With the back-to-school season just around the corner, school and university administrators, educators, parents, and students are preparing for another challenging year. The August release of Dynamics 365 education accelerator includes updated data model and sample apps that can help partner ISVs continue to build and deliver solutions for schools and universities.

In addition, the K-12 portal, an information hub built on Microsoft Power Apps, has been redesigned to make it easier for parents and students to track school activities and assignments. Plus, the release includes a data model aligned with Microsoft School Data Sync (SDS), an application offered with Microsoft 365 Education.

What’s new in the August release

• Higher education event marketing allows education institutions to leverage Dynamics 365 Marketing capabilities to reach students and families in meaningful ways.
• K-12 portal update includes an improved interface of the student portal for K-12 schools and a better experience for all users.
• School Data Sync (SDS) data model alignment makes it easier for partners to build connectors and for educational institutions to leverage the ability to flow data from SDS to Microsoft Dataverse.

Take advantage of event management capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing

With the August release of Dynamics 365 education accelerator, partners can leverage Dynamics 365 Marketing to bring the power of personalized communication and campaigns to education customers around the world. Partners will help customers enable targeted communication, direct customer journey, and ensure ongoing engagement with their institution.

This capability can be used to build campaigns for a variety of school events, including back-to-school orientation, family night, or school tours. Schools and universities can create events where participants can register and communicate with the institution, and schools can view attendance. Best of all, this capability is completely flexible for partners to customize.

Improved usability of the K-12 student portal

The K-12 student portal has received a design uplift to improve user experience.

School Data Sync (SDS) data model alignment transforms data gathering

School Data Sync (SDS), an offer from Microsoft 365 Education, reads rosters from most Student Information Systems (SIS) and creates classes and groups in Microsoft Teams, Intune for Education, and third-party applications.

By aligning the data model between the education accelerator and SDS, we will enable the possibility for customers already using SDS to leverage the powers ofDataverse, the Common Data Model for Education, and Power Platform.This is transformational from how data was gathered before and allows partners to build specific connectors for their customers.

Eduphoric is one such partner, and we are excited to see how customers will benefit from this work. According to Pamela Knott, Eduphoric’s director of education technology, harnessing the advantages of the Power platform help ” educators to support more students, more effectively in less time.” Knott says Eduphoric’s Learning Team solution ” aggregates attendance, behavior, course performance, wellness, and tech readiness data into one holistic student profile so that teachers, counselors, administrators and support specialists can identify struggling students and work together to get them back om track.”

What other partners are saying about Dynamics 365 education accelerator release

Microsoft’s partners who have seen a sneak peek are excited about the power and flexibility the August release provides:

• Thomas Manders, managing director for Coffee + Dunn: “With many of our clients in the education space, we understand schools’ needs to increase communications efficiency, improve the student relationships and innovate for the future of education. Serving as a robust foundation, the accelerator helps schools eliminate data silos, enable powerful insights and act on these insights to deliver exceptional student and alumni experiences. As a partner, we can help our clients achieve these goals much faster than starting organically.”
• Shekar Kadaba, chief experience officer for Frequency Foundry: “Over the last couple of releases, the Industry Accelerator team had responded to the market need for supporting and engaging students in different learning modes by adding additional functionality to support the student lifecycle. We see that envelope being been further pushed with the latest release.”

• Dr. Jennifer Beyer, vice president of product management for Anthology: “Our college and university partners have been able to leverage D365 Marketing as part of our solution to increase their intentional connections with their students whether it is driving them to complete their admissions application or keeping current students on track.”

Next steps

We encourage you to register andtest drive the education accelerator. You can accessGitHubto try out the solution, data samples, Power BI examples, and more.

If you have any questions,don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.If you’re a partner working in the higher education space and want to use the accelerator and help shape the next version of it, pleasereach out to us.

The post Dynamics 365 education accelerator helps partners deliver solutions for educators and students appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, a cloud-based solution that helps accelerate omnichannel transformation from order intake through orchestration to fulfillment.

Increasingly, consumers expect seamless omnichannel buying and after-purchase experiences with multiple fast delivery options. Companies are responding to this challenge by adopting solutions to centrally manage the entire order lifecycle from the time their customers place the order to the time it is delivered. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management enables organizations to adapt quickly and meet future order and fulfillment complexities while supporting contemporary methods like buying online or from an app for in-store or curbside pickup.

With Intelligent Order Management, business professionals gain real-time cross-channel inventory visibility and advanced analytical capabilities for better decision-making processes. Using AI-powered order insights, they can re-model and orchestrate the order fulfillment journey with easy-to-use drag and drop tools, and proactively overcome bottlenecks all while driving efficiencies across the supply chain to ensure that their customers’ needs are met on time and cost-effectively.

Order fulfillment becomes a competitive advantage

According to Statista, “In 2019, the same-day-delivery market in the United States amounted to 5.87 billion U.S. dollars. By 2024, this market is forecasted to reach 15.6 billion U.S. dollars. Same-day delivery in e-commerce in the U.S. is one of the most requested services.”

At Microsoft, we view this rise in demand for same-day delivery as an opportunity for businesses to turn order management into a competitive advantage. With Intelligent Order Management, we are providing businesses with the ability to meet these growing digital commerce needs by automating and optimizing fulfillment using real-time omnichannel inventory data supported by AI and machine learning.

Learn more in this webinar: Turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

Configurable, not coded

According to Gartner, “by 2023, 50 percent of medium to large enterprise will have adopted a low code application program (LCAP) as one of their strategic application platforms.” In responding to the trend toward low-code/no-code (LC/NC) applications, our solution is designed to be configured, not coded, making it a more modern open platform. Moreover, it allows users to proactively overcome disruptions by reconfiguring order flows using a powerful but simple drag and drop interface. With these tools, users can rapidly deploy and scale with the latest fulfillment methods by leveraging pre-built connectors to various ERP, order intake, fulfillment, and delivery partner from our growing ecosystem.

Learn more in this short video introduction:

Solution architecture

One of our objectives with Intelligent Order Management is to enable order intake from a variety of sources and pass them through the order orchestration, and process layers within the application. Intelligent Order Management’s event-driven order orchestration services then coordinate the events triggered by various APIs to different system connectors to make optimal fulfillment decisions. These decisions are continuously communicated and tracked for the entire order life cycle across all fulfillment partners and legal entities.

We also wanted to ensure that Intelligent Order Management could be used with other legacy systems within your business and since this is built on the Microsoft Power Platform, it enables us to deliver the low code, no code environment that users need to adapt quickly and respond intelligently to constraints and disruptions in the supply chain.

What’s next?

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management allows companies to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate order flows through a rules-based system with effective exception handling. Our groundbreaking solution also empowers business users with real rime visibility across inventory and order flows, and more importantly, provides the capability to quickly adjust and change any order path. Intelligent Order Management uses machine learning to learn how business users react to each exception and provide better recommendations each timehelping them achieve optimal stock levels and improve cash flow.

Ready to take the next steps with Intelligent Order Management? Get started today with a free trial. Or, to learn more, check out the top five reasons to transform your order management system with our e-book The Savvy CSCO’s Guide to Transforming Order Management.

1- “Same-day delivery market size in U.S. 2019-2024”, E. Mazareanu, May 12, 2021

2- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, 30 September 2020, Paul Vincent, Yefim Natis, Kimihiki Lijima, Jason Wong, Saikat Ray, Akash Jain, Adrian Leow

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of the Gartner Inc., in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Human interaction is at the cornerstone of every experience and today’s world has dramatically shifted what that means. Customers expect each touchpoint with businesses to be authentic, timely, and efficient, which has led to a rapid acceleration of customer engagement tools. Perhaps most important is customer service scenarios, where businesses must act on customer feedback to deliver in the moment. However, many businesses are falling short on this key activity, leading to more dissatisfaction and inefficiency.

61 percent of companies don’t close the loop with customers who gave feedback (Forrester)¹

Customer service is paramount to the success and longevity of customer relationships. That’s why Dynamics 365 Customer Voice brings powerful data, sentiment, and satisfaction analysis to Dynamics 365 Customer Service. With easy-to-use tools, your team will be empowered with the right information at the right time. To learn more about how to get started using Dynamics 365 Customer Voice with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, read our free e-book, “The Power of Knowing Your Customers.”

Panduit boosts loyalty by automating surveys

Companies that emphasize customer service are at the forefront of delivering great experiences. They adapt their systems to meet customer demands while elevating how they operate in a digital environment.

Panduit, a global electrical and network infrastructure manufacturer, took this to heart as they rebuilt their customer service group into a broader customer experience organization. With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and Customer Service, Panduit built a single platform to create a data-driven culture centered on the customer. They used survey results to track its Net Promoter Score as a strategic way to monitor overall customer sentiment and loyalty.

“For us, Dynamics 365 trumped its competitors because it’s such an easy platform to use. Now that [our customer service teams] get near real-time feedback in the voice of the customer, our advocates understand exactly what they need to change or continue doing” Jim Dillon, Director of Order Fulfillment, Panduit.

A connected service and voice of customer program doesn’t just impact the customer’s experience, it positively shifts how the company operations. Streamlined data and real-time insights into the customer make exceeding customer expectations simple, freeing up time for developers to work on other impactful projects. No longer can silo data be an effective form of understanding customers, and companies need to shift their systems into comprehensive platforms to provide the best customer experience.

Read more about how Panduit used Dynamics 365 to understand their customers.

Accelerate empathy and effectiveness of agents

Your customer service department is arguably the doorstep to your brand, products, and perception. From online chats to support agents, each avenue is a make-or-break moment for the customer and their relationship with your brand. These moments are built on two things: empathy and efficiency.

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice maximizes the effectiveness of the support you give customers, creating tailored interactions and cultivating longevity. Within Dynamics 365 Customer Service, chat agents can send surveys after a purchase or service, automatically capturing direct feedback. Additionally, surveys can be created as a feedback and customer service mechanism, giving businesses the opportunity to resolve complaints. Watch the video below to learn how to easily use surveys in Dynamics 365.

Agents who have access to automatically analyzed feedback from Customer Voice can help customer service departments continually understand their customers. And, with automation tools, agents can gather satisfaction scores and utilize the data to create more effective and efficient service calls and support chats. True digital transformation of customer service departments starts with the customer and with quality data, but ends with authentic connections. The technologies of tomorrow can create unparalleled value for organizations as agents can continually learn about the customer, improve their own effectiveness, and elevate brands.

The future of connected customer service

Connectivity is essential in a digital-first world, not just with customers but within companies. While each department has its own responsibility, they can all interact with the same singular customer making it critical that everyone is aligned on who that customer is, what their satisfaction is, and how to deliver on their wants and needs. A connected environment increases the chances for a positive experience, even in situations where a response is needed quickly.

63 percent of companies don’t have a cadence of sharing in line with decision making (Forrester)¹

Aligning technologies across the department, from voice of customer solutions to customer service solutions to your customer data platform, creates a wealth of unified data that all agents can tap into. This can create a level of consistency and proactiveness unmatched by competitors. Connecting technologies isn’t just about aligning on data, it’s also elevating the knowledge of agents and their understanding of customers. The future will demand tailored, consistent experiences, and creating a comprehensive solution that pulls all your data together for every scenario will leave a lasting impact on your valued customers.

Learn more

To learn more about listening to customers and aligning data across your organization, visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice website or start your free Dynamics 365 Customer Voice trial today.

To learn more about delivering great customer service, visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Service website or start your free Dynamics 365 Customer Service trial today.

Download our free infographic to learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

1- The State Of CX Measurement And VoC Programs, 2020, Faith Adams, Forrester, May 3, 2021.

The post Deliver authentic customer service with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In engaging customers today, we need to be heard above the noise, and we need to deliver creativity and uniqueness to each customer in the moments that matter. Customers are looking for value and for companies to address their needs on their terms. Companies now can start with a deep understanding of their customers and then act on this information to engage them and make them feel like they have a one-to-one relationship with the company. This approach is going from competitive advantage to expectation. The old segment-based approach to marketing automation is no longer adequate. In today’s marketing world, we need event-triggered communications to engage customers with personalized experiences. This extends well beyond traditional marketing practices and permeates deeper into your company beyond marketing teams.

After months of anticipation, we are thrilled to announce that thenew real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing are now generally available to all businesses, beginning in select regions and rolling out worldwide in the months ahead.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is transforming the way both marketers and business users alike can elevate customer experiences, win customers, and earn their loyalty faster through personalized, real-time, customer-led interactions, all on a unified adaptable platform by making every interaction count.

“Creating an enterprise-wide common conversation that meets customers in their exact moment of need is core to a successful growth strategy. This is exactly what makes Customer Journey Orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing a compelling and important addition to the Dynamics suite. It is an intuitive solution to one of CX’s greatest challenges: learning from signals and responding beyond expectations,” Liz Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst of Constellation Research.

And Dynamics 365 Marketing experiences get even better as you also use Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights makes it easy to unify customer data, augment profiles, and identify high-value customer segments. You can use profile and segment data in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to fine-tune your targeting and further refine your journeys to drive meaningful interactions.

We’ve partnered with Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst, Rusty Warner, to create a webinar titled Customer Journey Orchestration: Make Every Interaction Count to frame this modern marketing landscape. It’s a must-see overview that lays the foundation to understanding changing customer expectations and how marketing technology must evolve to meet these needs.

We have several customers that are already using these capabilities to elevate experiences for their customers and transform their businesses. Here are some of their stories.

Starting with a deep understanding leveraging the power of data and AI

The European Forum Alpbach (EFA) is a platform that drives ideas for an empowered and democratic Europe. It brings together young people, leading scholars, thinkers, scientists, policymakers, business people, and civil society actors from Europe and from all over the world to engage and contribute to its mission of shaping a stronger Europe. EFA is an incubator of ideas and an initiator of action for the European continent.

Like many organizations, disconnected tools and processes inhibited EFA from interacting with members along the customer journeys they had envisioned. By using Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration EFA was able to bridge the gap between their onsite and online customer experiences by pulling together those unconnected systems (i.e. CRM, payments, registrations, etc.) to create a complete end-to-end experience for their members.

“It’s fairly simple with this tool where we can trigger the communication to the user based on the actions they are taking such as processing a payment. We get data from different sources and based on this data, we can trigger actions in real-time. This is something that we couldn’t do before.” Mario Nurderscher, CRM Architect & Development Partner, European Forum Alpbach.

Using real-time event triggers and AI-powered channel optimization, EFA was able to orchestrate and automate ticket purchasing for their members. When a member purchases a ticket, a journey is triggered that orchestrates that member’s experience, including confirmation emails, real-time updates, and offers during the conference, etc. It was easy to create one journey with individual outcomes based on the actions of each member.

Triggering journeys based on events to respond in moments that matter

Leatherman, the originator and category leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives, sought a solution to meet their growing D2C (Direct to Consumer) communication needs. With the objective to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store, Leatherman leveraged Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration to deliver an end-to-end welcome journey for their new customers.

“[the Journey designer] is straightforward and easy to use, with an intuitive workflow layout. We have flexibility to trigger our journeys in multiple ways from our website and our other Dynamics products, and products from other vendors. The journey can also react to customer activities in real-time.”Liz Lee, IT Director, Leatherman Tool Group.

Using customer journey orchestration and Power Automate, the team at Leatherman was able to create a multi-touchpoint journey which allowed them to engage their customers across their commerce and marketing solutions using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. This allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.

Hyper personalizing communications at scale to drive better outcomes

“When I first heard about CJO, I immediately thought about the potential efficiencies the product would offer. To say that I was exhilarated, would be an understatement. CJO in Dynamics 365 has allowed me to build significantly fewer segments and has automated deployments that used to take my team and I hours to do. Instead now, I get to spend that time focusing on what matters; mentoring volunteer leaders and getting our volunteers into the field.”Dustin Lynch, Team Rubicon Sr. Associate, Operations Support Mobilization.

Team Rubiconis a veteran-led disaster response organization that serves communities before, during, and after disasters and humanitarian crises by mobilizing their network ofnearly150,000volunteers who largely consist offirst responders andveterans.In addition to responding to natural disasterslike hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes,Team Rubicon has beenleading vaccination efforts to help combat the COVID-19 crises.

The impact that nonprofit Team Rubicon has made in hundreds of disaster relief operations is life-changing for the people and communities they serve. The Microsoft stack and Dynamics 365 are at the core of their operations, and over the past three years, they have continued to innovate tech to support, scale, and drive their missions. Their latest tech innovation comes from the work they’re doing with Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration.

“The ability to communicate with our volunteers based on detected changes in our data and based on their actions in real time provides a huge boost to our volunteer experience. Having these notifications orchestrated reduces staffing requirements and allows our mobilization and communications teams to focus on more important tasks.” Ed Glover, Team Rubicon Technology Analyst.

By using real-time customer journey orchestration, Team Rubicon can not only re-confirm deployments, they can keep volunteers up to date with changing details such as meeting location, date or time updates.With CJO, they were able to reduce the overall number of segmentsmaintainedby35 percent and reduce the human effort to build,sendand monitorthese notifications byas much as8 hours per week. Team Rubicon is excited to expand the use of CJOto coveradditionalelementsof their overall communications strategy.

Orchestrating journeys that go beyond marketing to deliver a congruous experience to customers

One of the existing Dynamics 365 customers that have been evaluating and using real-time customer journey orchestration since its preview release is HP. The team at HP clearly knows that customer care goes beyond support. It’s about connecting the various customer interactions into a single, holistic experience that delights customers.

To achieve this, HP wants to provide both enterprise customers and home consumers with exceptional customer service. The company is working to enhance its support experience with Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration. By providing a more personalized experience, HP keeps the customer experience positive and builds lifetime loyalty, while also reducing support call times and lowering operational costs.

“With customer-led journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing, our agents can gain a real-time, 360-degree view of each customer and their support experience.” Jibu Mathew, Project Manager, HP Inc.

With end-to-end journey orchestration, HP’s goal is to keep each customer informed throughout the customer support lifecycle. This is achieved by delivering a highly personalized and context-aware experience using multiple channels including SMS and email. As the customer’s support case proceeds towards resolution, the customer plus the case data are orchestrated in a unified, end-to-end journey. By bringing the customer and case data together, HP is able to deliver a consistent and highly integrated experience to their customers.

These are just a few examples of how businesses are evaluating and implementing solutions based on our new customer journey orchestration capabilities and how we are empowering customer experience-focused organizations to unleash the power of data and AI to deeply personalize customer communications so that every interaction counts in the moments that matter. When you build on our trusted and adaptable platform, the creativity and experience design possibilities are limitless and you can start using them today.

Learn more and get started

Join me over the next few weeks for a three-part blog series that will give us a deeper look into how businesses are already using customer journey orchestration and driving business value.

Until then, to learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and sign up for a free trial to explore real-time customer journey orchestration and the other rich capabilities offered in Dynamics 365 Marketing.

The post Announcing Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration GA, it’s a game changer appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today’s consumers want the flexibility to buy and fulfill where, when, and how they choose. As retailers have expanded on purchasing options for customerslike buy online pick up in-storethey have quickly gone from value adds or differentiators, to baseline customer expectations. For many retailers, enabling omnichannel experiences is not only a means to grow; it is critical to surviving in a modern sales environment. Over the last year, retailers have moved quickly to meet customers on new and emerging channels to drive customer conversion and sales growth. Improving front-end experiences were often prioritized over establishing connected back-end systems that powered these new purchasing experiences and as a result, many retailers failed to deliver on a promise of seamlessly connected shopping for their customers due to siloed and disconnected data including cross-channel transactions and customer visibility.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce is built on a modern, intelligent, and headless platform that natively connects commerce systems, such as payment processing, fraud protection, along with easily extending to 3PL logistics. By looking across all facets of the customer journey, businesses can enable true omnichannel commerce across traditional and emerging channels, through a unified commerce platform. This ultimately allows retailers and consumer goods organizations to meet customers where they are, allow them to pay however they want, and make returns through whatever channel they choose to offer. It also provides managers and sellers with complete visibility of customers and business data. This connected data platform can help fuel your business for future innovation and growth across all relevant purchasing channels.

Let’s take a closer look at how data has transformed the way we perceive, power, and drive innovation across customer purchasing experiences.

Seamless journeys

Consumers expect seamless and frictionless experiences and have seemingly endless options of products and places to purchase. This means that even a single broken step in the customer journey can lead customers to move to another brand or retailer. In a recent PwC survey of 15,000 consumers, they found that one in three people will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience.¹

Savvy retailers understand the value of a seamless journey and are making investments to make this a reality. They know that consumers will continually evaluate their brand experience against the best they’ve ever had, not against their idea of what their average experience has been. For example, consumers see no issue comparing smaller and medium-size companies against the most successful e-commerce and omnichannel retailers.

To help businesses compete effectively in this climate, Dynamics 365 Commerce can connect all the steps and touchpoints across the customer journey, from payments to returns, both online and in-store. It empowers retailers to drive a connected commerce experience, providing increased cross-channel visibility, improving customer retention rates and helping businesses gain the necessary insights to offer increasingly personalized experiences.

Personalized experiences

Considering consumers’ low tolerance for bad experiences, businesses of all sizes, even small to medium-sized, must create outstanding customer experiences across platforms, from social to in-person, to check out and returns. Customers spend up to 40 percent more,² when they consider the experience highly personalized. Moreover, these types of integrated, seamless journeys lead to positive customer experiences that can also increase spending by as much as 140 percent.³

Truly connected systems

Achieving unified commerce requires integration across all systems and databases utilized in making omnichannel commerce a reality. Let’s consider payment systems to understand the benefits of integrating back-end systems.

Many businesses continue to use traditional payment gateways that route payments through a separate risk management system before passing them to another third party for payment authorization and completion. Typically, these legacy systems rely on numerous payment processors and processes for each different channel and region.

This type of disconnected system is inefficient and costly for businesses to operate. When systems are disconnected in this manner, it limits improvements to customer experiences because of a lack of insights and visibility. In addition, users will often have to run dozens of reports to stay on top of sales information from all channels and payment providers, and worse, these reports remain disconnected from ERP and CRM systems.

Integrated payments

Integrating payments is about more than consolidating all payments with one provider. It’s about ensuring all of your payment systems are integrated with other systems, including ERP systems, the point-of-sale platform, and the customer relationship management system. If businesses could integrate payment systems, they can enable the level of visibility necessary to provide more personalized customer experiences and move one step closer to true omnichannel retail.

Businesses can integrate payments in three ways: create a custom integration, use a plugin, or use a native integration. Custom integrations can be expensive due to integration and ongoing maintenance costs, pushing many retailers to opt for prebuilt plugins if a native integration was unavailable. Using plugins carries risk, however, as it means relying on yet another third party to build and maintain a vital link in your commercial processes. Native integration is a superior option as it reduces reliance on an additional third party and is also more affordable and reliable.

With Dynamics 365 Commerce, we offer the ability to work with a variety of payment providers, but we have invested in natively integrating payments to Adyen. Adyen (AMS: ADYEN) is the payments platform of choice for many of the world’s leading companies, providing a modern end-to-end infrastructure connecting directly to Visa, Mastercard, and consumers’ globally preferred payment methods. Adyen delivers frictionless payments across online, mobile, and in-store channels.

Because this integration is built and supported by Microsoft, you can depend on it to be an always up-to-date, seamless working solution while also delivering faster implementation for new businesses. For example, a retailer who recently chose Adyen on Dynamics 365 started accepting and testing payments within 38 minutes, compared to weeks with other providers.

Learn more about the Microsoft and Adyen partnership or check out our free Payments Webinar.

Build connected and seamless experiences today

Businesses across the globe have been challenged to adapt rapidly to changing customer needs and demands accelerated by the pandemic. Consumers and business-facing organizations are embracing digital transformation on a massive scale to compete and thrive in complex commerce environments. Dynamics 365 solutions enable retailers and consumer goods organizations to combine the best of digital and in-store to deliver personal, seamless, and differentiated customer experiences. With Dynamic 365 Commerce, businesses can streamline business processes, turn data into insights, and take advantage of dynamic, agile systems that adapt to customer needs on a proven and secure data platform.

Ready to take the next step with Dynamics 365 Commerce? You can take advantage of a free Dynamics 365 Commerce trial or check out our webinar, Get Full Control of Your Payments with Adyen and Dynamics 365.

1- “Experience is everything. Get it right.,” PwC

2- U.S., Business Impact of Personalization in Retail study, customer survey, Google, 2019

3- The true value of customer experiences, Deloitte

The post Exceed customer expectations with seamless and unified commerce experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The lead routing capability (preview) in Dynamics 365 Sales automates the distribution of incoming leads to sellers and teams, ensuring that leads are consistently assigned based on repeatable rules and configurations defined by your organization. Automated lead routing creates process efficiencies, so the right prospect reaches the right salesperson at the right time, eliminating errors from manual routing, and creating a balanced workload for global sales teams.

Dynamics 365 Sales lead routing (preview) is based on an easily configurable, rule-based assignment engine that automatically distributes leads using various commonly used parameters, strung together in a simple rule framework.

Shorten sales cycles and improve conversion rates

Customers are looking for quick solutions. In this digital age, they are aware of their needs, and know how to fulfill them. If customers don’t get a quick and satisfactory response to their query, they can easily reach out to a competitor.

It is critical not only to assign the correct seller to a lead but also to ensure that leads are assigned immediately. Lead routing in Dynamics 365 Sales assigns it to the seller as soon as a lead is either created or updated. The system detects a change, and if it fulfills the rules conditions then the lead gets assigned to the seller. The assignment is also expedited with the use of target segments within the rules, which helps in improving the lead conversion rate.

The right people for the right job

Sellers have different skills and competencies, they speak different languages, they’re located in different geographies, and they have different levels of selling experience. Assignment of incoming leads should be based on these characteristics, to make sellers more effective in their engagements and improve the overall customer experience, resulting in overall higher conversion rates.

Lead routing in Dynamics 365 Sales can be configured using detailed seller attributes and business rule configurations. The lead routing rules provide the flexibility to support the simplest of matching to complex ones, based on business needs.

Lead routing rules support:

• Direct matching of attributes between seller and lead, for example the geographic location of the lead matches where the seller is located.
• Indirect matching of attributes between seller and lead, for example the lead’s parent account territory matches the seller’s territory.

Seller attributes used in a rule can come from two different sources:

• General seller attributes, which come from within the master data form in Dynamics 365.
• Specific seller attributes, which are used only for routing rules.

Here are a few common ways seller attributes can be used:

• Territory and geography (country, state, district, pin code)
• Specialization
• Availability and/or capacity of seller
• Product of interest
• Lead score

Automation keeps focus on strategic activities

Kitchen automation tools were invented to help cooks focus on critical cooking activities and bring relief from mundane tasks. The cooks’ focus was directed toward making a delectable dish and efficiencies were gained to be able to serve more dining guests within a limited amount of time.

Similarly, lead routing features can help those responsible for lead assignments focus on strategic and mission critical activities and bring relief from time-consuming lead assignment and distribution. The Dynamics 365 Sales lead routing is flexible and easy to construct.

The distribution can happen in the following ways:

• Round robin
• Load balancing

Lead distribution can take into consideration seller capacity and availability. Capacity can be set for each seller and availability is maintained by the seller in the availability calendar.

Lead routing is a critical factor of sales success. Accurate and timely distribution of leads can significantly impact the top line of the organization. Lead routing in Dynamics 365 Sales provides an automated, rule-based routing process.

Next steps

Learn more about lead routing in the Administrator guide, and try out the lead routing capability in Dynamics 365 Sales.

The post Automated lead routing (preview): Right salesperson, right time, more sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.