Building a successful sales team starts with collaboration and insights. To boost performance across the sales journey, business development professionals must be empowered to engage across internal teams to better connect with customers and easily interact with data and insights. Like any organizational transformation, adapting teams to a new way of selling requires coordination between people, process, and technology—a challenging effort for any organization.

So, how does one of the largest professional services organizations in the world—with almost 400,000 people across 700 offices in 150 countries—transform and connect a sales organization that spans nearly every corner of the globe?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Optimize your organization and transform your sales processes.

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For Ernst & Young LLP (EY), one of the largest professional services member firms worldwide, its sales transformation journey included Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. EY began its extensive rollout of Dynamics 365 Sales with the simple mission to deliver exceptional client service. By equipping more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals across the globe with an intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated across marketing, sales, delivery, and insights, EY can help its clients and itself maintain a competitive edge across markets.

The sales system also sets the stage for enhanced seller productivity with Microsoft 365, including the ability to access and collaborate on customer opportunities within the flow of work from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. And Microsoft Copilot capabilities are expected to help sellers work more efficiently and improve customer experiences with email assistance, personalized sales content creation, AI-generated insights, and recommendations for next steps.

Breaking down barriers for a globally-connected team

To help their clients solve their most complex problems, EY needed a digital sales foundation that helped enable sellers to be connected, proactive, and insightful with a deeper understanding of account and opportunity data. A collaborative sales system can empower teams to help deliver consistently exceptional client services and continuously adapt to rapid changes across each client organization, industries, and entire markets.

That’s why EY turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and the latest advancements in AI to both unify and transform sales processes with a goal to improve cross-team collaboration and deepen connections with clients.

Led by a need for a more integrated approach to client relationship building focused on client value, EY identified the people who would gain the most from a global sales transformation. For example, EY pursuit leaders, who are dedicated to leading complex client relationships, could benefit from deeper insights into client and industry issues to deliver the right set of solutions when pursuing opportunities. Client-serving teams could also benefit from a system that provided targeted, meaningful information and insights, helping them to create winning proposals in less time.

In 2022, EY and Microsoft got to work on an architecture design and implementation plan for a sales platform that bridged both existing solutions and a modern, future-proof platform for insights, automation, collaboration, productivity, and reporting. These transformative solutions build on a years-long commitment to power growth and innovation of EY on Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

A new way to power a global organization

EY client-serving teams around the world are standardizing sales processes on a single, unified customer relationship management and productivity system. On this new, flexible platform, with the ability to integrate third-party applications and adapt new technologies, teams can leverage both tools they currently depend on and leverage the latest in Dynamics 365 and AI enhancements.

For example, teams will continue to manage engagements in SAP ECC, but the integration with Dynamics 365 Sales will help ensure a more seamless handoff of crucial information to delivery. This allows EY to take advantage of Microsoft capabilities, such as Microsoft Power BI data visualizations, Outlook, and Teams for enhanced collaboration and AI and automation features to streamline processes.

“We’ve brought the opportunity management process closer to where we spend our time—in Outlook, in Teams, and on the go while on mobile.”

Kris Kuty, Global Product Manager, Ernst & Young LLP

Early signs of success

Only months after deployment, EY reports that the new sales platform is making a real impact on the way they do business. Some of the results include:

• An enhanced CRM solution that has connected marketing, sales, and service processes for better collaboration between teams.
• Greater access to intelligence and insights, enabling client-serving teams, financial forecasters, and business planners to be more efficient and knowledgeable, equipped to make better decisions faster, and, ultimately, make deeper connections with clients.
• Standardized sales processes and unified views across accounts, using a globally consistent and streamlined system that includes a mobile Power App, Outlook, and Teams, with integrations to key EY systems for master data, risk management, and enterprise reporting. EY sales, service, and finance teams can access the information they need when they need it, right in the flow of work.
• Improved pipeline visibility, giving EY client-serving teams a clear view of client pursuits across their broad services, supported by contextual insights into each sales contact and activity.
• Tighter team collaboration, leading to more connected peer conversations and better outcomes for their clients’ most complex challenges.

Moving forward, the EY sales excellence journey will include AI and Copilot. To reinforce Dynamics 365 Sales as a key enabler for client serving individuals they expect to:

• Provide AI-based recommendations for client communications and next best topics utilizing historical interactions as well as industry insights and trends.
• Analyze seller behavior to recommend new ways of working.
• Provide AI-driven recommendations for deal scoring and lead prioritization.

“We are extremely excited about what is coming and what is possible. We’ve already kicked off with Copilot and the possibilities with AI are extremely attractive as we aim to serve our clients even better. We have our integrated platform in place, with Dynamics 365 Sales at the center. Now we can build on this and continue the transformation.”

Jeremy Hallett, Global Markets Enablement Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

Better positioned to design and deliver transformative cloud solutions to organizations worldwide

The EY transformation story showcases how Dynamics 365 Sales can help complex, regulated, multi-national organizations inspire a unified, customer-focused global sales operation—empowered to move business forward with a shared vision and digital toolkit. And, as one of Microsoft’s top systems integrators, EY is well positioned to help deliver that value to organizations everywhere.

“Putting Dynamics 365 and Copilot in the hands of more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals showcases how modern architectures and the latest advancements in AI create competitive advantage. Part of embarking down this journey was to demonstrate for our clients that it can be done for even the most complex global enterprises. The time is now to create new ways of working with AI-powered transformations.”

Jim Little, Global Microsoft Alliance Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

The EY organization can help complex organizations find their own path to differentiate with Dynamics 365 and AI and surface the right data for personalized customer experiences, critical business insights, and operational agility. Applying direct learnings from their global implementation of Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as day-to-day experiences using the technology, will bring a wealth of additional perspective, insights, and guidance to every engagement.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as the EY Microsoft Alliance. 

The post Ernst & Young reinvents sales globally with Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Being able to efficiently and effectively manage your resources is key to Dynamics 365 Field Service. Today, we introduce a new Crew Allocation Tool to streamline the process of making single-day membership changes to all your crews.

We’ve heard from users that it can be tedious to manually go into crew records, take a resource out for a day, add a new resource, and reset it all at the end of the day. Now, when a technician is on leave, a piece of equipment is out of service, or you need to add some additional support for a particularly intensive day, making the necessary crew reassignments will be a seamless, intuitive experience.  

Accessing the New Tool 

To find the new Crew Allocation Tool, you’ll first head to the Resources page. There you can either navigate to a view with your desired crews or just select up to fifteen crews you want to work with. You’ll see a new button in the control bar titled Crew Allocation that will open the tool. 

Making Single Day Membership Changes 

When you enter the new tool, you’ll see your selection of crews displayed in a grid along with all the members that are working that day. You’ll also see all the bookings that the crew has for the day listed for easy reference. To move a crew member from one crew to another is as simple as dragging and dropping one or more of these resources from their original crew to the target crew. You can also make your resource selection and use the Assign to crew button to select a new crew.  

Of course, sometimes the resource you want to add to a crew is not already on another. In this case, you can use the Available Resources Panel. This section of the tool, which is based on the views you already have defined from the Resources page, is where you will find any resources working that day who are not already on a crew. From here, you can also select one or more resources, and move them to a crew either by dragging and dropping or the Assign to crew button.  

The last kind of single day membership change is removing a resource from a crew. Let’s say you know a particular resource is booked up with individual training that day and won’t be able to contribute to crew activities. You can simply select that resource (or more than one resource) and click on the Remove button. Additionally, if you want to start from a clean slate, you can click Remove all and start all your crews from scratch.  

Updating Schedules 

Once you save your changes, the crew tool updates your crews and cascades your existing crew bookings. First your membership changes will be saved, with new resources being added to a crew, and removed resources being taken out for a full day in the target crew’s time zone. Then, the impacted resources’ schedules will be updated with appropriate bookings and cancellations. This phase will happen in the background, so you’re free to go on to your other daily tasks while the booking changes cascade.  

Now that all the booking changes are cascaded, your crews’ schedules will be up to date with the latest memberships and bookings.

This also means that if you create a new booking for the crew on the active day, it will populate to your new resource’s schedule like any other crew member.  

We’re excited to roll this new Crew Allocation Tool streamlines process tool out to all Field Service users and look forward to hearing about your experience. 

Explore more on Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation and share your feedback within the Field Service product or via our ideas portal. Your input drives continuous improvement for enhanced operational performance. 

The post Dynamics 365 Field Service announces the new Crew Allocation Tool, which enables the “Morning Shuffle”  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Azure Application Insights is now our comprehensive solution for end-to-end conversation diagnostics. As part of this advancement, we are phasing out unified routing diagnostics and integrating its capabilities into Application Insights. 

Key dates

• Disclosure date: May 9, 2024
  We sent communications to affected customers that we are deprecating unified routing diagnostics in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• End of support: July 1, 2024
  After this date, no new diagnostics records will be generated for conversations/records routed.
• End of life: July 15, 2024
  After this date, unified routing diagnostics will be taken out of service.

Next steps

We strongly encourage customers to leverage Azure Application Insights, which will be enriched with all the conversation and routing diagnostics related events. Application Insights offers a flexible and cost-effective alternative with the added advantage of customization to meet business needs. We aim to iteratively improve diagnostic capabilities of conversation lifecycle events. This ensures reliability and alignment with our commitment to cost-efficiency and user-centric innovation. Learn more about conversation diagnostics in Azure Application Insights. 

Please contact your Success Manager, FastTrack representative, or Microsoft Support if you have any additional questions. 

The post Transition from unified routing diagnostics to Azure Application Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we are thrilled to announce the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer service: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. With general availability on July 1, 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.

Modernizing service experiences with generative AI

Customer service expectations are higher than ever. It’s not only frustrating for customers to deal with long wait times, being transferred to the wrong agent or having to repeat themselves multiple times — it’s detrimental to business. When people have poor customer service experiences, over half of them end up spending less or decide to take their business elsewhere (Qualtrics).

Generative AI is transforming customer service and revolutionizing the way contact centers operate — from delivering rich experiences across digital and voice channels that enable customers to resolve their own needs, to equipping agents with relevant context within the flow of work, and ultimately unifying operations to drive efficiency and reduce costs.

We have experienced the transformational impact of generative AI firsthand with Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support (CSS) team, one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Before the support team migrated to Microsoft’s own tools, CSS was previously using 16 different systems and over 500 individual tools — slowing down service, hindering collaboration and producing inefficient workflows. With Copilot as part of the solution, the CSS team achieved a 12 percent decrease in average handle time for chat engagements and 13 percent decrease in agents requiring peer assistance to resolve an incident. And more broadly, CSS has seen a 31 percent increase in first call resolution and a 20 percent reduction in missed routes.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Applying learnings and insights from our own Copilot usage, coupled with multi-year investments in voice and digital channels, Dynamics 365 Contact Center infuses generative AI throughout the contact center workflow — spanning the channels of communication, self-service, intelligent routing, agent-assisted service and operations to help contact centers solve problems faster, empower agents and reduce costs.

Additionally, Dynamics 365 Contact Center is built natively on the Microsoft cloud to deliver extensive scalability and reliability across voice, digital channels and routing while at the same time allowing organizations to retain their existing investments in CRM or custom apps.

Key Dynamics 365 Contact Center capabilities include:

• Next-generation self-service: With sophisticated pre-integrated Copilots for digital and voice channels that drive context-aware, personalized conversations, contact centers can deploy rich self-service experiences. Combining the best of interactive voice response (IVR) technology from Nuance and Microsoft Copilot Studio’s no-code/low-code designer, contact centers can provide customers with engaging, individualized experiences powered by generative AI.
• Accelerated human-assisted service: Across every channel, intelligent unified routing steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent best suited to help, enhancing service quality and efficiency. When a customer reaches an agent, Dynamics 365 Contact Center gives the agent a 360-degree view of the customer with generative AI — for example, real-time conversation tools like sentiment analysis, translation, conversation summary, transcription and more are included to help improve service, along with others that automate repetitive tasks for agents such as case summary, draft an email, suggested response and the ability for Copilot to answer agent questions grounded on your trusted knowledge sources.
• Operational efficiency: Contact center efficiency depends just as much on what happens behind the scenes as it does on customer and agent experiences. We’ve built a solution that helps service teams detect issues early, improve critical KPIs and adapt quickly. With generative AI-based, real-time reporting, Dynamics 365 Contact Center allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels, including their workforce.

Here’s what customers are saying:

• “At 1-800-Flowers.com, we pride ourselves on exceptional service and continually raising the bar. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re creating a best-in-class solution that furthers our mission and helps inspire people to give more, connect more, and build more and better relationships.” — Arnie Leap, CIO, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.
• “MSC has always been known for the personal service that we give to our customers; Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps us elevate that customer-centric approach.”— Fabio Catassi, CIO, Mediterranean Shipping Company
• “For our support teams, efficient problem-solving and smooth customer interactions are key to delivering exceptional service. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and by leveraging its AI capabilities, we see a future where our support teams will deliver that level of service every day.”— Stephen Currie, Vice President Support Operations, Synoptek

If you’re attending Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, join me for my main stage panel on Thursday, June 6. Be sure to also stop by the Microsoft booth (#151) during the event to see Dynamics 365 Contact Center in action.

Stay tuned for the general availability of Dynamics 365 Contact Center on July 1.

The post Announcing Dynamics 365 Contact Center – a Copilot-first cloud contact center to transform service experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the dynamic world of service management, every action counts. From frontline workers in the field to back-office functions, the complexity of service delivery impacts the bottom line. Whether it’s a physical product consumed from inventory, or a service provided, both have financial implications, especially when external customers are involved, pricing and profitability come into play.

When a field service organization’s frontline operations run in isolation, consequences can be far-reaching: inaccurate costing, delayed invoicing, dissatisfied customers, and supply chain bottlenecks. To succeed in this complicated environment, organizations must integrate their systems to coordinate their services, finances, and supply chain processes. 

Recognizing this critical need, we recently announced the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Business Central, and today we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Finance as well as Supply Chain Management. This powerful integration ensures that the work of frontline workers, service managers, and dispatchers are seamlessly synced with the financial and supply chain heart of your business. Let’s explore some of the details of this native integration.  

Bridging the gap: Dynamics 365 integration 

The challenges 

Even with robust systems like Dynamics 365 Field Service and a strong ERP system like Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, gaps can emerge when these systems aren’t fully integrated: 

1. Limited financial insight: Without smooth integration, determining job costs and profitability requires switching between windows and consuming or updated data in multiple systems, which obscures their financial status. 
2. Supply-driven delays: Separate fieldwork and supply chain processes lead to inventory shortages and service delays. 
3. Invoicing bottlenecks: Disparate systems and manual processes cause invoicing and payment delays, disrupting cash flow. 
4. Inconsistent data: Discrepancies across systems create confusion, affecting accuracy of inventory, decision-making, pricing, and costing data. 

The solution

Our native integration addresses these challenges head-on: 

1. Operational visibility: Real-time insights into finances and inventory empower informed decision-making across your organization. 
2. Field-informed supply chain: Field Service work orders can drive estimated inventory demand, ensuring seamless supply chain coordination. 
3. Interconnected financial operations: Automated and powerful billing and invoicing capabilities of Finance informed directly by the services provided speed up payment cycles, improve cash flow, minimize errors, boost profitability, and turn every work order into a growth opportunity. 
4. Cost-effective integration: Our pre-built solution reduces implementation expenses and accelerates value realization. 
5. Reduced risk, faster implementation: The native integration minimizes risk while improving implementation timelines. 

Essential features 

Organizations can create new opportunities to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, and growth by integrating their Dynamics 365 Field Service and finance and operations applications. Key features of this native integration include:  

• Data alignment: Dual-write and virtual entities ensure all applications operate from a cohesive set of primary tables. 
  • Primary tables alignment: Basic concepts such as currency, units of measure, products and their attributes (like styles, configurations, colors) are synced between applications to ensure a consistent source of truth. 
  • Legal entity alignment: The company concept, native to Finance and Supply Chain, is used to filter critical lookups to put guard-rails in the system, helping drive transactions along company lines. 
  • Projects and accounts: Work orders are seamlessly synced with projects and customer accounts from the finance and operations applications, allowing for precise project tracking and customer billing.  
  • Inventory: Virtual tables expose inventory from Supply Chain directly in Field Service while work order inventory transactions align with item journals, directly impacting inventory levels in the system of record. 
  • Resources: Using dual-write, resources can be aligned directly with workers ensuring field service work order transactions are automatically associated with the right workers and recorded in their respective hours journal and expense journal lines. 
• Automated and precise invoicing: The integration automates the syncing of transactions, reducing manual work and mistakes. Organizations can decide when to sync the information and post project journals either as they use them or automatically when they finish the work order. 
• Full insight and management: No financial system can afford to lose transactional data. Our integration gives organizations complete insight and management of data moving between the systems, making sure they can fix issues that stop data from flowing between applications and re-sync the transaction. 

Get started now 

Dynamics 365 Field Service and the Dynamics 365 finance and operations applications work together to unlock efficiencies. Organizations that use these solutions together can boost their productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Grow your business with Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Finance, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain.  

Be on the lookout for future post in June for more ways to take advantage of this powerful integration that make it work for any organization.

Ready to get started today? Learn more about the integration, set up your organization, and create your first integrated work order.  

The post Unlocking efficiency: Dynamics 365 Field Service integration for seamless operations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s rapidly evolving sales environment, staying ahead of the curve is more crucial than ever. The latest updates to Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, particularly its enhanced integration with Outlook, are transforming how sales professionals gear up for their meetings. Let’s dive into how these new functionalities not only streamline preparation but also enrich customer interactions. 

Streamlined Outlook integration for comprehensive sales meeting preparation

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales expands its integration capabilities with Outlook, specifically accommodating users who have not enabled server-side sync. This pivotal update accelerates adoption, providing a unified platform where sales professionals can access and prepare for their Outlook-scheduled sales appointments directly within Dynamics 365. This coherence not only simplifies the logistical aspects of sales preparation but also enhances the overall efficiency and effectiveness of sales operations. 

Proactive meeting preparation

Copilot now allows sales teams to fetch Outlook meetings for the upcoming week, enabling them to prepare proactively. The ability to view detailed agendas and prepare in advance transforms how sales teams interact with clients, paving the way for more successful outcomes.

Refined meeting summaries for enhanced client interactions

The upgraded meeting preparation tool in Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales now offers richer, more detailed summaries. This enhancement provides sales teams with critical insights and key talking points, tailored to each meeting’s context. Such targeted preparation boosts confidence and competence, enabling sales professionals to tailor their approaches to meet the specific needs and interests of each client, enhancing the effectiveness of their pitches. 

Harnessing innovations for sales excellence 

The recent updates to Copilot in D365 Sales are a testament to our commitment to enhance the user experience and functionality of our sales management tools. By leveraging these new features, sales teams can enhance their productivity, improve client interactions, and ultimately drive more successful outcomes. As the digital landscape evolves, tools like Copilot in D365 Sales are invaluable for staying competitive in the fast-paced world of sales. 

Next steps

Learn more on leveraging Copilot in D365 Sales to prepare for meetings: 
Stay ahead with Copilot | Microsoft Learn 

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.    

The post Leveraging Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales to prepare for sales meeting appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.