This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
A new feature is coming that is designed to improve performance when working with financial dimensions and reduce the overall storage cost of storing financial dimension values. The initial changes for improved performance and reduced storage will being rolling out in application release 10.0.38. There are 3 new fields being added to the table Dimension code combination (DimensionAttributeValueCombination) for this initial application release.
You will see this improvement fully realized in application release 10.0.42 when 22 fields and related indexes are removed. These fields all begin with SystemGeneratedAttribute and are used for processes like financial journal entry.
Feature details
Enabling the feature Financial dimension performance and storage improvement feature will allow your environment to use just the 3 fields newly added to this table.
If you would like to test the removal of the 22 fields and indexes please contact technical support for further information and early enablement before application 10.0.42. Testing this change with any customizations that utilize data directly from this table – which should be very uncommon – will ensure smooth transition when they are permanently removed in 10.0.42.
Why is this a benefit? Removing these fields and indexes from this highly used table will provide an improved query and insert performance as well as reduced storage cost. While removing 22 fields is a great benefit, the larger gain for your environment is the removal of the related indexes.
Call to action
After enabling this feature in your test environment, verify all of your customizations and key business scenarios. Because all of these data model changes are fully encapsulated in Microsoft owned API calls, there should be no impact for environments with proper customizations. Any customization accessing this table should review the business need and consider other API endpoints for proper access.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the end-user experience of the offline-first Field Service Mobile application. In this second part we will go through some of the configuration and best practices for a successful offline rollout.
Mobile Offline Configuration & Best Practices
Leverage the out of the box mobile offline profile
The out of the box Field Service Mobile offline profile is a great starting point when enabling offline for your organization. It has common Field Service tables pre-configured along with some recommended filters to limit data. When modifying the mobile offline profile, it is recommended to not remove existing tables, but only add new/custom tables required by your organization. If you do want to remove tables from the OOTB profile, be sure there are no references or cross-linking in the views as relationships between tables can at times be difficult to identify at first glance.
Limit offline data synchronized to the device
One of the most important things to set your organization up for success with mobile offline is enabling the right data for your business scenarios. Given bandwidth and device constraints it is critical that data being synced from the server is limited as much as possible to have a fast and efficient experience.
We recommend you evaluate your offline data needs by considering the following:
What are the core business scenarios for a given Work Order assigned to the frontline worker using the application?
What is the minimum historical data which is required offline?
What relationships exist between tables which will be required to drive lists/views/lookups and cross references?
What elements on the application may not be needed offline and can be considered online only (excluded from the offline profile)?
Determining above may take several conversations with business stakeholders and frontline workers. It is recommended to document these details in text before diving in to configure your mobile offline profile.
Offline sync and application data
In addition to the data sync, the first sync will include app data which is used to drive the views and forms of the application. This app data is highly compressed when downloading over the network and unpacks after being downloaded to the device.
App data includes scripts, images, and other resources from the Microsoft Field Service solution and any additional customization from solution providers and admins.
While many of the out-of-the-box scripts should not be modified by the organization, for custom app data be sure to follow best practices:
Minify scripts to reduce file size.
Reduce image assets sizes.
Only include assets which are strictly required for mobile app usage.
Test as a user in real world conditions
It is important to test changes to your offline profile directly on the mobile application while using an account that mirrors the role that real end-users will ultimately be using to access the device. This is important because different roles in the organization may have different data access levels and have dramatically different results during offline synchronization.
When testing you can evaluate the Offline Status Page in the application to see which tables are being synchronized and how many records per table are being downloaded.
In addition to testing with the correct user role, be sure to test or simulate real world conditions; for example, you will want test cases to mirror the following:
Wi-Fi
Cellular (strong)
Cellular (weak/low signal)
No network
Testing in various network conditions will help you identify hidden issues where a table is missing from the profile or filter condition may be excluding a necessary record. In some cases, internal business logic may go to the server to get the missing record from the mobile offline profile; this provides a better user experience by avoiding errors for connected scenarios but can result in errors when the application is running without network.
This level of testing will give further validation that your offline configuration has met your business requirements and frontline workers will have success in any network condition.
Avoid extensive use of Web Resources with the offline application
Web resources have several offline limitations which can differ by mobile operating system. Due to these limitations and inconsistency between device operating systems, it is recommended to leverage PowerApps Composition Framework (PCF) controls
Be aware of larger file types such as images, videos, and documents
Large files and images require some special handling to enable for offline and limit so to avoid consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth or disc space.
The offline-enabled Field Server Mobile application will sync data from the server at regular intervals. If part of a workflow depends on interaction with the server, the response may take minutes to return to the client when the network is available, and not at all if the user is truly offline. To avoid the delay and make the offline experience more consistent, it is recommended to move as much business logic to the client as possible.
This may involve moving some capabilities traditionally handled by a server-side plugin to the client so it can function properly in offline mode.
Within the Mobile Offline Profile configuration each table can have its own sync interval. This interval determines how often that table is checked for updates.
You can change the sync interval for each table to reduce the frequency of syncing as users use the app. This may reduce network and battery usage.
It is recommended to set intervals to be less frequent on tables which are not updated often.
If you’d like to slow down all data downloads, update the sync interval for all tables in the offline profile to a higher interval.
With the release of Offline Sync Settings in Wave 2 2023, users can control their individual sync settings and set their client to only sync while on Wi-Fi. These settings can be leverages for scenarios where the Frontline Worker may for work extended periods of time without the need to sync, or have data capacity limits on their cellular plans.
Moving the mobile offline profile between environments
Commonly, configuration of the mobile offline profile is done in a sandbox environment and will need to be moved up to a test environment before ultimately being updated in production. To ensure consistently between environments it is recommended you move the offline profile as part of a managed solution.
This can be accomplished by creating a new solution and then binding the offline profile to that solution which can be exported. Simply re-import the solution to the new environment then publish and your changes will be updated with consistency between environments.
Watch this space – the next blog is coming in 2 days!
If there are new enhancement suggestions, it is recommended to submit those asks via the Field Service Mobile Ideas portal: Field Service Mobile – Ideas. This will allow the product team to evaluate new requests and plan for future product release waves.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Selling is all about relationships. We hear a lot these days about the disconnect that our increasingly digital world can create. But at Microsoft, we believe that digital tools, especially those powered by generative AI and real-time insights, can help strengthen sellers’ relationships with their customers. We’re continually investing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to enable sellers to engage with their customers more meaningfully. We are pleased to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023 report, with top scores possible in the Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap criteria for our sales force automation (SFA) platform.
Reducing complexity to drive seller success
The role of a seller has only grown more complex. A process that used to involve a couple of phone calls and face-to-face meetings now includes everything from targeted emails to impromptu online chats. Organizations rely on everything from digital sellers to field sellers to customer success champions to ensure their customers are supported end-to-end throughout the sales journey. Especially with hybrid workplaces and shrinking travel budgets, sellers need assistance from technology to build connections—between colleagues, across multiple data sources, and with customers.
The challenge is that sellers need to build these connections and foster relationships without sacrificing productivity. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, sellers spend more than 66 percent of their day managing email, leaving only about a third of their time for actual sales activities. Our answer is to provide simple solutions—focusing on collaboration, productivity, AI, and insights—to help sellers focus on closing deals. As Forrester states in its report, “Dynamics [365 Sales] showcases how SFA and office productivity solutions work together.” We believe this is what has earned our position as a Leader: we built solutions to give sellers access to real-time customer insights, subject matter experts, relevant data across different sources, and important customer and account information right in their app of choice—no context switching necessary.
Dynamics 365 Sales works natively with Microsoft Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. Additionally, copilot capabilities bring next-generation AI and customer relationship management (CRM) platform updates into collaborative apps like Outlook and Teams, unlocking productivity for sellers whether they are working in Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft 365 apps. By helping to eliminate manual data entry, meeting summarization, and other cumbersome processes, Dynamics 365 Sales ensures sellers have more time to create and nourish their customer connections, ultimately driving sales.
Providing insights that improve customer retention—and grow revenue
Referring to Microsoft, Forrester also reports that “Embedded insights are a highlight of the product”—something that Microsoft customer, DP World, knows well. DP World is the leading provider of worldwide, end-to-end supply chain and logistics. DP World implemented Dynamics 365 Sales to help the company diversify and scale after an acquisition that was driving new demand and traffic to the company. Dynamics 365 Sales provides its sellers predictive lead scoring and prioritized worklists based on AI, giving full visibility into its sales funnels and helping it effectively qualify leads and opportunities. This reduced DP World’s sales cycle, enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater customer retention.
Learn more about sales
We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.
Microsoft named a Leader
We received top scores in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023.
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing—for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Efficiently managing a contact center requires a fine balance between workforce engagement and customer satisfaction. The ability to create agent-specific capacity profiles in Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers administrators and supervisors to fine-tune the work allocation based on an agent’s experience and expertise, optimizing agent performance and delivering tailored customer service.
Understand capacity profiles
Capacity profiles are at the core of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, defining the type and amount of work agents can handle, ensuring equitable work distribution. Profiles are even more beneficial when agents are blended across various channels. Agent-specific capacity profiles take this a step further, enabling customized work limits for individual agents based on their proficiency. Let’s explore this capability with an example.
A real-world scenario: Casey’s challenge
Meet Casey, a Customer Service administrator at Contoso Bank who aims to maximize the efficiency of her customer service team. She wants senior agents to handle more responsibilities, giving junior agents the time to focus on training and skill development.
Casey decides to use agent-specific capacity profiles for credit card inquiries in the North America region. She sets up a “Credit Card NAM” profile with a default limit of two concurrent conversations. She assigns it to Kiana, a seasoned agent, and Henry, a junior agent who recently joined Contoso.
Customize capacity limits
Casey recognizes that Kiana’s seniority and expertise warrant a different limit. With agent-specific capacity profiles, she can easily update Kiana’s limit to handle three conversations at a time. The immediate benefit of this approach is apparent. This balance allows junior agents like Henry to invest more time in training and development while experienced agents like Kiana manage a higher workload efficiently.
Flexibility in action
In the dynamic world of customer service, circumstances can change rapidly. Contoso Bank faces an unexpected surge in insurance-related queries. Casey needs to adapt to this evolving scenario promptly and this is where agent-specific capacity profiles truly shine.
Casey has Kiana take on the additional insurance queries alongside her credit card queries. She assigns the “Insurance” profile to Kiana. She also resets Kiana’s work limit for the “Credit Card NAM” profile back to the default amount, providing her the bandwidth to handle the increased workload efficiently.
The result: Optimal efficiency
This example showcases the flexibility and real-time adaptability that agent-specific capacity profiles offer. Casey is empowered to make agile and precise work distribution decisions, ensuring that agents’ expertise and experience are utilized optimally.
Conclusion
In the world of customer service, where every interaction matters, this feature is a game-changer. It helps organizations reduce agent stress, elevate customer satisfaction, and offer a flexible solution for modern customer service management. By embracing this feature, businesses can ensure that their customer service is optimized for excellence, regardless of changing circumstances.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We recently announced the preview of our new Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile experience. This blog details the new capabilities on how technicians can benefit from this new streamlined experience, which cuts down the number of taps required to complete a booking in nearly half!
Upon launching the app with the new experience enabled, you will notice several things. Firstly, the styling and theming follows the Microsoft’s Fluent design system – bringing an experience like other modern enterprise apps like Teams and Office to your field service technicians.
There is a new bottom navigation bar with 3 main buttons:
Home – the landing page for the app, currently today’s bookings
Library – for helpful reference materials such as Guides
More – for easy access to the other areas of the app via the sitemap.
Tapping on your user avatar in the top left opens a familiar navigation menu where you can get help, provide feedback and access useful app settings, such as the ability to change your time zone and your applicable Dynamics 365 org.
Throughout the app, you will notice that touch targets are larger to eliminate mis-taps for conditions out in the field. Labels and icons, such as for booking status, are color coded for immediate visual recognition. The UX is responsive and adjusts to various screen sizes and portrait and landscape modes.
The Booking List
Every row in the booking list highlights the most important fields at a glance – such as the customer’s name, the incident type, the service address, the booking start time and the current booking status. There are one-touch filters and sorting options at the top – enabling the technician to easily filter based on booking status or sort by columns other than time.
There are also nifty timesaving shortcuts – swipe gestures to change the booking status from within the booking list and one-touch “Get Directions” button to start navigation. All of these features are designed to reduce the time required to get basic information and perform tasks. To access the booking details, simply tap on the booking from the list.
Booking details, tasks, services and products
Within the booking form, there are tabs to keep the information organized in an intuitive manner. Technicians can smoothly swipe between the tabs, instead of having to tap on them.
The General tab summarizes the key details of the booking and the associated work order. The “Edit Status” button at the bottom is both conspicuous and fixed at the bottom of the screen, making it easy to access and tap.
The one-touch “Get Directions” feature from the bookings list is available on this screen as well. Additionally, there are shortcuts to quickly start a phone call or send an email from to the onsite contact from this screen. The edit controls for the time and duration fields have also been completely redesigned using the Fluent mobile patterns. The summary field contains an expandable work description.
The tasks, products and services tabs include the list of Work Order Service Tasks, Work Order Products and Work Order Services for the current booking respectively. The tasks sub-grid has multiple UX niceties – a progress bar at the top, large tappable icons to easily check off completed tasks, a task description below each task title, links to attached Guides and Inspections (more on that in a bit) and a floating action button to quickly add tasks. The products and services lists inherit many of the same UX enhancements, with the additional features to mark an item as used and update the quantity inline.
These lists are designed to reduce the need to tap into the individual items by surfacing the relevant details and editing capabilities in the list itself.
If a user needs the unified client interface (UCI) for additional booking details, they can tap on the icon on the top right of any screen. Tapping on a record that doesn’t have the new experience also takes the user to the UCI experience – for e.g., tapping into a task will currently open the UCI form.
Step by step instructions
An exciting new feature for service technicians is the ability to access their Guides on their mobile devices with the Field Service app! If the Dynamics environment contains both Field Service and Guides solutions, users can access guides from within the library tab in the bottom navigation bar. Technicians can use guides containing instructional images and branching logic to help them when they need to follow predetermined procedures or troubleshooting maneuvers.
Each guide also has an outline to enable the user to see all the steps briefly. Also, both inspections and guides can be initiated from the task list as long as they’re attached to a particular service task – surfacing the instructions in context of the work order!
Taking notes and attaching images
Technicians will love the new timeline experience in the booking. It provides a streamlined view of text and image notes from the annotations table. It is super easy to add multiple pictures in one go by selecting them from the phone’s image gallery – or just snap away in the control itself. The image previews can also be seen inline. What’s more – rich formatted text is supported!
The new Field Service Mobile UX is packed with features simplifying the technician experience to enable them to be more productive in the field.
Try it out today by following our documentation. We are looking forward to your feedback as we bring additional enhancements, including support for our offline capabilities in the new experience as well.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The innovation continues. Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.
In business applications, we’re using generative AI to break down silos and bridge gaps between data, insights, and people so sellers, marketers, and customer experience (CX) professionals can deliver exceptional experiences across the entire customer journey, seamlessly.
With our 2023 release wave 2, we’re taking these capabilities to new heights across our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Sales Copilot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights applications.
As unveiled at yesterday’s Business Applications Launch Event, I’m thrilled to share highlights of what’s to come, including new ways that these applications—fueled by generative AI and Copilot—can help you use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration more easily than ever before. With a focus on delivering value to each line of business employee, our solutions are proven to maximize business outcomes across your organization.
Many of these capabilities are available today; all of them will be generally available or in preview before April 2024. Let’s check it out.
Use data and insights that used to be hidden
To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. But if your data is incomplete or you can’t get to it or take action on it, how valuable is that data and the insights that come out of it?
The new AI-driven capabilities releasing in this wave are set to revolutionize your customer experiences. With Copilot’s assistance, marketers, data analysts, and CX professionals can rapidly unlock data for enhanced decision-making, obtain valuable customer demographic and behavioral insights, and streamline both journey orchestration and content creation processes to fuel customer experiences.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you to harmonize disparate data sources into one complete 360-degree view of each customer; it will automatically assess incoming data and offer suggestions to improve the quality, resulting in a more complete view and better insights into each customer.
For sellers to maximize the number of qualified leads or deals closed, it’s important that they spend their time with leads and contacts with the highest likelihood of conversion. Obtaining this clarity involves looking across a growing number of customer touchpoint signals that sellers often don’t have access to (such as website visits or store visits), nor have time to analyze. That’s where the combined power of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales comes in. As sellers are working their leads, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales automatically summarizes the lead details, status, and recent activity details, including profile summaries from Customer Insights – Data. Combining sales data with important intent signals helps sellers get a full picture of their customer so they can tailor every engagement, right in their flow of work.
Unlock capabilities previously out of reach
Another one of the many beautiful things about Copilot is that it can unlock capabilities that were previously out of reach, and it applies to various roles across your organization.
For instance, thanks to dialog with data—a Copilot capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—marketers and CX professionals can get insights and define the right target audience just by asking a simple question instead of relying on data experts to do the work for them.
Creating customer journeys has also been completely transformed with Copilot. Marketers can now use everyday language to describe the customer journey they want to create, and Copilot instantly designs that journey for them, offering suggestions on segments, trigger-based actions, communication timing, branching options, and much, much more. What’s even better is that the suggested journey is now editable. So if the marketer needs to make a last-minute change to the journey’s scope, they can do so by simply asking Copilot to make the update.
When it comes to creating marketing content, bottlenecks can often arise: organizations may not have the right creative resources, enough time, or funding to produce effective content. So unfortunately, many promising campaigns never see the light of day. However, now, with the assistance of Copilot, marketers and CX professionals can easily produce highly appealing content with none of those roadblocks. Copilot capabilities like content ideas and content rewrite help these professionals write or refresh emails, forms, and more. And to make sure that collateral is on brand, they can use style assist which automatically applies colors, fonts, and styles based on a web URL and brand profiles to ensure a cohesive brand identity.
And to make it even easier to both understand your customers through data and act on insights from that data, we’ve combined Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into a single offering, with the name “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.”
Reach new levels of productivity and collaboration
With customer expectations on the rise and customer loyalty at stake, sellers and marketers need to be more on top of their game than ever, so infusing Copilot into the tools they already use—whether it’s Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, or Outlook—our solutions empower them to transform their day-to-day operations and supercharge their productivity.
Sales Copilot capabilities in Outlook deliver insights and opportunity summaries so sellers no longer have to work across multiple applications to get a comprehensive view of an opportunity or to prepare for a meeting. These summaries are accessible in various places, including collaborative deal rooms, ensuring collective visibility.
To ensure that collaboration flows smoothly across sales teams, Sales Copilot in Teams provides AI-powered planner tasks, like simplifying task assignments, setting due dates, and keeping everyone in the loop. And once it’s time for the presentation, the team is equipped with real-time tips and suggestions within the Teams meeting so they can take charge of the discussions.
Our goal is to equip sellers with the right information at the right time, in real time, so they can make every moment count when interfacing with a customer; and we’re making it all available within their flow of work.
Learn more about 2023 release wave 2 capabilities
The capabilities coming in this release wave are ushering in a new era of AI-powered efficiency and innovation, enabling you to use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.
The future of AI-driven success is here, and Copilot is leading the way. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and be ready to implement these transformative capabilities in your organization.
Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 2
Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.
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