The past year has presented enormous changes in both our personal and work lives. But one thing that hasn’t changed is our desire for personalized service experiences and quick resolutions when we have issues. Service, which is often the face of a brand, plays a key role in what that experience looks like. That means that organizations need to understand what customers are looking for as expectations continue to rise, and leverage technology in a way that allows them to reimagine what customer service can look like. As a champion in customer services, we’re pleased to announce for the eighth consecutive year, Microsoft was named a Leader in the June 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center. We believe this placement recognizes Microsoft’s continuous investment and authority across our service solution and Cloud functionality.

“Gartner defines the CRM Customer Engagement Center (or CEC) market as software applications used to provide customer service and support. This support is by engaging intelligentlyboth proactively and reactivelywith customers by answering questions, solving problems, and giving advice.

The orchestration of customer service processes through a CEC application involves both assisted and self-service experiences within the customer journey. This is typically built around case management records and processes and extends to emerging approaches such as conversation-based customer engagement.”

CEC applications are expected to harness and synthesize customer data during their interactions to improve service delivery.

Noted capabilities

Microsoft has long pioneered cutting-edge technologies that have led to the development of rich features that empower agents to collaborate and increase productivity, optimize resources, and personalize the customer experience. Microsoft has been a partner to service organizations around the worldhelping to quickly align service operations to strengthen business continuity to withstand a changing economic landscape.

Take SHI Cryogenics Group as an example. For more than 300 years, this manufacturer has pushed the boundaries of possibilities to remain at the forefront by deploying leading-edge technology. SHI Cryogenics Group wanted to apply the same level of innovation to its service and repair processes to enhance support and value for customers. To help achieve this goal, SHI Cryogenics Group turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

SHI Cryogenics has reduced product repair turnaround times from two months to two weeks and now shares real-time product data with its customers, providing them with insight into performance issues and service needs. SHI Cryogenics’ customers have more visibility into their products, experience fewer equipment failures, and get their issues resolved faster. Customers can trace any volume of work from production into the field and they’re confident that SHI Cryogenics can deliver support under any circumstance.

What’s ahead for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

We’re committed to deliver rich, innovative features that map to three distinct pillars:

• Tailor customer engagements. Deliver empathetic connected service experiences that provide a holistic view of customers’ case information to enhance first-time fix rates and support smooth service delivery every time.
• Elevate employee effectiveness. Empower employees across your service organization to solve problems faster with actionable insights, enriched data signals, and mixed reality.
• Optimize service operations. Drive proactive service with IoT, unlock new service revenue streams, and reduce downtime and service costs.

With 2021 release wave 2, we’re enhancing this leading end-to-end customer service solution. We’re transforming service operations by connecting people, places, and things. We’re committed to helping you deliver seamless customer-centric experiences by anticipating the needs and wants of every customer. We’re helping service organizations enhance agent productivity by providing the right tools at the right time, regardless of their role or location. And we’re helping to resolve issues the first time and help you identify gaps in service and opportunities for improvement through AI-driven analytics and rich insights. These efforts can drive new revenue streams that were previously overlooked. And yes, the possibilities are limitless.

The bottom line

Many service organizations consist of siloed agents answering service calls, putting customers on hold, asking the same questions repeatedly, and searching for the right answer while following an outdated script or canned response. This process is inefficient, costly, and unsatisfying to the customer.

The world of customer service is changing. Today, service organizations are evolving into profit centers, redefining business models, and creating powerful and fulfilling customer experiencesall supported by leading-edge solutions like Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

We’re excited to be positioned as a Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant Leader for the CRM Customer Engagement Center and are committed to bringing you the best customer service application available. Depend on Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help you tailor customer engagements, elevate employee effectiveness, and optimize service operations.

Learn more

Read the Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant Report for CRM Customer Engagement Center.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Check out Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2021 release wave 2.

GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, 15 June 2021, Nadine LeBlanc, Jim Davies and Varun Agarwal.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft named a Leader in 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Customer Engagement Center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Ignite kicks off in just a few days. This year’s digital experience brings together a global community of technology professionals to learn where Business Applications technology is heading, and the tools and resources available to help you solve the toughest challenges facing your business today.

Across three days of programmingNovember 2-4, 2021Microsoft experts will dive into technical and hands-on content across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, as well answer your questionsall streaming live and on-demand, so you won’t miss out.

We’ve pulled together a list of essential sessions to attend, both keynotes and breakout sessionsinformative featured presentations followed by a live Q&A. Be sure to register today to get updates before and during the event, as well as build your own session schedule.

Click on the linked titles below to learn more and add each event to your session scheduler.

Only have time for one or two sessions? Be sure to watch Microsoft Into Focus: Business Applications on Wednesday, November 3, 2021, for a sneak peek at new features and capabilities in 2021 release wave 2, as well as Build a hyperconnected business on Tuesday, November 2, 2021, to learn how to build a digital foundation for today’s business.

Day 1 (Tuesday, November 2, 2021)

Keynotes and core themes

Hear from Microsoft leadership on revealing the latest innovations that are shaping the flexible, innovative, and secure business environments of the future.

Microsoft Ignite Opening

Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 8:15 AM to 8:50 AM Pacific Time

Our economy and society are undergoing a sea change of digitization. Satya Nadella, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, will discuss technology trends and innovations across Microsoft cloud that will transform every business and industry going forward.

Build a hyperconnected business

Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 9:30 AM to 9:55 AM Pacific Time

In a rapidly changing world, there’s no more “business as usual.” The way we live and work will never be the same, and there’s no clear roadmap for what’s ahead. Organizations need the agility to respond rapidly and predict what’s next, and that requires a new approach to business solutionsone that harnesses data as a resource and turns its potential into power. Join Alysa Taylor, CVP, Industry, Apps, and Data Marketing; and Charles Lamanna,CVP, Business Applications and Platform, to learn how to build a digital foundation with Microsoft cloud that will carry your organization into the future.

Breakout sessions

Attend sessions that take a deeper dive into topics aligned to a variety of roles and interests. Live, interactive Q&A segments directly follow the featured presentation.

Accelerate cross-organization collaboration with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365

Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Time

Across industries, businesses are experiencing a tectonic shift in how, when, and where people work. In this session, hosted by Emily He, CVP, Business Applications Marketing, we’ll introduce new and upcoming integrations between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 that enable everyone across your organization to connect, communicate, and collaborate on business tasks and processes in a seamless, natural, and secure way. Get a first look at new capabilities in action and learn how everyone in your organization can achieve more together as one business, right in the flow of work.

Connect experiences across every customer touchpoint with a complete marketing solution

Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 12:30 PM to 1:00 PM Pacific Time

Companies struggle to make sense of an ongoing and accelerating data deluge and to pull actionable intelligence from it. This challenge has made data the lifeblood of business in the digital age and establishes a new value proposition: companies that can use data to serve customers are able to build stronger relationships. A company’s control over its datathat is, its digital autonomyhas never been more important. Learn how Microsoft offers a complete marketing solution to help you accelerate business growth and deepen customer connections from acquisition to retention. Win more hearts and minds in an omnichannel world, while building trust with the highest level of data governance, privacy, and compliance.

Enhance supply chain visibility, predict risks and improve decision making with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights

Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 1:30 PM to 2:00 PM Pacific Time

Customers have experienced supply chain disruptions since early 2020. Now, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights helps companies deliver great customer experiences. By unifying real-time data from third-party data providers, logistics partners, customers, and multi-tier suppliers, companies gain end-to-end supply chain visibility. This visibility is further enhanced by creating a digital twin to generate AI-powered, actionable insights allowing companies to proactively make decisions that put customers first.

Day 2 (Wednesday, November 3, 2021)

Keynotes and core themes

Hear from Microsoft leadership on revealing the latest innovations that are shaping the flexible, innovative, and secure business environments of the future.

Microsoft Into Focus: Business Applications

Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 8:15 AM to 10:00 AM Pacific Time

Get an inside look at what’s new in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You’ll hear from James Phillips, President, Microsoft Digital Transformation Platform, along with top engineers and other Microsoft Leaders as they guide you through the new features and capabilities in 2021 release wave 2.

Breakout sessions

Attend sessions that take a deeper dive into topics aligned to a variety of roles and interests. Live, interactive Q&A segments directly follow the featured presentation.

Gain a new perspective by bridging the physical and digital

Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 10:30 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time

In today’s environment of both digital and physical spaces, organizations have less visibility into their physical footprint than their digital channels, limiting their potential to optimize operations and improve employee and customer experiences. Microsoft is helping organizations harness observational data and use it to produce real-time insights to unlock business value. Join this session to learn more about how Microsoft continues to build onto its spectrum of solutions that bridge the digital and physical to unlock new perspectives.

Introducing Voice Channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Time

The new Voice channel, built on the same planet-scale platform powering Microsoft Teams, enables more personalized customer experiences across all channels, delivers AI at each step of the call, unifies insights across all interactions, and streamlines contact center operations onto one scalable, easy to use solution. Join us to learn more about the future of customer service experiences.

Explore more Dynamics 365 sessions

These feature keynotes and breakout sessions are just the start. Explore the full list of sessions that explore topics related to Dynamics 365.

In addition to the live streams above, each segment will be rebroadcasted throughout the event. The key segments are open to everyone, but we encourage you to register in advance to unlock the full Microsoft Ignite experiencefrom digital breakout sessions with live Q&As to conversations with Microsoft experts and your global community.

Even more to explore

Microsoft Ignite is your opportunity to learn and engage with Microsoft experts and a global community. Check out all of the activities at this year’s events:

• Ask the Experts: Bring your questions and get answers, while exploring the latest product announcements, by engaging with the engineers and partners who are building your most important tools and solutions.
• Connection Zone: Meet with local Microsoft leaders and channel managers, interact with engineers and technical experts, join live Q&As, and more.
• Learning Zone: Accelerate learning with the Cloud Skills Challenge, expert-guided sessions, step-by-step modules, certification details, and more.
• Intro to Tech Skills: Dive into the key topics, essential tools, and Microsoft technologies that can lead to new roles or a different career path.
• Create Zone: Snap animated selfies, express your point of view, and spark conversations in the #MSIgnite community with shareable content of all kinds.

Get the most of your Microsoft Ignite experience

Be sure to follow Microsoft Ignite on Twitter to stay up to date and connected with the community and register for Microsoft Ignite today to create a customized schedule. We’ll see you there.

The post Your guide to Dynamics 365 at Microsoft Ignite 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of tax calculation for Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Over the past three decades, technology has made the world smaller. The steady drive of globalization and digitalization has pushed through significant headwindssuch as market protectionism, global recessions, and, most recently, a global pandemicto change the way we live and conduct business. Now, despite vast geographic distances, it is relatively simple to connect, communicate, and trade instantly with almost anyone. This has set the stage for businesses of all sizes and industries to expand globally in pursuit of new markets, suppliers, talent, and revenue streams.

As businesses pursue global expansion, they are challenged to keep pace with a myriad of ever-evolving country-specific laws and frequently changing legal requirements from local, state, and national tax authorities. For many years, the only option available for business leaders looking to ensure tax compliance globally was to hire enough full-time finance and tax professionals to monitor policy changes and align company processes accordingly. Indeed, this has been the standard solution for some time now.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is changing this situation for companies with intelligent and timely globalization solutions, such as tax calculation. Tax calculation not only helps businesses unify their tax-relevant data, but it also leverages automation to make their tax calculation processes more efficient. At the same time, it assists in minimizing compliance risk by reducing opportunities to introduce errors into the process. In these ways, our new tax calculation service is simplifying and improving tax compliance for global businesses.

Learn more in our recent blog: Reduce complexity across global operations with Dynamics 365

Tax calculation service overview

Tax calculation is a low code, hyper-scalable, multitenant, microservice-based tax engine that enables organizations to automate and simplify the tax determination and calculation process. It is a standalone solution built on Microsoft Azure that enhances tax determination and calculation capabilities of Dynamics 365 applications through a flexible and fully configurable solution.

As tax calculation becomes generally available, it will integrate with Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and we plan to integrate with more first and third-party applications in the near future. Additionally, it is fully backward compatible with the existing tax engine in Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and can be deployed as a new feature in the Feature Management workspace. Tax calculation service can also be enabled at more granular levels, including by legal entity or business process.

Tax determination

One challenge for organizations today is determining the appropriate tax for their business transactions. This challenge increases in difficulty as organizations add new regions where they trade and as the volume and types of transactions they process grows.

Tax calculation configures and determines tax codes, rates, and deductions in a low code and flexible way based on any combinations of the fields of a taxable document, such as shipping to or from location address, item category, or nature of counterparty, typically found on purchase orders or invoices.

Tax calculation

Another related challenge that companies face in addition to determination is calculating the tax due for their transactions. Again, this challenge becomes more difficult as business scale increases and as business is conducted in more distinct tax regions, each with its own authorities and requirements.

Our tax calculation service helps businesses meet this challenge as well by configuring with low code experience and executing the complex tax calculation formulas and conditions required by tax regulators, such as tax calculation based on margin or tax calculation on top of other tax codes.

Multiple tax registration numbers

Organizations also face challenges when they have multiple tax registration numbers that must be rolled up or reconciled to one central legal entity or party. When businesses add multiple tax registration numbers, the complexity of tax determination and calculation multiplies in step.

Tax calculation enables organizations to support multiple tax registration numbers under a single party, such as a legal entity, customer, or vendor. It also supports automatic determination of the correct tax registration number on taxable transactions like sales orders and purchase orders. And it works across various workflow scenarios, including transfer pricing, consignment warehouse, or low-risk distributor model.

In conjunction with new tax calculation, modified Tax Reporting provides new capabilities to execute country-specific, tax regulatory reports like VAT Declaration, EU Sales List, and Intrastat from a single legal entity. In multiple tax registration business scenarios, the reports select sets of data only relevant for transactions with specific country tax registration and provide results in the legally required form of an electronic file or a report layout required to file taxes in the country of tax registration.

Learn more about the feature enhancements of Tax Reporting and availability for specific countries and regions in our release notesand TechTalk.

Tax on transfer orders

A final challenge that businesses face when confronting the complexities and risk of tax compliance in foreign markets is determining and calculating the tax on transfer orders. This situation is quite common, such as when a business has a regional manufacturing facility or central warehouse that feeds storefronts scattered across multiple countries.

With tax calculation, businesses can allow for tax on transfer orders to support the EU regulation “Exempt intra-EU supply according to article 138 of the Directive 2006/112/EC” for Intra-EU Supply of goods.

Availability

Tax calculation is deployed in the following Azure geographies.

• Asia Pacific
• Australia
• Canada
• Europe
• Japan
• United Kingdom
• United States

Learn more about the features of tax calculation service inour tax calculation overview, and check out our recent TechTalk on tax calculation.

Learn more what some of our partners are saying about the new tax calculation capabilities of Dynamics 365:

• in EY’s blog Microsoft Dynamics 365: supporting your organization to navigate the complex tax landscape: “The flexibility provided by the new tax calculation service combined with the global tax knowledge and experience provided by EY teams on the ground, can help enable your organization to automate tax calculations throughout the business from highly complex supply chain scenarios to more routine indirect tax compliance.”
• in KPMG’s blog Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the tax function – Part 1.

Next steps

If you are an existing Dynamics 365 user and would like to start today with tax calculation and Tax Reporting, check out our Get started with tax calculation documentation. Or, if you would like to see how Dynamics 365 Finance can benefit your company and enable smoother global expansion with microservice solutions such as tax calculation and Tax Reporting, we invite you to get started with a free trial today.

The post Tax calculation enhancements are now available for Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.