As the business landscape rapidly evolves, integrating AI solutions into field service operations isn’t just a trend—it’s a necessity. Previously, we shared “5 steps for helping you become AI-ready in field service”. Today, we want to talk about how you can transform your field service organizations by using AI capabilities to drive efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately boost the bottom line.

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The power of predictive maintenance

One of the most significant benefits of AI in field service is predictive maintenance. By using AI algorithms and machine learning models combined with Internet of Things (IoT) data, you can predict your customers’ equipment issues before they occur through continuous monitoring. But, predictive maintenance can also provide data-driven insights that can help you identify other patterns, trends, and potential areas for improvement—for example, energy expenditure—that help your customers see your field service organization as a partner.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service customers can use Connected Field Service to seamlessly connect their IoT devices to diagnose problems and identify potential issues even before customers become aware of them. Work orders are automatically generated based on IoT data and displayed in Field Service, where field service managers and dispatchers can then use the generative AI capabilities in Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365 to automate and streamline work order and resource management. This proactive approach also minimizes downtime, reduces repair costs, and can ensure uninterrupted service delivery to enhance customer experience and increase customer loyalty.

Optimizing frontline workforce management

Today’s enterprise companies can no longer rely on the old paper-based processes for scheduling and performing maintenance and repairs. While many organizations have made the switch to digital in the past several years, their processes remain in a half-digital, half-paper-based limbo that can end up making things more confusing than ever. Field service managers spend hours managing customer information—customer requirements, work orders, resources, schedules, and more. Having to switch between different applications—or between digital and paper—means mistakes are more likely to happen. The bottom line is somebody entering the wrong customer data can make insights and next steps less reliable—which can cost you money in the long run.

AI-powered workforce management tools can help you optimize scheduling and dispatching, helping to ensure that the right technician is assigned to the right job at the right time. This not only improves your operational efficiency, but also enhances customer satisfaction by reducing wait times and increasing first-time fix rates. Dynamics 365 Field Service Plugin for Microsoft Copilot in Outlook or Microsoft Teams enables your field service managers, dispatchers, and technicians to take advantage of generative AI capabilities that make them more efficient and responsive in servicing customers. With Microsoft Copilot, field service managers can simplify work order management by auto-summarizing work orders, assets, resources, bookings, and more. And more importantly, they can manage work orders inside the tool they use the most.

Maybe your field service managers spend a lot of time managing customer emails. Now, without leaving Outlook, they can use the Field Service Copilot pane to help them streamline work order creation with relevant details pre-populated from emails and provide key work order information. The scheduling suggestions in the Field Service Copilot pane also helps service managers schedule field technicians based on travel time, availability, skill set, and more. Your field service managers can also easily schedule work orders using Copilot for Field Service in Teams. As it does in Outlook, the app suggests scheduling options based on factors including availability, skill set, distance to the customer site, preferred time slots, and more. They can also use natural language search in Teams to locate information including guides and manuals, work orders, customer history, and more.

Field technicians can struggle with tightly packed schedules, especially when appointments and routes need to be updated during the day. Now, AI-powered work order updates (in preview) in Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app enable your field technicians to update work orders on the fly by describing work performed in natural language, using either text or speech-to-text capabilities. Based on their input, Copilot recommends updates to work order fields and updates them after confirmation from the field technician. Field technicians can also view AI-generated work order recaps on the go without having to navigate through customer records to view pertinent information.

Enhancing customer experience

Using Microsoft Copilot Studio, customers can create AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants to provide instant support to their end users, answering queries, and resolving issues in real-time. This 24/7 availability enhances customer experience, helping lead to higher satisfaction and loyalty. You can automate routine customer conversations with field service technicians, such as calls about regularly scheduled maintenance or warranty calls. This enables your technicians to focus on more high value conversations. A benefit of AI-powered chatbots created using Microsoft Copilot Studio is that customers can interact with them using natural language to describe their questions or issues. Any information collected from the chatbot can also be used to pre-populate work orders, helping technicians resolve issues or schedule service appointments faster. You can also use AI-powered chatbots to help keep your customers informed with automated service reminders and notifications via email and text messaging or enable them to reschedule appointments.

Driving data-driven decision making

By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI can uncover patterns and insights more efficiently than human analysts, providing you with better data to help you make more informed decisions. When it comes to your field service organization, using AI to discover trends and patterns can help with strategic planning and drive continuous improvement.

Dynamics 365 Field Service provides a resource and utilization report, a work order summary report, an optimization summary, and an admin report to help you drill down into how your field service operations are performing. You can also connect to Microsoft Dataverse, the intelligent data platform that powers Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps and the Microsoft Power Platform, to access your Field Service data and other relevant customer or operational data to create custom reports. For customers using the Microsoft Power BI Premium service, Dynamics 365 offers various ways to visualize your data using Microsoft Copilot in Power BI to get the most from your data. You can use natural language to get quick and easy summaries, or you can refine or guide the summary by customizing prompts, such as “summarize this page using bullet points” or “provide a summary of work orders on this page”. You can also ask specific questions about the visualized data on a report page and receive a tailored response. This response includes references to specific visuals, aiding you in understanding the specific data sources contributing to each part of the answer or summary within a report.

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers: Transformative AI in action

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers has successfully implemented AI in their field service operations, leading to significant improvements. By integrating Dynamics 365 Field Service with AI capabilities, they have streamlined their work order management, reduced manual tasks, and improved scheduling efficiency. The introduction of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service has further enhanced their operations by providing technicians with real-time assistance and insight.

The future of field service

The integration of AI into field service is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s a present-day reality. Business decision makers who embrace this technology can expect to see significant improvements in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance. Now is the time to harness the power of transformative AI and lead your field service operations into the future.

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Today, we’re announcing we will end product support and updates for Dynamics GP on the 30^th of September 2029 (with security patches ending on the 30^th of April 2031). We want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to our loyal GP customers. Your trust and collaboration have been essential to building an incredibly strong GP community! We’re dedicated to supporting your ongoing businesses and success during this transition.  

With advancements in technology and changing market dynamics, business leaders are looking at their operations tools now more than ever to stay competitive, drive growth, improve profitability and ensure long-term company success. Microsoft is committed to ensuring we offer robust and innovative solutions to meet these needs. Dynamics 365 Business Central is Microsoft’s flagship SMB ERP product, optimized to help businesses thrive in a new world of cloud and AI computing.  

Navigating change together

We understand change can be challenging. Transitioning from a familiar system to a new one requires careful planning and support. Microsoft is here to support you every step of the way. Our extensive partner ecosystem is ready to assist in making a seamless transition to the Cloud. Additionally, our partners offer specialized expertise and services to help you implement Dynamics 365 Business Central successfully.

We are also offering a range of resources to support  you during this transition, including training programs, documentation, and community forums. These resources will help you and your team get up to speed with Dynamics 365 Business Central quickly and efficiently. By leveraging these tools, you can ensure a successful transition and start reaping the benefits of your new ERP solution. 

Continuous innovation built on trust

Dynamics 365 Business Central integrates cutting-edge AI tools that transform how businesses operate. From automating routine tasks to providing predictive insights, AI empowers you to make smarter decisions faster. Additionally, our commitment to security ensures your data is protected using encryption and other industry security best practices, giving you peace of mind and allowing you to focus on your core business. This integration enables you to leverage the full potential of your technology stack, driving efficiency and increased productivity.

Learn more and stay up to date with announcements around Dynamics GP here.

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Successful sales is and always will be about human interactions, and the building of familiarity, comfort, and trust. But getting to those moments—all the searching and compiling and preparation—can take a lot of drudgery. Ensuring that an entire team of sellers has the time and capacity to strengthen those human relationships can be an enormous feat.

Sales also is and always will be competitive. Catching a change in the tone of a customer’s voice, sensing some enthusiasm for a feature your product offers that others don’t, anticipating a pain point and solving it before it comes up—these are all small advantages that can create big wins. Your competitors know this, too.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

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That’s where generative AI changes the game. For sales—and the customer relationship management (CRM) systems or platforms that drive them today—forgoing AI is not an option anymore. Implementing AI in ways that fit naturally with your business puts your sales teams at a competitive advantage. Forrester Research expects businesses that invest in enterprise AI initiatives to boost productivity and creative problem solving by 50 percent this year.¹ This expectation is predicated on the involvement, commitment, and understanding of leadership. Without leadership’s involvement in the planning and implementation of AI, organizations face difficulties realizing the technology’s potential and their own.  

While it’s true that most sellers are deep in digital debt, struggling to sip from a fire hose of data, emails, meetings, and notifications, AI should not be seen as merely a productivity tool. Rather, it’s a driver of growth, an enablement engine that transforms enterprises and primes them for innovation and future evolution. AI accelerates problem-solving by enabling data-driven decision making in real time, with far greater visibility at any moment in time. It also creates opportunities for unprecedented levels of personalization, creating the understanding among customers that you know them and their challenges.

By now you’ve probably heard about how AI can automate mundane tasks and allow employees to focus on higher level activities. In this blog post, we’ll show you specific use cases where AI can empower the innate skills of sellers to make CRM systems even more powerful and effective sales tools.

How generative AI lets sellers be more human

Prompt: “What are the pain points [Company] faces in the [industry] sector?”

In previous blog posts, we’ve pointed out how AI punches up personalization in the marketing and sales process, automating the production of tailored email templates and social media messages.

But AI personalization is not limited to content creation. It also means parsing data to ensure that a proposal is fine-tuned to address the specific customer pain points. Using information that might previously have taken hours to search, AI can test exactly which phrases and words resonate with specific sets of customers or sales segments. In essence, AI can make your customers feel heard. 

In part, that’s because you can spend more time listening. At its best, AI allows us to be more human. With Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, for instance, AI automatically collects and summarizes all pertinent details of sales calls and meetings in real time so sellers can be fully present during those valuable one-to-one conversations.

During a call, Copilot collects a wide range of information—pertinent pain points, customer sentiment, and action items triggered during the call—so sellers don’t have to be distracted by note-taking. Instead, they can bring to bear their situational awareness, focus on reading the moment, and react to context clues. Copilot creates the call summary and makes it available immediately, complete with action items triggered by the discussion.

But it’s not just about freeing sellers to be their best professional selves in those critical one-on-one conversations. AI can help sellers at every point it takes to get to those meetings—and well afterward, too.

Before the call: Bringing sales targets into sharper focus

Prompt: “Which of my accounts are most likely to close this quarter?”

The sales process in a nutshell involves knowing who to sell to, then knowing how to sell to each account identified. AI accelerates and enhances both processes.

Most sales leaders would agree that sellers spend too much time on non-selling activities. Research commissioned by Microsoft that included 31,000 workers across 31 markets found that sellers spend less than a third of their time actually selling. The same study indicated sellers spend more than 66 percent of their day managing email and other menial administrative tasks.² Their bosses support these findings.

Built to aggregate and refine massive amounts of data, AI can help from the very earliest stages of the sales process to investigate potential targets, providing data that sellers would take hours to collect on their own. And it’s not just time—AI creates utility by providing information sellers might fail to consider. Data that is already in a CRM system is continually augmented with relevant input from market research databases, news from the marketplace, or recent developments involving customers or their key decision makers.

This enriched information allows AI to help sellers score their prospect list based on a likelihood to convert historical engagements and other organizational data. With the right connected data source, a simple query like: “Which of my accounts are most likely to close this quarter?” generates accurate rankings that allow sellers to more effectively prioritize their efforts.

In addition to ordering target lists, AI provides valuable details about each specific account in a preparation brief, equipping sellers while slashing research time. Using natural language prompts, sellers can surface key details about new potential customers like pain points and purchasing patterns. In the case of existing customers, AI can populate account and opportunity summaries with names and titles of meeting participants, pending tasks, and highlights from recent meetings, email threads, and service or support tickets—so sellers come to each call primed with effectual information. AI can even predict the most optimal time to contact a customer and suggest the best channel for connecting. 

The presale time savings and utility of AI are significant. As per Gartner®, “By 2026, B2B sales organizations using generative-AI-embedded sales technologies will reduce the amount of time spent on prospecting and prepping for customer meetings by over 50 percent.”³

Optimal calls: Bringing persuasive information to every interaction

Prompt: “What does the [industry] say about our competitor’s products?”

AI’s ability to summarize and transform content allows AI-enabled CRM systems to process countless transactions and recommend approaches that work best. Sellers using AI can quickly accumulate compelling information, guided by best practices that help create a winning approach.

As we’ve noted, time is a limiting factor for sales teams. CRM systems enabled with AI, like Dynamics 365 Sales, can create dozens of pertinent, opportune introductory emails in seconds—a chore that used to take hours. 

But time-savings is only part of the picture. The quality of the emails produced by AI may include elements—active verbs, clear sentence structure—that not every seller excels in. For example, a seller from Company A might prompt an AI program to: “Draft a personalized email to [Company B] congratulating them on their recent product launch and suggesting a meeting to discuss how our solution can enhance their new product’s market performance.”

The resulting email can be personalized, note a recent development in the market, speak directly to an initiative that the customer is excited about, arrive at an opportune moment, and highlight features of the seller’s product tailored to address the customer’s pain points.

Furthermore, a simple query like: “What does the [industry] say about our [competitor]’s products? Once you collect that information, please provide me with five bullet points on how our is differentiated”, would provide differentiating points to use at an appropriate moment in a sales call. In preparation for an important one-to-one, AI can surface key talking points, identify needs and pain points, and generate similar use cases and success stories.

Dynamics 365 Sales, for instance, tailors sales pitches with industry-specific insights, then personalizes, reviews, and refines them. But the utility doesn’t end in preparation. During a sales call, the system can identify sentiment triggers and suggest next-best actions, helping to close more deals.

After a meeting, thoughtfully composed follow-up emails build trust and goodwill, and open a door for further communication. In the past, writing these emails and making them specific enough to be valuable has eaten a huge chunk of sellers’ time.

Create a greater customer impact with Dynamics 365 Sales

These examples only scratch the surface of the ways AI can allow sellers to lean into the intuitive capabilities that allow them to excel at their jobs. The more you work with generative AI as a team, the more efficiencies you can find in your processes.

Automating menial tasks returns potential to where it belongs—to the human in the loop. Seamless integration into your CRM system and tools that your teams already use enables more opportunity for innovation and sales acceleration. Your teams can grow their skills even as the process of selling becomes easier and more human—which means each interaction can create greater impact with your customers.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales.

Sources:

¹Forrester 2024 Predictions: Exploration Generates Progress, Forrester Research, Inc., October 2023.

²Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report, Microsoft, Inc., May 9, 2023

³Gartner, Multidimensional CRM: How GenAI Will Revolutionize Sales Force Automation Platforms, By Adnan Zijadic., 13 July, 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc.
and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with
permission. All rights reserved.

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