This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
For many years, companies have based their supply chain strategy on lowering costs and increasing efficiency. Often this resulted in relying on one supplier for important subcomponents, sometimes based offshore where labor is cheaper. During the pandemic, the world discovered that “lower costs and increase efficiency” is not a resilient strategy. A single supplier represents a single point of failure. On the other hand, having a lot of suppliers does not necessarily increase your supply resilience without a good business relationship and communication. The middle ground is to distribute the supply of critical components among a group of vendors, also known as multisourcing.
Of course, multisourcing comes with its own challenges. The new multisourcing functionality in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help you meet them.
Specify multisource policies for supply resilience
Two challenges of multisourcing are how to split the supply of an item across multiple vendors and how to allocate the vendor for a particular purchase order. Both are now easy thanks to the multisourcing features in Supply Chain Management.
First, you can now specify a multisource policy that identifies vendors and sets targeted percentages for each of them. For example, you might want 80% of your supply to come from your main vendor and 20% from a secondary one. Or you might want to distribute orders equally to three different vendors.
You can also specify the period in which the policy applies. Then just assign the policy to a product or set of products.
When Planning Optimization creates a planned order, it chooses the vendor so that the targeted percentages are met over time. In other words, the entire supply is allocated to a vendor, but over time orders are balanced between the vendors in the group.
Some vendors require a minimum order. With the multisourcing feature in Supply Chain Management, you can set minimum order quantities for each vendor and Planning Optimization will respect them.
You can also review the actual percentages kept versus the targeted percentage in the policy to monitor your supply resilience.
Choose the products you should multisource first
The new supply risk assessment workspace makes it easier to find products that are planned to be purchased from a single supplier. These may be good candidates for multisourcing to start increasing your supply resiliency.
The following recommendations can help you achieve higher supply resiliency:
Multisource products: Split the supply of components among a group of vendors. If you are starting to build this strategy, start with your most critical components.
Diversifyyour supply in geography and size: Have both local suppliers with shorter lead times and offshore suppliers with higher lead times.
Maintain good supplier relationships: Have a good business relationship and communication with your suppliers. When you are able to handle and adapt to disruptions together, you are more agile in fulfilling your customer needs.
Build long-term partnerships: Your relationship with your suppliers must be sustainable over time and based on trust to be able to handle disruptions over the longer term. High supplier turnover is not beneficial in the long run.
Assess your supply risk: Evaluate the performance of your suppliers using metrics such as purchase order deliveries as requested, on-time in-full deliveries, on-time deliveries, and in-full deliveries. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management makes this easier using the new supply risk assessment workspace.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management now streamlines warehouse configuration, reducing the time it takes to set up, validate, maintain, and troubleshoot your warehouse management processes. Let’s take a closer look at these and other improvements that help prevent wrong configurations and improve your users’ experience.
The new location directive scope feature eliminates the need to configure different location directives for multiple SKUs. You can now configure one location directive for a work unit that consists of single or multiple items, saving time, reducing maintenance and troubleshooting, and maximizing efficiency. Scope options give you more freedom when you design location directives and help reduce redundant configurations.
Location directive scope also allows you to edit the query that defines when a directive should be applied for a single order with multiple items.
We strongly recommend using this feature, especially if complexity and number of records make your location directive configuration difficult to manage.
Save time configuring Warehouse management with guided setup
Configuring Warehouse management is a time-consuming task if done manually. New step-by-step wizards in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management make configuring the Warehouse management module easier than ever before.
The Warehouse management initiation wizard provides detailed, step-by-step guidance for configuring basic settings from scratch, such as when you’re adding a legal entity.
The Warehouse initiation wizard provides detailed, step-by-step guidance for setting up an individual warehouse.
The Warehouse implementation tasks workspace helps you track your progress through a pre-configured list of tasks required to implement Warehouse management from scratch.
New troubleshooting tools find common mistakes in Warehouse management configuration
Errors in your Warehouse management configuration can lead to disaster. Additional validations and a new set of self-healing rules in the optimization advisor make it easier to identify and correct the most common configuration errors. We strongly recommend running the optimization advisor after you configure the Warehouse management module to detect any missing or incorrect configurations.
A new Preview query results feature helps you determine why a location directive isn’t working as intended, allows you to confirm the desired outcome of your queries, and helps you quickly identify issues with your query configurations.
Acceptance tests speed up validation of location directive configurations
In the past, Warehouse management customers would set up location directives, create test data, execute the process, and see whether the system worked. If it didn’t, they were back to square one, changing the setup, recreating test data, wasting time and money. Testing location directives was a laborious manual process that could take a lot of time.
The Warehouse management module now includes a powerful framework called acceptance tests. Its purpose is simple: to facilitate faster validation of location directive configuration. Here’s how the acceptance tests feature can be so powerful:
Test it before you embrace it: After you set up a location directive, you can test to validate the outcome of the directive without having to create test data. You can also use smart on-hand simulation to validate your configuration.
Visualize the location directive flow: The coverage view uses colored highlighting to indicate which location directives, lines, and actions were used in determining the result of a selected test.
Simplify maintenance: Turn on Run tests after change to automatically run all tests any time you change a location directive.
Adjust query criteria quickly with Edit query preview
The ability to reuse queries across warehousing configurations provides a great deal of flexibility. The new Edit query preview allows you to quickly review and adjust criteria when needed in the Related information panel, without having to open Edit query.
New Move up and Move down buttons in the Work templates page allow you to quickly change the sequence of work templates.
Copy configurations
Now you can roll out location directives to new warehouses without mistakes by copying location directive configurations across warehouses.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Marketers are often asked to do more with lessand do it yesterday. Every day, they need to quickly create compelling, unique email content that grabs the customer’s attention in a sea of competing messages. Designing marketing email content can be incredibly challengingand often the toughest part is getting started. It’s hard to be creative under pressure. Wouldn’t it be ideal if you could just focus on the key points you want to convey and let artificial intelligence generate your email copy? With AI-powered Content ideas in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can.
Kickstart creativity with Content ideas
The new Content ideas feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing helps you kickstart the creation of marketing emails and discover new ways to express your thoughts. AI generates custom suggestions that you can review and edit, much like brainstorming with a teammate. With Content ideas, you can find inspiration in seconds to create engaging event registration emails or convincing reminders to return and complete a purchase.
Imagine that you work as a marketer for a clothing retailer. The new winter collection hits the market in a few days, and you need to create a promotional email to sell out the fall collection. All you need to get started are a few thoughts about what you want your email to say. Content ideas will use them to generate text suggestions for you.
You type:
The end of the year is in sight
Winter is coming, but the only thing that’s freezing are our prices
Use code HAPPYDANCE
And, in just seconds, AI supplies the inspiration for engaging emails.
Content ideas will generate up to 20 text suggestions for your key points. Select the content you like best and use it as-is or customize it. No more writer’s block.
With Content ideas, you can easily produce new and original marketing email content on demand, without having to struggle or search the web for hours for an original idea.
Content ideas is a game changer for marketers
In our example, Content ideas helped you craft your fall promotion email campaign in minutes. You gained precious time and created engaging email content that was perfectly adapted to your brand’s essence. Your email campaign is a remarkable success. Customers snapped up the remaining clothes from last fall. The store is ready for winter, and so are you with fresh content ideas!
There’s no doubt that generative AI is on the rise. It’s a game changer for marketers, and with good reason. The possibilities are infinite. Microsoft is at the forefront of incorporating this exciting innovative technology in our products. Through Content ideas, Dynamics 365 Marketing capitalizes on AI to make marketers more productive and their jobs easier. By providing custom solutions that make each business unique, Content ideas helps marketers reimagine their email campaigns to deliver more with less.
Try it today, and level up your email campaigns with unique content in seconds!
Content ideas is available in preview in English-language environments in the North America region only. We will expand availability to more regions if there is high customer demand.
Content ideas uses the most advanced generative AI language model in the world, GPT-3. GPT-3 has been trained on a vast number of text samples from the Internet to generate text in English that looks and sounds like it was written by a human. Microsoft runs on trust. Trust must be earned in the short term as well as the long term. In Dynamics 365 Marketing, we see the responsible use of AI as an opportunity to demonstrate trustworthiness as well as a path for innovationa way to minimize harm and expand our capacity to provide useful and delightful experiences for our customers and their customers. Read how Dynamics 365 Marketing approaches responsible AI with intention.
Product visuals are for illustrative purposes only and might not reflect the general availability feature.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As a contact center manager, you need to ensure that customers are routed to the right agent while balancing factors like customer satisfaction, tiered SLA commitments, and agent satisfaction and utilization. Automated work assignment in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help. Choose the right assignment method to prioritize agents when multiple agents satisfy a work item’s skill and availability requirements, and Dynamics 365 unified routing will do the rest.
Out-of-box work assignment strategies
Let’s look at the assignment strategies available in unified routing and the scenarios where they may be most effective. Three are provided for you “out of the box.” These strategies incorporate skills-based routingthat is, if an incoming call is associated with a skill, then the assignment strategy will select only appropriately skilled agents. You can also create custom assignment methods to meet your business needs.
Highest capacity: Assign the work to the agent who has the most capacity remaining
In messaging channels like live chat and social media, agents can carry on multiple conversations at the same time. The number of conversations an agent can manage in parallel is their capacity. When more than one agent meets the requirements of an incoming work item, the highest capacity method assigns it to the agent who has the most capacity remaining. This strategy helps maintain an even distribution of conversations, leading to happier agents and more efficient agent utilization.
Let’s see how highest capacity assignment plays out in a sample scenario. We have two agents in a chat queue, Kayla Lewis and Finn Patel. Each has the same skills and the capacity to handle up to three chats at once.
Kayla and Finn are each assigned two chats. Kayla closes one of hers quickly. When the next chat comes in, both Kayla and Finn match the requirements, but Finn is still working on both of his earlier chats. Kayla has more available capacity, so she’s assigned the incoming chat.
Let’s extend this scenario and see what happens when there is a tie in capacity. When the next chat comes in, Kayla and Finn are “tied” at two chats each. Unified routing uses round robin assignment to break the tie. That means that since the last chat was assigned to Kayla, the new chat will be assigned to the next available agent, Finn.
Round robin: Assign the work to the agent who’s next in line
With asynchronous and longer-running conversation types like email, incidents, and tasks, capacity isn’t as important a consideration in assigning agents. In these cases, round robin assignment offers a way to evenly distribute conversations across agents. Round robin assigns a new work item to the next agent in turn. (This feature will be renamed “advanced round robin” in an upcoming release.)
Let’s look at how this plays out. This time Kayla and Finn are tasked with handling cases. By mid-morning, Kayla and Finn have been assigned four cases each. Kayla’s fourth case was assigned before Finn’s. After some time, Finn resolves one of his cases, leaving him with three open cases. A short while later, a new case comes in. Since Finn received a case last, unified routing assigns the next case to Kayla, even though Finn has more capacity available. This ensures that Kayla and Finn can work on a similar number of cases at an even pace.
Most idle: Assign the work to the agent who’s had the longest break
Most idle assignment is a common routing strategy in automatic call distribution systems. This method assigns conversations to agents based on how long ago they ended their last conversation. It gives agents who are working on longer, more complex conversations a chance to take a break and distributes new conversations to other agents. Most idle assignment has the largest impact on agent satisfaction and utilization in the voice channel.
Returning to Kayla and Finn, we find they’re now working in the voice queue. Kayla has a call that comes in at 1:00 PM. Finn takes a call at 1:05 PM. Kayla’s issue is complex and takes her 15 minutes to close. Finn solves his customer’s problem in five minutes. The next call comes in at 1:20 PM. The round robin method would assign the new call to Kayla since it’s her turn and she’s available. But with most idle routing, Finn is assigned the call instead since his last call ended earlier than Kayla’s. In effect, he’s had a longer break.
Custom strategies for complex work assignment requirements
If your call center has more complex work prioritization and agent assignment requirements, custom rules may meet your needs better than the out-of-box rules. Unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers an option to create custom work assignment methods when you need to:
Route work items to agents based on specific attributes or related entities
Dynamically match an agent attribute with a conversation attribute
Create fallback conditions to ensure the customer connects with an agent without a long wait (bullseye routing)
Sort or prioritize agents based on attributes like proficiency in a particular skill type, the agent’s name, and so on
A custom assignment method is made up of two parts, a custom prioritization ruleset and a custom assignment ruleset.
Custom prioritization ruleset. By default, unified routing assigns work in first-in, first-out order. This ensures that the customers who have been waiting the longest are connected to an agent first. If you need more prioritization bucketsfor priority customers, SLA expiration, and so onthen you can define a custom prioritization rule with multiple rules for each bucket.
Custom assignment ruleset. You can define assignment rules with custom agent matching and ordering parameters.
Choosing the right work assignment strategy is essential to maintain high agent satisfaction while optimizing agent utilization. Which assignment strategy do you use?
Learn more
To get more information about unified routing and work assignment in Customer Service, check out our recent blog post and read the documentation:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As technology advances, so do customer expectations. Whether a consumer or a buyer, it no longer matters as the respective lines between customer expectations have blurred, and, at the end of the day, the business-to-business (B2B) buyer is a consumer too. Hyper-personalized, self-driven, seamless interaction across any channel at any time is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have as customers want to engage on their own terms and expect businesses to deliver even better experiences. At the same time, exacerbated by a turbulent economy, businesses need to reduce cost and complexity to innovate quickly and stay resilient so they can meet current customers’ expectations and find new ways to engage them. Businesses that take the opportunity to optimize their processes to do more with less will stand out against the competition and be better positioned to drive loyalty, retain customers, and emerge stronger from these uncertain times.
We’re excited to share the new capabilities coming in the 2022 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and, more importantly, how these new capabilities will help you deliver greater efficiency, empower marketers to be more productive, and provide value to customers in moments that matter. Ready? Let’s get started!
1. Maximize the value of your data to understand your customers
The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and intent of each customer.
If you are a new Customer Insights user, you will be delighted by the first-run experience feature that helps you accelerate understanding your customers. To fuel your journeys, valuable insights are generated in a matter of minutes simply from a customer list, saving you time and avoiding advanced configurations.
2. Engage your customers in moments that matter with real-time marketing
To deliver unforgettable experiences, marketers need to send the right message on the right channel at the right time. To allow you to do just this, we have further developed our real-time engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Whether it’s to catch your customer’s attention to collect relevant details, or capture leads to nurture and strengthen the sales funnel, we’ve enhanced our capabilities so that marketers can effortlessly design customized forms with a few clicks. Through the modern drag-and-drop editor, marketers are guided step-by-step from creation to preview, test, and publish. Within seconds they can deliver compelling branded forms, on websites or landing pages, while directly tracking conversions.
To engage customers through their preferred channel, marketers can now easily build custom channels in real-time marketing. We’ve improved upon the model in outbound marketing by providing the ability to create a channel with all the power and flexibility that the box channels have. It enables marketers to extend their reach across bespoke text message providers, Viber, or direct mail, and activate these new channels in customer journeys using out-of-the-box modern templates, text message editor, and consent collection. In addition, marketers can natively track deliverability analytics to monitor the success of the custom channel activation.
Customers often qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. The frequency cap feature prevents message fatigue by setting limits on the number of messages that can be sent per channel per day, week, or month. At the same time, marketers can bypass the limit for the most important journeys, ensuring customers never miss an important message.
Define the maximum number of commercial messages with the frequency cap feature.
3. Personalize content to grow your audience engagement
Each customer is unique and driven by different incentives. To get noticed, businesses need to easily create personalized content that stands out and resonates to keep their brand top of mind.
Finding inspiration to create enthralling emails has never been so easy. Thanks to AI, marketers receive engaging content ideas, based on the key messaging points they want to convey. Marketers can also use feature-rich text links and QR codes for events and coupons within email campaignsto get more customers to engage, click, and convert.
Kick-start your email creation thanks to AI-generated content ideas.
Managing multi-brand content is often demanding as marketers spend time customizing each email to comply with specific brand guidelines. The new brand profile functionality helps them to gain time and consistency, and reduce content-related errors by defining default senders for emails and social links, as well as custom values such as URLs or compliance messages, and easily switch these settings for the brand they are working on.
To ensure compliance and privacy of customer interactions across multiple brands or business units, marketers now have the ability to fully customize out-of-the-box preference centers to match their business needs, from tracking or isolating consent data to adhering to brand guidelines for logos, styles, and colors. Furthermore, marketers can create and manage topics that align with your brands and business for customers to opt-in to marketing subscriptions, for example: “Get cooking tips and tricks”. Last but not least, consent is becoming entity agnostic and will work with customer profiles, contacts, leads, and custom entities.
Maximizing the impact of personalized content requires effectively targeting the right audiences. As part of our effort to improve marketers’ efficiency, we have redesigned our segment builder. The workflow and UX have been enhanced, and we’ve set the foundation for supporting contacts, leads, and any entity, including custom, in the future. Segments can be created instantly using an intuitive and powerful logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures. Marketers are empowered by AI-assisted natural language capabilities, the ability to create a static snapshot of segment membership, as well as previewing segment members and size. This not only scales reach but improves marketing productivity.
Improve your efficiency with the new segment builder, target both contact and leads, and preview segment members.
4. Connect your sales and marketing to provide seamless experiences
By placing customer needs at the center of the organization, deep collaboration within and across departments unlocks significant business growth opportunities.
For instance, as marketers nurture leads with real-time journeys, signals from the lead might indicate an urgency to engage with the sales team. Marketers can directly trigger a sales sequence or assign a follow-up call from the journey to the sales team to ensure the lead gets individualized attention at the right time when they are most likely to engage. Marketers identify potential leads, and sales teams receive smart assistance to optimize their time and prioritize opportunities in the lead nurturing process.
Hand off leads to sales by directly assigning, or phone call, or a sale sequence from the journey.
Businesses can capitalize on B2B contact unification in Customer Insights to create a complete view of accounts and contacts within the same environment. Typically, businesses engage with contacts, however, the context for engagement is based on the attributes of the organization in which the contact resides. Unified contacts provide the ability for marketers to now generate segments of contacts based on account attributes.
5. Use data and AI to optimize your campaigns and scale up your business
Harnessing the power of data and AI is key to marketing at scale and achieving higher levels of marketing maturity.
As businesses create a vast number of assets, they need to organize them according to their organizational structure to remain compliant and productive. They can now effortlessly organize their digital assets, content and journeys according to their business structure. Whether it’s business data or customer data, it can be isolated by departments, regions, brands, business units, and product lines, reducing your compliance risk.
In the upcoming months, you will be able to increase your throughput to send up to 300 million messages per month. This added capacity empowers your team to deliver personalized experiences at scale and will help you grow your business, whether you are increasing your customer base in new markets, expanding geographies, promoting new products, or building your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.
Use new features for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights with the 2022 release wave 2
From leveraging AI to capitalize on your data, optimizing real-time interactions and personalization capabilities, to customizing tools to meet your unique business needs, or facilitating deeper collaboration between departments, we are thrilled to deliver solutions that are designed to make your job easier, more productive, and ultimately enable you to transform customer experiences.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Now you can reach even more customers using the new Apple Messages for Business channel in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Customers can use the familiar Messages app on their Apple devices to connect with your service teams, confident that their conversation is verified and secure. Rich messages help your service team resolve customer issues, collect information, schedule appointments, and complete sales, all in the same conversation.
Like other asynchronous digital and social channels, Apple Messages for Business gives users the flexibility to start a conversation with your support team and return to it when it is convenient for them. Plus, a customer can initiate a conversation on their mobile device and continue it seamlessly on their Mac or iPad.
Benefits of Apple Messages for Business in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
By including Apple Messages for Business in your digital messaging solution, your service team can provide a more meaningful and personal customer service experience. The enhanced interactions available through this channel help your service team spend less time crafting messages and collecting data, and more time ensuring quality customer experiences.
Apple Messages for Business simplifies many common service interactions. With integration in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, it expands the options for how you engage with customers.
Using Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Apple Messages for Business in your omnichannel digital contact center provides the following benefits:
Customers can look up your company in Apple Maps, Safari, or Search and start messaging by tapping the Messages icon. It’s also easy to add a link directly in your own app, website, or other touch points.
Rich messages are used to simplify interactions like collecting information, scheduling appointments, completing transactions, and authenticating user identity.
Agents can use the same unified, contextual, and productive interface used by chat and other social channels to engage with customers and resolve issues.
Customers engaging with your digital contact center will find a consistent, customer-focused experience across any channel.
Administrators, supervisors, and managers can access the same integrations, services, and insights available for chat and other social channels.
Better together
As a digital channel, the addition of Apple Messages for Business expands and unifies the core omnichannel capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service with a configurable, high-productivity interface. It provides contextual customer identification, real-time notifications, integrated communications, and agent productivity tools, including rich messages, knowledge base integration, and search. Apple Messages for Business helps deliver more innovation and opportunities into your digital contact center to empower you to continually exceed customer expectations.
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