In today’s complex economic landscape, your business needs the latest digital capabilities to engage customers, connect people, insights, and processes across the organization, and grow revenues. 2021 release wave 1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 continues our commitment to continuously deliver capabilities that help you adapt to rapid change in your industry, innovate and solve challenges collaboratively, and harness insights to stay focused on what matters.

Designed to help you build agility and resiliency into every layer of your business, this six-month release wave of new and updated capabilities spans end-to-end customer experience and commerce, including supply chain and finance.

Connected customer experiences

Customer experience is built on consistent and personalized experiencesfrom the customer’s first interaction with the company through purchase and support. Microsoft is committed to helping you deliver personalization at scale, starting with rich insights to better understand preferences and needs, coupled with orchestrated customer journeys that open doors to new ways to attract, engage, and delight customers with a more human and empathetic approach.

Microsoft customer data platform (CDP)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insightsthe Microsoft customer data platform (CDP)connects data sources to gain the most comprehensive view of the customer, providing real-time insights that drive action in moments that matter.

This release wave extends audience and engagement insights for a more holistic view of customers. Audience insights enable every organization to unify and understand their customer data to harness it for intelligent insights and actions. Engagement insights enable individual and holistic interactive analytics over web, mobile, and connected products customer journey touchpoints. New turnkey integrations make it easier to share insights with other Microsoft or third-party applications, including Bing Ads, Google Ads, Facebook, HubSpot, Marketo, and many other popular services.

In addition, we’ve added AI-powered suggestions to help segment customers for more personalized messages, as well as features like predicted customer lifetime value and transaction and subscription churn to identify high-value and at-risk customers.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights works in lockstep with customer journey orchestration capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing (below) to power even more personalized experiences.

Read more 2021 release wave 1 highlights for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers organizations to easily scale feedback capture for agile responses and personalized customer experiences, all in a robust feedback management solution. The new wave of updates enhances personalization and analysis capabilities, making it easier than ever to understand your customers and build better experiences.

Custom survey headers provide more flexibility and personalization in outreach to customers, while customer survey scoring empowers users to create and unlock the insights that matter to their business.

Read more about updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

Marketing

New customer journey orchestration capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing bring together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation to engage customers in real-time based on interactions across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. And the enhanced cross-journey customer insights and analytics capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights help create more personalized experiences.

A completely redesigned email editor leverages AI to help you quickly create impactful, professional, and personalized content and deliver it at the right time. And enhanced integration with Microsoft Teams adds new webinar capabilities within Teams and the improved event participant engagement functionalities within Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Read more 2021 release wave 1 highlights for Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Sales

Release wave 1 updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales showcase the best of Microsoft productivity, collaboration, and intelligence in one business app to guide sellers to close deals faster.

Sellers can automate time-consuming sales tasks, such as creating and sending emails to customers, as well as updating customer records with up-to-date profile data from LinkedIn. Conversational intelligence automatically extracts actionable insights directly from sales calls.

An embedded Teams chat experience allows sellers to share Dynamics 365 information in Teams chats and channels and access linked Teams chats and channels within Dynamics 365. And an optimized seller workspace helps sellers understand pipeline health with out-of-box interactive charts and metrics and course-correct fading deals with AI-driven relationship and opportunity scores.

Explore more 2021 release wave 1 highlights for Dynamics 365 Sales.

Service

New capabilities help customer and field service teams deliver more consistent and engaging experiences, from the call center to on-site visits.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is delivering the all-in-one contact center, now with first-party voice built on Microsoft Azure Communication Services and intelligent, skill-based, and omnichannel routing across channels. In addition, we are enhancing agent productivity capabilities in knowledge management, timeline, email, and agent dashboards.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces a comprehensive experience for customers that will allow them to self-schedule service and rate technicians to ensure maximum satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Field Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Microsoft Teams enable field technicians to stay connected to work orders, information, and experts in real-time.

Learn more about updated capabilities to transform customer service and field service.

Connected operations

Complex organizations depend on the seamless flow of data, consistent business processes, and collaboration across finance and operations departments. This release wave further brings together people, data, insights, and processes with cross-app capabilities.

Commerce

Earlier this year, we announced the preview of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, bringing together business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B e-commerce capabilities onto a single unified retail and commerce platform. The 2021 release wave 1 will further empower Dynamics 365 Commerce users to better understand, serve, and engage with their customers while efficiently running operations across the value chain.

B2B e-commerce capabilities previously in preview are now generally available, bringing intelligent and user-friendly features available to B2C e-commerce retailers to business partners. This release offers partner onboarding, order templates, quick order entry, account statement, invoicing management, and more. In addition, we are delivering native integration to Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service for unified customer engagement across touchpoints.

Other enhancements include new AI-powered intelligent shopping features for more personal and relevant shopping experiences, such as the ability to shop similar looks and similar descriptions. We’ve also invested in expanding omnichannel capabilities, including the ability for retailers to notify frontline workers on mobile devices through the Microsoft Teams mobile app.

Retailers will also be able to synergize task management between Dynamics 365 Commerce and Microsoft Teams to improve productivity. And support for curbside pickup scenarios allows customers to pick up orders with a safe, contactless experience.

Retailers can further connect experiences across the end-to-end shopper journey with Microsoft Cloud for Retail, announced at NRF 2021.

Read a comprehensive overview of updates to Dynamics 365 Commerce.

Fraud Protection

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection brings together account protection, payment protection, and loss prevention, providing a 360-degree view of the fraud landscape to merchants.

Two new features significantly improve insights that can help better detect suspicious activity. Velocities help customers prevent loss from fraud by using the relationships and patterns between transactions to identify suspicious activity. External calls let Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection ingest external data from third-party information providers or in-house data models.

Read more about updates to Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

Finance

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance provides real-time visibility into operations, predictive outcomes, and data-driven decisions that drive business agility and growth.

Release wave 1 brings intelligent cash flow forecasting to preview with automation based on predictive results. These updates include users’ experience out-of-the-box machine learning, including when customers are predicted to pay, forecasting the budget, and viewing forecasted cash positions based on actual accounts payable, accounts receivable and project transactions, and predicted outcomes.

Finance insights bring the power of AI into finance processes, with configurable and extensible models to help you accurately and intelligently predict your company’s cash flow. Globalization capabilities deliver localization for Egypt, general availability of a new electronic invoicing service, public preview of tax calculation service, and several other highly requested features.

Explore the full set of updates in the release plans.

Supply Chain

Major shocks to supply and demand over the past year have exposed the fragility of the global supply chain. Moving forward, organizations must architect resiliency into their supply chains with the capacity to scale operations to meet demand and proactively remedy disruptions, as well as streamline order fulfillment.

We are introducing new capabilities to ensure a smooth-running production line and improve day-to-day work on the factory floor. The new Cloud and Edge Scale Unit add-ins for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management enable companies to easily scale production and distribution during peaks and keep critical processes running at high throughput on the edge.

Additional updates increase the visibility of inbound goods and automate landed cost calculation, streamline and automate rebates and royalties, help overcome disruptions by managing changes in process manufacturing master data, and improve overall warehouse operating efficiency.

Read how these updates help you architect resiliency into your supply chain.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, announced at Microsoft Ignite, is a new application that can help accelerate omnichannel transformation across order and fulfillment. It provides the flexibility companies need to capture orders from any order source, including e-commerce, marketplace, mobile apps, or traditional sources like electronic data interchange (EDI).

Service-based operations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations unifies operational workflows to provide the visibility, collaboration, and insight needed to drive success across teams from sales to finance. Updates in release wave 1 deliver rich new experiences with the ability to forecast, use, and invoice non-stocked materials on projects. Also included is the ability to set up contractual commitments like billing methods and chargeability rules by task or by work breakdown schedule. Customers using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation will be able to upgrade to Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Read more about updates to Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

Business management for small and midmarket organizations

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central provides a connected cloud business management solution for growing small to medium-sized businesses (SMB), bringing together finance, sales, service, and operations teams within a single application. Updates in this release wave help you adapt faster, work smarter, and perform better. New customer onboarding capabilities provide getting started checklists and in-app contextual guidance to help speed time to productivity for employees. Improved interoperability with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel empowers a more collaborative, productive organization. In addition, this release wave expands availability to more countries, including India, Greece, Romania, and Turkey.

Discover the latest innovations for Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Human Resources

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides HR leaders with the tools needed to optimize workforce programs such as leave and absence, benefits, and compensation, as well as transform the employee experience with self-service. A new app for Microsoft Teams enables employees to view time-off balances and submit leave requests from within the unified collaboration workspace they already use. The app has been enhanced to include support for benefit notifications and a summary statement providing a consolidated view of benefits for employees. Other updates continue to broaden the human capital management (HCM) ecosystem through integration APIs and strategic partnerships.

Learn more about new and planned capabilities for Dynamics 365 Human Resources.

Catch up on the 2021 release wave 1

For a complete list of new capabilities, please review the Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 plans, as well as the overviews of new capabilities for Dynamics 365, integrated Microsoft Teams experiences, and new Power Platform capabilities announced at Microsoft Ignite in early March.

The post Highlights from 2021 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Over the last several months, we have continued to see the agility and resiliency shown by businesses across the globe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the holiday trading period, we saw businesses adapt to new customer needs across digital channels, along with enhancing and streamlining in-person buying experiences. As vaccines become available, many retail businesses are looking at the future shopping needs of their customers and what the return to in-store buying will mean for customer experiences. Along with this, business-to-business (B2B) buying has also been transitioning from in-person to more digital and self-service buying options for accounts and partners.

Building atop the great features released in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce 2020 release wave 2, we are bringing additional capabilities to Dynamics 365 Commerce 2021 release wave 1, grounded in intelligence to help businesses meet the needs of their customers across consumer-facing and business-to-business segments. We are delivering innovation across the following key investment areas:

1. New digital commerce capabilitiesto further enhance customer experience and business outcomes: We continue to build upon the foundation e-commerce capabilities including announcing the general availability of B2B e-commerce capabilities on a single connected platform.
2. Enhancements through ingrained intelligence to drive growth and efficiencies: Utilize enhancements with AI and machine learning to further improve insights into business operations and deliver differentiation.
3. Expand on omnichannel capabilities to improve business performance: We continue to invest in core capabilities that support unified commerce capabilities along with enhancements with broader Microsoft and Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the new capabilities and highlights we are bringing to our customers within the Dynamics 365 Commerce 2021 release wave 1.

Build rich, relevant, and intuitive digital commerce experiences for every customer

With the acceleration of digital commerce channels amidst COVID-19, we continue to invest in building the best e-commerce platform available on the market. With the addition of business-to-business e-commerce capabilities for Dynamics 365 Commerce, we are bringing intelligent and user-friendly features available in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce to business partners.

B2B e-commerce capabilities now available: B2B e-commerce capabilities for Dynamics 365 Commerce enables organizations in varied industry segments to digitize their B2B transactions with personalized, user friendly, and self-serve driven B2C e-commerce-like experiences while still providing the unique capabilities needed for a B2B user to be productive in their job function.

As e-business teams look for solutions in the market, not only are they benchmarking their future-state online buying experience against B2B peers, but also against B2C leaders. They need solutions with a best-in-class foundation of B2C features, such as robust marketing and merchandising and experience management tools. With this release, we are bringing a range of B2B e-commerce capabilities to market including partner onboarding, order templates, quick order entry, account statement and invoicing management, and more. In addition, we are delivering native integration to Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service for unified customer engagement across touchpoints. Unique B2B capabilities such as contract pricing, quotes pricing lists, e-procurement, product configuration and customization, guided selling, bulk order entry, and account, contract, and budget management can also be layered on top of our rich e-commerce capabilities to deliver a great buying experience for every partner.

Enhanced search engine results: Improve SEO rankings for product landing and display pages to enable quicker page discovery through native support for schema.org/product metadata. Product pages can utilize existing Dynamics 365 Commerce headquarters product data to simplify and streamline merchandising workflows.

Enhancements through ingrained intelligence to drive growth and efficiencies

Unlock immersive AI-powered intelligent shopping features that enable more personal and relevant shopping experiences for every customer.

Shop similar looks: Bring fresh and appealing choices to the forefront of the shopping experience using the power of AI and machine learning. The effect can be transformative and can create additional selling power as shoppers find more of the things they want in an easy-to-use visual experience.

Shop by similar description: This recommendations service enables customers to easily and quickly find the products they need and want (relevant), find more than they had originally intended (cross-sell, upsell), all the while having an experience that serves them well (satisfaction). For retailers, this functionality helps drive conversion opportunities across all customers and products, resulting in more all-up sales revenue and customer satisfaction.

System monitoring and diagnostics across in-store and e-commerce: Access to system diagnostic logs allows better visibility for IT administrators and enables improved time to detection, time to mitigation, and time to resolution of live-site incidents. IT administrators are able to determine key contributing factors of incidents, which allows for targeted engagement with Microsoft support teams, or with implementation partners, ISVs, or other stakeholders.

Cloud-powered customer search (preview): Customer data is the lifeblood for businesses, and yet almost all businesses run into the problem of duplicate customer records because of inefficient customer search algorithms. If cashiers are not able to easily find a customer, they end up creating new customers. With this enhancement, businesses will be able to easily switch their current customer search experience from SQL-based search to cloud-powered search to gain performant, relevant, and scalable search capabilities.

Expand on omnichannel capabilities to improve business performance

We continue to see the rapid evolution of technologies supporting business, employee, and customer shopping experiences. With this, comes the need to deliver tools that span across channels to streamline purchasing experiences and empowers staff to perform at their best. In this release, we are continuing to invest in making Dynamics 365 Commerce the best solution for omnichannel shopping and bringing new capabilities to customers and frontline workers alike.

Better together with Microsoft Teams: Administrators now can provision Microsoft Teams from Dynamics 365 Commerce and create teams for stores, add members from a store’s worker book, and more in Microsoft Teams, and synchronize the changes in the future. They can also notify frontline workers on mobile devices and synergize task management between Dynamics 365 Commerce and Microsoft Teams to improve productivity.

Additional features and improvements to Curbside Pickup

In today’s world, it is important that organizations can offer safe and flexible fulfillment options to meet their customers’ ever-changing needs. Building on Dynamics 365 Commerce’s existing capabilities that enables buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), Dynamics 365 Commerce now offers additional features to optimize convenient and COVID safe curbside pickup. These capabilities will make it easier for businesses to deploy mobile POS devices and allow their store associates to efficiently manage orders that need to be fulfilled and picked up. With this release, we have added the following features and improvements to Dynamics 365 Commerce:

• Ability for shoppers to set their preferred pick-up location on E-Commerce channel.
• Ability for businesses to offer multiple pickups and delivery options for shoppers to choose from.
• Flexible configuration of pickup time slots per day by location and allowing shoppers to choose a pickup time slot on E-Commerce channel.
• Improved email receipts and notifications with the ability for businesses to customize email receipts, configure by deliver mode, etc.
• Enhanced order fulfillment visibility for store associates with live tile and notifications to monitor and address orders that need to be fulfilled.
• Streamline order pick-up flows, including support for QR codes.

Enhancements to inventory visibility, movement, and adjustments

Inventory management and visibility is key to business success in order to give customers clear insights into where stock is located, reduce out-of-stock situations, and empower our sellers, managers, and merchandisers to make better decisions. With this update, we have made a range of improvements touching inventory and stock management including enhancements to e-commerce inventory availability lookup API, inventory aware product discovery for e-commerce customers, improvements to inventory lookup operations via in-store point of sale, along with comprehensive in-store inventory management capabilities.

Chat in Dynamics 365 Commerce with Power Virtual Agents and Dynamics 365 Customer Service (Preview)

Customer service functionality will be added to Dynamics 365 Commerce by leveraging the capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. Site administrators will be able to configure the chat widget on the e-commerce site with proactive notification capability based on different criteria.

This will be supported via native integrations with Dynamics 365 Customer Service chat or virtual agents into Dynamics 365 Commerce. With this, contact center agents will be able to look up customer information using Dynamics 365 Commerce Call Center and act on customer’s details and orders as required.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce

Please share your thoughts with us about the 2021 release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Commerce. We will continue to bring new capabilities and enhancements to Dynamics 365 Commerce and look forward to sharing more in the future.

The post Continued innovation in Dynamics 365 Commerce 2021 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s increasingly complex business environment, project-centric organizations face a variety of challenges to succeed; challenges like winning new deals, optimizing resource utilization, simplifying time and expense processes, streamlining project financials, and gaining key business insights. Ultimately, project-centric organizations are always looking for ways to optimize their operations and improve their bottom line.

Since its launch, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations has connected sales, resource management, project management, and finance teams within one application to help win more deals, accelerate project delivery, and maximize profitability. In our first 2021 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Project Operations, we’ve refined and enhanced features that will continue to empower your project-centric business.

Non-stock materials for projects

With this update, sales and account managers using Project Operations deployed for lite and resource or non-stocked scenarios can provide more accurate quotes based on estimates, including non-stocked materials and their pricing as well as project contracts that contain services and materials. This update will also allow consumption tracking of these materials during the project delivery phase so project accountants can invoice customers for their use.

Procurement agents will have the ability to record pending vendor invoices for projects and provide these insights to all personas involved, from the project manager to the project accountant. Project team members and project managers will be able to track and approve non-stocked material usage against the project, enabling downstream accounting. Accounting and finance can see non-stock material costs immediately and invoice customers for their usage.

Task-based billing

In project-centric businesses, account and project managers often face the challenge of accommodating their customer’s complex billing and contracting needs. Sometimes a set of project tasks are complimentary or not chargeable, like proof of concept or presales activities, while the remaining tasks may require fixed fee or time and materials billing. Another example of complex contracting requirements is when multiple organizations need to be billed for different sets of tasks under the same project. Project Operations deployed for resource or non-stocked scenarios now support multiple billing scenarios with the flexibility to define what to bill for, whom to bill, and when to bill for each contract line all the way down to the task level.

Customers will now have the flexibility to use multiple billing methods in the contract while keeping the work in the same project for easy management and invoicing. Finance and leadership now get combined, accurate project profitability analysis for the work under a contract, regardless of its billing requirements.

Improvements to project planning and task scheduling experiences

Since its release, Project Operations has leveraged project management capabilities from Microsoft Project for the web. Project Operations customers have benefited from new features released by the Project team like Export to Excel, Export Timeline to PDF, Create Attachments on Tasks, and more. Learn more about what’s new in Project.

One 2021 release wave 1 feature we’d like to highlight is Scheduling modes, which will enable project managers to designate how Project Operations calculate task assignments depending on what makes the most sense for a particular project. Define the amount of work needed to complete an assignment (fixed effort) or the amount of time it will take to complete (fixed duration). Alternatively, set a completion date or the amount of work, and let Project Operations determine the allocation of resources needed to meet the deadline (fixed units).

Throughout the 2021 release wave 1, the Project team will bring even more new features to Project for the web and to Project Operations as well.

Enhanced Project Operations APIs

Project for the web capabilities in Project Operations were preventing certain scheduling entities from create, update, and delete programmatic access. We have now enabled enhanced APIs so customers can develop custom solutions to utilizing this API. Learn more about Schedule APIs.

Learn more about these features and how Project Operations connects project-centric businesses in one application

Learn about these capabilities by reading the What’s New April 2021 release notes and the Project Operations 2021 release wave 1.

We invite you to watch on-demand event sessions showcasing these features, Reimagine Project Management with Microsoft.

To learn more about Projects Operations, watch videos on how Project Operations can help you:

• Win more bids with better deal management
• Optimize resource utilization
• Accelerate project delivery
• Enhance collaboration and simplify time and expense
• Drive project performance
• Increase business agility

The post Discover the latest capabilities in Dynamics 365 Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In any business operations software, the ability to visualize, inspect, and print data in an appropriate layout is paramount. In Dynamics 365 Business Central and in most other software, reports serve these purposes.

Our partner community is familiar with customizing built-in reports, either as suppliers of a vertical solution that adds capabilities to underlying data which must be reflected in the relevant reports, or as resellers who tailor reports to meet individual customer requirements.

In the past, you had to modify existing reports through code customization by directly editing the report object.

In Business Central online, direct customization is not possible. Instead, you add new objects or modifications in a controlled manner through extensions to the base product. The extensions make it easier to deploy, maintain, and upgrade the software.

However, until now you weren’t able to extend report objects, so partners had to copy and branch any report that required modification. These steps were a pain point that incurred costs and a maintenance burden even for the simplest changes. As a result, closing this gap has been the highest voted idea on the Business Central Ideas site year after year.

2021 release wave 1 brings support for report extensions in Dynamics 365 Business Central. You can now extend both document type, visual reports as well as processing reports. You no longer need to branch reports when you add capabilities, and multiple solutions can now add to the same base report dataset. Plus, as a reseller who adds additional customer requirements and custom layouts, you have access to all of the resulting report datasets.

With the introduction of report extensions, there are two approaches to customizing reports:

• Use the event-based substitution of a report, which is useful for taking over reports without changing any actions in the user interface.OK
• Use the new report extension for making additive changes.

New report extension AL object

Report extensions are based on a new object type in AL, the programming language used for manipulating data and controlling the execution of the various application objects, such as pages, reports, or codeunits. With this object type, you can extend an existing report in several different ways, including the following:

• Add new columns to existing data items.
• Add new nested data items.
• Add columns for fields in a source table, a table extension, related tables, variables, procedures, or expressions.
• Add a new RDLC layout or Word layout.
• Add or modify the request page.

Note that there is no support for extending or modifying an existing layout.

In an upcoming service update, we will add support for labels, as well as some limited abilities to modify existing data items, such as adding to request fields, calc fields, or triggers.

Use report extensions to make additive changes to existing reports, such as adding a country column to the existing customer top 10 list.

Choose layouts from report extensions

When an extension deploys to a customer environment, either as an AppSource app or as a per-tenant extension (PTE), any report layouts in the extension also become available in the environment. However, if you want to apply a report extension layout to a specific report, you need to add installation and upgrade code in the extension. Users will be able to choose a layout from a report extension in the Report Layout Selection page that lists all available layouts for a given report.

The Report Layout Selection page includes any layouts from report extensions so that the user can choose between all available layouts.

Next steps

Learn more about report extensibility in the release plans, the documentation, or at the virtual launch event sessionLE21-08 What’s new in Visual Studio code and AL, which covers report extensions in detail. The virtual launch event site has many other valuable sessions on new features in Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 1 release.

We encourage you to explore the new report extension feature and provide feedback to our AL GitHub repo. You can also submit any suggestions for additional coverage or improvements on the Business Central Ideas site.

The post Extending reports in Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In a rapidly changing landscape, interactions between customers and organizations have become the cornerstone to bottom-line success and brand loyalty. That’s why Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers organizations to easily scale feedback capture for agile responses and personalized customer experiences, all in a robust feedback management solution.

With the 2021 release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, we’ve enhanced our personalization and analysis capabilities, making it easier than ever to understand your customers and build better experiences.

Personalize every interaction with customers

Enhanced survey header customization for maintaining a consistent brand identity

Understanding customers begins with capturing the right data in the right place at the right time. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers feedback collection across every channel; from email to web, SMS, and QR codes. Now, we are bringing custom survey headers to the survey creation process giving organizations more flexibility and personalization in their outreach to customers.

Users can now upload custom images or select from ready-made images for more beautiful surveys. New features such as formatted text, alignment, color selection, sizing, and cropping let organizations stay consistent in how their brand looks, feels, and resonates with customers.

Simplified and customizable data analysis for agile decision making

Data analysis can be intimidating and time-consuming, and in today’s world organizations need to be quick to stay ahead of the competition. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is easy to use, making it stress-free to surface rich insights about customers. With this update, we are bringing custom survey scoring to the data analysis process, empowering users to create and unlock the insights that matter to their business.

Users can now create and customize their own satisfaction metrics by assigning point values to questions. Directly within the dashboard, users can create a scoring index and calculate average points across questions, allowing them to analyze data in their preferred way. These scored responses make it easier to uncover the trends and rich insights about customers so organizations can make better and quicker customer engagement decisions.

Other updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice from attaching a file, over surveyed management, and pause and resume surveys, are now available to view on our 2021 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Customer Voice documentation.

Transform how you understand customers with partner solutions

Alongside the built-in capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, our partner ecosystem brings enhanced solutions, templates, and workflows to create a comprehensive customer experience solution. These added capabilities expand how organizations understand customers and transform engagement in the moments that matter.

Clarabridge

Our partnership with Clarabridge, through the Microsoft Business Applications ISV Connect program, provides organizations with more complete insights about their customers’ experiences by unifying survey feedback along with calls, chats, messages, emails, social, and more. Clarabridge offers an omnichannel best-in-class natural language understanding AI engine that uncovers valuable insights about customer sentiment, effort, intent, loyalty, and emotion. The fully integrated solution enables organizations to drive action by automatically identifying friction and high-effort touchpoints along the customer journey, reducing customer churn, and diving into the root cause of traditional key performance metrics such as NPS, CSAT, and customer lifetime value. This information is then made available for issue tracking, aggregated reporting, and close loop case management in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Learn more about the Clarabridge and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice solution.

Download the Clarabridge and Microsoft Datasheet.

Solgari

Solgari brings real-time customer feedback through voice and text to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice so organizations can quickly deploy secure, compliant, and scalable surveys to customers. Now available, organizations can utilize Solgari to automate phone and SMS surveys directly within the application using survey questions, workflow, and reporting functions. Customer feedback is captured instantly and integrated directly within Dynamics 365 Customer Voice where the Microsoft Power BI dashboard can surface rich insights about customers. This solution enables businesses to have more effective decisions across any use casecustomer, prospect, staff, and student feedback. Phone and SMS surveys typically have a higher response rate, and now with Solgari and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, organizations can be flexible and more personalized in their feedback capture. Learn more about the Solgari and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice solution.

Understand your customers like never before

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is here to help you deliver value to your customers by truly understanding them and responding in the moments that matter. We are continually making product updates, from privacy improvements in January to orchestrating customer journeys at Spring Ignite, and deeper integrations with other Dynamics 365 applications. We are excited about the future of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice as a complete feedback management solution that can transform customer engagement, drive a customer-centric culture, and deliver better business outcomes for your organization. Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

Interested in a demo of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and our partner solutions? Contact customervoice@microsoft.com.

Download our latest e-book to learn more about understanding your customers or sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. See available offers that will help empower organizations to evolve their customer experience approach.

The post New features personalize customer experiences in Dynamics 365 Customer Voice appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Successful fraud protection relies on a lot of information. The more insights you have into transactions and accounts, the better you will be able to detect suspicious activity. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection uses advanced AI models to bring together diverse sets of information into a single assessment score that indicates the overall risk of an event. Customers can create rules that threshold this score to make decisions in a manner that suits their risk appetite. However, sometimes customers also have the need to directly reason over raw attributes in their rules, for example, to detect business policy violations or to stop emerging fraud patterns specific to their business. In this preview, we are adding two features that will significantly improve the information available in the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection rule engine: velocities and external calls.

Velocities use relationships and patterns between historical transactions to identify suspicious activity and help customers prevent loss from fraud. External calls let Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection customers ingest data from third-party information providers or from their in-house AI models. All these inputs may be needed by customers to make fully informed decisions on their events.

Identify potential fraud with velocities

How do you determine if a transaction is suspicious? In short, you have to look at the bigger picture. For example, there may be nothing suspicious about someone buying a single exercise bike online. However, if they buy fifteen exercise bikes over a short period of time, each with a different payment instrument, that might indicate possession of stolen payment information and malicious fraud. This is why monitoring the relationships and patterns between current and past transactions is essential in determining the riskiness of any given event.

Velocity detection allows customers to analyze the historical patterns of an individual or entity such as a credit card, IP address, or user email. Velocities already play a significant part in our AI-driven risk assessments, and now we are enabling our customers to define their own velocities that matter most to their business. With velocity checks, you can get the answers to questions such as: How much money has a user account spent in the last hour? How many distinct payment instruments have been used from this device in the last seven days? How many times has this user account attempted to login in the last five minutes? Customers can then utilize these historical patterns in real-time decision-making.

Some behaviors are more suspicious regardless of the business, such as hundreds of login attempts within a short interval from the same IP address. Other behaviors might be suspicious for one business, but not for another. It is not uncommon for a single customer to make two to six transactions a month at a grocery store. However, it might be more suspicious if a single customer makes two to six transactions in a month at a luxury car dealer. Velocities are an important tool for any fraud protection service, but their effectiveness depends on being able to customize it to your business.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection’s velocities provide customers the ability to fully customize their velocities, all the way from which attributes to monitor, to the timeframe they monitor them over, to what thresholds they want to set.

Velocities also allow customers to connect behaviors from different assessment events including account creations, account logins, and purchases. For example, a customer could block a user from logging in based on an inordinately large number of purchases made from the account in a short interval, or flag a purchase for review based on suspicious login attempts, since both velocities may be indicative of account compromise.

Make informed decisions in real-time with external calls

Until now, using the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection’s rule engine customers could make real-time decisions based only on the data available within the product. This included data sent as part of the request payload, data uploaded in the form of lists, data generated by device fingerprinting, and risk assessment and bot detection scores produced by our AI models. However, sometimes customers may need additional signals from data sources outside the product to inform their decisions. Some customers may choose to partner with third-party information providers for additional data enrichment. Details such as address verification and phone reputation can help discover suspicious and fraudulent activity. Other customers may choose to utilize scores from their own in-house AI models tailored to their business. All these inputs may be important for customers to make fully informed decisions regarding their business.

Our external calls feature enables customers to bring in data from essentially any API endpoint on the web, ensuring they have full context and flexibility needed at the point of decision. This update continues to increase the power and scope of what can be done from within the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection rules engine, allowing customers to utilize outside data when orchestrating their decisions.

Note that velocities and external calls are features made available in preview with reasonable consumption limits. In the future, we may bring these to general availability in an appropriate way.

Get started with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection

Join the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection Insider Program, to get an early view of upcoming features and discuss best practices to combat fraud.

Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to try out these new features and check out the documentation for velocities and external calls, where you can learn how to create, use, and manage these new features.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities including account protection, purchase protection, and loss prevention, and check out the e-book, “Protecting Customers, Revenue, and Reputation from Online Fraud.”

Finally, you can check out all the latest product updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

The post Customize your protection with new features in the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection preview appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.