There’s still time to join today’s free Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit. Connect with industry icons and peers. Expand your network and get insights from savvy CFOs as they share their perspectives on the impact of COVID-19, how their organizations pivoted in response, and how they plan to transform for the future.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the New York Times, reimagination leverages “innovations born of necessity like remote control of manufacturing processes, AI bots helping diagnose patients, and more effective distance-learning technologies.”

Modern finance leaders are not only responding and recovering from the global health crisis, but they are also implementing Satya’s advice by reimagining the future of business by accelerating automation and digital transformation. In today’s virtual summit, CFOs share their proven insights and strategies for their own enterprise’s reimagination and continued transformation.

Key themes we explore in this summit include how to:

• Sustain core financial processes
• Provide engaging analytics to support quick decisions
• Empower productive remote work while maintaining employee engagement
• Enable a safe return to the office process while creating more permanent remote roles and balancing a hybrid workforce

Gain valuable insights from finance leaders

Hear from thought leaders on immediate actions they took to sustain core financial processes during the pandemic, how they’re continuing to reduce costs in a shifting business and economic landscape, and how they plan to leverage lessons learned to transform for the future. Hear their specific tactics and case studies for how they’ve maintained liquidity and forecasted cash flow, cut costs while investing in the future, and secured access to critical financial data and reporting all while mitigating risk from fraud, supply chain disruptions, customer disruption, and ongoing uncertainty.

Learn more about how finance roles are transforming with changing skill sets, growing responsibilities, and the shift to remote work. Utilize leaders’ tips and best practices for taking a data-first approach to harmonize productivity and wellbeing in this work-from-home environment.

Discover how they’re building agility into core processes to prepare for and rapidly respond to future emergencies, taking proactive actions that leverage AI-driven insights, and improving accuracy of and time to completion for forecasting and scenario analysis using machine learning. This focus on automating finance processes and operations allows time for finance teams like yours to perform strategic work as a key part of reimagining for the future.

Keynotes from Rebecca Henderson (Harvard Business School), AstraZeneca, and Unilever

Participate in sessions with keynote speakers, including economist Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School, as well as Mark Fowler of AstraZeneca and Ritesh Tiwari of Unilever.

Attend live Q&As

Ask questions and get answers from Microsoft experts and event speakers during a live Q&A session.

Create or join a roundtable

Wonder how your peers are using this time to move forward and reimagine the future? Join a small roundtable or create your own to look at innovative ways to tackle today’s challenges.

Connect with peers

There are more than 2,000 finance leaders from top companies around the world attending this summit. Expand your network, share, and learn by connecting with peers through small roundtables and breakout sessions

Register now

Now’s the time to register for the Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit. Don’t miss out on this event and the opportunity to discuss challenges, best practices, and lessons learned as finance organizations continue to respond to, recover from, and reimagine the future post-COVID-19. Capture insights from thought leaders and see how targeted solutions can address your key challenges. Directly connect with peers to build your network and get outside perspectives. Sign up now and join today.

What: Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit

When: February 24, 2021

The post Connect with finance leaders at Finance Reimagined—a free digital event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Understanding your customers starts with gathering their feedback. But a Forrester study¹ found that at the end of 2020, decision making with customer insights was organizations’ biggest challenge with marketing programs. That’s why having a voice of customer (VoC) programa program designed to capture the needs and wants of the customerin your organization is critical to improving customer experiences, driving a customer-centric culture, and delivering better business outcomes.

VoC programs need to be built on a strong foundation of principles, but it takes more than that to succeed. Our newest webinar featuring Forrester analyst Faith Adams explores what voice of customer programs are, how it can impact your business, and what steps you can take today. Watch “Build Better Customer Experiences with VoC Programs” today.

The four principles of successful VoC programs

1. Listen to your customers where they are

In today’s interconnected world, your customers exist in a variety of channels from email to social to web. If your organization can meet your customers in those channels, both in collecting feedback, closing the loop, and delivering a great experienceyou can build lifelong loyalty.

Organizations with a strong VoC program utilize its tools to deploy surveys in every channel in real time, creating a seamless and easy process for the customer. Prioritizing understanding how customers see your products and services will help every department, from marketing to sales to customer service, have a greater impact on the customer experience.

2. Maximize insights for deeper connections

A deeper connection with your customer can only form from a complete understanding of their perceptions, needs, and wants. Strong VoC programs maximize customer insights with powerful tools such as AI-analysis and customer satisfaction metrics such as NPS satisfaction over time allow organizations to continuously have a pulse on their customers’ perception.

With direct feedback analyzed and visualized in a manner that is easy to interpret, tailoring future interactions becomes easier than ever. Sales, marketing, and customer service can adjust their daily interactions and decisions to align with what matters most to customers and are empowered to develop lifelong relationships.

3. Integrate data across your organization

Data silos prevent rich customer insights and authentic experiences. Successful VoC programs truly transform data management and create a culture of customer centricity where every department has access to the right data at the right time.

Further, sharing the insights you gather from direct feedback can be utilized to create holistic customer profiles. Together with behavioral data, these unified customer profiles can be accessed directly from the VoC, elevating how organizations think about their customer and how to respond.

4. Respond quickly to build customer relationships

Finally, a VoC program needs to enable an organization to respond in the moments that matter. The combination of data from applications and the use of real-time notifications creates accelerate response times.

The most important part of the customer journey for your organization is closing the feedback loop. When customer feedback is received, 88 percent of customers expect a response from businesses within 60 minutes. That’s why VoCs let you set triggers for when customer satisfaction dips, creating an instant pathway to delivering a great customer experience.

Starting your Voice of Customer journey can be daunting, but it’s the first step to orchestrating authentic connections and responses to customer feedback. With these four principles in mind, and with all departments bought into a singular vision, organizations can improve business outcomes.

To learn how Microsoft can empower your organization to use a robust VoC to quickly collect and understand omnichannel feedback at scale, visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice website.

Start your free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice today and check out our on-demand webinar “Build Better Customer Experiences with VoC Programs” today.

¹Forrester Analytics, Business Technographics Marketing Survey, 2020.

The post 4 principles of successful voice of the customer programs appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As we enter 2021, we reached out to a few Microsoft partners and asked if they could share with us about their experiences from 2020how they and their customers faired amidst the challenges presented by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as what trends they’re seeing, what lessons they had learned, and what predictions they had for 2021.

In our last article in this series, we talked to Sunrise Technologies CEO John Pence. This time, we hear from Aden Forrest, CEO of Australia-based Simple, a marketing operations platform that helps companies plan, create, and optimize their marketing activities to deliver exceptional customer experiences across marketing touchpoints. Learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners like Simple can help you get the most value from your Dynamics 365 implementation.

A shift in conversation, a focus on people

According to Forrest, when the pandemic hit in March, the executive board at Simple reviewed the situation to determine how it was going to navigate the upcoming period of uncertainty. “Our offices were closed and our working from home policy was put in place,” Forrest said. “Some of the activities included setting up weekly board meetings, weekly company all hands meetings, daily stand ups, and team check-ins that focused on team and individual well-being.”

Forrest noted that, over the course of the year, the types of conversations he’s having with customers has shifted. “Our conversations are now focused on supporting our new market normal and new expectations,” Forrest said. “The big picture is still important, but immediate payback is equally critical. It truly is a ‘think big, start small, and grow fast’ conversation. For our own applications, we are also diving into the following conversation areas immediately; supporting newly remote teams, business and regulatory compliance, reduced budgets driving increased productivity requirements, and larger rapid digitalization of business outcomes,” Forrest said.

Forrest has observed a common trend across the customers he works with: a focus on people. “Consistent across all of our customers and prospects are the people aspects of our new normal,” Forrest said. “Our customers are aggressively investing in their people, and this translates into how they support them through their respective technology and processes. These are typically areas that have previously been under-invested in.”

Cloud-based business grows in 2020

Forrest said the fact that Simple’s business is powered by cloud-based business applications benefitted the company greatly over the course of 2020. “Our business has not only continued under the enforced remote working requirementsit has grown,” he said. “Our customers were able to continue to use our solution with no service interruptions, and as a result, they have invested further in our offerings.”

The COVID-19 environment has led to increased innovation within Simple, Forrest said. “As an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), we have delivered more applications and capabilities than before across Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Teams, and our customers are also extending our applications and other cloud technologies faster than before,” he said.

Lessons from a challenging year

Forrest said the year’s critical learnings have included the following five lessons:

1. People will always surprise you. The strength of the human spirit is amazing.
2. Don’t be afraid to ask for more from your team, partners, and customers.
3. Communication continues to drive culture, brand, and relationships.
4. Technology, and your ability to embrace it, can be the difference between survival and excelling.
5. Stretch targets become the new norm in a time of crisis.

While 2020 was a demanding year, Forrest thinks his team has emerged more resilient and focused. “Our business faced many challenges in 2020, but through totally focusing on the value we provide our customers and cutting back on anything not linked to delivering this, I believe our team has become stronger, more engaged, and significantly more commercial,” he said.

“I believe our team has become stronger, more engaged, and significantly more commercial.”Aden Forrest, CEO, Simple

A new business landscape

Looking ahead to 2021, Forrest believes that staff retention initiatives will be increasingly important, “since in the remote digital environment, good people will be able to work for an ever-increasing number of global employers. Business culture and the associated brand will become even more important. People want to work for causes, not just money.”

Forrest believes that the new cloud-enriched business landscape will continue to provide people the ability to work as countries will continue to manage lockdowns. “Through technology, the world has gotten significantly smaller, and employers need to understand the benefits and potential challenges this brings. The trusted relationship between the employer and employee is going to take on even more importance,” he said.

He continued, “2020 has been all about survival in our new normal. 2021 will be all about taking full advantage of this new business landscape. Things will not go back to the way they were. 2020 has changed the business landscape for the better, forever. It is now up to Microsoft and its partners to ensure this is for the betterment of all. We have exciting times ahead.”

Learn more

• Learn how Simple helps Australian Government and Enterprise manage marketing and communications with ease.
• Learn how to accelerate your success with Dynamics 365 partners.
• Stay up to date on the latest partner success stories and trends by visiting the partner blog.

The post Why Simple’s CEO thinks exciting times are ahead in 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Effectively managing fraud requires a multi-tiered strategy. It is essential to adopt a fraud prevention strategy with a broad view, encompassing multiple user interaction events, and phased decision-making points.

A user interacts in many ways on a merchant’s website, such as searching for products, updating account info, writing a review, adding or removing items from their cart, or signing up for events or newsletters. Each of these interactions provides tell-tale signs of their behavior and intent. Analyzing all of these interactions cohesively helps to identify fraud more accurately and provides a seamless experience to legitimate customers.

The classic approach to fraud is to look for specific events to identify certain types of fraud, like purchases with a stolen credit card or account takeovers. Most tools support this approach, to assess specific generic events such as purchases, sign-up, sign-in, or coupon redemption. Evolving beyond this classic approach requires tools that can help you tailor a fraud prevention strategy to best suit the unique interactions between your business and your customers.

Custom assessments are available as part of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and enable you to tailor a fraud prevention strategy that best suits your business and customer needs.

Analyzing the customer journey in your business is the first step in understanding where to deploy custom assessments.

Identify key touchpoints of a user journey

Begin by identifying user actions that could indicate a high risk of fraud or help you track unusual behavior later in the user’s journey. These actions can vary by the type of business you run. For example, a user updates the physical address on their account. If a restaurant offers promotions for users from certain locations, an address change may indicate a risk of fraud or abuse of the promotion and you may choose to act immediately. In contrast, if you are an e-commerce merchant offering gifts and accessories, this event alone may not indicate risk, but subsequent actions may. In this case, you can add an additional check if the next action was updating the phone number, as it may indicate the risk of a compromised account.

Create custom assessments for these key touchpoints

After you have listed the touchpoints that are key indicators, you can add assessments to these events. Custom assessments have the flexibility to define every part of the assessment to match your business-specific scenario — including the API name, event name, and the payload. This helps you to easily manage all the assessments.

Using the rules engine to determine actions

After your custom assessments are created, you can use the rules engine to configure what actions you want to take on them. From the earlier example for a restaurant, you can create rules for the address change event to check the distance between both addresses or the history of orders from that user and return a reject decision to block the user. Or if you are the e-commerce merchant, return this event to a watch list for action later.

You can view the performance of your custom assessments, including the total volume of events and what rules were triggered if any, in the scorecard tab of the assessment.

Next steps

To learn more about custom assessments, check out the documentation. To see for yourself how Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection can help your business, get started today with a free trial.

The post Build a tailored fraud prevention strategy with custom assessments appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Finance leaders are organizations’ linchpins, and during crises such as the pandemic, they take on enormous responsibilities to steer their businesses through the storm while simultaneously preparing for the future. Some of the actions savvy finance leaders are taking during these uncertain times are to continue to reduce costs, mitigate risks, and accelerate their company’s digital transformations.

Our upcoming event, Finance Reimagined, is a free virtual conference. The summit will feature talks from finance leaders, from whom you’ll learn about hard-won lessons and hear valuable insights. Discover the actions your peers and industry leaders are taking to sustain core financial processes through the pandemic and how they’re pivoting to the future amidst continued uncertainties. And engage with thought leadership content, peer-to-peer discussions, and more.

• What: Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit
• When: February 24, 2021

Capture learnings and best practices

During the summit, for which more than 2,000 finance leaders have registered, successful leaders reveal how they are leading their companies through three key stages: Response, Recovery, and Reimagination.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained in the New York Times, response means “responding to the immediate impact through office closures, cost cuts,” etc. Next comes “recovery, which is already underway in many places, and will be more like a ‘dial’ than a ‘switch.'” The critical third phase is “reimagination.” This is where “innovations born of necessity during the previous two phases will emerge, like remote control of manufacturing processes, AI bots helping diagnose patients, and more effective distance-learning technologies.”

The most innovative and renowned finance leaders have used the crises to not only respond and recover but to further embrace the potential of digital transformation and to reimagine the future.

Gain insights from impactful speakers

Hear keynotes from industry leaders, including economist Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School, who will share her thoughts on reimagining capitalism and grappling with the future of work, and finance leaders Mark Fowler of AstraZeneca and Ritesh Tiwari of Unilever.

Get a sneak peek of PwC’s CFO Pulse Survey, which provides a vision and practical steps to “the new normal.” This includes how finance is shifting to embrace and enable the modern workplace across cost, risk, and efficiency agendas.

Learn how to embrace the need to move quickly and how doing so requires a modern finance function that is resilient, adaptable, cost-effective, and focused on speed to value in a session with Tony Klimas, partner, Global Finance Practice Leader at Ernst & Young LLP, and Myles Corson, Global and Americas Market Leader, Financial Account Advisory Services at Ernst & Young LLP. They will also reveal findings from the 2020 DNA of the CFO study and share lessons from the front lines.

See how targeted solutions are addressing key challenges

See how finance leaders are overcoming challenges through sessions focused on you and your pain points. For example, learn how to confidently complete a virtual close, provide engaging analytics to support quick decisions, and take a quantitative approach to understand and address employee engagement.

In other sessions, take a deep dive into predictive analytics, and learn how AI is being infused into financial processes to proactively reduce write-offs, improve cash flow, and make accurate, data-driven, and proactive decisions. And see real-world uses of automated SOX control, including how Microsoft leveraged models to automate the processing of payout statements, saving close to 20,000 hours of manual work and bringing the error rate to zero.

Engage with peers and build your network

Engage in peer-to-peer discussions through small-group breakout sessions. Join existing roundtables or create your own and invite peers to discuss challenges related to respond, recover, or reimagine. Connect with thought leaders and advisories, and add these business leaders to your own professional network.

Register today

Benefit from others’ hard-won lessons and prepare for the future. Register now for Finance Reimagined.

The post Join Microsoft at Finance Reimagined: response, recovery, and reimagination appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Despite significant headwinds in 2020a global pandemic, economic downturn, and technology budgets clippedcustomer data platform (CDP) growth is booming. Businesses are charging full steam ahead on digital transformation efforts as their customers have dramatically moved toward online channels. According to a McKinsey Global Survey of executives, organizations across sectors and geographies are likely to report a significant increase in remote working, changing customer needs, and customer preferences for remote interactions.

Here is a deeper look at the three major trends that will impact how businesses think about customer experiences moving forward, and how a powerful, real-time customer data platform like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights can help you bring together transactional, behavioral, and demographic data to create a 360-degree view of your customers.

1. The physical will become digital

Increasingly, we are moving into an era where almost everything we see will have the potential to become a transaction. From social media to streaming channels to in-storewhen it comes to selling online or offline, it’s no longer one or the other. E-commerce gets physical with augmented reality, while stores go digital.

Augmented reality enables online shoppers to take part in bespoke, store-like experiences and try products virtually, while AI-powered personal assistants round out the experience with individualized recommendations. On the other hand, the transformation of the traditional retail space will continue as a new breed of “stores without walls” will go beyond the confines of the physical space to create a blended experience; an experience that allows in-store customers to find and order out-of-stock products online or receive location-targeted texts about items they have browsed online that are available in the store.

2. Personalization will be built in partnership

Customer experience is developed over a series of touchpoints along the customer journey that requires tight cross-functional alignment. 2021 is the year where customer experience teams will join forcesuniting marketing, sales, service, commerce, and ITto drive customer experience initiatives. A crucial part of this partnership is breaking down silos though shared access to data and analytics that offer real-time visibility. Collaboration across departments will enable businesses to serve customers intelligently all the way from acquisition to checkout and delivery.

3. Agile and integrated technologies will pave the way

Maintaining strong customer experiences require a real-time pulse on changing customer preferences and agile innovation to address them. Businesses will continue to invest in modern and adaptable technologies that meet global sustainability goals and uphold data security and privacy standards. These technologies will push the envelope as they become increasingly agile, operate in real-time, and integrate with everyday business applications. Think about AI-powered virtual agents for self-service, conversational interfaces, or augmented reality to help improve first-time fix rates and conduct remote auditsall while lowering costs and minimizing carbon footprints by avoiding unnecessary travel.

CDPs provide a foundation for personalization

As businesses seek to raise their digital game and transform customer experiences, CDPs deliver on the promise of building a rich customer view with an end-to-end look into the customer journey. Let’s see why CDPs are becoming an essential part of the tech stack and how they power personalized experiences at scale:

• Adapt to the audience

Eighty-one percent of customers want brands to get to know them and understand when to approach them and when not to, according to Accenture. CDPs break down the organizational and technology system silos by unifying the ever-increasing volume of data from all sources, including traditional sources like campaigns, transactions, and calls, and emerging sources like social shopping, augmented reality, virtual agents, and chatbots to create the 360-degree view of the customer. Machine learning models and built-in AI help cluster customer profiles to identify high-value and at-risk customers and recommend relevant products and services. This adaptive modeling and nimble decision-making empowers businesses to scale personalized interactions in real time.

• Center customers with care and empathy

Customer empathy means understanding their needsincluding what really matters to them, the worries, and aspirations they haveand it’s crucial for building strong customer relationships. While empathy has traditionally been limited to in-person interactions, digital empathy requires customer insights. Data is the primary way to listen to your customers and regardless of the system of engagement, CDPs help capture both explicit and implicit signals about customer behavior and intent. Advancements in machine learning have made it possible to interpret new kinds of data and even extrapolate the emotion from an interaction. With the right customer insights, businesses can apply empathy to digital interactions to not only enhance the quality of service but also help customers feel good about their interactions.

• Make personalization even more personal

The customer experience is not linearit includes the touchpoints that a company has created as well as touchpoints owned by different providers, often with no way of connecting and accessing information about these interactions. The dream that businesses are striving for is seamless, omnichannel personalization. They are putting customers at the center and creating value at every step, facilitating a consistent journey, regardless of channel. CDPs makes it possible for businesses to craft the right offers, messages, and experiences at speed. The AI-powered insights and analytics keep a real-time pulse on changing customer preferences; enabling the redesign of journeys and interactions to nurture demand, drive higher quality leads, and tailor content to fit the customer.

• Earn trust that drives loyal, lifelong customers

Tightening restrictions on data collection has made it difficult to personalize messaging. Regulatory bodies have increased standards and pressure to meet global sustainability goals and minimize carbon footprints. It’s imperative to reinforce the ethical usage of data and discover new ways to improve customer experiences while respecting the people behind the data. CDPs centralize and streamline the customer data infrastructure, helping build trust and loyalty with customers through strong consent management, data governance, and privacy controls.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is an AI-powered customer data platform with unmatched time to value. Trusted by enterprises across industries, it is empowering business teams across sales, service, and marketing to personalize experiences at scale. For instance, Campari Group, an alcoholic spirits manufacturer, is using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to unify a fractured data landscape and accelerate time to market for new campaigns that support end-to-end customer journeys across the organization. Just as many bars and restaurants were closing in response to COVID-19, Campari leveraged Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to multiply its revenue five-fold through deeper customer engagement. This is just one example of how CDPs are making personalization more personal.

Take a guided tour and check out the e-book, “Delight your customer in just three steps,” to see how your organization can use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to unlock insights and drive personalized customer experiences

The post Top 3 customer data platform trends for 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.