Think about the time spent between the moment you open an email or chat, find, and reply with the requested information, and then get back into the flow of your work. Add up those minutes-long interruptions, and you begin to realize why we often can’t finish everything on our to-do lists.

We want to dramatically reduce those disruptions by bringing together business processes, information, communication, and collaboration, enabling an integrated workspace for teamwork. Not only does this save time and improve collaboration throughout the day but frees up time so you can stay focused on customers.

At Microsoft Ignite, we are announcing a breadth of more connected and engaging experiences between Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams, bringing together the features you depend on into a unified digital workplace for collaboration across your entire organization. These new capabilities help everyone work together from anywhere in a more seamless and natural way, as well as better engage with customers for more personalized experiences.

Watch now

We’re making it simple to meet, chat, call, and collaborate right from within your Dynamics 365 workspace. For example, as you browse a customer record, you can see related conversations and people, and then start or continue a chat without switching to Teams. Similarly, while working in Teams, you can seamlessly access and share business processes, records, and information from Dynamics 365so everything you need to stay focused and productive is in context to the task at hand.

Whether you work in sales or marketing, service, finance, commerce, or human resourcesany role that depends on teamworkthe unified collaboration features in Dynamics 365 applications and Teams will help you get daily activities done in a way that simply keeps everyone connected virtually in a natural way.

Let’s take a closer look at how our approach to unified collaboration makes an impact across the organization.

Sales: boost collaborative digital selling and engagement and transform customer interactions into revenue

Strong team collaboration and communication is essential in a sales organization, helping every seller identify, track, and share leads and opportunities. With Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, we are helping put collaboration in context and providing actionable next steps using AI-driven insights. This allows sellers to be more productive, work together better, and build stronger customer relationships.

Today we are announcing several new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales to boost collaboration across sales teams.

We are introducing an embedded Teams chat experience for Dynamics 365a side panel that shows recent and ongoing chats, channels, and people in Teams related to the customer record in view.

As a seller browses customer records, the side panel displays (1) Teams chats and channels that mention the customer or account, as well as (2) suggested chats and contacts based on colleagues who are working on the account. Without switching to the Teams app, sellers can start or continue the conversation thanks to a (3) Teams chat experience which also (4) displays the customer record and quick actions to help avoid switching apps to find relevant information.

Recent years have witnessed a radical shift in buyer behavior that has led most businesses to alter traditional sales methods and adopt digital sales to stay relevant, maintain a competitive advantage, and cater to the buyer’s needs without losing the all-important personal touch. Voice and video now are important channels to ensure sellers keep connection and drive valuable conversations without missing any follow-ups.

Today, we are introducing bothan embedded Teams dialer experience for Dynamics 365 as well as an extensible video or audio Teams meeting experience that seamlessly ties back to Dynamics 365 Sales.

As a seller is presented with the next best customer to reach out to, they can click-to-calla side panel showing the teams dialer opens, including real-time business-critical insights such as transcript with important mentions highlighted (1), a place for note taking (2), and automatic detection of action items (3) sellers can ensure actions are captured ready for follow up.

We also cater for Teams meetings that are scheduled and tracked by the seller. When they join the call from Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 the familiar Teams client opens whereaside from the custom video, avatar, or shared contentthe seller will be presented with the same real-time insights as they did during the audio call, including the transcript with important mentions highlighted (4), a place for note-taking (5), and automatic detection of action items (6) sellers can ensure actions are captured ready for follow up.

All insights are tied back to the relevant record in Dynamics 365 Sales CRM with zero effort on the seller’s side. Within seconds of completing the conversation, the summary page will be available; including conversational KPIs representing the seller’s behavior during the call (7), commitment and follow-ups made during the call (8), important mentions (9), and the full playback option alongside sentiment analysis and segmentation of the call to topics (10).

These new team collaboration experiences are supported by multichannel engagement capabilities in Teams that help improve the way sellers connect with other sellers, prospects, and customers. The Dynamics 365 app for Mircosoft Teams enables sellers to engage with audio and video online meetings, and support for third-party outbound and inbound calling ensures advanced call control functionality is right where is should be: alongside the information that is fueling sellers’ conversations with the caller. Conversation intelligence automatically transcribes calls and analyzes content, sentiment, and behavioral styleinsights that can improve the way sellers engage with prospects and customers.

Learn how VITAS Healthcare, C.H. Robinson, Microsoft Inside Sales, and Grant Thornton transformed sales with Dynamics 365 Sales and Teams.

Marketing: turn event attendees into loyal customers

Virtual meetings and webinars are now a preferred way to connect and engage with audiences. With Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, planning online events and nurturing your attendees is fast and easy.

Customers can set up, promote, and report on events hosted on Teams from within DynamHRics 365 Marketing. In a few simple steps, they can export attendee data and view customer segments created in Dynamics 365 Marketing based on audience attendance. Customer journeys, including starter emails, are also automatically created to nurture attendees. Users can then further customize the content and experiences for attendees based on how they engage and orchestrate personalized customer journeys.

Today we’re announcing that commercial Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers will soon get six months of Dynamics 365 Marketing at no additional cost. We’ll have more details on this offer to share soon, along with eligibility details, and we are excited to see you reap the benefits of these solutions together.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Marketing or visit our help documentation to get started. Also, discover how Project Management Institute Minnesota and Discoveries, Inc are using these event management capabilities in the real world to improve engagement with event attendees.

Customer service: resolve customer issues faster using the power of collaboration

As cases that reach your live agents become increasingly more complex, it’s more important than ever that your customer service tools are designed to make life as easy as possible for your agents to resolve customer issues. This includes how cases get assigned and how your agents collaborate with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within your organization. Key features such as unified routing and assignment capabilities leverage rule-based and machine learning classification to ensure incoming work items are routed to the best-suited agent or queue. But, there are still times when customer service agents need support from other colleagues to quickly address customer issues without having to escalate or transfer the case. With the new embedded Teams chat capability, directly accessible from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service agent desktop, agents can collaborate with SMEs to resolve cases faster and more effectively, ultimately improve the customer experience.

The Teams chat feature enables agents to easily start conversations with SMEs and other peers, avoiding the disruption of switching apps, while maintaining a seamless flow of work. The enhanced collaboration feature reads the context of the customer record and suggests relevant collaboration contacts for the agent. Related Teams chats initiated from Customer Service are visually differentiated to enable faster discoverability. In addition, agents can link relevant Teams chats to the customer record so that the conversation, information,and context is immediately available.

Field service: enhance collaboration across field service

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, and Teams work together to enable field technicians to stay connected to work orders, information, and experts in real-time, even from some of the most remote job sites.

Technicians and field service agents can use the integrated Teams experience within Dynamics 365 Field Service to collaborate in real-time with experts on work orders, as well as use Dynamics 365 Virtual Agents for Customer Service to enhance their productivity as they complete service tasks. Technicians can access the content they need related to the task at handfrom customer records to schematicsfrom a mobile device or for a hands-free experience, a Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset.

The solution is enabling surgeons at hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System in New York to advise counterparts 7,000 miles away at Kyabirwa Surgical Centre in Eastern Uganda. “Microsoft Teams, Dynamic 365 Remote Assist, and HoloLens 2 allow us to bring our knowledge into a community, share that knowledge, and make it part of that surgical community on a long-term basis,” explains Dr. Michael L. Marin, Chairman of the Department of Surgery and Surgeon-in-Chief at Mount Sinai. “It helps us create a sustainable program of surgical care.”

Retail: maximize retail collaboration and staff efficiency

On the retail frontlines, it’s critical to have the most current and accurate product and inventory information customers need in the moment. With Teams and Dynamics 365, retailers can provide the frontline with streamlined mobile tools to connect with peers and get near-instant access to information they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

With Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, we are also removing the barriers between the head office and individual stores by providing new task management functionality right within Teams. Task management functionality in Dynamics 365 Commerce allows managers and workers to create task lists, manage assignment criteria, and track task statuses integrated between Dynamics 365 Commerce back office, store commerce, and Teams applications.

Users can easily track task completion across all relevant stores, re-assign tasks, and give feedback and proof of execution where applicable.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Commerce and check out our task management capabilities.

Human Resources: simplify employee leave and absence management

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides a comprehensive personnel management solution, including performance, leave and absence, and payroll integration. A new update, now generally available, enables employees to view time-off balances and submit leave requests from within Teams where they are already collaborating and getting their work done.

Employees simply type in keywords and a chatbot responds immediately to let them know leave balances or request time off. Managers can just as easily review and approve time-off requests with just a few clicks. By enabling employee and manager self-service, HR teams can stay focused on more strategic tasks while empowering employees to better manage their leave and absence benefits.

Learn more about the employee leave and absence experience in Teams.

Boost collaboration for better customer experiences across the organization

These integrated collaboration capabilities are just the start. We continue our investment in innovation to transform work, so everyone can be more efficient, more collaborative, more insightful and ultimately, deliver the best customer experiences possible.

Learn more on the Microsoft Teams blog and explore all of the ways Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams help move projects forward and keep people connected with chat, suggested actions, and records in collaborative workspaces.

The post Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams: extend collaboration across teams appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Digital commerce is reshaping every step in the supply chain. Consumers today expect seamless omnichannel buying and after-purchase experiences with multiple fast delivery options.

Many organizations, however, are struggling to modernize operations to keep up with the growth. In fact, a recent study* found that nearly 61 percent¹ of companies expect over half of their sales to come from digital channels in the next couple of years.

At the same time, over 50 percent² of the companies felt that their supply chains were unprepared to meet growing digital commerce needs. A lot of themexperienced delays due to longer fulfillment times and slower distribution due to the pandemic,and almost 37percent³ofcompanies felt that they lacked the supply chain technology they needed to meet the growing digital commerce needs. For 52 percent⁴ of these organizations, enabling cost-efficient fulfillment was a key priority.

Today we are introducing a new Dynamics 365 application that can accelerate omnichannel transformation across order and fulfillment. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management adapts quickly and meets future order and fulfillment complexities while supporting contemporary methods like buying online for in-store or curbside pickup.

This purpose-driven supply chain solution allows organizations to centrally manage the entire lifecycle of an order from intake to fulfillment so that they can respond quickly to constraints and disruptions and still deliver on the order promiseunlocking the new ways to meet customer needs, be more responsive, and adapt new business models to stay profitable and relevant. Intelligent Order Management can integrate with existing enterprise systems, improving time to value and interoperability.

Let’s look at how our latest innovation enables businesses to achieve higher service levels while also driving efficiencies and savings across the supply chain.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is built on a modern open platform that can provide the flexibility companies need today to capture orders from any order source like online e-commerce, marketplace, mobile apps, or traditional sources like EDI and fulfill them from their own warehouse, 3PL, stores, or drop-ship with vendors or other delivery fulfillmentpartners.

Order management is a mature space, and the current solutions in the market are extremely rigid. With Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, companies can use out of the box pre-built connectors from an ecosystem of more than 200 Microsoft Power Platform connectors to add new order intake, fulfillment, and delivery method. It helps them easily scale during peak demand.

Deliver on your order promise

The solution leverages AI to give real-time recommendations for how to fulfill each order based on existing inventory and will provide information and insights into the implications of possible choices.

This uses exception-based management so that while business users have complete visibility and access to adjust and change any order path, only those exceptions are raised for business decisions. With machine learning, the system learns how the business user reacts to each exception and learns to provide better recommendations next time.

Get real-time inventory visibility

One of the key differentiators of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is an integrated real-time inventory visibility service, a microservice built on Microsoft Dataverse that is highly scalable and extensible, providing a single, global view of the inventory positions across all legal entities.

The fulfillment orchestration engine uses this real-time inventory data to optimize fulfillment and, in the process, ensure optimal stock levels across the channel to improve cash flow.

Manage the entire order lifecycle

To deliver a true omnichannel experience, organizations must centrally manage the entire lifecycle of the product from capture to delivery. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management provides real-time visibility into each step of the order journey. It provides fulfillment insights in real-time through customizable and integrated dashboards so that the supply chain team can take the right countermeasures to overcome constraints and continue to track and improve operational efficiency to deliver to the customer on time.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management also breaks down silos so that the organizations get a single view of the order even if they use multiple systems across their subsidiaries and headquarters. The system also helps organizations streamline the return processes. Whether returns are collected at a retail store, fulfillment center, or service center, returns can be initiated through an app, online, or at the store.

The other key differentiator is that this solution is truly built for the business user so that they don’t have to rely on IT every time order flows need to be changed. The supply chain team can leverage the embedded policy designer to design the rules to optimize their business processes.

They can use the journey orchestration designer tools to model and automate the response to fulfillment constraints and leverage machine learning to influence the flow of the order to optimize it. Whenever an organization predicts or detects constraints in their fulfillment network, this helps them proactively overcome the bottlenecks and drive efficiencies across the supply chainall while meeting deliveries on time and in full.

Get up and running quickly

Lastly, the onboarding to Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is done using a guided experience. Organizations today want to get up and running soon so that they can immediately start to drive efficiency in their fulfillment processes before rolling out worldwide. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is a software as a service (SaaS) running on the Microsoft cloud.

Organizations can scale during peak order volumes by supporting various order intake, fulfillment, and delivery partners using pre-built connectors. This order orchestration engine is built on Power Platform, which has more than 200 pre-built connectors, allowing any business user to instantly connect into this ecosystem. In addition, we will continue to expand the ecosystem of connectors by working with design partners like Orderful, BigCommerce, Magento,Flexe, HighJump,Vertext,Flintfox, etc. As we progress with the release we’ll announce further collaborations.

It can easily integrate with your existing enterprise systems such as any ERP, CRM, or warehouse management and fulfillment system and seamlessly synchronize data using Dataverse. It has no dependency on other Dynamics 365 products, and it works seamlessly with both Dynamics 365 and non-Dynamics 365 business applications. It is truly going to enable customers to reimagine omnichannel fulfillment by making it automated, intelligent, and frictionless. This will be available in preview on April 30, 2021, and will be generally available on July 30, 2021.

“We are constantly expanding the number of ways by which customers can purchase our products as well as number of fulfillment options to meet their needs. With Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, we can centrally orchestrate fulfillment and optimize the order journeys across all sources and scenarios. This will enable us to proactively respond to fulfillment risks and constraints while delivering on the order promise”Jeff Suellentrop, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, Digital (DTC) and Programs, Breville

Learn more

• Contact us at D365OMS@microsoft.com to learn more and preview the solution
• Visit the Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management website
• Watch the on-demand session Intelligent fulfillment orchestration for optimized delivery at Microsoft Ignite and the Microsoft Ignite keynote.
• Read more in the Dynamics 365 Microsoft Ignite announcement blog.

¹Base: 470 global decision makers of digital transformation strategies and operations as it relates to the retail experience for customers with channel engagement from online and offline

^2,3,4Base: 624 global decision makers of digital transformation strategies and operations as it relates to the retail experience for their retail experience for customers

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, November 2020

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

The post Adapt quickly and fulfill efficiently with Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

With more employees working remote, it is more important than ever to meet workers where they work. This includes making tasks related to human resources easier to track from home. This becomes even more important as more organizations use Microsoft Teams not only for collaboration but also to help improve employee experiences and productivity.

We’re announcing the Dynamics 365 Human Resources app for Microsoft Teams, which is now generally available. The app lets employees view their time-off balance and quickly submit time-off requests. They can also send their coworker’s information about upcoming time off in Microsoft Teams channels and chats outside the Human Resources app. This experience is seamless across devices.

Making a request to take a sick leave or vacation is as simple as chatting with a bot. The bot provides employees with the number of hours that they have available to take off. They can chat with the bot to submit a requestor can use the Time off tab to view existing requests, upcoming leave, and more. Employees can also submit partial day leave or submit leave requests that are comprised of different dates and leave types.

How it helps managers

The Human Resources app makes it easier for managers, like Jonathan Mayer of Spairliners, to stay in the loop. Spairliners was an early adopter of the Human Resources app Teams app. Jonathan said it has helped his company gain user acceptance while rolling out leave and absences to colleagues.

“The pandemic and generalization of home office had increased our usage of Teams. It is really nice and user friendly to be able to request leaves directly from Teams,” said Jonathan Mayer, who is head of Project Management, Process and IT at Spairliners. “As a manager, the workflow is also faster as you can accept or reject requests without opening another tool.”

Once requests are submitted, the manager (or the leave request approver depending on how the leave workflow is configured) is sent a Teams notification. The manager can quickly look at the leave details and also see the availability of other team members to ensure that there are no gaps in coverage if someone is away. They can approve or deny the leave request using the interactive bot messages.

Employees are notified via a Teams notification as soon as their leave requests are approved or denied. To ensure that their team members are aware of the upcoming leave request, employees can easily share the approved leave requests with a Teams channel or with other team members via a Teams message.

Next steps

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and how the app is helping your organization. Enable the Dynamics 365 Human Resources app for Microsoft Teams directly in the Microsoft Teams app store.

To learn more about these exciting new capabilities, see Human Resources app in Teams.

The post Manage time off requests with Human Resources app for Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Faced with a historic level of social and business disruption, companies have been forced to respond quickly and strategically to meet the challenge. To help address this challenge, and elevate customer experiences, we are introducing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Elevate customer experiences

Connecting with people has never been more important, and customer expectations have never been higher. Customer tolerance for disjointed experiences, or even worse, tone-deaf communications is unacceptable. Organizations that deliver better end-to-end customer experiences (CX) are taking share. Despite a decade of discussion about the importance of CX, many companies have failed to elevate their experiences to the level desired.

Beyond the human value of great experiences, elevated experiences are critical to driving business valueenabling growth and driving brand equity, preventing churn, and enabling higher marketing and customer engagement return on investment.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is working to revolutionize how organizations address these challenges to enable teams such as marketing, sales, customer success, commerce, or customer service to create engaging and impactful customer-led experiences.

We are announcing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing will be released for preview as part of the April 2021 release wave 1 updates in EMEA and North America. This landmark innovationbrings together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation and is designed to help businesses:

• Engage customers in real-time
• Win customers and earn loyalty faster
• Personalize customer experiences with AI
• Build customer trust with a unified, adaptable platform

Plus, commercial Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers will get six months of free access to Dynamics 365 Marketing at no additional cost. We’ll have more details on this offer to share soon, along with eligibility details, and we are excited to see you reap the benefits of these solutions together.

Moving from segment-based marketing to real-time interactions

Customer journey orchestration helps you make the next great leap in customer experiences: from segment-based marketing campaigns to moments-based interactions, creating a personalized, holistic customer journey for each individual. This enables you to strengthen your relationships at every touchpoint across both digital and physical, breaking down walls between marketing, sales, commerce, and service organizations. Dynamics 365 Marketing responds to customer actions during the journey.

Win customers and earn loyalty

In the highly competitive technology market, HP’s brand is built on its high-quality products and differentiated service. Loyalty is critical to enabling business performance (Customer Lifetime Value, Gross Margin, etc.) and every support call is an opportunity. HP is working to turn support interactions into personalized engagement moments using Dynamics 365 Marketing with customer journey orchestration. This will allow HP to break down longstanding data silos, better engage customers in real-time with the most impactful messaging, and leverage AI-driven recommendations.

“With customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing, our agents will gain a real-time 360-degree view of each customer and their support experience,” explains Brian Johnston, Business Architect, HP. “We’ll be making the most of our customers’ time and treating them with empathy and understanding. It makes HP feel real to the customer, and it makes the customer feel real to HP”

The result will be an enhanced and highly-personalized customer service experience that improves quality of service, builds customer lifetime loyalty, and also saves the company money by shortening the time spent solving problems.

Personalize customer experiences with AI to enable more engaging content

Authoring impactful content quickly and easily is a big challenge. With built-in AI recommendations for content, channels, customer segmentation, and analytics, companies can be sure to deliver the right message. The reimagined email editor helps select and deliver the best image, video, document, or fragment using AI. A new centralized asset library allows you to search, version, manage and use AI to tag your digital assets.

Journey authoring is also assisted by AI with targeted customer segments, channel optimization, and experimentation. As customers engage, the customer journey adapts and responds to interactions with relevant content driving further engagement.

We’re engineering AI throughout Dynamics 365 Marketing to help you create engaging and impactful messages faster. Powerful experimentation capabilities and analytics track progress towards your business objectives, helping you to exceed business goals.

Campari raises the bar for delivering customer experiences

The Campari Group, home to some of the world’s iconic alcoholic spirit brands, knows how to create great brand experiences and is always working to deepen its relationships with customers. To gain a 360-degree customer view and enhance the personalization of its marketing, sales, and customer service efforts, Campari Group deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing. With AI-driven recommendations and customer journey orchestration, Campari Group can now personalize real-time marketing messages for maximum impact across all customer touchpoints.

“Customer journey orchestration enables contextually relevant and consistent real-time conversations with every customer across all interaction points,” explains Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT Marketing and Sales. “We can more precisely align marketing messages for each communication channel to gain the greatest impact. We see the effects in in-store sales and also in e-commerce, which is particularly important during COVID.”

Within weeks, Campari Group connected all the data points in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and deployed its first email marketing automation campaign against those segments in the United States. Roll-out in the United Kingdom and Australia followed shortly.

Stronger connections with Microsoft Teams

The dramatic shift to online meetings and virtual events has made it even more important for event managers to easily use Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing.

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced new and updated features that enable you to run rich webinars and events, true to your brand with a professional experience for attendees. We also announced the ability of Teams to easily follow up with event attendees with Dynamics 365 Marketing. This allows you to continue connecting with attendees, nurturing them into loyal customers.

Turn insights into action

Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, makes it easy to unify customer data, identify high-value customer segments, or those likely to churn. When you combine it with Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can engage customers in a personalized way and in real-time to drive meaningful actions. Seamlessly use segments from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to target marketing campaigns. Personalize content with rich profile information, and create individual journeys based on customer history and preferences. With the addition of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you build custom AI models and improve relevancy with advanced segmentation and targeting that can then be brought to life with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Learning customers’ preferences and sentiment is critical to personalizing engagement. Today, we are also announcing real-time survey capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice that enable you to adapt customer journeys or trigger relevant communications. For example, if a customer is not satisfied with a specific product feature or service, the response can quickly stop marketing campaigns while also notifying an account manager for personalized follow-up.

Together, these connected applications help companies personalize moments that matter across all touchpoints in a customer’s journey and build deeper customer relationships with more meaningful engagement across both digital and physical channels.

Agencies bring customer-first approach to journey creation

Developing highly impactful and personalized experiences across the customer journey requires a fresh approach. We are excited to be working with a number of leading agencies that have expertise in transforming customer experiences to deliver stronger connections to leading brands and measurable business impact.

“VMLY&R is excited to partner with Microsoft, helping empower organizations to reimagine and transform customer experiences. Harnessing the power of AI, data, and insights to create connected customer and brand experiences have never been more important. We look forward to collaborating with Microsoft and the Dynamics 365 team to deliver amazing customer experiences for organizations around the world,” says David Mitchell, Chief Technology Officer, VMLY&R.

Agencies such as VMLY&R (a WPP company) and Kin + Carta use creativity, technology, and culture to create experiences that engage customers one-on-one across every touchpoint from marketing through service, across both digital and physical experiences.

“As people have more and more ways to interact with brands, it’s never been more vital to deliver a consistent, seamless experience for customers and to look towards the future to find innovative ways to meet their needs,” says Rob McGowan, Managing Director of Edit, part of the Kin+Carta connective. “It’s this challenge that we believe the new customer journey orchestration features in Dynamics 365 Marketing are ideally placed to answer.”

Learn more and get started

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 all capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing and the preview of real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities planned to be released in North America and EMEA April 2021.

The post Drive personalized interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

To help boost your fraud protection strategy, we’ve released an improved data upload experience in Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. The centralized interface guides you through importing historical data for purchase protection and loss prevention.

For details about this feature, refer to the schema for purchase protection and loss prevention. If some fields are not applicable to your industry, you can leave them blank. We recommend that you upload as much information as possible to capitalize on the adaptive machine learning capabilities.

Steps to improve your data uploadexperience

1. Export data from your data warehouse and prepare your data to match the schema.
We recommend uploading 3 to 6 months of historical data for optimal results.Upload data from at least 10 unique staff/POS devices to generate your first Loss Prevention report. For Purchase Protection, we suggest loading 3 to 6 months of mature data where refunds and label data are present.

2.Prepare your data to match the schema. Pay attention to the date format, which requires ISO 8601 in UTC time.

You can use DateTime.UtcNow.ToString(“o”) to convert datetime format.

For SQL, you can use SELECT: CONVERT(VARCHAR(33), DateColumn, 127) FROM MyTable.

Or, you can use the Excel function =CONCAT(TEXT([cell],”yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss”),”.0000000Z”) to make the conversion.

Be sure to review and remove all escaped characters, such as commas, new line characters, and multi-line characters.

3. Prepare data files to upload.

Save the data in UTF-8 encoding.You can split a file that exceeds 10 GB into multiple uploads. Try to make the column header the same as what is specified in the schema to leverage the auto-mapping capability.

4. Upload the file in the Fraud Protection portal.

Follow the directions for purchase protection and loss prevention, upload the data file, and then map the data columns accordingly. When data upload and mapping is complete, you can start processing the data.

The processing may take some time depending on the size of data. A loss prevention report will be generated and ready to view after data processing is complete. For purchase assessments, the assessments are ready to use when data upload is complete. You can integrate purchase APIs, if you have not already done so, and then use the assessment scores to make decisions about your transactions.

To upload historical data and enhance your fraud prevention journey, feel free tosign in now. If you’re not currently using Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, you cansign up for a free trial.

The post Import historical data to optimize fraud protection appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Don’t miss Microsoft Ignite, an all-digital three-day event kicking off this next Tuesday, March 2 at 8:00 AM Pacific Time! This is your opportunity to get a sneak peek at the future of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, connect with experts, and engage with your global community. We’ve packed the line-up with technical and hands-on contentfrom learning sessions to live Q&As, featured speakers to one-on-one consultationsall streaming digitally live and on-demand to help you get the most from the event.

To help you plan your experience from the variety of sessions and activities, we’ve compiled some essential presentations, sessions, and viewing tips below. Click the linked titles to learn more and add each event to your session scheduler.

Tune in to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform featured sessions

To kick things off on Tuesday, March 2, tune in to the opening keynote hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella streaming live at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. Then, learn what’s new and on the horizon for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in these featured sessions:

Tuesday, March 2 | 1:00 PM 1:30 PM Pacific Time
What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Power Platform

Hosted by Charles Lamanna, CVP, Low Code Application Platform and Julie Strauss, Partner PM Director

Learn about new and upcoming capabilities across Power Platform, including demos, real-world examples of Power Platform in action, new features, and the roadmap for later this year. Also, learn how Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents rapidly enables digitization and automation with a modern set of capabilities.

Tuesday, March 2 | 2:00 PM 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Elevating the end-to-end customer experience with Dynamics 365: Infusing intelligence from front- to back-office

Hosted by Muhammad Alam, CVP, Dynamics 365 and Lori Lamkin, VP, Dynamics 365 Marketing

Learn about new solutions and capabilities from Dynamics 365 that enable you to deliver unparalleled customer excellence on every step of the journeyfrom agility in predicting and meeting customer needs to flawlessly executing with an intelligent and agile supply chain.

Wednesday, March 3 | 11:00 AM 11:30 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Teams + Dynamics 365: The unified collaboration platform for modern business

Hosted by Takeshi Numoto, CMO, Commercial Marketing and Emma Williams, CVP, Microsoft Office Modern Workplace Transformation.

Discover how we are integrating Microsoft Teams into Dynamics 365 across marketing, sales, customer service, field service, and commerce solutions to up-level collaboration across your organization and drive stronger engagement with customers.

Wednesday, March 3 | 3:00 PM 3:30 PM Pacific Time
Drive a data culture with Power BI: Vision, strategy, and roadmap

Hosted by Arun Ulagaratchagan, CVP, Power BI

Learn how Microsoft Power BI can help drive a data culture in your organization and get a sneak peek at the vision and roadmap for Power BI. You’ll discover how AI automatically find patterns in your data, you will learn about how Power BI is built into Teams and Excel to enable incredible collaboration experiences, and how Power BI with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics meets your most demanding needs.

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.

Sessions: More than 100 opportunities to ramp up your skills

Learn about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform capabilities and expand your skills, all guided by the experts and engineers behind the tools you use every day. Browse the session catalog to plan your personalized schedule. In the session catalog, you can filter sessions by solution area, such as Dynamics 365 or Power Platform, session time, start time, theme, or expertise level to find the right sessions for you. Register to access a personalized schedule planner that tracks all of your sessions, meetings, and messages.

More to explore

Microsoft Ignite will include live segments and Q&A, available across time zones. Check out all of the events and activities hosted by our team of experts:

• Connection Zone: Discuss topics with experts and peers, check out fun activities, and connect with your global community. Explore the end-to-end customer experience with Dynamics 365, and learn how to work together better and build stronger customer relationships with Teams and Dynamics 365, and connect with peers about all things Dynamics 365, from certifications, developing applications.
• Learning Zone: Explore learning modules to sharpen existing skills or add new ones, no matter your experience level. Learn how to get started with Power Apps or deep dive into business scenarios, such as how to manage scheduling options in Dynamics 365 for Field Service.

Get the most of your Microsoft Ignite experience

Be sure to follow Microsoft Ignite on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date and connected with the community and register for Microsoft Ignite today.

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