These days, customer experience is everything. Happy customers are loyal customers, but, as a group, they can be an elusive audience. Three quarters of consumers have tried new shopping behaviors since the pandemic started and 73 percent expect to continue to incorporate different brands they’ve tried into their routines.¹ As we see a slow, but continued return to normal in 2022, the path to customer loyalty remains uncertain. 

It’s likely not a surprise to most marketers that keeping a customer involves far less investment than acquiring a new one. Studies show, driving customer loyalty is worth the effortincreasing retention rates by as little as 5 percent could increase sales by over 25 percent.²

How do you know which customers are likely to stay and which ones are on their way out the proverbial door? And, if you can keep their attention, what’s the best way to ensure they have a positive experience?

Let’s look at three actions you can take to understand and engage customers who may be at risk of abandoning your brand and how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can help companies foster customer loyalty

Understanding churn

In the U.S., even the most loyal customers won’t tolerate a bad experience, with 17 percent saying they will walk away after one negative engagement. In Latin America, the risk of losing customers is even higher, with 49 percent saying they will walk away from a brand after just one bad experience.³

Knowing which customers are likely to churn can help your marketing efforts be more successful. Predicting which customers may abandon your brand allows you to focus your retention engagements on desired and higher-value customers and on increasing their loyalty. Machine learning models and AI-driven analytics can speed up the process of predicting if, and when, a customer is likely to stop using your service or product.

Trusted solutions like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights help companies leverage machine learning and AI-driven insights to predict customer behavior, allowing you to learn from human interactions at-scale using predictive data. The easiest way to start with predictive data is to use pre-defined models. Out-of-box models like the ones available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights give you the benefit of speed. You can train your models quickly and start learning about your customers now, rather than starting model development from scratch.

Pre-built solutions don’t block you from customizing your models later. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights you can customize the AI or bring your own with Azure Machine Learning. Train a customized model, schedule models to run on a regular basis, and integrate the output as an attribute of a customer record. You can also set your model to retrain itself regularly so that you are continuously improving your results. For custom predictive insights, you can use Azure Machine Learning and Azure Synapse Analytics, which combine customer data with enterprise data to develop, train, and fine-tune machine learning models.

With an out-of-box model you may learn customers have a stronger likelihood of churn based on the time since their last purchase in a particular product category. Adding an additional factor to that model such as the type of device used for online purchases could help your teams spot opportunities for improving customer engagements. For example, you may learn customers who shop on their mobile device for a more complex product have a higher need for support services if you want to reduce their product return rates. Learn more about how Dynamics 365 Customer Insights leverages AI and machine learning to predict data and customer behaviors.

Making room for improvement

Customers have more channels and platforms than ever before to express their opinions and share their experiences. Today’s customers expect high quality products, services, and brand experiences and they’re not shy about telling other shoppers, and you, when you’ve missed the mark.

Using Sentiment Analysis to synthesize customer feedback with business aspects can help you better understand and respond to your customers’ needs and wants. Whether it’s a comment made online about an order arriving later than expected, or a heartfelt thank you to a service rep who created an exceptional in-store experience, these inputs are valuable insights.

The challenge is in making sense of increasing volumes of customer data without lowering accuracy and increasing labor costs. Natural Language Processing is a type of AI that gives machines the ability to understand text in a way that is similar to how humans do the same. Natural Language Processing powers sentiment analysis by quicky assigning a sentiment score to each comment and then associating that feedback with aspects of your business. This automated process can help you make valuable insights actionable ones with less effort and at a lower cost. Quickly understand not only what your customers are saying, but why. Find out what’s working well, and which business processes or customer touchpoints may need attention.

Some examples of how you can improve your customers’ experiences using Sentiment Analysis are:

• Identifying customers with negative sentiment, and using that insight to focus your campaigns and engagements and optimize them for higher satisfaction and loyalty.
• Learning about touchpoints with issues and opportunities that are pointed out by customers and working to optimize underperforming processes or aspects of your business.
• Segmenting customers based on their sentiment and running personalized campaigns with targeted sales, marketing, and support efforts such as rewards for happy customers delivered through your loyalty program.

The more you understand about if and how your customers’ expectations are being met and the faster you can act on your findings, the more likely you are to drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Customers today are more engaged than ever. Listening to them, understanding what they want, and then meeting, or exceeding their expectations, is key to earning their loyalty.

Creating unique experiences

Customers often churn because the experience you crafted didn’t deliver on their expectations. A positive customer experience can lead to a 10 percent to 15 percent boost in sales conversion rates, but consumers not only want a positive experience, 80 percent want it personalized.⁴

Customers want to feel valued. Remember the last time your favorite barista had your perfect drink order ready by the time you reached the counter? Imagine scaling out that feeling at hyper scale, making each one of your customers feel just as special as you did while walking out of the coffee shop.

Hyper-personalization leverages the immense amount of value already within your customer data, using AI to help you deliver the right message, through the right channel, at the right time. While personalization isn’t necessarily a new concept, traditional methods of generic segmentation will no longer hold your customers’ attention.

By combining transactional, demographic, and behavioral data, and creating 360-degree views of your customers you can deliver targeted, personalized journeys. Customized engagements informed by past interactions along with individual insights such as customer lifetime value and brand affinities reduce the effort required to deliver what customers want now. Delivering tailored, next best recommendations minimizes friction points in the purchase process by helping customers quickly find what they actually need.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

When customers get what they need, they become your loyal and raving fans. To learn more about how your company can drive customer loyalty through personalized experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights webpage. Sign up for a free Dynamics 365 Customer Insights trial to experience how you can deliver personalized customer experiences with the ultimate 360-degree view of your customers.

Sources:

1- The great consumer shift: Ten charts that show how US shopping behavior is changing, McKinsey & Company

2- Prescription for Cutting Costs, Bain & Company

3- Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right, PwC

4- Personalizing the customer experience: Driving differentiation in retail, McKinsey & Company

The post How to foster customer loyalty through personalized experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

More and more customers are using process orchestration between their front-office and back-office business applications. Low-code and no-code tools are proliferating. Fusion teamsin which pro developers, IT admins, and citizen developers collaborate to build softwareare popular. It’s no wonder the job of administering these applications has become a growing challenge. We’re making that job a little easier by bringing the management of Finance and Operations apps and other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps into a single experience for the first time.

While other Dynamics 365 apps are managed in the Power Platform admin center, today admins must manage Finance and Operations apps in a dedicated portal called Lifecycle Services. Over the next several release waves, we’re making Finance and Operations apps available to be installed and managed in the Power Platform admin center.

Manage Dynamics 365 applications all in one place

Today, every instance of a Finance and Operations application is considered an environment. Customers are entitled to a sandbox and a production environment when they purchase licenses for Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, or Project Operations, and they deploy these environments in Lifecycle Services.

In the Power Platform admin center, you have more flexibility. A single environment can govern many Dynamics 365 apps, such as Marketing, Sales, and Field Service, as well as hosting Power Automate flows and Power Apps. The improvement we’re introducing is that Finance and Operations apps can be installed in the Power Platform environment model like any other Dynamics 365 application.

Giving Finance and Operations admins more choices

Administrators have differing needs based on the applications their company uses. If you don’t need Power Platform capabilities, you can continue to use Lifecycle Services to manage your Finance and Operations environments and apps. In the future, we’ll provide a way to migrate environments from Lifecycle Services to the admin center, should you choose to do so.

If you want to manage all your Dynamics 365 apps in a single environment and admin center, the new capability is available for Project Operations trials. Project Operations environments come with dual-write, business events, and virtual entity support, drastically reducing setup time. We’re adding support for Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce trials, and will support sandbox and production environments in the future as well. Eventually, customers will be able to choose the Power Platform admin center for all their administration and governance needs.

Next steps

Sign up for a Project Operations trial and give us your feedback!

The post Manage Finance and Operations apps in the Power Platform admin center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Imagine your eagerly awaited brand-new speakers finally arriveand they don’t work. The first thing you do is call customer support, expecting a quick response. You hear crickets instead. How likely are you to buy from that company again? According to a recent study, two-thirds of shoppers would stop doing business with a brand after just two to three poor customer service experiences. Organizations let customers go unattended at their peril. Use of a fallback queue to catch misrouted queries is imperative.

One fallback queue for multiple divisions is a customer service nightmare

Businesses use fallback queues to make sure no customer query falls into a crack. For organizations with multiple divisions, however, managing a fallback queue becomes a tedious task if only one queue is used for this purpose.

In this scenario, supervisors must be hyper-vigilant for any work that’s sent to the fallback queue. Agents in different divisions who are assigned to a monolithic queue may receive cases that they aren’t proficient in solving. They may also lack access to data outside of their division that they need to resolve a case.

Introducing workstream-level fallback queues in unified routing

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is introducing an enhancement in unified routing to address these issues: workstream-level fallback queues.

Workstreams group the same type of customer queries. We’ve also seen businesses using workstreams to differentiate between their internal groups or divisions. Organizations can now create different fallback queues for each of their workstreams in the unified routing settings. Whenever the routing system can’t identify the queue to which an incoming work item should go, it routes the query to a workstream-level fallback queue.

Administrators can create a new fallback queue or choose an existing queue to use as a fallback. They can assign a fallback queue to a different workstream at any time. Admins can assign agents to fallback queues according to their business requirements.

Managing fallback queues is easy with Power Automate

It isn’t enough to have a fallback queue for each workstream, however. Businesses also need to monitor their routing systems so that the fallback queues themselves don’t become a customer query graveyard. Organizations can use a Power Automate workflow to notify internal stakeholders, like supervisors and administrators, whenever a work item is routed to a fallback queue. Here’s how:

Send an email when a work item is routed to a workstream-level fallback queue

When a query is routed to a queue, the queue is associated with the work item in the Conversations table. We’ll use that action to trigger our flow. In the same action, we’ll determine whether the associated queue is a fallback queue by matching its ID. That’s Step 1 in the screenshot below.

Steps 2 and 3 get the name of the workstream and the “friendly” name of the fallback queue. The friendly name will be more helpful than the queue ID when we include it in the email that we send in Step 4.

Step 1: When a work item is routed to a queue, determine whether the queue is a fallback queue

1. Open your fallback queue in the Customer Service admin center.
2. In the URL, find the string that starts with “queueRecordId”%3A” and ends with “%2C and copy everything between the quotation marks. This is the queue ID.
   For example, if the URL contains “queueRecordId”%3A”5ee5b674-7eb9-ec11-983f-0022483d69c5″%2C, the queue ID is 5ee5b674-7eb9-ec11-983f-0022483d69c5.

3. In Power Automate, create an automated cloud flow. Select the Microsoft Dataverse trigger When a row is added, modified or deleted.
4. Set Change type to Modified, Table name to Conversations, and Scope to Organization.
5. In Select columns, enter the following string: msdyn_cdsqueueid
6. In Filter rows, enter the following string, replacing {queue ID} with the ID you found in step 1: _msdyn_cdsqueueid_value eq {queue ID}

Step 2: Find the name of the workstream that’s associated with the conversation

1. Insert a new step. Select Microsoft Dataverse as the connector and Get a row by Workstream as the action.
2. Set Table name to Work Streams.
3. In Row ID, select the dynamic content Work stream (Value).

Step 3: Find the name of the queue that’s associated with the workstream

1. Insert a new step. Select Microsoft Dataverse as the connector and Get a row by Queue as the action.
2. Set Table name to Queues.
3. In Row ID, select the dynamic content Queue (Value).

Step 4: Send an email

1. Insert a new step. Select Office 365 Outlook as the connector and Send an email (V2) as the action.
2. In To, enter the address or addresses to notify when a work item is routed to the fallback queue.
3. Enter the subject and body of the email.
   In our example, we’ve included both the IDs and the names of the workstream and fallback queue using dynamic text that was collected in the preceding steps.

Save and test your flow.

Here’s the entire flow. Numbered steps in red arrows correspond to the steps provided earlier.

It’s been our constant goal in unified routing to provide customers with robust and flexible routing solutions. Fallback queue enhancement not only gives freedom to businesses in terms of distributing their incoming workload. It also makes it easier for supervisors to monitor and manage their organization’s fallback queues.

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

References

What Customer Service Leaders Should Be Prioritizing in 2022

Next steps

Read the fallback queue documentation.

The post Workstream fallback queues ensure no customer goes unattended appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service considers both work item requirements and your agents’ capabilities to direct incoming work items to the agent that’s best suited to handle them. Routing configurations can be complex. When unified routing issues occur and work items aren’t assigned as expected, you need to track down and fix the problem.

Unified routing diagnostics help by giving you advanced tools for analyzing your routing configurations. Often, however, you have to verify settings manually in different parts of the system, requiring a call to customer support. To help you resolve these routing issues on your own, unified routing diagnostics now include assignment trace and error indication capabilities.

Diagnose assignment issues with assignment trace

Assignment trace gives you insights into why some work items are taking longer to get assigned. In addition to showing the current assignment status, it provides details of the assignment criteria to help you understand why a certain work item is getting assigned incorrectly or is not getting assigned at all.

Identify routing issues with error indicators

Error indicators help you identify and understand the configuration misses that may be preventing a work item from being classified and assigned to the right agent. You can access these enhanced diagnostics at the record level in the Diagnostics tab in the system.

Scenario: Issue with skill matching algorithm criteria

Let’s consider a scenario with Contoso Coffee, which sells coffee beans. A new queue in its Consumer Division handles high-priority queries from Contoso Club members. Renee, the supervisor, added two new agents to the queue. While doing her daily analytics report check, she observes that although there is a new work item in the queue, it has not been assigned yet. She decides to diagnose the reason for it.

Drilling down into the logs per routing stage, Renee quickly finds out with the help of the new error indicator that no agent matched the criteria that were specified in the routing rules. She decides to take a closer look at the assignment trace details to understand the assignment criteria. After looking at the criteria, Renee realizes that the default skill matching algorithm has been set to Exact Match. Although both agents have the required skills to handle the work item, their skills weren’t an exact match. Since the criteria weren’t met, the work item wasn’t assigned.

Having error messages and assignment trace with criteria specified in the diagnostics saved Renee a great deal of time. She has all the information she needs to diagnose and fix the problem, all in one place.

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

Next steps

Learn more about enhanced unified routing diagnostics and read the documentation:

Diagnostics for unified routing (Dynamics 365 Customer Service) | Microsoft Docs

Dynamics 365 Customer Service unified routing default queue and diagnostics (video) | Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The post Solve unified routing issues faster with enhanced diagnostics appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The role of the chief financial officer (CFO) has been evolving for some time, from hindsight report generation to forward-looking advisor, business innovator, and change agent. During the pandemic, many finance leaders took ownership of large-scale digital transformation effortsa trend that is only accelerating. Indeed, a central lesson learned through the challenges of the past two years is the advantage of being able to rapidly adapt an organization to minimize the impact, or avoid altogether, the effects of disruption. Even as we move into a post-pandemic world, disruptive events are here to stayincreasing in both severity and frequency. At the same time, new business models are emerging, such as the subscription economy and service-based experiences like platform-as-a-service (PaaS), that require significant changes to financial and operational models.

Taken together, the need to adapt and overcome disruption and the opportunity presented by emerging business models offer a clear justification of why organizationsand in particular the futurist, change-making CFOmust develop flexibility and adaptability to achieve resilience. This point has not gone unnoticed. According to McKinsey, only 11 percent of companies believe their current business models will be economically viable through 2023, while another 64 percent say their companies need to build new digital businesses to help them get there.¹ Despite having so much at stake, many finance leaders face roadblocks on the journey to become more agile. Therefore, this blog looks at 3 forces driving adaptability for CFOs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

1. Modernize enterprise resource planning solutions

The first force driving adaptability is the modernization of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Recent technological advances, such as the shift from the rigid structures of monolithic ERP to highly adaptable, composable business applications, are a primary benefit driver of ERP modernization. This is perhaps one reason that, according to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that have successfully renovated their ERP platforms will achieve at least a 40 percent improvement in IT agility to deliver business outcomes.² This will not surprise companies that had completed ERP modernization before or during the pandemic. These businesses grew US corporate equity, assets, and profit ten times faster than corporate debt during the 21 months of the pandemic³proving that savvy companies, boosted by digital transformation, can rapidly pivot to new sales and services models.

Dynamics 365 Finance offers businesses standardized capabilities on a composable ERP platform. Plus, it can function as both a stand-alone solution, allowing organizations to avoid costly rip-and-replace of legacy technology or as a tightly integrated and extensible system. As CFOs look to modernize existing ERP solutions as a path to unlocking adaptability, Dynamics 365 is enabling the transformation and improving IT agility to embrace new business models.

Learn more in our recent blog: Dynamics 365 breathes composability into enterprise resource planning modernization.

2. Enable a real-time, single source of truth

Though expensive to maintain and resource-intense to customize, legacy ERP often becomes highly customized and fragmented as businesses grow and add new solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or warehouse management systems (WMS). These additions are disparate and disconnected from a central ERP, leaving data silos that are difficult to integrate and reconcile. Without unified data available in real-time across the organization, finance leaders can remain stuck in the function of economic guardians and unable to rise to the role of business innovators.

Dynamics 365 Finance is built on a modern, open platform that can be easily connected to both legacy internal solutions and modern, cloud-based systems via RESTful APIs. This flexibility and extensibility serve to unlock adaptability, automate data harmonization, and create a single source of truth. Ultimately, this allows finance teams and the broader organization to confidently make quicker, data-first decisions.

3. Deliver AI-driven insights

As we have discussed previously, AI is poised to transform the finance function. The core set of financial management processes that support the work of every organization are often highly manual, making them slow to innovate and challenging to transform. While progress has been made through automation, specific tasks, like predicting when a customer will pay an invoice or creating an intelligent cash flow forecast, require more person-hours than are available in a month, let alone on demand. This is because these tasks require comprehensive knowledge of large, complex data setsa job ideally suited to the application of AI and machine learning.

Dynamics 365 Finance recently announced the general availability of finance insights, a set of AI-powered capabilities that help companies improve the efficiency and quality of financial processes by leveraging intelligent automation. Finance insights provide three new financial management tools: customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and budget proposals. When combined with Dynamics 365 Finance, these tools improve business decision-making by delivering AI-driven business insights that are clearer and faster while also improving operational efficiency by utilizing intelligent automation.

Take a deeper look in our webinar with special guest R “Ray” Wang from Constellation Research, Inc., to learn how analytics, automation, and AI can help you achieve financial dexterity.

Maximize financial visibility and profitability

As we have seen here, businesses and the finance leaders who support them need the right technology solutions to drive adaptability if they are to thrive in an era of disruption and to capitalize on emerging trends, such as PaaS, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and the subscription economy. To this end, we walked through three forces that are driving adaptability for CFOs with Dynamics 365 Finance: modernizing ERP systems, enabling a real-time, single version of truth, and delivering AI-driven insights.

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 Finance can help your organization maximize financial visibility and profitability in our new normal, check out our webinar with special guests from The Adecco Group. You can also see Dynamics 365 for yourself with a Manage Financial Risk Guided Tour today.

Sources:

1- McKinsey Digital, 2021. The new digital edge: Rethinking strategy for the postpandemic era.

2- 2021 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.

3- McKinsey & Company, 2022. The CEO agenda in 2022: Harnessing the potential of growth jolts.

GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post 3 ways Dynamics 365 powers adaptability for chief financial officers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.