We are excited and honored thatGartner has recognized Microsoft as a Leader in their 2022 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.* This evaluation of Microsoft was based on specific criteria that analyzed our overall Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.This is the second year in a row we’ve been recognized as a Leader. As Product-Centric enterprise customers transition their mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes to the cloud, we believe they look to recognized vendors for the technology to transform and realize business value. We’re honored to be recognized in this space.

An integrated enterprise ERP solution

Both Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance offer organizations the standard capabilities they expect in an ERP solution but delivered on a modern, open, and cloud-based architecture that empowers composability and scalability. These solutions can work as stand-alone products or together as an integrated, extensible solutiongiving businesses the flexibility to work the way they want.

Building a Leader

At the heart of our vision is the relentless desire to empower organizations to enable a resilient and sustainable supply chain, and it is through this vision and dedication that we have built a Leader. Let’s explore the qualities we believe put us in this category.

Cloud-native ERP integrated with the Microsoft technology stack

Dynamics 365 is a cloud-native application that runs, and was built on, Microsoft Azure. This seamlessness between cloud and application helps organizations to scale as their business grows and to protect their data with security tools from Microsoft. Companies can drive innovation with continuous updates, which are quality validated and controlled by the customer, allowing them to set the pace of change while also leveraging the latest and greatest feature updates. It also allows organizations to use Microsoft Power Platform. Power BI can bring insights to the surface, and Power Automate can streamline processes by automating repetitive tasks with no-code tools embedded in Dynamics 365. The underlying Microsoft Dataverse architecture also makes it easy to integrate with third-party applications for niche requirements or communicate with customers and suppliers when order or shipment information is updated.

Dynamics 365 integrates natively with Outlook and Teams, enabling companies to use the tools they already have and are familiar with to augment their finance and supply chain tasks. Stay in the flow of work with embedded Teams integration, which allows cross-team collaboration on things like supply and demand planning.

Embedded advanced analytics on a composable platform

Dynamics 365 incorporates embedded Power BI dashboards, which puts the data you need at your fingertips and in the context of modules like warehousing and procurement. For example, with Power BI, you can gain a single view of your warehouse performance to optimize location capacities and make efficient labor scheduling decisions.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance are built on a composable platform, making it easy to extend your solution with Power Platform, providing low-code tools like Power Apps and Power Automate. Where ERP customizations were once a heavy, time-consuming task, these tools empower end users to customize their solutions and build apps so you can work the way you want. Furthermore, users can leverage prebuilt customizations and industry-specialized solutions from our ISV partner network to help speed development even further. Internally at Microsoft, we’re leveraging Dynamics 365 and custom Power Apps to enable a circular economy at our Microsoft Circular Centers.

Flexible manufacturing capabilities

Modern manufacturers require nimble solutions and flexible systems to adapt quickly to changing demands and production processes. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features a logical and intuitive UI designed for modern production floor execution, whether you’re running discrete or continuous processes.

Additionally, while some manufacturers may use the native functionality in Dynamics 365 to control their manufacturing activities for machines, equipment, and personnel, many manufacturers are implementing manufacturing execution systems (MES) to meet advanced and bespoke manufacturing requirements. For manufacturers that have either built MES solutions in-house over a number of years or have implemented a third-party MES, integrating an MES with ERP can be challenging. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management takes the pain out of integrating with your MES by leveraging the power and simplicity of application programming interfaces (APIs). Data exchange is fully automated and occurs in near real time, keeping data current in both systems with no manual data entry required.

Investing in innovation with global coverage

We are thrilled to be recognized as a Leader again in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.* But our ambitions don’t stop here. We are continuing to invest in making Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Dynamics 365 Finance even better with innovations that will make our products smarter and more efficient for for enterprises of all scaleglobal, large, and mid-market.

Learn more

To learn more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management or Dynamics 365 Finance, request a demo or take a tour today.

Magic Quadrant reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. The research enables you to get the most from market analysis in alignment with your unique business and technology needs. View a complimentary copy of the Magic Quadrant report to learn more.

*GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises,” Greg Leiter, Dixie John, Robert Anderson, Tim Faith, September 26, 2022.

The post Microsoft recognized as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales on October 3, the first Viva application designed to improve the employee experience for a specific role: sellers. Viva Sales brings together a seller’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams seamlessly in their workflow, enabling them to save time and return to what they loveconnecting with customers and closing deals. 

Designed for seller productivity, Viva Sales:

• Delivers real-time business context from a seller’s CRM system in Microsoft Outlook and Teams to reduce time spent searching for relevant information.
• Keeps sales teams easily connected and deals moving forward by facilitating knowledge sharing and efficient collaboration.
• Augments a seller’s actions and decisions with AI-powered insights to improve customer engagements.

Viva Sales does all this while eliminating the burden of manual CRM updates, thus boosting sales team productivity.

Partner solutions enhance the Viva Sales experience

We’re looking to grow an ecosystem of complementary solutions to enhance the Viva Sales experience starting with a partnership with Seismic, the leading enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to ignite revenue growth. Through this partnership, our joint customers can streamline the meeting and buyer engagement experience for sales teams and improve productivity through preparation, automation, and intelligence in their daily flow of work. As the first step in this journey, Seismic Enablement Cloud uses AI-powered insights from Viva Sales to recommend content, training lessons, and a prebuilt digital sales room as post-meeting follow-up actions in Viva Sales. This delivers value to sellers right in their flow of work. As a customer of Seismic, Microsoft’s global sales team will take advantage of this partnership and looks forward to seeing the results.

“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft to reimagine the future of selling with Viva Sales, streamline the fragmented seller workflow and give salespeople precious time back to do what they do best: sell. Now with Seismic’s leading enablement solutions used by some of the largest enterprise companies, sellers can not only show up to a customer meeting better prepared, but also be equipped with personalized, automated,and intelligent sales tools to help them delight customers and grow revenue.”Hayden Stafford, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Seismic.

Viva Sales supports customer choice in CRM

The next era of selling must embrace a hybrid worldnot only where and how people work, but their technology stack, too. That’s why Viva Sales includes out-of-the-box functionality for both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM. We’re excited to announce our launch customersAdobe, Crayon, and PwC. Here’s what they have to say:

• “As our sales teams are spending more time out meeting with customers and balancing the world of hybrid work, the need to navigate multiple systems and tools quickly and easily is vital to their success. Adobe is evaluating Viva Sales to determine how it can improve our team’s productivity and effectiveness, and give them more time to spend building strong relationships with our customers,” said Stephen Frieder, Head of Global GTM and Sales, Adobe.
• “With Viva Sales, we can empower our sales team to spend more time with customers by automating tasks such as entering data into CRM, and the platform provides relevant insights, content, and coaching that helps push a deal forward. As a customer-first company, Viva Sales enables us to spend more time focusing on what’s most important and that’s providing business value to our customers,”said Melissa Mulholland, CEO, Crayon.
• “When we speak with our clients, we consistently hear about how sellers need a more unified and frictionless experience. With Viva Sales, we see a significant opportunity to offer our clients a chance to cut down on day-to-day repetitive tasks and benefit from insights gleaned to improve customer engagements and stay focused on big picture goals,” said George Korizis, Customer Transformation Practice Leader, PwC.

Reimagine the selling experience with Viva Sales

Sellers are critical to an organization’s bottom line. Yet, according to a survey we commissioned with Futurum, nearly 7 in 10 salespeople (68 percent) shared they would be more productive at work if they didn’t have to enter data into their CRM manually. And 81 percent said faulty data has led to an embarrassing mistake with a customer.¹ Viva Sales enriches the user experience with AI-driven insights and actions to help sellers maximize their time with customers. With more than 270 million monthly active Teams users, Viva Sales acts as a bridge connecting the data and insights sellers need to sell effectively and close deals faster with the productivity and collaboration tools, they use every day. Viva Sales enables a seller to:

• Eliminate manual data entry by interacting with CRM from Outlook and Teams, and syncing customer engagement data to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM: Viva Sales eliminates the duplicative work of updating CRM systems by allowing sellers to update their CRM data from Teams and Outlook. Sellers can capture new contacts from emails and meetings right into their CRM and see key customer insights such as previous activitiesincluding emails and meetings. Furthermore, sellers can save emails directly from Outlook into CRM so organizations maintain customer connection and relationship history.

• Easily collaborate with colleagues on customer records within Teams and Outlook: With Viva Sales CRM, sales records are first-class citizens in the digital experiences sellers use most. With contacts, opportunities, and accounts at their fingertips, sellers can move deals forward, make better decisions, and collaborate with others in Outlook and Teams. Sellers can track, search, share, and inline edit CRM entities across Outlook and Teams, leveraging Context IQ, using rich contextual cards, keeping sales teams in their flow of work, reducing unnecessary application and context switching, and boosting satisfaction.

• Augment customer engagements with AI-powered insights: Professionalism with customers and follow-through are important attributes of any good seller. When communicating with customers on Teams, Sales Conversation Intelligence (SCI) can generate meeting summaries, track customer sentiment, and suggest action items for customer follow-ups post meeting. SCI eliminates the need to take notes during calls by recording, transcribing, and providing valuable insights. Sentiment analysis within SCI helps a seller to better track caller sentiment about a specific topic, helping to guide the conversation and plan the best approach for future conversations. 

Improve business results by improving team productivity and enabling strategic insights on deal wins and losses

Today, businesses cannot track and utilize insights from customer engagement data along with CRM data uniformly and consistently across sales teams. Therefore, they miss opportunities to learn and use insights from deal wins and losses for the next customer proposal. By tracking customer engagement data effortlessly and consistently in CRM systems, Viva Sales allows sales leaders to have a unified view of activities, deals, and revenues while removing the friction of sellers keeping their CRM systems up to date. These views can enable relevant insights for better sales engagement within and across customer accounts. With improved data tracking, businesses can also run timely and more accurate sales reports.

Switching Viva Sales on is an easy decision! Viva Sales respects company security and privacy policies in sharing customer contact information, including CRM access controls and user permissions. Viva Sales is free for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers, and otherwise available at $40 per user, per license at general availability on October 3, 2022. Viva Sales is available separately and not part of the Viva suite.

Next steps

To get started with Viva Sales, reach out to your Microsoft sales team and visit the Viva Sales webpage for a demo and more information. Read more about Microsoft’s announcements today for the Viva platform from Jared Spataro.

To learn more:

• Introduction to Viva SalesTraining | Microsoft Learn 
• Installing Microsoft Viva Sales Application from the M365 Administration CenterYouTube 
• How to get started using Microsoft Viva SalesYouTube 
• How to install Microsoft Viva Sales Application for OutlookYouTube 
• Viva Sales FAQ 

¹Futurum.

The post Announcing the general availability of Viva Sales, an intelligent selling experience in Microsoft 365 and Teams appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the customer experience (CX) game, the last best experience sets the bar for the next. Businesses that are successful at meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations are hearing glowing testimonials like:

“This brand makes valuable information directly available.” “The salesperson recommended the perfect solution.” “How did the brand know exactly what I was looking for!” “This brand perfectly understands our business goals.” “I received a discount exactly when I needed it.” “Rep x is my trusted advisor.” “This was an amazing service from A to Z.” “This is my favorite brand.”

Excellent CX encourages your customers to purchase your products, be repeat customers, and recommend your brand. It keeps your brand prominent, helps maintain ongoing relationships, and fuels emotional connections, which is especially important in between purchases. So how do we live up to these customers’ expectations? Let’s start by understanding the customer and learning how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can help.

Understanding today’s customer

Triggered by the boom of connectivity and the accelerated shift to digital during COVID-19, customers’ expectations have changedand they are rightfully asking for more. This also applies to business-to-business (B2B) customers, who have adopted the same purchasing behaviors as they have in their personal lives. They want modern, consumer-like experiences that allow them to engage on their own terms.

Customers are seeking more autonomy as they engage with brands. They call for digital first, immediate, self-service solutions. According to Trust Radius, virtually 100 percent of buyers want self-service options for at least part of the buying process, up 13 percent from 2021.¹ Once customers make the decision to engage with a salesperson, they expect the person to know their intentions.

To add to this, buying journeys are no longer linear. Customers no longer follow a sequential top-down path across marketing and sales. They go back and forth between content and online and offline channels. However, expectations remain the same for seamless, friction-free interactions that are personalized regardless of the touchpoint.

They tune out one-size-fits-all interactions that make them feel like they’re just another number, especially when businesses could make use of the data collected from their past interactions to anticipate their needs and ultimately deliver better-personalized experiences.

Customer experience and the sales landscape

The sales process has become even more complex. As buyers are faced with economic pressures, customer experience is even more important than ever. This is causing brands to interpret more signals, due to the variety of stakeholders and their indecisiveness in the purchasing process.

And buyers are allowing themselves to be inconsistent as they reconcile decision-making with practical realities. As they engage with a myriad of business stakeholders, their decisions can seem contradictory. This is causing businesses to miss opportunities to simplify the process and deliver relevant experiences across shifting influences.

Customers feel the disconnect and ask questions, such as: “Why do I still see ads for a product I already bought?”, “How could the seller not know about my past order?”, “Why are the promotional messages I’ve seen differ from the vendors’ pitch?”.

Though a small number of businesses can deliver congruous experiences, the truth is that most are failing to connect the dots. Technology, people, and data siloed within different departments are preventing businesses from working as one. Creating a holistic continuum of engagement from customer insights to identifying intent and actioning that information with the right buyer at the right time is a challenge.

Finally, departments such as sales and marketing are misaligned. The businesses’ organizational structures are preventing effective collaboration, and they share different goals, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs), too often not oriented toward achieving revenue optimization. In the long run, those inconsistencies in the experiences affect the overall perception of the brand and, most importantly, customers’ satisfaction.

What the research is telling us

Yet CX is where businesses are and will increasingly compete. Most professionals who engage in or lead CX for their businesses or department expect to compete on the basis of CX.

LinkedIn found that for 85 percent of sales and marketing leaders, alignment is the largest opportunity for improving business performance today.² Marketing needs to orchestrate engagement whenever it’s appropriateincluding prompting sales with intent signals and digital buyer behaviors that indicate that sales engagement would be valuable or welcomed. Sales must consistently use marketing-provided content and technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This allows sellers to engage with buyers further down the funnel, increasing the effectiveness of sellers through higher qualified leads.

This is driving the transformation of CX where businesses streamline and automate processes to enhance customers’ interactions with their brand. The goal is to continuously refine CX at every touchpoint to grow and foster an ongoing relationship. “This brand perfectly understands our expectations.”

As an example, Northrup & Johnson, a luxury yacht broker and charter service provider, has seen a shift in the expectations of its buyers, who are increasingly self-exploring digitally throughout their buying processcomparing different models, taking virtual tours, and comparing with competitors. They expect a highly personalized experience both digitally and with the sales team. They want to lead their sales process and not have it dictated to them. Northrup & Johnson engages its customers on all channels with content specific to the yacht models they’ve expressed interest in or the tours they’ve taken. As its customer’s propensity to buy increases, it routes them to a seller at the right moments, such as reaching out after they had a great boat charter experience. Leveraging a unified customer understanding creates self-service experiences that then empower sellers with knowledge of affinities, intent, and lifetime value. 

Our approach

So how do you prepare your organization to transform CX and deliver frictionless, outstanding experiences to maintain a competitive edge? One thing is clear: doing things the “old way” is no longer an option.

Companies that require a customer to fill out a web form or start with a phone call will rapidly become irrelevant. Instead, they need to provide consumer-like experiences and be comfortable with unknown visitors to their digital properties. With control ceded to the buyer, they are no longer being forced through a one size fits all funnel and may enter in the middle of the funnel with a preference, then pop up the funnel to assess their options. They could start by buying and then seek knowledge about their purchase, or anything in between. The customer journey needs to flow seamlessly between sales and marketing as a result. 

Enabling these experiences starts with data. Instead of customer understanding being limited to that which a seller is willing to manually enter into their customer relationship management (CRM) system, all the interactions, purchases, and multitudes of different data sources can come together to shine a light on the buyer journey. By unifying data, organizations can gain a full understanding of their customers.

Combined with AI capabilities, they can curate a timeline of individual customer interactions, identify relevant behavioral signals in the buying process, and through automated predictive analytics, understand key factors influencing actions and KPIs, such as churn, customer lifetime value (CLTV), net promoter score (NPS), and customer sentiment. Based on those insights, marketing and sales teams can craft real-time single or multi-step personalized journeys that automate the best experiences for each buyer. They can be orchestrated to quickly advance the buyer to the next step of the journey and accelerate the pipeline through marketing-led lead identification that seamlessly notifies sales to contact the buyer at exactly the right time, in the right channel, and with the right offer. “I received a discount exactly when I needed it.”

Through automated lead scoring and AI-powered next-best-action recommendations, these once tedious tasks no longer prohibit sellers from focusing on building relationships and delivering value in every interaction. Based on similar account interactions, sellers can also recommend relevant products to customers (“the salesperson recommended the perfect solution”) and in the long run through repeated on-point exchanges transform relationships (“rep x is my trusted advisor“).

Sellers and marketers can create self-service consumer-like experiences and provide content that contributes to lead generation to meet buyers where they are. “This brand makes valuable information directly available.” They can empower customers to engage on their terms, the conversations are no longer seller-led but guided by the customers’ choice and timing. Customers experiencing self-driven paths are likely to buy more than initially planned.

A key to this is analyzing the effectiveness and pipeline through a common lens and using data to optimize journeys, and personalized content to accelerate the pipeline, improve close rates and increase customer retention.

Bringing these capabilities to the forefront illustrates how CX is driving the need to build sales and marketing alignment. It allows companies to automate empathy and relationship building beyond the sales cycle based not just on who the buyer is, but on the moments that matter to keep the company top of mind, relevant, and the buyer happy. “This was an amazing service from A to Z.” 

Transforming customer experience with Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

To guide each B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) business in their CX transformation and accelerate their growth, we provide unrivaled connected sales and marketing capabilities through Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights applications.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights respects privacy when unifying fragmented data, sometimes from hundreds of data sources across the organizationincluding data from Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Marketingto create a unified profile that can be enriched with first- and third-party data sources and used to generate AI-powered insights that identify churn risk and drops in customer sentiment and suggest the next best action to satisfy customers. 

These insights about the customer can be activated in real time within Dynamics 365 Marketing to identify segments and preferred channels, trigger flawless journeys, create self-service content, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences not just based on who the customer is, but also in real time based on what they are doing. For example, Biologische Heilmittel Heel, one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers of homeopathic remedies worldwide, is using Dynamics 365 to provide its buyersdoctors, pharmacists, and veterinarianswith self-service curated content. Due to the nature of this industry and its complexity across buyers, the message and approach have to be personalized from one customer to the next. This also makes it difficult to support customers throughout their journey with the company. Dynamics 365 has enabled seamless data sharing across the organization, enabling it to understand the customer and orchestrate real-time consumer-like experiences that span sales and marketing while putting the buyer in control.

Through Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can continue to build seamlessly on marketing efforts. Marketers orchestrate handoffs by identifying prospects showing purchase intent across their buying journey and automatically pass marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) at exactly the right time to optimize sales engagement. With AI-driving sales force automation, sales teams can jumpstart digital selling and meet buyers where they are using sales accelerator sequencing and predictive scoring. Through personalized work lists and AI-optimized next-best-action recommendations, they know exactly what customer and activity to focus on to accelerate sales and increase wins. All these capabilities, along with embedded collaboration and real-time conversation intelligence, boost seller productivity and enable them to read customer signals to know if their engagements and the buyer experience are effective.

Connected, these applications unlock unique opportunities to create individualized experiences that meet customers’ expectations whether they are one-time empathetic interactions or lifetime emotional connections.

Microsoft’s solutions empower your teams to transform CX so that your customer base refers to your organization as “my favorite brand.”

Next steps

Learn how Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales can meet your customers’ expectations.

Footnotes

¹Trust Radius.

²LinkedIn.

The post Transforming customer experiences with connected sales and marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Financial management is in the midst of a transformative moment. The global operating environment of business today is increasingly complex and prone to turbulence from numerous sources. New business models are disrupting the status quo and challenging the idea of how products and services are delivered and experienced. Finance leaders are assuming greater responsibilities in their organizations and often doing so with smaller team footprints than would have been imaginable a decade ago.

Staying on top of local laws and regulations in several countries is resource-intensive and challenging. Not only do individual countries and regions have their own regulations, but these rules are continuously changing, making compliance a perpetual task that requires close attention. Technology-enabled digital transformation is at the forefront of the tools available to finance leaders who must do more with less. This blog focuses on how Microsoft’s enhanced Tax Calculation capabilities help automate complex tax scenarios and deliver more scalable and easy-to-adopt tax solutions to our customers.

For a general refresher of the Tax Calculation enhancements available in Microsoft Dynamics 365, be sure to visit our previous blog post.

Empowering global financial excellence

Ernst & Young Global Limited (EY) is one of the largest professional services firms in the world. One of the ways that EY engages with clients is as advisors and system implementers of tax technology. To better understand how Tax Calculation helps organizations scale financial excellence, let’s look at how EY helps its clients quickly deploy highly adaptable tax solutions for their businesses.

“Tax requirements are only getting more complex. Adding flexible and scalable no-code/low-code Tax Calculation capabilities to an already powerful ERP solution, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, is definitely compelling functionality.”

Greg Hari, Director, Indirect Tax Transformation at EY

Client challenges

In part, one of EY’s clients faced challenges related to significant technical tax complexity across an extensive global footprint. The client’s small finance team was responsible for operating many business scenarios and handling a vast range of transactions.

To effectively manage complex global operations like these from a tax perspective, the business required a solution with the flexibility to scale to support its worldwide footprint and mirror its distinctive corporate structure. At the same time, the solution had to handle today’s unique tax complexities so that the in-house finance team could easily maintain business expertise to operate in all the territories they’re currently in today and allow for future expansion and ever-changing tax regulations.

Traditionally, clients selecting or implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in these situations often require an external tax engine to perform tax determination and calculation or frequently end up with a sub-optimal determination solution. And indeed, this was the assumption and potential concern of EY’s client in this circumstance. However, as EY worked with the client during discovery, it explained the features and benefits of the native out-of-the-box Tax Calculation functionality included in Dynamics 365 Finance, which ultimately gave the client assurance over the tax determination that could be delivered.

“A new tax calculation service as a native component of Dynamics 365 was one of the key factors that helped Microsoft cater for the client’s complex requirements. It also gives us ahigh degree of confidence in recommending the solution because we understand it can be configured to meet bespoke requirements without significant coding or expensive customizations.”

Greg Hari, Director, Indirect Tax Transformation at EY

EY successfully supported the client through the implementation and go-live process earlier this year.

Automating complex tax scenarios

The Tax Calculation enhancements to Dynamics 365 released last year have been helping our customers to automate complex tax scenarios that required costly customizations before. Some of the complex scenarios that our customers have successfully enabled while deploying the new Tax Calculation capabilities include:

• Transfer price model and limited risk distributor
• Consignment warehouses with multiple VAT registrations
• EU triangulation transactions
• EU VAT on margin
• EU distance selling
• US origin-based and destination-based sales tax
• Tax deductibility by the usage of the goods and services

Organizations can more effectively streamline and automate tax determination and calculation by leveraging our enhanced no-code/low-code tax calculation functionality, which is part of Globalization Studio within Dynamics 365. This can create significant advantages as it allows companies greater functionality to handle more complex enterprise-level scenarios while also reducing some of the maintenance burden and associated risk, even with a relatively small team. It also allows users to easily customize the solution to suit future needs as tax regulations evolve and businesses scale.

A scalable and robust tax calculation service allows both enterprise and small organizations to support and maintain a very effective tax calculation solution in-house.

Greg Hari, Director, Indirect Tax Transformation at EY

The Globalization Studio capabilities offer more than effective tax determination and calculation. Also included are no-code/low-code globalization tools and services and out-of-the-box content for electronic invoicing, tax audit and regulatory reporting, country-specific payment formats, business documents, and more. The combination of these easy-to-use and flexible services and the out-of-the-box content, extended by partners, allows users to operate our solution in more than 200 countries/regions and meet multiple tax compliance requirements and local business practice requirements.

What’s next?

Are you an existing Dynamics 365 user who would like to use the Tax Calculation capabilities in your organization? If so, you can get started today by visiting the Tax Calculation overview documentation.

Or, if you are looking for a solution to optimize across subsidiaries, acquire new companies, or expand internationally and are interested in learning more about the tools to streamline processes, increase compliance, and strategically grow your business globally, we invite you to take a guided tour of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

The post Automating complex tax scenarios with enhanced Tax Calculation capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Customers appreciate the quick access to help that self-service bots provide. They want to be empowered to research and solve issues on their own, which increases their brand loyalty. Knowledge management integration in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents enables customers to find answers from a knowledge base directly in a bot conversation, and still get help from a human agent when needed.

Your human agents benefit, too. They don’t need to spend time answering straightforward questions that customers would prefer to find answers to themselvesif they had an easy way to search. Your agents have more time to deal with complex issues that truly need human intervention.

Display Dynamics 365 knowledge articles in self-service bot conversations

With knowledge search integrated in Power Virtual Agents, self-service bots can display articles from a Dynamics 365 knowledge base in an adaptive card in the chat.

Let’s say Monique has an issue with a Brewmaster 4000 coffee machine. Preferring to look for information on her own, she goes to the Contoso Coffee website. After a proactive greeting from Contoso’s self-service bot, Monique describes her issue. The bot searches the Dynamics 365 knowledge base and returns an adaptive card that links to an article on how to troubleshoot Brewmaster 4000 coffee machines. Monique is satisfied with the information.

She also wants to extend the warranty on her machine. The bot offers to connect her to a human agent. Monique agrees, and the bot hands the conversation off to a live agent.

Configure your self-service bots to search Dynamics 365 knowledge articles

Before you can integrate knowledge management with your self-service bots, you need to satisfy some prerequisites:

• You must have knowledge management configured in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• Your environment must have Dataverse search enabled.
• You must have knowledge base articles published to a Power Apps portal.
• You must have a bot with at least one topic.

Broadly speaking, configuring the integration is a four-step process:

1. Set connection references for the “Search Dynamics 365 knowledge articles” flow.
2. Turn on the flow action in Power Virtual Agents.
3. Add the action to the topic.
4. Publish the bot.

Set connection references and turn on the search flow

Go to the Power Apps maker portal (https://make.powerapps.com) and select the notification to update connection references. If you don’t see the notification, you’ll need to ask your admin to set the connection references and turn on the flow for you.

Configure the references for the connections to Microsoft Dataverse and Content Conversion.

Next, turn on the “Search Dynamics 365 knowledge articles” flow. For the full procedure, go to Set connection references in the documentation.

Add the action to a topic in your self-service bots

In the example below, we’re going to add the search flow action to the “Greeting” topic in our bot. The “Greeting” topic has preconfigured trigger phrases and a question. At the output of the question, we need to call the “Search Dynamics 365 knowledge articles” flow action, as shown in the following figure.

The customer’s response to the question is available in the variable “searchText1 (text),” which acts as an input to the action. The action’s outputthat is, the result of the knowledge base searchis stored in the variable “bot.jsonResult1 (text),” which is redirected to “Show Dialog” to present the output in an adaptive card.

Save the topic and publish the bot.

The following illustration shows the output from our example.

When the customer selects Show Content, the chat displays a summary of the knowledge article, along with a link to view it in the portal.

For more information about showing the results in an adaptive card, go to Render results in the documentation.

If the default adaptive card doesn’t meet your needs, the Bot Framework Composer provides an easy way to modify it. In the following picture, we’re using the Bot Framework Composer to tweak the output of “Show Dialog.”

Learn more

For more information about knowledge management in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and how to add it to your self-service bots, check out the documentation:

Overview of knowledge management | Microsoft Docs

Configure knowledge management | Microsoft Docs

Integrate knowledge management in Dynamics 365 with a Power Virtual Agents bot | Microsoft Docs

The post Empower self-service by adding knowledge base search to your bots appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Organizations are looking for ways to offer hyper-personalized service and foster deeper relationships with their customers. Customers want to connect to agents who understand their needs. They feel more comfortable talking to an agent who has served them in the past, knows about their issues, and can resolve them quickly. Agents want to serve their customers, meet service-level agreements (SLAs), and receive high satisfaction ratings. The key to achieving all these goals is a good relationship between agents and customers. Preferred agent routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help build those relationships.

Introducing preferred agent routing in Customer Service

With the preferred agent routing feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations can offer relationship management to their customers. Once set up, the unified routing system will connect the customers to their corresponding preferred agents, thus ensuring a delightful service experience.

Administrators can associate up to three agents with a contact to help ensure that if a customer’s most preferred agent isn’t available, they can still be connected to an agent who is familiar with their past interactions and preferences.

Fallbacks ensure no customer goes unattended

In case no preferred agent is available, fallback options ensure that a customer will never be left unattended. Administrators can choose one of two fallback options:

• Next best agent based on assignment logic. The system will try to find an available agent based on the assignment rules already in place. If no preferred agent is found or is available, then the work item is assigned to other available agents, ensuring that the customer is always served. We suggest this option for live chat conversations and voice channel calls.
• No one. Let the work remain unassigned in the queue. A supervisor or available agent must manually pick up the work item. We suggest this option for asynchronous or social channels, where the customer doesn’t directly connect to a live agent.

Preferred agent routing in action: Contoso Coffee’s Gold membership plan

To see how your organization can benefit from preferred agent routing, consider the following scenario based on the illustration above.

Contoso Coffee recently started offering a Gold membership plan. Gold membership comes with premium customer service, which includes a dedicated relationship manager (preferred agent).

Madison calls the support line to report a problem with her old coffee machine. She has such a pleasant interaction with the support agent, Malik, that she buys a Contoso Caf 100 and enrolls in the Gold membership plan.

When Kayla, the customer success manager, gets the new subscription information, she reviews Madison’s customer service history. Noticing the positive sentiment in her interaction with Malik, she associates Malik as Madison’s preferred agent.

A few months later, Madison buys a bag of coffee beans and receives the wrong product. She initiates a chat to get a replacement. The chat is automatically routed to Malik, Madison’s preferred agent. Knowing her purchase history and remembering that she had praised Arabica coffee beans in their previous interaction, Malik suggests replacing the incorrect product with Contoso’s new Arabica beans, recommended for the Caf 100.

Madison feels happy and satisfied with the personalized support she received, without having to explain her issue to different agents. Malik feels happy to receive a high satisfaction rating from Madison.

Learn more

Check out the documentation for more information about automatic assignment and preferred agent routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service:

Configure routing to preferred agents | Microsoft Docs

Assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Docs

Configure assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Docs

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

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