In today’s digital economy, delivering an exceptional customer experience across every touchpoint has quickly become a competitive differentiator. Most organizations realize if they hope to remain successful they must effectively leverage the vast amounts of data available to them in order to support the personalized engagement that customers expect. According to McKinsey, organizations that harness customer data for insights can achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within two or three years. Yet, with the numerous applications and systems organizations use across multiple lines of business, it can be challenging enough to unify all of this data to gain a single source of truth and insights, let alone make those insights actionable.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a customer data platform (CDP) built to help organizations do just that. Connecting seamlessly to systems of engagement across lines of business and vendors, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offers data activation on your own termsadding value and complementing your existing investments. Moreover, it allows data to flow both waysfirst ingesting and interpreting all of the data from your various systems, applying artificial intelligence (AI) to derive insights, and then activating those insights directly to the line of business applications that enable action.

Data ingestion and unification

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights reduces the time it takes to collect data from all your business applications, vendors, and engagement sources. Pre-built connectors simplify the process of pulling in data from first- and third-party data sources such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Salesforce, and SAP. The engagement insights (preview) capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights captures signals from websites, mobile apps, and connected products. Once the data is ingested, it’s a three-step process to map, match, and merge the data into a single, unified view of every customer.

Activation across lines of business and systems of engagement

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps your organization surface insights directly within the applications and systems your organization uses every day to enable action across all lines of business. Export the unified profiles, measures, or segments to the applications relevant to your business. Provide your marketing team with the customer segments for targeted lead generation, enable sales team with cross-sell and upsell recommendations, and empower customer service to provide pro-active omnichannel support. A rich collection of APIs allows you to connect Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to third-party solutions or your own applications, like CRMs, email automation tools, social media platforms, POS, ERP, and more.

Adapt and extend

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights connects the data within your organization, but it can also scale and support your resources on demand. Pre-built connectors to Microsoft Power Platform solutions make extending even easier, providing more ways to orchestrate and personalize your unique customer journey.

• Build custom apps with embedded customer insights by using Microsoft Power Apps
• Connect your customer data with Microsoft Power BI to customize dashboards and reports
• Trigger workflows in response to customer signals using Microsoft Power Automate

Valuable insights derived from data

Campari Group, a global spirits manufacturer, used Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to unite a technology stack that spanned multiple systems and vendors and used the insights to enhance the value that the company derives from its data. Campari Group has grown rapidly through acquisitions, each bringing with it another IT landscape to integrate including CRM systems from SAP and Salesforce; web experience and content management systems such as Adobe Creative Cloud, WordPress, and Drupal; analytics platforms and tools like SAP Analytics Cloud, Google Analytics, and Power BI; and marketing automation platforms and social media tools such as HubSpot, Sprinklr, Eventbrite, and Constant Contact.

Campari Group established API connectors to the numerous data sources that the company draws from, including social media, event marketing, and Wi-Fi connection databases. They quickly began to benefit, thanks to the out-of-the-box, AI-driven data segmentation capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

“In just two weeks, we connected all of the data points in Customer Insights and deployed our first email marketing automation campaign against those segments in the United States,” says Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global ITMarketing and Sales at Campari Group. “We then rolled out to the United Kingdom in two weeks and Australia in two weeks. With Dynamics 365, we’re able to be very agile and continuously roll out new capabilities for our campaigns.”

Gain a holistic view of your customers

Take a guided tour to see how your organization can use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to unlock insights and drive personalized customer experiences.

Join our on-demand webinar, “Deliver connected experiences with customer data platforms” to learn the role of AI and machine learning in a customer data strategy, how to shape a customer journey that extends beyond marketing, and more.

The post Unify ecosystem-wide data with a flexible customer data platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Even in challenging times, the holiday season’s irresistible deals attract both customers and fraudsters. A differentiated fraud prevention strategy is essential to keep a merchant’s fraud losses minimized while letting legitimate customers continue to have a smooth shopping experience.

Consumers often change buying and engagement patterns with merchants during the holiday season like shipping to a new address when buying a gift or adding a new card on file that may give them higher rewards or a higher spending limit.

These new consumer behaviors pose a challenge for fraud prevention because it makes it more difficult to differentiate between fraud attempts and legitimate purchases.

Online purchases are expected to increase this year due to social distancing requirements. Now more than ever merchants need to adopt a differentiated strategy for fraud preventionone that helps adapt and respond to changing customer behaviors and minimizes fraud loss.

Here are three tips for the holiday season to help keep fraud low and maximize gains during these peak sales times.

First: Identify your fraud attack zone

While this may sound like a no-brainer on the face of it, identify and make a list of products in your portfolio that fraudsters can benefit from, either by reselling the products or using it themselves.

One of the key strategies in fraud defense is to identify where you are likely to be attacked. A product that is of limited supply or being posted with a high discount is more likely to be targeted than a product that is abundantly available year-round and has a low discount. Digital goods, especially one-time or non-subscription digital goods, tend to be targeted more than physical goods.

Commonly, these will also be the products most of your customers want and are the star items of your holiday deals.

Loosening fraud-decision thresholds on these products could make you a soft target for fraud. Instead, evaluate if you can apply limits such as maximum quantity and then use it in a watch-list fashion for reviews and reporting.

If you have a process in place for manually reviewing some transactions, consider adding confirmation or shipping delays until the review is completed.

Second: Set up rapid internal fraud communication channels

Core sale events and accompanying fraud attempts can last from a few hours to days. During which there will be an outburst of information coming from customer escalations, social engineering attempts, reports of successful purchases, and successful fraud prevention.

Weeding out noise from useful signals in real-time is essential. Normal communication methods such as support tickets and email messages can’t scale to meet these needs.

Set up channels that promote cross-functional communication in real-time, such as incident management tools, command room techniques, or collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams. Include fraud analysts, review agents, customer support agents, and any other teams involved in handling fraud or customer escalation in these rapid communication channels. This helps with quick resolution of any false positives (customers blocked due to fraud suspicion) and to identify new fraud patterns as well as react to them.

Third: Monitor trends as near to real-time as possible

During the rush of holiday sales activity, it is essential to monitor the trends as near to real-time as possible and as granular as possible. Set up reporting on decisions and trends such as reject rate, approval rate, review rate, and trends of total volume and score distribution with views across slices of products, geographies, and user segments. All teams responsible for fraud prevention should always have a hawk’s eye on these reports and be ready to quickly jump-in if suspicious trends are seen.

How Microsoft can help your business combat fraud efficiently this holiday season

If you are currently using Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, you can use the virtual fraud analyst capability to get a segmented view across your products and fraud profiles. The scorecard gives you a real-time view of the performance and support tool that helps to search and investigate all transactions including risk information and history. You can also enable the transaction acceptance booster feature to share data with banks in real-time to maximize customer experience and reduce wrongful declines.

Next steps and continued learning

If you are not currently using Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, you can learn more and start a free trial to see what additional value you can bring to your business and customers.

The post 3 ways to minimize fraud this holiday season appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Effective December 1, 2020, for all 10.0+ versions of Dynamics 365 Financial Dimension Framework we are preventing deletion from the following Dimension tables:

• DimensionAttribute
• DimensionAttributeValue
• DimensionAttributeSet
• DimensionAttributeSetItem
• DimensionAttributeValueSet
• DimensionAttributeValueSetItem
• DimensionAttributeValueCombination
• DimensionAttributeValueGroupCombination
• DimensionAttributeValueGroup
• DimensionAttributeLevelValue

This change is applied directly in the database and follows the same business logic that is used within the application.

These changes protect the integrity of the financial accounting data. Any customizations or scripts will need to be immediately updated to comply with these changes. Note that updating data to blank values is not a valid solution because this corrupts data. In the future, we will also not allow table updates.

Why the changes were necessary

These tables were originally designed to be immutable data structures, which means that they are completely controlled by Microsoft or the official X++ APIs designed for extenders. This design allowed for high throughput and durable references that could stand the test of time when performing historical regulatory reporting.

Unfortunately, many extenders have worked around these guidelines to delete records from the tables directly, leading to data corruption and downstream impact. Examples of such issues include:

• Duplicate account rows in financial reports that are frequently used in year-end account reconciliation processes.
• Transactional processing failures that prevent the ability to post documents like Sales order invoices or Purchase order invoices, among others.
• Historical reporting errors and/or changes resulting in the inability to meet auditing and/or regulatory reporting requirements.
• Year-end processing that may be blocked due to out-of-balance errors.

Fixing these issues is extremely error-prone and time-consuming to both customers and Microsoft. Potential fixes also put the accounting data at risk, and greatly limit the ability to focus on go-forward improvements.

Product support

Microsoft does not provide support on customizations or direct SQL queries to the above-mentioned tables. This means that front-line support and engineering teams will not be able to help with issues caused by these customizations. If you encounter data corruption due to customizations or running direct SQL queries, contact our services team or delivery partners for assistance. It is very important that you update all customizations or direct SQL queries that delete records from these tables. In the future, Microsoft will provide a tool for self-service correction of data for targeted scenarios.

Next steps

For detailed information about financial dimensions and the risks of changing data directly, see Part 6: Advanced topics in the “Ledger account combinations” topic. To address one of the known requests of hiding or inactivating values that are no longer relevant, we will prioritize the ability to support “soft-deletions” and the corresponding removal of unused references. If you have additional requests, please share them in the Dynamics 365 Application Ideas portal.

The post Prepare for dimension table changes in Financial Dimension Framework appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

A new Total Economic Impact (TEI) from Forrester Consulting outlines the cost savings and business benefits enabled by migrating from Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics GP to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central cloud.

Cloud-based business management solutions have helped countless small and medium businesses (SMBs) realize cost savings, securely access data, boost productivity, and improve customer experiences. However, as the pandemic disrupts business as usual, many SMBs are looking to accelerate cloud adoption to ensure business continuity, adapt to change, and support remote worka decision that requires better data on the return on investment (ROI) for specific solutions.

SMBs using Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP, and Dynamics SL on-premises are no exception.

Streamline business operations with the cloud

To help our Dynamics 365 NAV and Dynamics 365 GP on-premises customers examine the potential ROI they can realize by deploying Dynamics 365 Business Central, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a TEI study.

Forrester interviewed five current Dynamics 365 Business Central customers to understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with migrating to the cloud. Modeled after these five interviews, analysis was conducted on a $15-million, 250-employee composite organization. This analysis demonstrated benefits of $466K over three years versus costs of $178K, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $288K and an ROI of 162 percent.

“The move to Business Central has been especially helpful during the pandemic, as our users can access key business functions remotely.”Controller, specialty manufacturing customer interview

Dynamics 365 Business Central enabled these five customers to bolster operational efficiency, avoid costs, and comfortably scale their deployments with growth while benefitting from the flexibility inherent in the cloud. Customers reported improved flow of operations, more granular visibility into their business performance, better employee experiences, and boosted productivity, along with lower licensing fees and IT costs.

“We were looking for an upgraded ERP solution capable enough for our complicated operations, in the cloud. Business Central is that solution. We have everything we need in one tool.”CEO, specialty manufacturing customer interview

Specific cost savings and ROI benefits that improved productivity and operational efficiencies include:

• Avoidance of one full-time equivalent (FTE) and one part-time equivalent finance and operations hiresby enabling organizations to keep growth on track while reducing the need to hire by an average of 10 percent.
• Improved flow of operations by an average of 8 percentthanksto better tools to complete work and more efficient workflows, enabling staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
• Elimination of $44K of third-party reporting spend over three yearsby leveraging Dynamics 365 Business Central and other Microsoft solutions, such as Microsoft Power BI, organizations reduced the need for externally-generated reports while gaining a more granular visibility into their business.
• An additional $40K in cost savings by moving to Dynamics 365 Business Centralattributed to migrating from on-premises Microsoft and non-Microsoft enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools.

We believe the Forrester TEI study validates the results of SMB customers across industries from professional services to banking, consumer goods, and retailers. By migrating to a single cloud solution, Dynamics 365 Business Central provides a connected cloud business management solution that brings together sales, services, and operations teams.

Learn more

Read the full Forrester Consulting TEI study today to learn more about how you can unlock the insights and agility needed to adapt faster, work smarter, and perform better.

The post Realize cost savings for SMBs with Dynamics 365 Business Central appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Omnichannel has become a dominant force in how companies meet customer expectations, and for good reason. Ninety-eight percent of Americans switch between devices on the same day, using multiple channelsvoice, social, chat, email, and SMS. Omnichannel engagement allows customers to reach out on nearly any device, on their preferred channel while managing all engagement channels uniformly on the back end, creating a seamless customer experience.

True omnichannel support ensures an effortless transition and consistent experience from one channel to the next without causing agents to lose context or the customer having to repeat information. In short, omnichannel allows customers to pick up where they left off on one channel and continue the experience on another.

Omnichannel collects and harnesses information from every interaction across channels to drive stronger, more meaningful customer relationships, improve operational performance, and increase revenue. Plus, businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies achieve 91 percent greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses that don’t.

Multichannel versus omnichannel

Multichannel and omnichannel are often used interchangeably, but they are very different. Like omnichannel, multichannel support offers customers more than one method for contacting customer service. However, rather than working in parallel, each channel lives in its own silo with its own dedicated team of agents. This limits the sharing of communication or information between channels, and often creates a poor customer experience.

For instance, take this scenario: the customer uses one channel to contact support and that team creates a ticket, but if the customer contacts the company again through a different channel, another ticket is created by that team. Each team has a ticket and tries to resolve the same issue. In this example, the customer must repeat the same information shared with the first agent to the second agent, and so on as each new siloed channel is used to contact support. Not only is the customer experience poor, but it’s also highly inefficient for the organization.

Omnichannel shifts this paradigm. Instead of customer ticket resolution, the emphasis is on the customer relationship. Omnichannel provides customers the freedom to move from one channel to the next when contacting support. The one constant is the customer, creating consistency from channel to channel so communications are threaded, making it easy for the customer to pick up where the conversation left off. Omnichannel creates a consistent customer experience at every touchpoint regardless of channel. With omnichannel support, channels are integrated so agents can view the conversation and still maintain context even if the experience leads to multiple channels.

An end-to-end customer view

It is the consistency of the customer experience that leads to positive customer engagement and retention. As customer interactions become more frequent and sentiment toward your brand increases, a positive cycle of interactions occurs, often leading to up- and cross-sell opportunities.

Omnichannel engagement strategies help companies better understand their customers through every interaction as the data is tethered to the customer, not the case number. Through consistent service delivery across channels, customer issues are resolved more efficiently, and this is particularly important in increasing customer satisfaction and building long-term engagement.

Time to adapt

We all know that the pandemic has created significant barriers for most organizations. However, this disruption has fueled a pioneering spirit of ingenuity and innovation as “how we always did it” has now been replaced with “this is how are we do it now.”

With stay-at-home orders, businesses transforming how they reach customers, and social distancing, maintaining quality customer service can be daunting to even the most capable of organizations. However, omnichannel can be a life ring to organizations in the pursuit of meeting customer expectations during this pandemic. In stressful times, providing customers the ability to reach out on their preferred channel is one less trigger for discontent. But that’s just part of the story. Providing the right channels is important as well.

Take for example, the San Diego Workforce Partnership. This nonprofit is reimagining workforce development by delivering programs that help job seekers meet current and future workforce needs. Part of their core beliefs include the understanding that an integrated approach is key to attain durable self-sufficiency. When state and local regulations forced Workforce Partnership to close its physical headquarters and surrounding offices, it became very difficult to service the growing volume of displaced workers.

San Diego Workforce Partnership quickly pivoted. Their core beliefs came into play as the Workforce Partnership reimagined itself leading to a long-lasting transformation, not just a short-term fix. The Workforce Partnership adhered to their foundational beliefs by creating an integrated approach to attain resilience during the crisis and beyond. By leveraging Microsoft Teams, a website chatbot built with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, and the omnichannel capabilities within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they were able to increase remote collaboration and provide service to more people in need.

As the shutdown eliminated in-person meetings with displaced workers, the Workforce Partnership website became the primary outreach tool. Now, a chatbot answers routine questions, generating a 75 percent resolution rate, and because the chatbot integrates with omnichannel, it successfully connects customers with live agents upon customer request. The chatbot and omnichannel capabilities within Customer Service have gone a long way toward creating a more positive and consistent experience for those in need of their services. With the chatbot handling increased volumes of inquiries, Workforce Partnership staff have more time to serve their community’s needs, handling each interaction with care and empathy.

One day the Workforce Partnership offices will reopen, and people will return for in-person assistance. But for now, thanks to its remarkable digital transformation and use of the Customer Service omnichannel capabilities and Power Virtual Agents, the community has one more friction-free touchpoint when seeking employment assistance during this time of uncertainty.

Better together

Omnichannel for Customer Service, an add-in to Dynamics 365 Customer Service, enables organizations to instantly connect and engage with customers on their preferred digital channels. The application offers contextual customer identification, real-time notifications, and agent productivity tools like knowledgebase integration, AI-powered agent suggestions, and real-time sentiment analysis. Supervisors get visibility and insights into emerging trends and agent efficiency across all channels through built-in, AI-driven dashboards.

• Try the Customer Service omnichannel capabilities free for 30-days
• Read the San Diego Workforce Partnership story
• Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The post How omnichannel enhances the customer experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Companies that work with manufacturing and distribution need to be able to run key business processes 24/7, without interruption, and at scale. Challenges arise with unreliable connections or network latency when business processes compete for the same system resources when peak scale is required, or during periodic or regular maintenance for different regions, across time zones, or to meet different scheduling requirements. The ability to execute daily mission-critical processes must be agnostic to these situations.

Cloud and edge scale units enable companies to execute mission-critical manufacturing and warehouse processes without interruptions. This functionality is provided by the following add-ins, now available in public preview:

• Cloud Scale Unit Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
• Edge Scale Unit Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Cloud and edge scale units allow you to build resilience into your supply chain by providing dedicated capacity for your manufacturing and warehouse execution processes. This also places scale units near the location where the work is done, such as on the shop floor or in the warehouse.

How cloud and edge scale units work

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides scale units in the cloud that runs in the nearest Microsoft Azure data center. Alternatively, scale units can run on the edge, hosted in appliances right in your facility. All scale units are connected to your enterprise-wide Supply Chain Management hub in the cloud to have all information readily available to fulfill your business needs.

Cloud and edge scale units for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management deliver on two key business objectives:

• When a company is offline or when network latency is high,mission-critical processes must keep running.
• When throughput is high and heavy processes runin parallel, manufacturing and warehouse processes muststill support high user productivity.

Hybrid multi-node topology is the foundation

One important foundation for cloud and edge scale units is a hybrid multi-node topology for Supply Chain Management. We have evolved the Dynamics 365 architecture into a loosely coupled system that runs selective business processes in a distributed model. Scale units are the environments that run those business processes, where all computation capacity is reserved for the processes and data in the assigned workloads.

Workloads define the processes and data

Workloads define the set of business processes, data, and policies including rules, validation, and ownership that can run on scale units. The preview capabilities include one workload for manufacturing execution and one for warehouse execution. These workloads bring the processes and data from the execution phase of the manufacturing and warehouse processes into the scale units.

Inbound, outbound, and other warehouse management processes for cloud and edge scale units have been split into decoupled phases for planning, execution, receiving, and shipping. Manufacturing processes are structured in a similar way for planning, execution, and finalization. Scale units take ownership of the execution phase.

After you configure the workload, the workers on the manufacturing or warehouse shop floor continue to go through the work and report results like they are used to, but now operate on the dedicated scale unit processing capacity.

Modern user experience for workers on the production floor

The new Production Floor Execution (PFE) interface for manufacturing workers comes with a modern, touch-friendly user experience. It not only looks great but is also tuned for difficult illumination situations on the shop floor.

Plus, the PFE now supports Dynamics 365 Guides which can be used to guide users to complete tasks in the best possible way, especially in complex production scenarios.

Deployment experience for scale units and workloads

The Scale Unit Manager helps you to configure scale units and define where workloads for selected manufacturing and warehouse facilities run.

In the future, the topology analysis page will show facilities, your Supply Chain Management hub, and your scale units. By looking at measures for bottlenecks, latency, and performance history you can identify the most beneficial applications for your scale units.

Next steps and learning

Dynamics 365 can help you build resilient supply chains in a multi-node topology using scale units in the cloud or on the edge. This is available now in public preview.

The post Boost supply chain resilience with cloud and edge scale units in Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.