Don’t miss Microsoft Ignite, an all-digital three-day event kicking off this next Tuesday, March 2 at 8:00 AM Pacific Time! This is your opportunity to get a sneak peek at the future of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, connect with experts, and engage with your global community. We’ve packed the line-up with technical and hands-on contentfrom learning sessions to live Q&As, featured speakers to one-on-one consultationsall streaming digitally live and on-demand to help you get the most from the event.

To help you plan your experience from the variety of sessions and activities, we’ve compiled some essential presentations, sessions, and viewing tips below. Click the linked titles to learn more and add each event to your session scheduler.

Tune in to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform featured sessions

To kick things off on Tuesday, March 2, tune in to the opening keynote hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella streaming live at 8:30 AM Pacific Time. Then, learn what’s new and on the horizon for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in these featured sessions:

Tuesday, March 2 | 1:00 PM 1:30 PM Pacific Time
What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Power Platform

Hosted by Charles Lamanna, CVP, Low Code Application Platform and Julie Strauss, Partner PM Director

Learn about new and upcoming capabilities across Power Platform, including demos, real-world examples of Power Platform in action, new features, and the roadmap for later this year. Also, learn how Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents rapidly enables digitization and automation with a modern set of capabilities.

Tuesday, March 2 | 2:00 PM 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Elevating the end-to-end customer experience with Dynamics 365: Infusing intelligence from front- to back-office

Hosted by Muhammad Alam, CVP, Dynamics 365 and Lori Lamkin, VP, Dynamics 365 Marketing

Learn about new solutions and capabilities from Dynamics 365 that enable you to deliver unparalleled customer excellence on every step of the journeyfrom agility in predicting and meeting customer needs to flawlessly executing with an intelligent and agile supply chain.

Wednesday, March 3 | 11:00 AM 11:30 AM Pacific Time
Microsoft Teams + Dynamics 365: The unified collaboration platform for modern business

Hosted by Takeshi Numoto, CMO, Commercial Marketing and Emma Williams, CVP, Microsoft Office Modern Workplace Transformation.

Discover how we are integrating Microsoft Teams into Dynamics 365 across marketing, sales, customer service, field service, and commerce solutions to up-level collaboration across your organization and drive stronger engagement with customers.

Wednesday, March 3 | 3:00 PM 3:30 PM Pacific Time
Drive a data culture with Power BI: Vision, strategy, and roadmap

Hosted by Arun Ulagaratchagan, CVP, Power BI

Learn how Microsoft Power BI can help drive a data culture in your organization and get a sneak peek at the vision and roadmap for Power BI. You’ll discover how AI automatically find patterns in your data, you will learn about how Power BI is built into Teams and Excel to enable incredible collaboration experiences, and how Power BI with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics meets your most demanding needs.

In addition to the live streams above, each segment will be rebroadcasted throughout the event. The key segments are open to everyone, but we encourage you to register in advance to unlock the full Microsoft Ignite experiencefrom digital breakout sessions with live Q&As to conversations with Microsoft experts and your global community.

Sessions: More than 100 opportunities to ramp up your skills

Learn about Dynamics 365 and Power Platform capabilities and expand your skills, all guided by the experts and engineers behind the tools you use every day. Browse the session catalog to plan your personalized schedule. In the session catalog, you can filter sessions by solution area, such as Dynamics 365 or Power Platform, session time, start time, theme, or expertise level to find the right sessions for you. Register to access a personalized schedule planner that tracks all of your sessions, meetings, and messages.

More to explore

Microsoft Ignite will include live segments and Q&A, available across time zones. Check out all of the events and activities hosted by our team of experts:

• Connection Zone: Discuss topics with experts and peers, check out fun activities, and connect with your global community. Explore the end-to-end customer experience with Dynamics 365, and learn how to work together better and build stronger customer relationships with Teams and Dynamics 365, and connect with peers about all things Dynamics 365, from certifications, developing applications.
• Learning Zone: Explore learning modules to sharpen existing skills or add new ones, no matter your experience level. Learn how to get started with Power Apps or deep dive into business scenarios, such as how to manage scheduling options in Dynamics 365 for Field Service.

Get the most of your Microsoft Ignite experience

Be sure to follow Microsoft Ignite on LinkedIn and Twitter to stay up to date and connected with the community and register for Microsoft Ignite today.

The post Join Dynamics 365 and Power Platform at Microsoft Ignite appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

There’s still time to join today’s free Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit. Connect with industry icons and peers. Expand your network and get insights from savvy CFOs as they share their perspectives on the impact of COVID-19, how their organizations pivoted in response, and how they plan to transform for the future.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the New York Times, reimagination leverages “innovations born of necessity like remote control of manufacturing processes, AI bots helping diagnose patients, and more effective distance-learning technologies.”

Modern finance leaders are not only responding and recovering from the global health crisis, but they are also implementing Satya’s advice by reimagining the future of business by accelerating automation and digital transformation. In today’s virtual summit, CFOs share their proven insights and strategies for their own enterprise’s reimagination and continued transformation.

Key themes we explore in this summit include how to:

• Sustain core financial processes
• Provide engaging analytics to support quick decisions
• Empower productive remote work while maintaining employee engagement
• Enable a safe return to the office process while creating more permanent remote roles and balancing a hybrid workforce

Gain valuable insights from finance leaders

Hear from thought leaders on immediate actions they took to sustain core financial processes during the pandemic, how they’re continuing to reduce costs in a shifting business and economic landscape, and how they plan to leverage lessons learned to transform for the future. Hear their specific tactics and case studies for how they’ve maintained liquidity and forecasted cash flow, cut costs while investing in the future, and secured access to critical financial data and reporting all while mitigating risk from fraud, supply chain disruptions, customer disruption, and ongoing uncertainty.

Learn more about how finance roles are transforming with changing skill sets, growing responsibilities, and the shift to remote work. Utilize leaders’ tips and best practices for taking a data-first approach to harmonize productivity and wellbeing in this work-from-home environment.

Discover how they’re building agility into core processes to prepare for and rapidly respond to future emergencies, taking proactive actions that leverage AI-driven insights, and improving accuracy of and time to completion for forecasting and scenario analysis using machine learning. This focus on automating finance processes and operations allows time for finance teams like yours to perform strategic work as a key part of reimagining for the future.

Keynotes from Rebecca Henderson (Harvard Business School), AstraZeneca, and Unilever

Participate in sessions with keynote speakers, including economist Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School, as well as Mark Fowler of AstraZeneca and Ritesh Tiwari of Unilever.

Attend live Q&As

Ask questions and get answers from Microsoft experts and event speakers during a live Q&A session.

Create or join a roundtable

Wonder how your peers are using this time to move forward and reimagine the future? Join a small roundtable or create your own to look at innovative ways to tackle today’s challenges.

Connect with peers

There are more than 2,000 finance leaders from top companies around the world attending this summit. Expand your network, share, and learn by connecting with peers through small roundtables and breakout sessions

Register now

Now’s the time to register for the Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit. Don’t miss out on this event and the opportunity to discuss challenges, best practices, and lessons learned as finance organizations continue to respond to, recover from, and reimagine the future post-COVID-19. Capture insights from thought leaders and see how targeted solutions can address your key challenges. Directly connect with peers to build your network and get outside perspectives. Sign up now and join today.

What: Finance Reimagined virtual CFO summit

When: February 24, 2021

The post Connect with finance leaders at Finance Reimagined—a free digital event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Understanding your customers starts with gathering their feedback. But a Forrester study¹ found that at the end of 2020, decision making with customer insights was organizations’ biggest challenge with marketing programs. That’s why having a voice of customer (VoC) programa program designed to capture the needs and wants of the customerin your organization is critical to improving customer experiences, driving a customer-centric culture, and delivering better business outcomes.

VoC programs need to be built on a strong foundation of principles, but it takes more than that to succeed. Our newest webinar featuring Forrester analyst Faith Adams explores what voice of customer programs are, how it can impact your business, and what steps you can take today. Watch “Build Better Customer Experiences with VoC Programs” today.

The four principles of successful VoC programs

1. Listen to your customers where they are

In today’s interconnected world, your customers exist in a variety of channels from email to social to web. If your organization can meet your customers in those channels, both in collecting feedback, closing the loop, and delivering a great experienceyou can build lifelong loyalty.

Organizations with a strong VoC program utilize its tools to deploy surveys in every channel in real time, creating a seamless and easy process for the customer. Prioritizing understanding how customers see your products and services will help every department, from marketing to sales to customer service, have a greater impact on the customer experience.

2. Maximize insights for deeper connections

A deeper connection with your customer can only form from a complete understanding of their perceptions, needs, and wants. Strong VoC programs maximize customer insights with powerful tools such as AI-analysis and customer satisfaction metrics such as NPS satisfaction over time allow organizations to continuously have a pulse on their customers’ perception.

With direct feedback analyzed and visualized in a manner that is easy to interpret, tailoring future interactions becomes easier than ever. Sales, marketing, and customer service can adjust their daily interactions and decisions to align with what matters most to customers and are empowered to develop lifelong relationships.

3. Integrate data across your organization

Data silos prevent rich customer insights and authentic experiences. Successful VoC programs truly transform data management and create a culture of customer centricity where every department has access to the right data at the right time.

Further, sharing the insights you gather from direct feedback can be utilized to create holistic customer profiles. Together with behavioral data, these unified customer profiles can be accessed directly from the VoC, elevating how organizations think about their customer and how to respond.

4. Respond quickly to build customer relationships

Finally, a VoC program needs to enable an organization to respond in the moments that matter. The combination of data from applications and the use of real-time notifications creates accelerate response times.

The most important part of the customer journey for your organization is closing the feedback loop. When customer feedback is received, 88 percent of customers expect a response from businesses within 60 minutes. That’s why VoCs let you set triggers for when customer satisfaction dips, creating an instant pathway to delivering a great customer experience.

Starting your Voice of Customer journey can be daunting, but it’s the first step to orchestrating authentic connections and responses to customer feedback. With these four principles in mind, and with all departments bought into a singular vision, organizations can improve business outcomes.

To learn how Microsoft can empower your organization to use a robust VoC to quickly collect and understand omnichannel feedback at scale, visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Voice website.

Start your free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice today and check out our on-demand webinar “Build Better Customer Experiences with VoC Programs” today.

¹Forrester Analytics, Business Technographics Marketing Survey, 2020.

The post 4 principles of successful voice of the customer programs appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As we enter 2021, we reached out to a few Microsoft partners and asked if they could share with us about their experiences from 2020how they and their customers faired amidst the challenges presented by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as what trends they’re seeing, what lessons they had learned, and what predictions they had for 2021.

In our last article in this series, we talked to Sunrise Technologies CEO John Pence. This time, we hear from Aden Forrest, CEO of Australia-based Simple, a marketing operations platform that helps companies plan, create, and optimize their marketing activities to deliver exceptional customer experiences across marketing touchpoints. Learn how Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners like Simple can help you get the most value from your Dynamics 365 implementation.

A shift in conversation, a focus on people

According to Forrest, when the pandemic hit in March, the executive board at Simple reviewed the situation to determine how it was going to navigate the upcoming period of uncertainty. “Our offices were closed and our working from home policy was put in place,” Forrest said. “Some of the activities included setting up weekly board meetings, weekly company all hands meetings, daily stand ups, and team check-ins that focused on team and individual well-being.”

Forrest noted that, over the course of the year, the types of conversations he’s having with customers has shifted. “Our conversations are now focused on supporting our new market normal and new expectations,” Forrest said. “The big picture is still important, but immediate payback is equally critical. It truly is a ‘think big, start small, and grow fast’ conversation. For our own applications, we are also diving into the following conversation areas immediately; supporting newly remote teams, business and regulatory compliance, reduced budgets driving increased productivity requirements, and larger rapid digitalization of business outcomes,” Forrest said.

Forrest has observed a common trend across the customers he works with: a focus on people. “Consistent across all of our customers and prospects are the people aspects of our new normal,” Forrest said. “Our customers are aggressively investing in their people, and this translates into how they support them through their respective technology and processes. These are typically areas that have previously been under-invested in.”

Cloud-based business grows in 2020

Forrest said the fact that Simple’s business is powered by cloud-based business applications benefitted the company greatly over the course of 2020. “Our business has not only continued under the enforced remote working requirementsit has grown,” he said. “Our customers were able to continue to use our solution with no service interruptions, and as a result, they have invested further in our offerings.”

The COVID-19 environment has led to increased innovation within Simple, Forrest said. “As an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), we have delivered more applications and capabilities than before across Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Teams, and our customers are also extending our applications and other cloud technologies faster than before,” he said.

Lessons from a challenging year

Forrest said the year’s critical learnings have included the following five lessons:

1. People will always surprise you. The strength of the human spirit is amazing.
2. Don’t be afraid to ask for more from your team, partners, and customers.
3. Communication continues to drive culture, brand, and relationships.
4. Technology, and your ability to embrace it, can be the difference between survival and excelling.
5. Stretch targets become the new norm in a time of crisis.

While 2020 was a demanding year, Forrest thinks his team has emerged more resilient and focused. “Our business faced many challenges in 2020, but through totally focusing on the value we provide our customers and cutting back on anything not linked to delivering this, I believe our team has become stronger, more engaged, and significantly more commercial,” he said.

“I believe our team has become stronger, more engaged, and significantly more commercial.”Aden Forrest, CEO, Simple

A new business landscape

Looking ahead to 2021, Forrest believes that staff retention initiatives will be increasingly important, “since in the remote digital environment, good people will be able to work for an ever-increasing number of global employers. Business culture and the associated brand will become even more important. People want to work for causes, not just money.”

Forrest believes that the new cloud-enriched business landscape will continue to provide people the ability to work as countries will continue to manage lockdowns. “Through technology, the world has gotten significantly smaller, and employers need to understand the benefits and potential challenges this brings. The trusted relationship between the employer and employee is going to take on even more importance,” he said.

He continued, “2020 has been all about survival in our new normal. 2021 will be all about taking full advantage of this new business landscape. Things will not go back to the way they were. 2020 has changed the business landscape for the better, forever. It is now up to Microsoft and its partners to ensure this is for the betterment of all. We have exciting times ahead.”

Learn more

• Learn how Simple helps Australian Government and Enterprise manage marketing and communications with ease.
• Learn how to accelerate your success with Dynamics 365 partners.
• Stay up to date on the latest partner success stories and trends by visiting the partner blog.

The post Why Simple’s CEO thinks exciting times are ahead in 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Effectively managing fraud requires a multi-tiered strategy. It is essential to adopt a fraud prevention strategy with a broad view, encompassing multiple user interaction events, and phased decision-making points.

A user interacts in many ways on a merchant’s website, such as searching for products, updating account info, writing a review, adding or removing items from their cart, or signing up for events or newsletters. Each of these interactions provides tell-tale signs of their behavior and intent. Analyzing all of these interactions cohesively helps to identify fraud more accurately and provides a seamless experience to legitimate customers.

The classic approach to fraud is to look for specific events to identify certain types of fraud, like purchases with a stolen credit card or account takeovers. Most tools support this approach, to assess specific generic events such as purchases, sign-up, sign-in, or coupon redemption. Evolving beyond this classic approach requires tools that can help you tailor a fraud prevention strategy to best suit the unique interactions between your business and your customers.

Custom assessments are available as part of Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and enable you to tailor a fraud prevention strategy that best suits your business and customer needs.

Analyzing the customer journey in your business is the first step in understanding where to deploy custom assessments.

Identify key touchpoints of a user journey

Begin by identifying user actions that could indicate a high risk of fraud or help you track unusual behavior later in the user’s journey. These actions can vary by the type of business you run. For example, a user updates the physical address on their account. If a restaurant offers promotions for users from certain locations, an address change may indicate a risk of fraud or abuse of the promotion and you may choose to act immediately. In contrast, if you are an e-commerce merchant offering gifts and accessories, this event alone may not indicate risk, but subsequent actions may. In this case, you can add an additional check if the next action was updating the phone number, as it may indicate the risk of a compromised account.

Create custom assessments for these key touchpoints

After you have listed the touchpoints that are key indicators, you can add assessments to these events. Custom assessments have the flexibility to define every part of the assessment to match your business-specific scenario — including the API name, event name, and the payload. This helps you to easily manage all the assessments.

Using the rules engine to determine actions

After your custom assessments are created, you can use the rules engine to configure what actions you want to take on them. From the earlier example for a restaurant, you can create rules for the address change event to check the distance between both addresses or the history of orders from that user and return a reject decision to block the user. Or if you are the e-commerce merchant, return this event to a watch list for action later.

You can view the performance of your custom assessments, including the total volume of events and what rules were triggered if any, in the scorecard tab of the assessment.

Next steps

To learn more about custom assessments, check out the documentation. To see for yourself how Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection can help your business, get started today with a free trial.

The post Build a tailored fraud prevention strategy with custom assessments appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.