The world is getting noisier, which makes it harder to earn customer attention. We’ve previously described the importance of hyper-personalization to break through the noise and enable customers to explore brands and products on their own terms. Regardless of whether they are consumers or business-to-business (B2B) buyers.

At Ignite 2023, we announced a unique Copilot-powered real-time web personalization solution in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in partnership with Optimizely*. Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of this solution in preview to customers worldwide. Current Customer Insights customers can sign up now to access the public preview.

_{*To use Optimizely with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights you need to acquire a license for Optimizely Web Experimentation}

The state of web personalization today 

According to recent research from Econsultancy, 93% of businesses see an uplift in conversion rates because of personalization. Yet only 6% of businesses believe they are doing it well. They face three main challenges.

First, traditional tools for personalization have limited data about your customers. It’s no longer sufficient to show content based on a customer’s browsing history, location, and other derived signals alone. The shift away from 3^rd party cookies further exacerbates this problem.

Second, even the companies that have collected a wealth of data through their Customer Data Platform (CDP) often struggle to synchronize the customer identity and data between their CDP and personalization tools. This synchronization is essential for real-time personalization. It enables companies to use comprehensive customer understanding from all data sources unified in CDP to tailor experiences based on both current behavior and predicted actions.

Third, personalization is disconnected across channels due to the fragmentation of marketing and web technologies and the data silos within each tool. A customer might see one offer option on the web but get a different message in an email or through an ad on social media. With companies expanding the channels through which they engage with users, it becomes increasingly challenging to connect the dots of a customer’s journey.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to the rescue

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely* enable organizations to deliver hyper-personalized omni-channel experiences across web, social, email and offline channels without writing custom code. Marketers and web admins can seamlessly collaborate to create personalized campaigns using unified data from Customer Insights. This enables companies to:

1. Go beyond browsing history by using comprehensive data from Customer Insights to personalize experiences. For example, leverage the predicted lifetime value of a customer to create targeted experiences.
2. No-Code Personalization using segments from Customer Insights in Optimizely. For instance, create a segment for high-churn customers in Customer Insights and use it in Optimizely to increase engagement when they visit the website next.
3. Ensure uniform personalization across all channels with bi-directional integration between Customer Insights and Optimizely. For example, an audience in Optimizely can be created using the predicted lifetime value from Customer Insights and repeat browsing history from Optimizely. This audience can then receive targeted monetary offers. Marketers can also show the same offer in messages sent via a customer journey in Customer Insights, using Optimizely’s signal (activity) on which treatment they received earlier. This can be done through segments refined based on customer activities or real-time triggers based on specific customer actions.

4. Activate audience across channels in journeys to further target the original visitors with the same offer if the prior web and message touchpoints failed to convert them and export the segments into advertising and social platforms for re-targeting.

There are even more possibilities for customer experience teams. They can, for example, use defined audiences to create ‘lookalike’ segments on social media platforms. This strategy helps them identify and engage new potential customers who share characteristics with their existing audience, expanding their reach and intensifying customer engagement efforts.

“Copilot in Customer Insights and Optimizely not only enable hyper-personalization but democratize it-any marketing or Customer experience team can now deliver such a campaign quickly and without requiring specialized skills – creating segments, journeys and content with the help of Copilot and then setting up the experiments with Optimizely’s market-leading capabilities.”

Kevin Li, VP of Product Strategy at Optimizely.

Leveraging website personalization to accelerate B2B sales

Web personalization can boost B2B sales by showing the right product to the right customer at the right time. CommScope, a leading telecommunication and wireless network company, uses web personalization to increase purchase intent for web visitors and then routes them to a seller based on their cross-channel engagement. This way, CommScope can generate higher quality leads and revenue from its website.

“Customer Insights and Optimizely enable us to personalize each customer’s experience in real-time with consistency across website and email marketing, enabling self-exploration and demand generation, while also accelerating our sales pipeline by empowering our reps to identify the highest intent leads at the right moment.“

Bob Vonderheide, Director of Customer Experience Technologies at CommScope.

What’s next 

This is just the beginning, and there’s much more to come. Working with early adopters, we know that our customers often rely on their marketers and developers collaborating to add scripts to their websites and mobile apps. We will facilitate this collaboration with a developer portal that gives developers tools to test and verify that the script has successfully been added and functioning as the marketer intended. To enable bespoke scenarios such as personalized e-commerce product pages, we will enable collection of custom events including data such as product details, category, and price. Finally, we will reduce noise from unwanted events through filtering based on pages, location, and other attributes. You can follow the release plans to stay updated on when these features become available.

Meanwhile, we will continue to work with customers as part of the preview to measure and optimize real-world latency and performance. We estimate general availability beyond 2024 wave 2 with the enhancements outlined above.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

• To learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights explore Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Watch the video to discover how Optimizely enable web personalization with our Contoso scenario.
• Leverage all our new AI innovations for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys by transitioning to real-time marketing.
• Get a full view of what is coming in 2024 release wave 1 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Get Optimizely Optimizely is a third-party app which requires a subscription.

The post Omni-channel real-time personalization with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On June 4, 2024, we introduced the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer engagement: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Microsoft Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. This standalone Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution enables customers to maximize their current investments by connecting to preferred customer relationship management systems (CRMs) or custom apps.  

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

A complete solution for contact centers

Learn more

Today, we are excited to announce that Dynamics 365 Contact Center is generally available, offering a complete but fully-composable solution for contact centers. Organizations will benefit from new native capabilities such as generative AI, technology from Nuance, and much more all built from the ground-up to power mission-critical service operations with extensive scale and reliability on the hyperscale cloud platform of Azure.    

Key benefits of Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Dynamics 365 Contact Center key capabilities include: 

Effortless self-service 

• Customers have the freedom to engage in their channel of choice across voice, SMS, chat, email, and social media apps.
• Sophisticated pre-integrated copilots for digital channels drive context-aware, personalized conversations for rich self-service experiences. 
• Provide a frictionless conversational interactive voice response (IVR) experience in real time through natural, human-like interactions. 

Accelerated human-assisted service 

• Intelligent unified routing steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent best suited to help, enhancing service quality and minimizing wasted effort. 
• Agents gain a 360-degree view of customers and AI tools for real-time sentiment analysis, translation, transcription, and more to help streamline service. 
• Let Copilot automate repetitive agent tasks such as conversation summary, drafting emails, suggested responses, and knowledge search. 

Operational efficiency 

• Generative AI based real-time reporting allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels including their workforce. 
• Maximize Copilot by connecting it to an organization’s existing data and business applications using more than 1,200 pre-built connectors that eliminate the need for expensive IT integration. 
• Empower employee helpdesk and human resources functions using Microsoft Teams as a secure, integrated engagement channel. 

Dynamics 365 Contact Center customer stories

We’re thrilled to see the initial impact that our early adopter customers and partners are having with Dynamics 365 Contact Center:  

“With Lenovo’s Premier Support Plus and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’ve established a transformational partnership that strives for customer satisfaction, alongside operational excellence”

Lishuang Xu, Executive Director, Customer Engagement Center, Lenovo.  

“Sales and marketing thrive on smooth customer interactions. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center, early adoption means we’re ahead, modernizing our approach with AI for increasing effectiveness and improving customer satisfaction”

Ian Au-Yeung, Chief Revenue Officer, Synoptek 

“With Dynamics 365 Contact Center powered by Copilot, we see tremendous potential for significant enhancement in contact center staff productivity, ensuring quicker and precise responses that elevate our customer service and affirm our leadership in the insurance industry.”

Ritu Thakur, Head of Group Operations, AIA Group   

Take the next step 

Available now for $110 per user/month, Dynamics 365 Contact Center includes digital and voice channels as well as individual channel options for purchase.¹   

Additionally, we are introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium—a new offer combining Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise with Dynamics 365 Contact Center for customers seeking to consolidate on an integrated, generative AI-powered contact center and CRM service solution that delivers personalized customer journeys. Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium is available now for $195 per user/month.² Customers with existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise licenses adopting Dynamics 365 Contact Center will have the ability to move to Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium. 

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Contact Center. 

^1,2 Pricing is accurate as of June 2024. For additional pricing information, see here.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center is now generally available  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In February, we announced the general availability of Copilot for Service, which helps organizations realize the benefits of generative AI by extending their existing investments in CRM and contact center solutions. Copilot for Service helps quicken agents’ time to resolution by assisting them with common tasks using the full context of the customer journey. 

With prebuilt integrations for common CRMs, you can embed Copilot for Service inside the agent desktop to help agents be more productive and create seamless customer experiences across channels.  

On July 1, we are introducing several new capabilities in Copilot for Service to further support agents working in their CRM of choice. 

Email assistance

Copilot can help agents draft emails to answer customer queries. Using the context of customer records and actions, such as cases and emails, Copilot can provide an email draft written in the voice of the organization. Agents can review and alter the draft as needed before sending, and they can adjust the tone. With Copilot, agents can spend less time authoring and more time helping customers solve complex issues. 

Context-aware multiturn chats 

When an agent is involved in a customer conversation, they sometimes encounter difficult questions they can’t answer on their own. Instead of making a customer wait while they ask a colleague or conduct research, agents can ask Copilot a question. Copilot identifies the agent’s intent and understands the context of CRM data, including customer records and cases, so it can provide answers tailored to service scenarios and better support the resolution of customer issues.

Case summarization 

With case summarization capabilities, Copilot understands which case an agent may be working on and summarizes the details for them, so agents can ramp up on their assigned cases faster. Armed with the most important aspects of a case, agents can then reduce time to resolution for customers. And because Copilot understands the context of CRM data, agents can be confident that they are giving customers the most informed answers.

Real-time streaming 

When agents use Copilot to write an email response or ask a question, including multiturn questions, they can read the generated responses on the user interface incrementally, without having to wait for the entire response to be generated. Agents can also choose to stop Copilot from generating a response and start fresh. This helps reduce wait times and gives agents a chance to refine their requests if needed. 

Learn more

These features will begin rolling out on July 1. You can access them by selecting the Start with Microsoft Copilot option when using the Copilot for Service landing page.

Read the documentation to learn more.  

Find out how you can make Copilot for Service part of your Contact Center as a Service solution.   

The post Use expanded Copilot for Service capabilities in your CRM appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s rapidly evolving service landscape, organizations must manage their entire operations lifecycle efficiently—from initial client interaction to final service delivery and profitability. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations stands out as the comprehensive solution designed to meet the unique needs of service-centric organizations. It seamlessly integrates service-based operations, from sales and project management to resource allocation and financials, ensuring a smooth journey from prospect to profit.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations: Connect your service-centric organization, effortlessly 

For service-centric businesses, managing operational complexities requires a robust platform that provides end-to-end visibility and control over the entire service lifecycle. Dynamics 365 Project Operations is engineered to fulfill this need. It brings together crucial functions into a single, connected solution, including deal management, project delivery, financials, resource planning, and customer engagement.

With Dynamics 365 Project Operations, service organizations can:

• Enhance client engagement: Manage customer relationships effectively from initial prospecting to project delivery, ensuring consistent and personalized client experiences.
• Streamline project execution: Coordinate and manage complex service delivery processes, ensuring projects are delivered on time, within scope, and on budget.
• Optimize resource allocation: Allocate resources efficiently, balancing demand and capacity to maximize productivity and reduce costs.
• Boost financial performance: Gain deep financial insights to manage project profitability, from budgeting and forecasting to billing and revenue recognition.
• Facilitate collaboration: Connect teams across geographies and functions, fostering collaboration and ensuring access to real-time data and insights.

The crucial role of time tracking

Accurate time tracking is a cornerstone of operational efficiency for service-centric organizations. It directly influences key aspects such as billing, project costing, and overall profitability. Delays or inaccuracies in time entry can ripple through the organization, leading to postponed invoicing, misalignment in project cost tracking, and ultimately, a negative impact on profit margins. Ensuring that time entries are precise and timely is not just a matter of administrative accuracy; it’s a critical factor in maintaining financial health and operational integrity.

Recognizing the importance of efficient time management, Microsoft has introduced a groundbreaking feature within Dynamics 365 Project Operations that aims to revolutionize how service organizations handle time entry.

Introducing Copilot in time entry: Elevating efficiency and accuracy

To address the complexities and challenges associated with time tracking, Dynamics 365 Project Operations now includes a time entry feature, equipped with Microsoft Copilot abilities. This AI-powered assistant is designed to simplify and enhance the time entry process, making it more intuitive, accurate, and less burdensome for employees.

Copilot in time entry

Simplify the time entry experience and reduce steps for project team members

Find out more

Revolutionizing time entry with AI

Traditional time entry can be a significant pain point for service organizations. It often involves manual, time-consuming processes prone to errors and inaccuracies. This not only affects financial accuracy but also disrupts project management and resource planning.

Copilot in time entry addresses these challenges by offering an intelligent, AI-driven solution that simplifies the entire process. Here’s how it revolutionizes time entry for service-centric operations:

1. Intelligent suggestions: Copilot uses AI to provide intelligent time entry based on projects and tasks, making it easier to capture time accurately.
2. Context-aware assistance: It offers contextual recommendations, allowing users to input detailed and precise time entries without having to recall every task manually.
3. Streamlined process: By automating repetitive and administrative aspects of time tracking, Copilot frees up employees to focus on higher-value tasks.
4. Reduced errors: The system’s automated checks and suggestions help minimize errors, ensuring that time entries are accurate and compliant with project requirements.

Business outcomes and benefits for service-centric organizations

The Copilot in time entry feature is a game-changer for service-centric organizations, delivering substantial benefits that enhance operational efficiency and financial performance:

1. Boosted productivity and efficiency: By simplifying the time entry process, Copilot allows employees to save time and focus more on delivering high-quality service to clients. This boost in productivity translates into better project outcomes and increased client satisfaction.
2. Enhanced accuracy and compliance: Automated, AI-driven time entries can lead to greater accuracy, reducing the likelihood of discrepancies and errors. This leads to more precise billing, better compliance with contractual terms, and improved financial tracking.
3. Increased employee satisfaction: By reducing the administrative burden associated with time tracking, Copilot improves employee satisfaction. This allows them to concentrate on their core responsibilities, enhancing their engagement and performance.
4. Actionable insights for strategic decision-making: Reliable time tracking data provides valuable insights into resource utilization, project costs, and operational efficiency. This empowers service organizations to make more informed decisions, optimize their processes, and drive strategic growth.

Embracing the future of service operations

The introduction of Copilot in time entry to Dynamics 365 Project Operations highlights Microsoft’s commitment to innovating and enhancing service-centric operations. It showcases how AI can be harnessed to streamline complex processes, reduce administrative overhead, and improve overall efficiency.

For service-centric organizations, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, enriched with Copilot capabilities, is the key to managing the entire lifecycle effectively—from initial client engagement to project completion and beyond. By adopting these advanced tools, businesses can enhance their operational excellence, boost financial performance, and sustain a competitive edge in a rapidly changing market.

Discover how Copilot in time entry can revolutionize your service operations. Learn more about Dynamics 365 Project Operations and explore the transformative potential of AI-driven time tracking by visiting Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations.

The post Discover the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Project Operations for faster time entry appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As enterprises are asked to manage increasingly complex business processes and data environments, context-aware AI summarization by Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 streamlines operations by synthesizing data from multiple sources across Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources. By delivering clear, actionable insights from ERP data, this generative AI feature eliminates context-switching and allows users to make better decisions faster.

Transformative AI summarization in Dynamics 365

Copilot generative AI features are revolutionizing the user experience in Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources. Insights that used to require literally dozens of clicks, searches, and views in multiple windows—and a lot of deep thinking about complex data—are now presented to the right user, at the right time, automatically. Let’s take a closer look at how Copilot aggregates data from multiple sources and displays it in easily digestible and context-aware summaries.

Vendor summary streamlines understanding of vendor performance and financials

What do we mean by “context-aware”? One meaning is that Copilot summarizes data based on the user’s role to deliver real-time, role-specific insights. Take the vendor summary, for example. Traditionally, procurement managers had to navigate multiple forms to understand vendor performance. Copilot summaries streamline these insights by providing quick access to crucial information, such as active contracts, purchase orders, late deliveries, and overdue payments. For accounts payable teams, however, the vendor summary presents essential financial details about a vendor. For both roles, the vendor summary enables faster, data-driven decisions for better vendor interactions.

Sales order and purchase order summaries pinpoint critical items in open orders

Another perspective on “context-aware” is AI summarization based on task. Consider purchase and sales orders. Procurement and sales teams often spend significant time following up on open orders. Getting a comprehensive overview or pinpointing lines that need attention can be challenging, because the necessary data is typically spread across multiple forms. Copilot summaries consolidate the information, enabling users to easily identify critical items.

It’s not just about summarizing data, though. AI summarization also facilitates quicker action on next steps. Copilot’s summary includes convenient one-click filtering options, allowing users to swiftly access the information they need to act.

Customer summary streamlines insights by role for more effective customer relationships

When it comes to customer information, “context-aware” refers to everything that creates a relationship between an organization and its customers—information that’s often found in multiple, disparate tables, reports, and modules. Copilot addresses the challenges faced by roles such as accounts receivable agents, sales order agents, and customer account managers, who need comprehensive and role-specific information about customers that’s often scattered across multiple systems. For example, while accounts receivable teams need quick access to open invoices, sales order teams require details on open orders and shipments. Copilot consolidates all relevant data into a single, context-aware summary that’s specific to each role, allowing agents and account managers to tailor their interactions with customers, strengthen relationships, and enhance operational efficiency.

Warehouse worker home screen brings warehouse teams up to speed quickly

“Context-aware” can also refer to a user’s surroundings and situation. Warehouse start-of-shift stand-up meetings can miss important updates, and they don’t cover changes that happen throughout the day. Copilot’s dynamic operational summary on the Warehouse Management home screen brings warehouse workers up to speed at the start of their shifts and keeps them on top of the situation as they go about their day, helping them quickly adapt to changes and ensure daily goals are met.

Workflow history summary streamlines review and approval of invoices and expense reports

AI summarization streamlines examination of workflows by providing a concise overview of recent actions and comments, allowing approvers to quickly act without navigating through separate detail screens. Copilot summaries apply to workflows in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources, aiding review and approval processes and supporting informed decisions for things like vendor invoices, time-off requests, and expense reports.

Product preview summary consolidates product details for quick consumption

Procurement managers typically must navigate multiple forms to gather product details such as name, description, dimensions, hierarchy, life cycle state, and release policy. Copilot consolidates this information and other key product attributes in a single, concise summary, making these details quick and easy to consume.

Product detail summary streamlines inventory management

When a warehouse manager views the product detail page, Copilot’s summary focuses on relevant information that would take multiple clicks to find, such as on-hand inventory levels, purchase information like main vendor, and batch numbers that are expiring soon.

Employee workspace summary makes leave management easier for both HR and employees

An organization’s success relies on both employees and customers. Effective time-off management is crucial for employees to make informed decisions and for the organization to optimize time-off utilization and manage financial liabilities from unused leave. Time-off information is scattered across multiple screens in the employee self-service portal. Copilot consolidates key details like vacation and sick leave balances and potential forfeitures due to policy, and includes a link to submit leave requests, all in one summary view.

Retail statement summary provides insights about risky transactions across multiple stores

Physical stores send cash-and-carry transactions to Dynamics 365 Commerce for inventory and financial updates. The store operations team must ensure proper posting, but identifying pending transactions can be difficult across multiple stores. Summaries of posted and unposted retail statements highlight stores needing attention and flag risky transactions like returns without receipts or price overrides. Brief error summaries for failed statements aid in quick resolution, enhancing store management efficiency.

Merchandise workflow summary streamlines managing product configurations

For retail merchandisers, the challenge lies in managing complex product configurations without errors. Copilot addresses this challenge by streamlining merchandising workflows, offering a clear summary of settings, automating data validation, and providing a risk preview to anticipate issues. Here, context-aware AI summarization enhances efficiency, reduces the risk of lost sales, and drives growth.

More benefits of context-aware AI summarization of ERP data

Beyond the specific benefits we described earlier, Copilot summaries in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Finance, Commerce, and Human Resources enhance user experience and operational efficiency in multiple ways.

• Enhanced productivity: With key data points automatically summarized, users spend less time analyzing vast datasets and can focus on strategic decision-making and core activities.
• Proactive problem-solving: With real-time summaries, users can anticipate challenges and address them proactively, improving business agility and resilience.
• Improved accuracy and insight: Copilot highlights critical information and trends, reducing the risk of human error in interpreting complex data. Analysis is more accurate and insightful, crucial for effective decision-making.
• Customized user experiences: Each summarization feature is tailored to the specific needs of different roles within an organization, ensuring that every user receives the most relevant and actionable insights.
• Seamless integration: AI features integrate seamlessly into your existing Dynamics 365 framework, providing a smooth user experience without the need for extensive setup or training.
• Scalable decision support: Whether for small tasks or large-scale strategic decisions, Copilot summaries meet the needs of businesses of all sizes, scenarios, and requirements.

These benefits collectively contribute to a more streamlined, efficient, and informed ERP environment, setting the stage for more advanced AI features to come.

Introducing generative AI responsibly

Integrating generative AI into ERP products presents challenges. It requires ensuring that the AI features are reliable and robust enough for mission-critical business settings. It also requires building customer trust in the AI capabilities. Our vision is an autonomous ERP system that automates and optimizes business processes with minimal human intervention. However, this is a journey we’re embarking on together to instill confidence in the results and encourage greater adoption over time.

Our approach is to gradually introduce low-risk AI features that provide immediate benefits and time savings, gather user feedback, and build excitement. This way, we can improve the AI features based on user needs and business operations, laying the foundation for more advanced AI features in the future. We prioritize the safe deployment and continuous improvement of AI features in our ERP suite and are leading the way for responsible and impactful integration of AI in the ERP landscape.

Ensuring the ethical use of AI technology

Microsoft is committed to the ethical deployment of AI technologies. Through our Responsible AI practices, we ensure that all AI-powered features in Dynamics 365 adhere to stringent data privacy laws and ethical AI usage standards, promoting transparency, fairness, and accountability.

Learn more about AI summarization in Dynamics 365

Interested in learning more about the power of AI summarization to transform your business processes with unparalleled efficiency and insight? Here’s how you can dive deeper:

• Watch a brief video demonstrating the new AI summarization feature.
• Read the documentation to understand the specifics of each Copilot summarization feature:
  • AI summaries with Copilot in Supply Chain Management
  • Customer page summary in Finance
  • Enable Copilot statement posting summaries – Commerce | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
  • Workflow history summary in Finance
  • Employee self service leave summary – Human Resources | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
• Engage with other Dynamics 365 users in our community forums to learn from their experiences and share your own.

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer? Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post AI summarization in Dynamics 365 synthesizes and simplifies complex data appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.