Most of us know at least one college student who is attending some or all of their classes online to cope with current circumstances. With many schools operating primarily online or in a hybrid mode, millions of students are cut off from the traditional sources of support that colleges offer.

To help students navigate these challenges, we’re continuing to add new capabilities to the Dynamics 365 education accelerator, including a recent update that enables tele-advising to help students connect with their academic advisors online or in person, and an easy-to-read student success path that helps them monitor progress toward their academic goals.

The January 29, 2021 update includes:

• An updated student portal with an improved user interface and user experience.
• Advisor connection, allowing students to request in-person or online meetings with their advisor.
• Student success path to give students an at-a-glance view of their progress toward completion of program requirements.
• Personalized progress with details about their academics, such as current courses, assignments, appointments, and notifications.
• An advisor dashboard with a comprehensive view of top- and bottom-performing students, and upcoming appointments with students.

Student portal

Student success path

Delivering success through the partner ecosystem

Microsoft partners have already been helping higher education institutions make great use of these capabilities for their students.

The latest release of the accelerator focuses on ensuring that students continue to have access to advisors and key student success resources, even when they are not able to meet in person. Even when we all return to in person meetings, these tools will continue to ensure that advisors and students remain aligned and working to help each student achieve their goals.

—Dr. Jennifer Beyer, Vice President, Product Management, Anthology

With the January 2021 release, the Dynamics 365 education accelerator has truly transformed into a usable, functional and relevant extension of the Microsoft Dataverse for partners like the Frequency Foundry to continue to adopt into our ISV solutions.

With the introduction of features such as tele-advising, assisting students in understanding their graduation goals through the success path, and the updated student portal, the higher education accelerator provides a solid data architecture foundation for our CRM solution, greymatter.

With these great additions, we’ve been able to successfully extend our offering from our niche higher education marketplace to school districts with greymatter for K12. We’re stoked about the possibilities for us and for what it means for our higher education and K-12 customers.

—Shekar Kadaba, Chief Experience Officer | Chief Product Officer, Frequency Foundry

Ready to build your own education solution?

The education accelerator takes the unified data approach of Microsoft Power Platform a step further to help you build solutions for schools more quickly. To get started, download the education accelerator, which includes a higher education component and a K-12 component, from AppSource.

Read the documentation to learn more, or reach out to our team with your questions.

The post Support student success with the Dynamics 365 education accelerator appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As today’s world expands with a massive wealth of customer information gleaned from brand interactions, purchases, services, and experiencestruly understanding your customers is of the upmost importance. The traditional approach of analyzing one piece of purchase data or one simple survey is insufficient for businesses looking to make an impact on the bottom line. With more information comes more opportunity to increase sales with effective marketing, but it also comes with a challenge: privacy.

According to a 2020 study conducted by Forrester¹, protecting customers’ personal information and privacy was the top priority for marketing decision makers when considering customer analytics.

Today, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, we are empowering organizations to collect direct customer feedback through semi-anonymous surveys and keep personal information anonymous.

Semi-anonymous surveys

Gathering and tracking customer metrics is critical for a business to build better customer experiences and respond in the moments that matter. With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, organizations can send direct surveys and collect customer feedback, then analyze it using powerful, built-in artificial intelligence to uncover key customer insights. Now, semi-anonymous surveys create peace of mind for customers when responding to surveys so you can receive more reliable feedback while protecting privacy.

Not only do semi-anonymous surveys enable you to understand your customers, but they can also be an important tool in listening to your employees. With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, you can capture internal feedback and monitor responses only by title, department, and work location, keeping personal identifiers out.

Watch the video below for additional details on how to collect anonymous employee feedback with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

The new semi-anonymous survey feature allows organizations to select which fields they want to keep anonymous, and which fields to track. For example, you can select to keep relevant location such as location of purchase but exclude personal information such as name and email. This gives organizations even more power managing their data. With rich data now at organizations’ fingertips, departments can align on marketing decisions to build better experiences and lifelong fans.

The value of customer data

Your business is only as successful as your understanding of your customers and data.

A Forrester study in 2018² found that data-driven organizations are growing at an average of 30 percent or more annually.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, the customer understanding process is simplified with easy-to-use survey creation, data analysis, integration with your other applications, and automatic notifications so you can meet the customer at every moment. Now, with added functionality for survey reminders, you can be sure to capture all relevant feedback and information to uncover rich insights.

Ultimately, data-driven and customer-centric organizations are at a competitive advantage because they understand the value of how better insights lead to more sales. Many organizations are missing the key piece of an easy-to-use direct feedback management solution, holding them back from creating a holistic view of the customer and maximizing data’s value. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers a complete understanding of your data, linking together direct and indirect feedback directly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and enabling better customer experiences.

Get started today

Customer privacy is key when collecting data and making decisions. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers you to bridge the gap between uncovering key customer insights and protecting personal information, allowing you to build meaningful relationships for long-term success. With unified customer profiles linked across your business applications, customer-first and employee-first organizations can act quickly on feedback and drive great experiences.

Gain an overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

Ready to start connecting with your customers and listening to your employees? Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

¹Forrester Analytics, Business Technographics Marketing Survey, 2020.

²Brian Hopkins, James McCormick, and Ted Schadler, Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace for Global Growth, Forrester, October 19, 2018.

The post How you can collect feedback and protect customer information appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we published the 2021 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities that are planned to be released between April 2021 and September 2021. This first release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing focuses on deeper personalization to engage customers, more channels to reach customers with the right messages, and analytics to improve results and achieve your business goals.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is adding enhancements to save time so sellers can focus on selling, to provide more access to data insights, and to enhance the mobile experience for sellers on-the-go. Look out for updates to automation and sequencing, Conversation Intelligence, and many exciting updates to the mobile app!
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is delivering the all-in-one contact center, now with first-party voice built on Azure Communication Services and intelligent, skill-based, 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 the maximum satisfaction. These investments matched with enhanced productivity capabilities for technicians through the new knowledge management module will enable the best technician and customer relationship.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance brings our intelligent cash flow offering to preview with automation based on predictive results. Users will experience out of the box machine learning showing when customers are predicted to pay, forecasting what budget should be, and viewing forecasted cash positions. We continue to expand localizations; this release adds Egypt, extending the number of out-of-the-box countries and regions to 43 and the number of languages to 48. We are also shipping the general availability of Electronic Invoicing Add-on for Dynamics 365the first configurable globalization microservice that extends existing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Project Operations. This will provide better scalability and agility for customers to adapt to changing regulatory requirements.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides a unified real-time view across finance, manufacturing, supply chain, warehouse, inventory, and transportation management in one single application for running a business. The cloud asset management software leverages scale units in the cloud to run mission-critical processes without interruption. Advanced predictive analytics and Power Platform tie-ins have allowed us to optimize and automate asset management, IoT, machine telemetry, planning, warehousing, material sourcing, and logistics. Other notable features for this release are in the areas of rebates, inbound landed cost, and global inventory accounting.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations delivers rich new experiences with the ability to forecast, use, and invoice non-stocked materials on projects and enables the ability to setup contractual commitments like billing methods and chargeability rules by task or a work breakdown schedule element. Customers using Dynamics 365 Project Service Automation will be able to upgrade to Dynamics 365 Project Operations when upgrade scripts become available.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides is focusing on intelligent workflows. By taking further advantage of data captured with Microsoft HoloLens as well as AI innovations, users can get to work and confirm their results faster and simpler than ever.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources continues to broaden the Human Capital Management (HCM) ecosystem through integration APIs and strategic partnerships. The employee experience expands to support additional enhancements for benefits management such as notifications, summary statements, and a consolidated view of employee’s enrollments.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce has released new capabilities that are now available in preview to support B2B operational flows for the e-commerce channel. This B2B offering provides our customers with an integrated B2B and B2C e-commerce offering in a single commerce solution with unified merchandising and site management capabilities enabling a wide range of business models across industries and verticals. Also, generally available in this wave are multiple functional and usability enhancements to the existing buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) processing flows. These new BOPIS enhancements will allow organizations more flexibility to offer their shoppers multiple pick-up delivery options and allows for configuration and selection of pickup timeslots.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection adds behavioral and mobile fingerprinting improving the accuracy of fraud management rules.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central delivers a set of new features designed to simplify and improve the way our partners administer tenants, and the way administrators manage licensing and permissions. Application enhancements expands the integration with Teams and adds country and regional expansions.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice expands the capabilities to collect feedback with pre-filled answers, file upload support, drill down question type, and customized survey header. Additional capabilities designed to improve survey response rate includes pause and resume survey to enable users to complete the survey on a different device, automated survey reminders for recipients who have not filled the survey, and over-surveyed management to avoid sending too many surveys to the same person within a given period. Finally, creating a follow up action workflow is made easier with Microsoft Power Automate survey response trigger.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights audience insights capabilities enables every organization to unify and understand their customer data. Audience Insights added support for on-premises data ingestion including new Power Query connectors, additional controls for AI-based data unification, new first- and third-party enrichments like Experian, new predictive models for transaction churn, and support for new first- and third-party activation destinations like Marketo. The engagement insights capability (preview) in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables organizations to interactively understand how their customers are using their products and servicesboth individually and holisticallythrough their website, mobile apps, and connected products touchpoints. Engagement insights expands to multi-channel analytics over data from other channels for richer customer analytics, downstream actions, and optimizations.

Industry accelerators

• Dynamics 365 education accelerator adds a marketing and communications feature which will allow districts and ministries of education to effectively take a proactive communication approach with various stakeholders such as educators, community members, and parents.
• Dynamics 365 media and communications accelerator further expands on the “fan engagement” theme adding additional support for virtual events and health and hygiene at physical venues. This release includes features to aid in registering and participating in virtual sessions and Teams-based events as well as additions for importing content metadata enabling search personalization and other key enhancements.

Highlights from Power Platform

• Microsoft Power BI continues to invest in three key areas that drive a data culture: amazing data experiences, integrations where teams work, and modern enterprise BI.
  • Power BI Pro delivers AI infused insights to help everyone easily discover insights. We will also continue to make authoring Power BI content easier than ever through the new Quick Create experiences while continuing to evolve our advanced capabilities like small multiples and composite models. Power BI will further expand the integration with Teams with new experiences in Teams channels, meetings, and chat.
  • Power BI Premium continues to deliver features that help organizations accelerate the delivery of insights at scale, meeting the most demanding needs of an enterprise. This release adds flexible licensing models for organizations to choose between per user and per capacity licensing options.
  • Power BI Embedded delivers a new generation of the product helping customers increase their ROI, scale rapidly, and get up to 16x faster performance. Customers will also get visibility into utilization at the workspace level, enabling consistent utilization analysis and cost management. In addition, Embedded Generation 2 introduces a lower entry level for paginated reports and AI workloadsstart with an A1 SKU and grow as you need!
• Microsoft Power Apps combines the flexibility of a blank canvas that can connect to any data source with the power of rich forms, views, and dashboards modeled over data in Microsoft Dataverse. This release adds Monitor for end-user app debugging capabilities, printing support (one top ask from our maker community), and mixed reality capabilities for canvas apps. We are also enhancing the global relevance search experience and adding in-app notifications for model-driven apps. Power Apps portals enhances Power BI integration to support Microsoft Azure Analysis Services live connections and enables the ability to send custom data objects, which provide additional context for personalizing reports and dashboards for end users. On the Dataverse for Teams front, we added the ability to share apps with colleagues outside a team and enabled editing of table data in excel.
• Microsoft Power Automate enhances cloud flow integration with other Microsoft products. For example, there is a new trigger when an action is performed in Microsoft Dataverse. This feature improves working with the common events model and provides better integration with Dynamics 365 Finance + Operations. Power Automate Desktop was released to general availability in December 2020, and it enables makers to automate the diversity of applications on their desktops. Going forward, we will provide migration for existing Softomotive and UI flows customers, secure credential management, and much more. Finally, there are improved experiences in Process advisor, a process mining capability in Power Automate that reveals insights into how people work, provides rich visualizations where users can identify repetitive, time-consuming processes best suited for automation.
• Microsoft Power Virtual Agents brings improvements in the authoring experience with topic suggestions from bot sessions, image and video support, and new topic trigger management to improve your bot’s triggering capabilities. For Power Virtual Agents (PVA) bots authored in Teams we are adding the “@mention” capability, and the ability to share your bot with a security group. We are also building on our Power Automate integration with better error handling. Finally, we will acquire PCI and HITRUST certifications and support for the government cloud.
• AI Builder, a Power Platform capability, will introduce new AI functionalities in preview as well as form processing improvements. New capabilities include new region availability and signature detection in form processing in order to detect if a signature is present at a specific location in a document.

For a complete list of new capabilities, check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 plans.

Early access period

Starting February 1, 2021, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during April 2021. Take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and get ready to roll out updates to your users with confidence. To see the early access features, check out the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform pages. For questions, visit the Early Access FAQ page.

We’ve done this work to help youour partners, customers, and usersdrive the digital transformation of your business on your terms. Get ready and learn more about latest product updates and plans, and share your feedback in the community forum for Dynamics 365 or Power Platform.

The post 2021 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In this blog series we are exploring the latest fraud related events and issues on the rise in our digitized world. The first installment in the series explored account takeovers (ATO) and the $7 billion yearly loss affecting even the largest organizations. The second installment explored the ways fraudsters are capitalizing on the rise of e-commerce.

In our third post of the series, we will touch on the ways fraudsters are taking advantage of the move to online sales during COVID-19 in the food service industry. The increase in online and in-app orders has opened the door for transaction- and offer-related fraud deeply impacting businesses already hurting from the impact of COVID-19.

Read “Protecting Customers, Revenue, and Reputation from Online Fraud” to learn how AI helps your organization adapt to shifting fraud patterns and protect you against account takeover, lost revenue, and more.

COVID-19 and the impact of fraud in numbers

Fraudsters are strategizing new ways to capitalize on vulnerabilities amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic making fraud detection increasingly important as millions are faced with financial hardships. In September 2020, the Federal Trade Commission reported that in the United States alone, over 205,000 consumers have experienced fraud attacks linked to COVID-19 amounting to over $145 million in fraud losses.

With more virtual transactions than ever before, businesses across the globe are increasingly susceptible to fraud. One industry hit hard is food service.

Types of fraud associated with restaurants

When the pandemic brought on strict new regulations, restaurants and consumers alike were quick to adapt. Between March and April 2020, there was a reported 78 percent increase in card-not-present (CNP) activity. Fraudsters pounced on this opportunity and began placing orders with stolen credit cards, claiming food never arrived, and even creating fake social media posts to deceive customers. These actions not only hurt a restaurant’s bottom line, but also their reputation.

In August 2020, a popular pizza chain, Little Caesar’s, was forced to release a statement that an offer circulating the internet promising free pizza in honor of the chain’s 61st birthday was fake. The offer was posted to a profile masquerading as Little Caesar’s official account and had over 100,000 shares. Stores were forced to turn away angry customers expecting free pizza.

In the United Kingdom, a similar advertisement was making its way into customer’s inboxes, once again claiming free pizza was just a click away. The message claimed to be from Domino’s and prompted users to click on a phishing link and where customers would give their personal information.

The jump in online and over-the-phone orders has skyrocketed CNP transactions. CNP transactions occur when a credit card and its holder are not present for payment, making verification of a valid transaction tricky. While customers may find saving their payment information on profiles for online orders convenient, fraudsters see it as their chance to engage in fraudulent activity.

As the pandemic continues, fraudulent activity cripples many businesses across the world. The food industry’s need for a solution to address fraud is clear. Many business owners have been left wondering what their options are to reduce fraud.

Darden Restaurants addresses fraud with Dynamics 365

Darden Restaurants, operating some of the most recognizable brands in full-service dining including Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse, needed to move swiftly to address a growing fraud issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the shift to an online-only model, Darden Restaurants started noticing some fraudulent payments and looked to Microsoft for help. Darden Restaurants deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection to combat purchase fraud at LongHorn Steakhouse, and together with Microsoft they had the solution quickly up and runningprotecting the restaurants and customers against fraud.

How Microsoft protects the food industry from fraud

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection helps merchants combat the types of fraud and legacy security systems gaps that are threatening the food service industry.

A cloud-based solution recently awarded the Juniper cybersecurity platinum award, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is designed to help e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, and omnichannel merchants protect their revenue and reputation. Deploying adaptive AI technology that continuously learns, Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection defends against purchase, account, and omnichannel return and discount fraud while reducing operational expenses and increasing acceptance rates. It also helps protect user accounts from fraud exposure, helping to retain customers and maintain satisfaction.

Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection offers three capabilities which can be integrated together or used individually, providing merchants the option to use the capability that best suits their business needs:

1. Account protection helps protect online revenue and reputation, and safeguards user accounts from abuse and fraud by combating fake account creation, account takeover, and fraudulent account access.

In the first trend above, offer fraud, restaurants could utilize the account protection capability to help safeguard accounts. Businesses and merchants with account protection could protect their customers’ data by preventing fraudulent account access. Rather than worry about keeping their customers’ data safe, merchants can focus on seamless customer experiences. With both fraud attacks and cost of fraud to United States merchants rising, there is no better time to add the account protection capability to your toolkit.

2. Purchase protection helps protect revenue by improving the acceptance rate of e-commerce transactions with insights and tools that help balance revenue opportunity verses fraud loss and checkout friction.

The second trend, transaction fraud, highlights the need for purchase protection. With a higher number of transactions and new online users entering their card information, purchase protection can help keep customers happy while helping mitigate fraud loss.

3. Loss prevention helps protect revenue by identifying anomalies on returns and discounts arising from omnichannel purchases, enabling store managers and loss prevention officers to quickly investigate potential fraud and take action to mitigate losses.

Restaurants across the world could utilize loss prevention to help analyze merchant data and to identify patterns of anomalies to increase merchants’ visibility into potential fraud on returns and discounts while notifying restaurant managers so action can be taken to prevent losses. It’s time to fight buy online, pick-up in store (BOPIS) fraud with the loss prevention capability.

Learn more

Learn additional information 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.” Learn more about our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Retail offerings.

Questions? Contact your Microsoft sales representative to learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection capabilities.

The post Fraud trends part 3: fraud in the food service industry appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Truly engaged, always connected

As digital commerce continues to evolve and become an integral revenue stream for retailers and consumer goods companies, it is paramount for these companies to digitally transform their supply chain as well. They need the agility to rapidly plan and adapt to changing customer needs, use AI and machine learning to automate order orchestration, fulfilment, and delivery, and lastly, seamlessly add new fulfilment methods like buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) or curbside pick-up. Customer shopping behaviors are constantly changing, but customers continue to seek near-instant gratification when buying online or in-store. If a product is not on the shelf when they need it, they will order it from another retailer instantly using their cell phone.

According to a recent study by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Microsoft, 69 percent of retail businesses were impacted due to disruptions in supply chain and shifting customer demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and only 51 percent of retail decision makers felt their supply chains are prepared to meet growing digital commerce needs. One of the ways to achieve agility is to enhance end-to-end visibility of their supply chain and have access to real-time omnichannel inventory data. Creating a digital supply chain twin is a starting point to help businesses gain visibility all the way from the supplier upstream to the customer downstream. With the digital twin, the supply chain leaders can predict disruptions, simulate different countermeasures to overcome them, and automate the execution of these countermeasures to resolve the issues in a timely manner. Further, with real-time visibility into their inventory, retailers can drive demand for overstock products and expedite replenishment of out-of-stock items in a cost-effective manner.

Companies like Michael Hill are using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to be more agile in responding to changing market needs. With their stores impacted by lockdowns due to the pandemic, Michael Hill accelerated their roll out of Microsoft Dynamics 365 to gain end-to-end supply chain visibility and improve availability of their valuable inventory. They overcame complications related to shipping to global customers and seamlessly shifted to using each retail store as a warehouse location so that customers can order jewelry online and pick up at the store of their choice.

“Moving our supply chain onto Dynamics 365 was a major step-change from our legacy platform, but the really exciting part is the speed with which we are now adapting to changing business needs be they driving incremental efficiencies in our warehouse, trialing new fulfilment models or unlocking deeper insights into customer experiences. We are able to trial and mature new models faster than ever before.”Ian Dallas, Program Manager Supply Chain and Finance, Michael Hill

They can take the customer-first approach using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to support its warehouse management system (WMS), transform its supply chain, and connect production, inventory, and distribution directly to in-store operations and customer fulfilment. They are now able to expand their fulfilment choice to their customers including curbside pickup as a contactless option in Canada.

“Now that we have established Dynamics 365 as our operating WMS, the world is our oystertactically, we are able to deliver agile flow solutions that we could only dream of with our legacy systems. Strategically, we have a foundation for our expanding supply chain transformation endeavors, enabling integration with best of breed partners to deliver outstanding customer experiences.”Nat Cooper, GM Global Logistics, Michael Hill

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps companies close the gap between demand and fulfilment to deliver a delightful customer experience. Companies can rapidly re-plan supply and distribution of products in near real-time within minutes with in-memory microservice to effectively adapt to shifting customer demand.

“It’s like magic. With Planning Optimization, our master planning went from five to seven hours to less than five minutes and the on boarding couldn’t have gone any smoother.”Andy Lee, IT Operations Manager, Fenwick

The intelligent distributed order management system can manage, automate, and optimize order fulfillment to ensure on-time delivery in a cost-effective manner. This ensures that the inventory is not only stored closest to where the customer demand is, but also in the right quantity to reduce the time to fulfillment. It helps drive down excess inventory.

Companies like Dr. Martens have implemented virtual warehouses using real-time omnichannel inventory data and together with their overnight store replenishment capability, they are able to get the right products to the right store within a short lead time.

Also, according to the study by Forrester, retailers are building redundancy into their supplier network to gain agility and become more resilient. Forty-five percent of the retailers are planning to increase the size of the distribution networks, and 42 percent of the retailers plan to onboard more suppliers to ensure greater flexibility going forward. This includes adding transportation partners to alleviate bottlenecks in getting goods to customers as demand fluctuates. Forty-eight percent of retailers consider last-mile delivery to be one of the top five most important components of supply chain agility. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps retailers optimize their sourcing and fulfillment strategy with a fast and sophisticated supplier qualification process. It enhances collaboration with vendors using portals and streamlines planning of inbound and outbound shipments to ensure on time delivery to the customer.

As retailers embark on their journey to the next normal, they can improve resilience and easily scale with cloud and edge computing enabling faster decision making in a compressed timeframe.

A company like Chemist Warehouse, a large regional retailer with 500 franchise stores and 20,000 products, digitally transformed to the cloud to be able to offer a true omnichannel retail experience to its customers. Chemist Warehouse integrated the enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business-to-business offerings from Dynamics 365 to achieve complete transparency about which products are on order, who is delivering what, when it will be delivered, and who has ordered it. This has helped them streamline delivery and pave the way for expanding its online customer offering from click and collect, to click and deliver, while the customer experience at the point of purchase (whether in-store or online) is made as friction free as possible.

“The main reason to leverage the Dynamics 365 platform is time to value-add. The mantra for us is scalability and agilitythey’re the two things that we bear in mind with everything we do. It’s really to be able to provide a better experience to the customer.”Jules Cardinale, Chief Information Officer, Chemist Warehouse

Learn more

• Learn more about how Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps retailers and distributors improve resiliency and enhance visibility and scale operations, and learn more about our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Retail offerings.
• Read additional details in our recent blog post from Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Industry, “NRF 2021: enabling retailers to reimagine the road ahead with Microsoft Business Applications.”
• Read additional details in our recent blog post from Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, WW Retail and Consumer Goods Industry, “Introducing Microsoft Cloud for Retail.”
• If you are at NRF, visit our booth for more information and to engage with our knowledgeable staff.

The post Quickly respond to changing retail needs with an intelligent supply chain appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Truly engaged, always connected

The events of 2020 have left a lasting impact on the retail industry and retailers are fueling rapid innovation with development and rollout of new technologies. The global pandemic has shifted how customers buy, as well as renewed recognition of the critical value of technology to customers. Convenience, flexibility, and personalization will continue to dominate customer choices. The retailers who continue to thrive will be those that let customers engage on their terms while simultaneously connecting with customers in more meaningful ways.

Retailers today are collecting data from every customer interactionfrom websites and apps to helpdesk chats and support calls, to physical store visits. But is all the data really being utilized and what is the impact on customer relationships? The ability to deliver a personalized customer experience relies heavily on a retailer’s customer understanding. This is where customer data platforms (CDP) can help retailers gain a holistic view of customers, deepen relationships, and build ongoing trust with the customers who are vital to their bottom line.

Read additional details about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 is reimagining retail in our recent blog, “NRF 2021: enabling retailers to reimagine the road ahead with Microsoft Business Applications.”

Customers demand and respond to personalized experiences

Customers today expect personalization from the organizations they interact with. According to Forrester, 80 percent of U.S. online users feel comfortable sharing some personal information with retailers in order to personalize their experience. Every customer is unique and has a unique path to purchase, and personalization helps retailers guide customers on the right path based on their needs and behaviors. CDPs provide the crucial foundation for enabling personalized customer interactions by bringing together transactional, behavioral, and demographic data from across channels to create multidimensional customer profiles. They enable activation on realtime insights across the customer journey and on destinations including analytics, marketing, advertising, and engagement platforms.

Customers reward businesses they trust

While virtually every interaction is being tracked, nearly 67 percent of customers have little to no understanding about how their data is being used by companies, according to Microsoft research in partnership with iProspect. This is an opportunity for retailers by showing transparency and showcasing the value they can provide in exchange for dataorganizations can ultimately earn customers’ trust and loyalty.

How it’s done

A number of organizations have found unique ways to combine deep customer understanding with innovative experiences to achieve growth and set themselves apart from the competition. One such organization is Chipotle Mexican Grill, a chain of more than 2,700 restaurants with multiple sources of customer data including a loyalty program, point-of-sale data, a customer care center, and digital platforms. They turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to unify data and better understand their customers.

Getting personal, at scale

Chipotle has millions of customers each year across its thousands of locations, but with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights the company has a deep understanding of individual customer preferences. They now know whether customers typically order for lunch or dinner, what their favorite meals are and which channel they use to make their purchase. These insights have allowed Chipotle to target customers with promotions and messages that appeal to them.

Using the map, match, and merge logic at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Chipotle can standardize and reconcile conflicting data and then set up business rules and act on them. The result is unified profiles with detailed views of each guest. Chipotle also uses Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to grow its customer base by converting more guests into loyalty program members. Using rich demographic data, they were able to gain insights on guests who made purchases but weren’t members of their loyalty program, which added up to 30 percent more unified customer profiles.

“Every customer is different. Customer Insights allows us to understand each customer’s differences and market to them as a unique individual.”Sashi Kommineni, Director of Enterprise Analytics, Chipotle Mexican Grill

The ability to personalize has been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many customers have become hesitant to visit restaurants. Dynamics 36 Customer Insights helped Chipotle understand customer concerns and provide appropriate messaging, such as information about delivery and pick-up options. Though this highly specific targeting, Chipotle was able to increase conversations and use of these services.

Take the next step

By leveraging customer data to provide elevated, personalized experiences, retailers can build lasting relationships with customers, increase brand trust, and grow customer loyalty.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a secure and flexible customer data platform with built-in AI to unify customer data and generate insights that power personalized experiences. Using prebuilt connectors, the solution brings together first- and third-party data sources including interactions with the web, mobile apps, and connected products. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights proactively identifies segments and generates predictive insights such as churn rates, lifetime value, and recommended products. Real-time integration with business applications and business processes ensure that marketing, sales, and service efforts are tailored for each customer. Brands see results faster with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an intuitive and ready-to-go customer data platform that requires minimal training and IT assistance.

Take a guided tour to see how your organization can use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to unlock insights and drive personalized customer experiences, and learn more about our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Retail offerings.

The post The power of CDPs: building customer trust and loyalty in retail appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.