Harness the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) to revolutionize your organization’s service delivery with Field Service. Connected field service refers to IoT connected devices sending information about their performance to a field service organization. This allows the field service organization to perform proactive and predictive maintenance for their clients moving from a break-fix model. Instead of the client calling you and saying, “This machine is broken,” you call the client and say, “We see your machine might be performing less than optimally. We will come in later today to service it.” Based on the service alert, the best-suited technician with the right skill and proximity to customer location is dispatched to resolve the issue resulting in reduced asset downtime.

How does connected field service improve your key performance indicators (KPIs), you ask? Let’s discuss seven KPIs that will improve with connected field service.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

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1. First-time fix rate

This is an important field service KPI related to customer experience. According to Aberdeen, the average first-time fix rate for an organization is around 75 percent.¹ That means three out of four service calls are resolved on the first visit by a technician. With connected field service, you notify the customer when things need to be fixed or adjusted. You can funnel information about the problem, as well as customer information, to a technician in real time, and the technician arrives on-site with all relevant customer history.

First-time fix rates remain consistently high in connected field service organizations. This improves customer experience, which increases retention and referral in most organizations. Keeping your customers informed throughout the resolution process builds confidence and trust and leads to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. More importantly, customers want their problems fixed the first time to minimize disruption.

2. Customer retention

This is a standard field service KPI. Think about it along these lines: there is a cost for most of your clients to switch to a different field service provider. They need to do a lot of research, break your contract, initiate a new contract, and so on. In a predictive maintenance context, customer retention tends to be very high because equipment malfunctions are addressed even before customers have the chance to call it in. Remote monitoring of IoT devices enables organizations to enhance their responsiveness to customer needs. With continuous monitoring, you can quickly detect issues and notify customers about service disruptions or necessary actions. Keeping your customers informed throughout the resolution process builds confidence and trust and leads to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. By using Connected Field Service, the client has “one less thing to worry about,” and they are not likely to walk away from those contracts.

3. Percentage of billable hours

Percentage of billable hours is a measure of productivity because it refers to the percentage of time your technicians are doing work that is directly billable to a client. For productivity to increase on the technician side, technicians need tools, guidance, and data they can pull up in real time. Percentage of billable hours typically drops when technicians need to spend a large portion of time on non-essential, more logistical business tasks. When all the resources are transparent within the same customer relationship management (CRM) system—which happens at the intersection of the cloud, IoT, and connected field service—technicians’ time becomes more productive.

4. Completed vs. invoiced jobs

This KPI goes right to your revenue stream, as you typically cannot get paid for a job without invoicing it. You are looking for integrative, intelligence-driven solutions whereby customer information is “speaking” directly to invoicing within your CRM. The goal is to create a seamless loop for the client: you solve a problem they were not even aware of by using information from connected devices, and once the problem is solved, the invoice arrives ready to go. There are no lags. Connected field service can help keep your financials consistent.

5. Cost reduction

IoT-powered Field Service enables organizations to streamline their operations and reduce costs. Remote monitoring and predictive maintenance reduce the need for frequent physical inspections and unnecessary maintenance visits, resulting in efficient resource utilization and reduced operational expenses. Proactive problem diagnosis and maintenance prevent major breakdowns and extensive repairs. Prevented issues lead to cost savings by minimizing downtime, eliminating emergency service calls, and optimizing resource allocation. 

6. Employee retention

Customer retention is crucial to your bottom line, yes, but employee retention is a good measure of how functional your organization is in terms of leadership, managers, and processes. One of the core issues when employees leave any field service organization is lack of communication and collaboration; connected field service can help solve collaboration problems by allowing everyone in your organization open access to the same sets of resources and data. (You can restrict some access to the most senior levels, too.) If employees feel like a valuable part of the business, they are less likely to leave.

7. Resource allocation

With device data and service maintenance information gathered through IoT, organizations can make informed decisions when dispatching technicians. Factors such as device performance data, historical maintenance records, technician expertise, availability, and proximity help to optimize resource allocation. Assigning the right technician with the appropriate skills and proximity to the job ensures efficient service delivery and reduces response and resolution times.

Learn more about connected field service

Connected Field Service can impact almost any KPI. This is a look at seven of them, but there’s more to explore—learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you deliver exceptional service.

Sources

¹The Numbers Behind First-Time Fix Rates You Should Know About, Fieldpoint.

The post How to improve business KPIs with Connected Field Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Introduction

 Every warehouse manager is keen on improving the processes on the warehouse floor. But where to start? What to optimize? It is far from easy to discover the bottlenecks. This is where the Power Automate Process Mining comes really handy. In the 10.0.35 release we ship the integration of Supply Chain Management Warehouse module with Power Automate Process Mining. This integration gives some really valuable insight into the material movement in the warehouse. 

What is Power Automate Process Mining?

 Power Automate Process Mining is a tool which exists exactly to help you gain insights, find bottlenecks and continuously improve business processes. It offers rich visualizations and deep analytics so one can get clear insights into the data. 

 There is an online version of it – part of the Power Automate offering. Using Power Query Online one can load data about the processes from various sources – starting from the Excel file, SQL databases and even calling custom APIs. Users can also connect to the already prepared data in Azure Data Lake and utilize powerful tools like Azure Data Factory for data preparation. The online version offers a customizable Power BI report with detailed process insights. However, one can download a desktop application which allows to perform deep process analysis. The desktop version reuses the same backend – same data and process definition – as an online version. 

 When working with Power Automate Process Mining you have to know some terminology – cases and activities. In the context of the warehouse material movement process analysis, Case is a closed warehouse work and Activity is a single work line (pick or put). Thus, a single case consists of activities – each of them is a “visit” to a certain location in the warehouse. 

 How to analyze material movement process in the warehouse using the Power Automate Process Mining? 

 In the 10.0.35 release we ship the integration of Supply Chain Management Warehouse module with the Power Automate Process Mining. It allows you to: 

• Easily load warehouse material movement data into the Power Automate Process Mining. Users can choose how much data to load and so forth. 
• The resulting Power Automate Process Mining Power BI report is integrated right into Supply Chain Management. Users can gain process insights without leaving Supply Chain Management – similar to embedded Power Bi reports experience. 

 In order to get insights, the user should first upload the data to Power Automate Process Mining. Our integration allows to achieve that right from Supply Chain Management UI: 

• Go to Warehouse management > Setup > Process mining > Warehouse material movement process configuration. 
• On the Action Pane, select Deploy process to open the deployment wizard and follow the on-screen instructions. 

Note that for sake of integration with Power Automate Process Mining a staging table is created on the Supply Chain Management side. It contains data which is then read by Power Automate Process Mining. As part of the deployment wizard execution, the system will load only 200 cases (closed warehouse works) into the staging table and thus into the Power Automate Process Mining. Below we show how to load a full set of data. 

After the successful deployment user will see a page like this: 

Here user can see the processing history – “Processing log” section will show events related to the staging table population and cleanup. Users can refresh the staging table manually by clicking the “Refresh staging table”. One can also set an automatic refresh schedule. But remember that it will only refresh data in the staging table in Supply Chain Management. After the staging table in Supply Chain Management is updated, you would normally want to refresh the Power Automate Process Mining process as well. You can do that by clicking the “Configure in Power Automate” button and trigger a refresh there (you can also setup an automatic refresh there as well). 

You can find more details regarding the setup in the docs here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2235867&clcid=0x409. 

Let’s now see what insights you can get from this. 

What kind of insights are available? 

 Take a look at this short video to get a feel of the possibilities:

After the deployment is done, users can go to “Warehouse management > Setup > Process mining > Warehouse material movement process configuration” and view the process report.

On the “Case summary” page one can get a quick overview of the material movements in the warehouse which can feed furthermore detailed investigation. The map control at the left basically shows you how material flows in the warehouse. Depending on your selection during the process deployment nodes can represent either Location Profile, Warehouse Zone or the Warehouse Location. On the map control you can choose if you want to look at frequencies or performance. Other KPIs on page are self-describing – they aim to give you an overview of the overall state of the process and also give you a feeling of the slowest cases (works) and activities (locations). 

“Variant summary” and “Variant DNA” pages deal with the concept of variants. Several cases (works) could basically repeat the same route through the warehouse. Each unique route is a variant. So by looking at statistic related to variants you could find the most common ones and optimize for those. Or you could find unexpected outliers and further investigate the reason behind them. 

But let’s take a sneak peek into a more advance process mining scenarios available with the desktop application. First you need to download and install it by clicking on the “Open in Power Automate Process Mining” button. 

“Process map” visualization also is a prominent part of the tool. After all, it is very natural to represent processes as graphs. But here you have much richer possibilities about what metrics to show, how to highlight and cluster nodes: 

You could even define your own business rules which would influence the process map visualization by directly showing if process violates expected process behavior. For example, here I have created a business rule which highlights where short picking has happened: 

We have met the concept of variants when looking into the Power BI report. But in the desktop application you can get much more insights and statistics around the variants: 

Most of the features we have seen so far are helping at discovering, visualizing and analyzing the processes. But AI powered Root Cause Analysis feature goes beyond that. It allows you to analyze what and how different business factors influence business process performance. For example, you may want to find out which factors are influencing warehouse work execution time the most. Remember though that tool requires the case level attributes to be used in RCA analysis. You can define your own custom metrics (like “Number of short picked lines”) and use those in the RCA. 

Conclusion 

Usage of Power Automate Process Mining for sake of getting insights into the warehouse material movement definitely enriches analytical toolset and allows to get insights which were pretty hard to get before.  

To learn more about this feature and Supply Chain at Microsoft,

click below:

Feature Insights:

Work with added efficiency in quote-to-cash with Dynamics 365 Sales – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

Supply Chain at Microsoft

Take a tour – Supply Chain Management | Microsoft Dynamics 365

We’re excited to launch Free Trial | Microsoft Supply Chain Center Preview ,  which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news

The post Power Automate Process Mining empowers warehouses to boost their efficiency significantly appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

What do customers want? They want the consumer goods brands they buy and love to deliver a total experience. One that is transparent across the product lifecycle and is personalized at every touchpoint, regardless of whether it’s the ever-demanding business-to-consumer (B2C) realm or the not-so-different-anymore business-to-business (B2B) landscape of consumer packaged goods (CPG) distributors and retailers.

According to Gartner® Top Strategic Technology Trends in Consumer Goods Manufacturing for 2023, the top CG technology trends in 2023 focus on customers, technology, and sustainability. This translates to consumer behaviors evaluating three primary areas:

• Financial impact and uncertainty. What is the value of this product? Is it worth the money? Does it work?
• Trust in manufacturer integrity. Is the manufacturer doing what it says it is doing?
• The experience working with and for a company. How do consumer goods manufacturers treat suppliers, employees, and consumers? Are they providing and participating in current platforms and technologies?

The pressure is on CPG brands to meet these accelerating expectations and answer these unspoken questions that are top of mind for consumers.

How can brands accomplish this when not all customer journeys are alike and consumers are in control?

Connect your brands, employees, and consumers

Evolve with changing consumer preferences

Explore solutions 

Evolving with the customer is essential

Journeys are no longer linear and are driven by the customer—be it the consumer, retailer, or distributor—who determines the preferred path including any stops, starts, and detours along the way. Giving them the option to choose what messages they want to receive along with when and how they receive them is essential for creating a successful journey. Some customers prefer human interaction, others self-service across digital channels, and many require a combination of physical and digital. Others prefer to avoid personal interaction and choose a tech interface whenever possible. Giving customers these choices require brands to have synergy across multiple experience disciplines. It requires a shift from customer experience (CX) to what Gartner® calls total experience (TX). According to Gartner®, “TX is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by intertwining the multi-experience (MX), CX, employee experience (EX), and user experience (UX) disciplines.” A sophisticated customer experience is the goal, but more importantly, it is delivering a total experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations. Research on this topic brings home how critical this is. 

A recent Harvard Business Review article brings home how critical this is.

“Our recent survey of 6,200 customers in China, France, and the United States uncovered seven CX factors that directly influence customer satisfaction. The first four—convenience, choice, navigation, and payments—are indispensable. That is, the presence or absence of these factors determines whether a customer judges a particular experience as good or bad. Think of them as table stakes. The remainder—ambiance, expertise, and touch-and-feel—amplify the baseline level of satisfaction. While their presence boosts satisfaction from “good” to “very good” 70 percent of the time, their absence turns a “bad” experience into a “very bad one” 89 percent of the time.”

Identifying ways to understand and adapt to evolving consumer preferences along with delivering direct-to-consumer engagement is integral to enhancing the customer journey.

Our approach

It starts with data 

Brands are looking for ways to understand consumers better. They need insights in order to know them and orchestrate customer journeys as well as identify interactions that contribute to customer lifetime value (CLTV), churn, and loyalty. This requires CPG brands to gain a holistic understanding of consumers and build brand equity through tailored data-driven marketing and experiences.  

To achieve this, CPG brands need to leverage data from multiple sources, such as point-of-sale, e-commerce, social media, loyalty programs, surveys, and third-party providers, and combine them into a single view of the consumer. This improves consumer understanding, empowering brands to directly engage with individuals and target their personal needs, all powered by AI.

It requires elevating the consumer experience

In today’s uncertain times, consumers demand an end-to-end experience that provides value, quality, convenience, inclusivity, and sustainability. Brands must not only meet these expectations but also elevate the experience to the next level. This requires real-time personalization throughout the customer’s journey. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing utilizes insights about the consumer and activates them in real-time to optimize journey workflows, to create generative AI-powered segments and content to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that drive customer engagement. For example, Campari Group, a worldwide leader in spirits, wines, and non-alcoholic apéritifs industry is using our solution to increase awareness of Negroni week, an event that celebrates one of the world’s greatest cocktails and raises money for global charitable causes. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing generative AI Copilot is being used to send personalized emails to venue owners to get them involved. With generative AI targeting, Campari uses natural language to describe segments and uses generative AI Copilot for content ideas using key points to generate text suggestions expediting campaign creation and increasing marketer productivity. Watch Campari Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to learn more.

It’s collaborative

Whether it’s brand building, product development, supply chain, or customer care, everyone is responsible for customer experience and optimizing the customer journey. It is a collaborative effort to deliver a great customer experience and requires breaking down data, technical, and people. Customer data needs to be combined with business operations data, marketing, sales, service, and supply chain should work in unison and be seamlessly integrated.

Collaborative intelligence can help CPG brands and retailers:

1. Understand customer behavior, preferences, and needs better, and tailor their offerings accordingly.
2. Optimize their assortment, pricing, and merchandising strategies, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Innovate faster and launch new products that meet customer demand.
4. Build trust and transparency with each other and with customers.

This is exactly what Natuzzi is doing using our solution to bring beauty and timeless harmony to people around the world. Working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables Natuzzi to deliver a well-crafted experience across both B2C and B2B lines of business and empowers their entire global team spanning marketing, sales, field service, and customer care to deliver a seamless total experience. In a disjointed selling environment, Natuzzi can communicate better and more consistently with each customer with improved ongoing messaging, promotions, and events. With targeted campaigns, they are moving contacts to prospects and prospects to customers. Luxury furniture is a complicated market, and our solution keeps Natuzzi close to its customers and on top of market trends.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales to meet your customers’ expectations and bring your customers into focus.

You can also download a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. And for the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers elevate the customer experience, download the e-book Reimagine Retail in the Digital Age.

Discover more Microsoft solutions for the consumer goods industry.

GARTNER® is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Deciphering consumer desires: Elevating customer journeys in retail CPG appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft recently introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first AI copilot integrated into customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications in the cloud, that is designed to augment workflows, uncover insights, identify the next best actions, and reduce time spent on administrative tasks. Organizations relying on on-premises applications will struggle to compete with peers embracing these AI-powered technologies in the cloud. It is paramount for companies to migrate their critical business processes to the cloud now.

We at Microsoft want to empower every organization of any size to adopt these innovative AI-powered technologies so that no one is left behind, and that is why we are introducing AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move).

AIM offers organizations a tailored path to move critical processes to the cloud with confidence. It provides qualified customers with access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, expert assessments, investment offers, tools, and migration support.

AIM’s coverage extends to a broad range of on-premises business applications from Microsoft, including Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics SL, and Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises. It truly reflects Microsoft’s commitment to guiding on-premises business application customers into the era of AI-guided productivity.

Let’s dive deeper into the AIM offering.

Accelerate now by starting with AIM assessments

Before embarking on a cloud migration journey, businesses want to understand the business value, expected outcomes, and key steps and dependencies for moving their on-premises business applications to the cloud. We designed AIM assessments to help customers answer these foundational questions. Our partner ecosystem plays a vital role in delivering these assessments, and now with AIM, we are expanding the coverage of the partner activities program to include AIM assessments for a broad portfolio of on-premises products.

Innovate faster and stay ahead of the competition

When migrating to the cloud, accelerating time to value while minimizing risks is crucial for project success. AIM offers expert implementation guidance and services from Microsoft and its certified partners. Success by Design, a systematic approach for successful cloud deployments, provides prescriptive guidance for designing, building, and deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions, as well as transitioning from on-premises to the cloud.

AIM provides partners with access to additional Success by Design tools and guidance, such as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal, which offers tailored implementation guidance for successful cloud deployment. FastTrack solution architects from Microsoft are available to collaborate with eligible customers, validating solution architectures, mitigating risks, and overcoming deployment blockers. These architects work closely with the partner ecosystem to ensure seamless transitions. And as part of our Unified Support offerings, we’re launching new project quality advisory services that help support a successful cloud transformation.

Partners that want to accelerate their customers’ move to the cloud can work together with AIM Modernization Centers. These service providers bring tools, assessments, and expert migration guidance to other Microsoft partners and their customers, allowing partners to build migration expertise while focusing on delivering business outcomes for their customers. 

Move with agility and scale as your business grows.

Transforming your business through the cloud is an incremental process. AIM provides exclusive offers that help customers optimize their investments. The recently expanded Bridge to the Cloud 2 (BTTC2) promotional offer enables on-premises customers to utilize discounted subscription pricing as part of migrating to the cloud.*

In summary, AIM is a comprehensive offering that unlocks the potential of AI-powered business systems while reducing costs, providing agility for business model innovation, and operating securely with resilience. Let’s explore how some customers have benefited from moving their legacy on-premises business applications to Dynamics 365 in the cloud.

Reducing costs and driving efficiency

United Kingdom-based energy company Viridor experienced immediate cost savings and a 50 percent reduction in legacy apps after migrating to Dynamics 365, resulting in reduced IT support costs. It further experienced a 30 percent reduction in reporting effort across the organization and is saving 400 hours a month through streamlined account processes. Similarly, UK-based manufacturer Kodak Alaris projected a 25 percent cost reduction by migrating to Dynamics 365, driven by decreased customizations and ISV costs.

Driving agility and scale

Manor AG, burdened by aging applications and on-premises infrastructure, initiated a cloud migration project that improved resiliency, efficiency, and overall customer experience. With Dynamics 365, Manor AG gained greater visibility into operations, allowing for optimization of procurement, sales, pricing, and stock monitoring. Similarly, Azelis, a specialty chemicals and food ingredients service provider, improved scalability by deploying Dynamics 365 across 71 entities, leading to increased productivity and meeting carbon reduction goals.

Improving extensibility, reliability, and security

Dynamics 365 offers a 360-degree view of your business by connecting data from ERP and CRM systems. It provides actionable insights through unified data accessible via Microsoft 365 and Power BI. With more than 5,000 developer extensibility points, Dynamics 365 is flexible and can be personalized to meet industry-specific needs. Microsoft Security ensures the reliability and security of Dynamics 365 in the cloud, protecting data and applications with multiple layers of cybersecurity.

AIM for the future with Microsoft today

Microsoft is committed to empowering customers to take advantage of AI capabilities in every line of business, and with AIM, organizations can start now to move to the cloud, making it easier than ever to adopt AI-guided productivity and realize the full potential of AI-powered technologies. Get started with AIM today and unlock a brighter future for your business. Watch the on-demand Inspire 2023 session to learn more. 

AIM for the future with Microsoft

Adopt innovative AI-powered technologies

Get started

To learn about how AI copilot is breaking down data silos, turning insights into actions, and giving customers a new reason to embrace the cloud, check out this blog post: Reshaping the future of business with Microsoft Sales Copilot, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and a new cloud migration program.

*This offer is subject to change.

The post Introducing AIM from Microsoft: Future-proof your business in the cloud appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As a seller, you know you need to focus on building relationships with your customers and getting the details you need to close the deal. The challenge is that like most sellers, you spend less than 30% of your time selling.^[1] Most of your day goes to searching for information and administrative duties like composing emails and keeping your CRM system up to date. You need more from your technology—and we delivered. In February, we introduced the world’s first AI copilot in CRM with the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot. And today, we’re announcing Microsoft Sales Copilot, a role-based copilot designed to improve sales productivity by empowering sellers with the data and insights they need, when and where they’re needed, allowing them to focus on what they do best—selling.

Sales Copilot brings new capabilities to Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to increase their productivity and personalize every customer interaction. And it works out of the box—not just with Dynamics 365 Sales, but with Salesforce, too.

The following Sales Copilot capabilities are now available for preview^[2]:

• AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries to streamline your sales process and close deals faster
• A customer meeting preparation summary view that includes auto-generated summaries of previous meetings, recent notes, highlights of issues and concerns, and CRM information
• Real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings, prompted by the customer’s mention of a competitor or brand
• Customer email summary and follow-up, with contextual replies and actions based on Outlook emails and CRM data

Additionally, we recently announced the general availability of collaboration spaces in Sales Copilot. Collaboration spaces in Teams can easily be created from Sales Copilot in Outlook to help sellers stay better connected with their customers and colleagues.

Watch this brief video to learn how Microsoft Sales Copilot can help you improve your sales productivity:

AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries

Sales Copilot uses generative AI to quickly summarize leads and opportunities for you. An opportunity summary is a concise overview of the status, progress, and potential of a prospective sale or deal. A “catch up” section highlights key updates since the last visit. An opportunity summary is also available in Outlook, where sellers can view a brief background of the opportunity and the latest activities.

Similarly, a lead summary gives sellers an overview that seamlessly combines data from multiple sources, such as CRM information, contact profiles from LinkedIn^[3], and the latest news from Bing to expedite the lead qualification process.

Meeting preparation and summaries

Being prepared for customer meetings is vital for sales productivity. It facilitates informed decision-making and fosters productive discussions, ultimately yielding improved sales outcomes. Sales Copilot detects meetings coming up in the next 24 hours and offers a summary of recent email exchanges and the last three seller notes to help you prepare.

After the meeting, Sales Copilot in both Outlook and Dynamics 365 Sales generates a professional and friendly meeting summary email, making follow-up as easy as clicking a button.

Real-time tips in Teams meetings

In Teams, sellers receive real-time coaching tips (currently in private preview) during meetings right in the Sales Copilot Teams panel, to help them respond to customer inquiries and competitor or brand mentions. It’s easier to overcome objections and demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable and prepared when the information you need is right in front of you.

Summary, follow-up, and contextual emails

Sales Copilot lets you spend less time composing email. Select a pre-defined category or enter your own text, and Sales Copilot suggests content with specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data, helping sellers quickly follow up, reply to inquiries, and move deals forward. Adjust the tone and length of the message to better resonate with your customers, fostering stronger connections. You can further customize the suggested content before you send it.

Sales Copilot is equally invaluable on the receiving end, summarizing lengthy email threads when you respond to incoming messages and enabling you to save the summary to your CRM with one click. By condensing complex discussions, it streamlines the communication process and ensures comprehension. It also helps to keep you on track by identifying action items and key customer requests in your incoming emails that you might have missed. It continuously monitors your inbox so you don’t have to.

Collaboration spaces

Sellers can easily work with colleagues and customers in collaboration spaces—predefined Teams channels with pinned apps designed for collaboration. Collaboration spaces link to your CRM system and are accessible from Teams, the Sales Copilot app in Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. Learn more about collaboration spaces.

Responsible AI

Microsoft is committed to investing in features that reduce or eliminate unsafe output from generative AI capabilities in products like Sales Copilot.

Sales Copilot inherits your organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies and enforces two-factor authentication, making Sales Copilot a tool you can trust.

Because we know that data leakage is a concern for our customers, as it is for us, the language models that underlie Sales Copilot aren’t trained on and don’t learn from your company’s business, tenant, or individual data. Sales Copilot is part of the Azure ecosystem and employs the same safeguards, compliance boundaries, and enterprise-grade security.

Microsoft copilot AI adheres to our commitment to responsible AI. Engineering teams at Microsoft are continuously working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety, and promotion of harmful content, guided always by our responsible AI principles.

Users have access to specific guidance that helps to reinforce the responsible use of generative AI content. For instance, we provide guidance and prompts through informational elements that instruct the user:

• How to responsibly use suggested content and actions, including prompts
• How to review and edit responses as needed
• How to manually check facts, data, and text for accuracy

Sales Copilot also cites public sources wherever relevant, so the user can easily find the web content it references.

More innovations to transform the customer experience

In addition to Sales Copilot, we’re announcing copilot innovations across Dynamics 365 to empower organizations to deliver exceptional experiences throughout their customer journeys.

• We’re adding copilot capabilities to the newly unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and continuing our innovations in real-time marketing. Along with the copilot capabilities that are in public preview (Content Ideas, Query Assist, and Dialogue with Data), soon you’ll be able to use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys as well as style emails, forms, and event registration pages to match your brand guidelines.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce Copilot can craft compelling, persuasive, and engaging content for product listings for online commerce, with an aim to drive discoverability and conversion. It allows merchandisers to optimize for search engines while tailoring the content for their customers, brand, and voice.

Next steps

Try Microsoft Sales Copilot today to see how it can improve your sales productivity by enabling sellers to engage with customers more effectively and close more deals faster.

Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Outlook and Teams: Microsoft Sales Copilot deployment guide for Dynamics 365 customers

Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: Enable and set up copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales

Learn more about all the upcoming Dynamics 365 Sales Wave 2 2023 features: Overview of Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 release wave 2 | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Visit the Dynamics 365 Sales website to take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial.

Footnotes:

[1] Global State of Sales Report 2022 (linkedin.com)

[2] At preview, capabilities available in English in geographies that support Dynamics 365 Sales.

[3] A Sales Navigator license is required to access contact profiles from LinkedIn.

The post Improve sales productivity and close more deals with Microsoft Sales Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Adapting to evolving customer expectations: staying ahead in the new marketing landscape

Customer experience has significantly transformed in recent years, moving away from linear buying journeys and one-size-fits-all approaches. Nowadays, customers expect digitally enabled, hyper-personalized experiences. To stay competitive, organizations must embrace a customer-first approach, bridging departmental gaps to deliver cohesive experiences. By harnessing the power of their data, organizations can gain a deep understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft 1:1 personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions to drive better customer engagement and long-term loyalty. However, that is not enough, to become or stay leaders in their industries, organizations need to take advantage of generative AI to unlock capabilities and levels of productivity that were previously out of reach.

We are making it easier than ever to acquire these capabilities. Today, at Inspire, we announced, that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing are coming together as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI driven solution which will revolutionize your customers experiences. Within this solution are two apps: Customer Insights – Data (currently known as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) that empowers you to effectively build a unified, real time 360-degree profile of your customers, and Customer Insights – Journeys (currently known as Dynamics 365 Marketing) that allows you to act on this comprehensive understanding to deliver highly personalized experiences. These two apps allow you to start with data or journeys and purchase what you want while providing a 40 percent savings on the base license offer compared to previous packaging.

To learn more please visit Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs.

Transforming customer experiences with real-time marketing and Copilot generative AI capabilities

Recognizing the need for a modern approach to address the high level of engagement demanded by customers, over the next year we will be transitioning all customers of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys from outbound to real-time marketing. Transitioning to real-time marketing enables you to do more with less, drives superior business results, caters to the evolving customer experience landscape, and will propel your businesses into the future of marketing. Real-time marketing has already surpassed traditional outbound marketing in functionality, effectiveness, usability testing results, satisfaction surveys. Moreover, our innovations and upcoming AI features are available exclusively in real-time marketing.

Starting August 2023, new customer environments will only include real-time marketing and event management. Existing customers, if necessary, will be able to add outbound marketing through a self-serve interface. We will continue to support outbound marketing but will not be adding new enhancements.

Transition to real-time marketing

Get started

By transitioning to real-time marketing now, you can gain the following benefits:

Leverage AI to do more with less

Embrace generative AI to ensure long-term success by increasing your productivity while delivering superior customer experiences. You can already leverage Copilot features to assist you in targeting the right audience simply by describing your segments using everyday words – without having to learn the underlying data model or construct queries. With content ideas, you can provide key points or select a topic and a tone of voice matching your message to generate engaging email content within seconds. Furthermore, to complement your message, you can easily choose images from your library that resonate with your audience without having to spend time searching for them.
In the upcoming months, you will be able to use innovative Copilot capabilities to make your messages more compelling by rewriting your existing content, create journeys just by describing them in simple words, set up quiet times to prevent messages from sending during unwanted times, effortlessly style your emails and forms based on your website design, and receive guidance to authenticate your domains easily. By adopting AI now your organization will be better equipped to stay competitive and thrive in the ever-evolving market landscape, ensuring better business results.

Optimize every interaction

Experience the power of seamless integration between Customer Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys, allowing you to continuously capitalize on customer understanding and insights in real-time, to proactively address customer needs and enhance every interaction. Leverage real-time marketing to craft journeys for contact and lead entities in Dataverse, or profiles from Customer Insights. React to customers’ actions instantly using out-of-the-box triggers, custom triggers, or triggers based on any data change in Dataverse without writing any code. Refine your audience targeting with advanced segmentation capabilities, and an unlimited number of segments. Deliver your messages through out-of-the-box text messages, push notifications, custom channels and benefit from AI-powered channel optimization to reach customers on the most effective channel. Embrace hyper-personalization features like dynamic text and no-code conditional content to support 1:1 responsive campaigns tailored to individual preferences with real-time marketing.

Unify sales and marketing

To win deals, sales and marketing teams must work together – break down silos between these teams to fuel revenue growth and increase pipeline. As a marketer, use our new and improved UX across all capabilities! As part of the enhanced upcoming lead scoring builder, you will be able to define granular qualification criteria to better identify and prioritize leads. Thanks to the deep integration with Dynamics 365 Sales, you can align your efforts with sellers by sharing a unified timeline of customer activities, seamlessly transfer qualified leads to the sales team or engage sales representatives within your customer journey exactly at the right time by assigning a sales call or triggering a sales sequence to further increase the likelihood of closing deals. Continuously optimize your marketing efforts by using AI-powered attribution analytics to understand how your marketing activities contribute to your defined milestones.

Scale your business

Real-time marketing unlocks new opportunities for growth and success. Thanks to business units, brand profiles, and a new consent center you can tailor real-time marketing to cater to your business’ unique requirements. As a scalable, customizable solution, real-time supports up to 100 million marketing contacts with 300 million monthly interactions so you can grow your customer base in new markets, reach additional geographies, promote new products, or expand your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.

The future is now: the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and real-time marketing

To make sure your transition to real-time marketing is a success, we have designed a user-friendly interface that does not require extensive retraining – you will experience UI enhancements that significantly improve usability and efficiency.
To easily kick start delivering experiences using real-time marketing, we have designed an email transition tool, made outbound segments available directly in real-time, and empowered you to generate more engaging content and revisit or create new journeys within minutes thanks to our new AI Copilot features.

Please visit for detailed guidance and resources for transitioning to the real-time marketing.

We are excited about how this change to an AI powered, unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, with a generative AI interface coming to every capability will fundamentally change what your company can achieve and how easily you will be able to achieve it.
We look forward to building the future of customer experiences together and have big plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in the coming year and beyond.

Read our real-time marketing FAQ

Discover the upcoming Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journey wave 2 2023 features:

• Video of release wave 2 2023
• Release planner wave 2 2023 Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data
• Release planner wave 2 2023 Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

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