box predictions the data can support, giving companies the opportunity to remediate data issues and increase the value they can get out of the data.

To get value from insights, these must be available where they can be actioned. With the latest customer interactions compiled into a unified timeline and made available directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing, each team can be guided by a complete understanding of their customers and their recent activities. Armed with relevant customer information accessible directly within the flow of their work, sellers and marketers can orchestrate next best experiences that exceed their customers’ expectations.

Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences

To run successful campaigns, marketers must target the right customers. Often this means finding that one person who understands the underlying data set and can create the right segment to target. Now, using query assist, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can build segments in minutes by simply describing audiences’ characteristics in natural language,for example, create a segment from contacts living in Seattle.

Creating compelling emails can be hard and often getting started is the hardest part. Copilot can assist marketers in finding inspiration and generating engaging emails within minutes. With Content ideas, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can easily craft engaging emailsit’s like brainstorming with their team. After marketers specify the type of email they want to send and select the tone of voice that is the right fit with their brand, Copilot generates high-quality content that marketers can easily adjust. With the assistance of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can significantly reduce the amount of time spent copywriting, and shipping engaging emails is faster, more efficient, and fun.

In order to maximize marketing ROI, it is important to know what activities are having a positive impact. Out-of-the-box AI-powered dashboards help marketers understand how their activities contribute to defined milestones, for example, number of webinar registrations, qualified leads, or opportunities created. Thanks to AI-powered milestones and rules-based attribution models, marketers can easily identify their best performing activities and journeys, drop ineffective tasks, and optimize their marketing spend.

Unify sales and marketing to accelerate your funnel

It is no longer enough for sales and marketing teams to just be “aligned,” they must now be unified so together they can effectively nurture leads, close pipelines, and build a loyal customer base. With the new lead scoring model and qualification model in real time marketing, marketers can define criteria and identify leads to prioritize so every single qualified lead gets attention at the right time from the sales teams.

Furthermore, to make sure leads are actioned immediately, marketers can automatically assign leads to the seller in Dynamics 365 Sales. Leads are identified, prioritized, and while they are still hot, they are seamlessly passed to the relevant or available expert on the sales team to increase the chances of closing the deal.

To ensure the seller is enabled to deliver value in every interaction, sellers can access valuable insights directly within their Dynamics 365 Sales workflow. They can for instance use average transaction amount, total sales, loyalty reward points, and customer lifetime value for each contact, account, or lead and use these insights to hyper-personalize the interaction. This kind of interaction builds relationships, exceeds expectations, and leads to loyal customers.

Start using Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights wave 1 2023 features

We aim to help you capitalize on your data to better understand your customers. We aim to democratize the use of generative AI so you can deliver experiences that build customer loyalty while improving employee productivity. We aim to facilitate seamless collaboration across departments so your organization can operate as one seamless unit. And we are excited to bring solutions in this wave designed to do just this, while making your work easier and enabling you to transform customer experiences so you can grow your business.

Business Applications Launch Event

Discover new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

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Read the release notes to discover all Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights new capabilities.

The capabilities highlighted above are planned to be released from April 2023 through September 2023 either as previews or generally available.

Visit the website to sign up for a free trial for Dynamics 365 Marketing and for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Note: The product visuals are only for illustrative purposes and might not reflect the general availability feature.

The post Use generative AI to drive customer engagement with 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The role of the seller is evolving. Buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. To achieve this, sellers must be efficient and effectiveprioritizing who to engage, identifying how and when to connect, and spending more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers. Sellers can’t be overwhelmed trying to make sense of too much data and information; rather, they need the data to work for them by providing value in every customer interaction.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can improve their sales by prioritizing their best bets, collaborating with their sales team in the moment with Microsoft Teams built-in, knowing when they should engage with prospective customers, and then seeing how it went after ending the call. Sellers are given the gift of time, plus intelligence, so they can close more deals faster than before.

For years, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have asked sellers to enter data so sales managers could forecast revenue and assess seller performance. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Viva Sales, we have put the applications to work for youusing AI to simplify data capture and recommend in-the-moment interactions whether selling from Dynamics 365 Sales or in Microsoft 365 productivity tools. Starting today, we will begin to roll out new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales that use the power of AI to help sellers:

1. Prioritize your work to land more deals faster.
2. Stay productive and collaborate in the flow of work with Viva Sales.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in store for sellers in the weeks and months ahead.

2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales

Learn about the new sales capabilities helping sellers with the power of AI.

Read the release plan

Prioritize your work to land more deals faster

The sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers to sell with intent by building a prioritized worklist and surfacing automated activity recommendations to speed the sales process. Sequences enable sales organizations to automate these processes, tailoring them to their unique sales approach and best practices. Sequences are powered by our common customer journey orchestration engine shared across Dynamics 365 applications. We are enhancing the sequence capabilities to support account-centric selling with multiple sequences to a record, improve effectiveness with actionable AI-powered suggestions, and analyze performance using sequence insights.

Time with customers is precious, so every sales interaction matters. Conversation intelligence helps sellers make the most of their sales calls by transcribing the dialog and using AI to detect sentiment, questions, and actions to ensure no follow-up is missed. In this release, we have enabled text message as an additional channel for sellers to engage with customers and added additional AI capabilities to redact sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) data from phone calls and provide in-the-moment suggestions to guide sales conversations.

Sellers are routinely managing many deals at the same time. As sales engagements progress and sellers learn more about their customers, they need to regularly adjust and review this data while, at the same time, keeping an eye on how they are performing. Sellers can easily maintain the various stakeholders for an account with the new org chart capability, identify and analyze the activity of key decision makers, and ensure they stay on top of their performance and update their pipeline with the new opportunity management experience. The new opportunity experience eliminates many processes that sellers would normally need to do and streamlines everything into a single workspace.

Stay productive and collaborate in the flow of work

Not all sellers spend all their time in a CRM system. Many spend much of their time in productivity tools, emailing, calling, and collaborating with colleagues and customers. In October 2022, we launched Microsoft Viva Sales. We are empowering salespeople with AI-driven insights and data automation right in the flow of workin the productivity and collaboration tools millions are already using every day: Microsoft 365 and Teams.

Selling is a team sport. Enabling sales team members to collaborate with each other effectively with the right tools is key to their success. Collaboration spaces bring together the right users, contextual insights, and productivity apps to boost seller collaboration in Teams. Collaboration spaces makes internal and external collaboration take center stage. Sellers can use sales templates to create a collaboration space. Sales templates speed up structured team/channel creation with predefined channels, pre-pinned apps, and integrated access to CRM data.

For sales teams, the adage “time is money” is more relevant than ever before. Sellers are busy people who find it challenging to balance the time and effort required to respond to customer emails with their other responsibilities. Pain points include:

• Pulling data from a CRM system is time-consuming with complicated navigation and menus.
• Keeping track of customer opportunities and the history is difficult and increases for sellers managing many accounts.
• Responding to a high volume of emails can be overwhelming and might cause the seller to miss important details.

With the help of Copilot in Viva Sales, alongside the context of the email or meeting and CRM data, we will now generate suggested email content for a variety of scenariossuch as replying to an inquiry, creating a proposal, or summarizing the action items from meetings. Viva Sales brings together Microsoft 365 data and CRM data to help sellers quickly generate responses using the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.

Organizations have taken pride in the customization of their CRM systems, considering it to be critical to their business success. These customized experiences allow sellers to engage and capture customer data effectively within their CRM system. In October, we introduced Viva Sales, which lets sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data into any CRM system, eliminating manual data entry and giving more time to focus on selling.

In February, we released the ability for CRM administrators to customize CRM forms, fields, and behavior in Viva Sales for accounts, contacts, and opportunities. With this release, we will add the ability to configure additional out-of-the-box entities as well as custom entities using queries defined in the CRM system. CRM administrators will be able to add or remove relevant custom and out-of-the-box entities to Viva Sales forms and control filtering and sorting behavior of lists using CRM-defined queries. Sellers will be able to see custom and out-of-the-box entities in the Outlook side pane in Viva Sales, share custom entities with colleagues in Teams, search for custom entities in the Teams messaging extension, and connect Outlook email and meeting activities to custom or out-of-the-box entities.

Learn more about 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales

These are just a few of the new capabilities that we are rolling out for sellers in 2023 release wave 1. To learn more about these new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, click on the links below.

• Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales release wave documentation on Learn.
• Watch the Copilot in Viva Sales demo.

If you are not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

The post Spend more time selling—new sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.