Faced with a historic level of social and business disruption, companies have been forced to respond quickly and strategically to meet the challenge. To help address this challenge, and elevate customer experiences, we are introducing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Elevate customer experiences

Connecting with people has never been more important, and customer expectations have never been higher. Customer tolerance for disjointed experiences, or even worse, tone-deaf communications is unacceptable. Organizations that deliver better end-to-end customer experiences (CX) are taking share. Despite a decade of discussion about the importance of CX, many companies have failed to elevate their experiences to the level desired.

Beyond the human value of great experiences, elevated experiences are critical to driving business valueenabling growth and driving brand equity, preventing churn, and enabling higher marketing and customer engagement return on investment.

Dynamics 365 Marketing is working to revolutionize how organizations address these challenges to enable teams such as marketing, sales, customer success, commerce, or customer service to create engaging and impactful customer-led experiences.

We are announcing real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing will be released for preview as part of the April 2021 release wave 1 updates in EMEA and North America. This landmark innovationbrings together the worlds of customer experience and marketing automation and is designed to help businesses:

• Engage customers in real-time
• Win customers and earn loyalty faster
• Personalize customer experiences with AI
• Build customer trust with a unified, adaptable platform

Plus, commercial Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 customers will get six months of free access to Dynamics 365 Marketing at no additional cost. We’ll have more details on this offer to share soon, along with eligibility details, and we are excited to see you reap the benefits of these solutions together.

Moving from segment-based marketing to real-time interactions

Customer journey orchestration helps you make the next great leap in customer experiences: from segment-based marketing campaigns to moments-based interactions, creating a personalized, holistic customer journey for each individual. This enables you to strengthen your relationships at every touchpoint across both digital and physical, breaking down walls between marketing, sales, commerce, and service organizations. Dynamics 365 Marketing responds to customer actions during the journey.

Win customers and earn loyalty

In the highly competitive technology market, HP’s brand is built on its high-quality products and differentiated service. Loyalty is critical to enabling business performance (Customer Lifetime Value, Gross Margin, etc.) and every support call is an opportunity. HP is working to turn support interactions into personalized engagement moments using Dynamics 365 Marketing with customer journey orchestration. This will allow HP to break down longstanding data silos, better engage customers in real-time with the most impactful messaging, and leverage AI-driven recommendations.

“With customer journey orchestration in Dynamics 365 Marketing, our agents will gain a real-time 360-degree view of each customer and their support experience,” explains Brian Johnston, Business Architect, HP. “We’ll be making the most of our customers’ time and treating them with empathy and understanding. It makes HP feel real to the customer, and it makes the customer feel real to HP”

The result will be an enhanced and highly-personalized customer service experience that improves quality of service, builds customer lifetime loyalty, and also saves the company money by shortening the time spent solving problems.

Personalize customer experiences with AI to enable more engaging content

Authoring impactful content quickly and easily is a big challenge. With built-in AI recommendations for content, channels, customer segmentation, and analytics, companies can be sure to deliver the right message. The reimagined email editor helps select and deliver the best image, video, document, or fragment using AI. A new centralized asset library allows you to search, version, manage and use AI to tag your digital assets.

Journey authoring is also assisted by AI with targeted customer segments, channel optimization, and experimentation. As customers engage, the customer journey adapts and responds to interactions with relevant content driving further engagement.

We’re engineering AI throughout Dynamics 365 Marketing to help you create engaging and impactful messages faster. Powerful experimentation capabilities and analytics track progress towards your business objectives, helping you to exceed business goals.

Campari raises the bar for delivering customer experiences

The Campari Group, home to some of the world’s iconic alcoholic spirit brands, knows how to create great brand experiences and is always working to deepen its relationships with customers. To gain a 360-degree customer view and enhance the personalization of its marketing, sales, and customer service efforts, Campari Group deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing. With AI-driven recommendations and customer journey orchestration, Campari Group can now personalize real-time marketing messages for maximum impact across all customer touchpoints.

“Customer journey orchestration enables contextually relevant and consistent real-time conversations with every customer across all interaction points,” explains Chad Niemuth, Vice President, Global IT Marketing and Sales. “We can more precisely align marketing messages for each communication channel to gain the greatest impact. We see the effects in in-store sales and also in e-commerce, which is particularly important during COVID.”

Within weeks, Campari Group connected all the data points in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and deployed its first email marketing automation campaign against those segments in the United States. Roll-out in the United Kingdom and Australia followed shortly.

Stronger connections with Microsoft Teams

The dramatic shift to online meetings and virtual events has made it even more important for event managers to easily use Teams and Dynamics 365 Marketing.

At Microsoft Ignite, we announced new and updated features that enable you to run rich webinars and events, true to your brand with a professional experience for attendees. We also announced the ability of Teams to easily follow up with event attendees with Dynamics 365 Marketing. This allows you to continue connecting with attendees, nurturing them into loyal customers.

Turn insights into action

Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, makes it easy to unify customer data, identify high-value customer segments, or those likely to churn. When you combine it with Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can engage customers in a personalized way and in real-time to drive meaningful actions. Seamlessly use segments from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to target marketing campaigns. Personalize content with rich profile information, and create individual journeys based on customer history and preferences. With the addition of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, you build custom AI models and improve relevancy with advanced segmentation and targeting that can then be brought to life with Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Learning customers’ preferences and sentiment is critical to personalizing engagement. Today, we are also announcing real-time survey capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice that enable you to adapt customer journeys or trigger relevant communications. For example, if a customer is not satisfied with a specific product feature or service, the response can quickly stop marketing campaigns while also notifying an account manager for personalized follow-up.

Together, these connected applications help companies personalize moments that matter across all touchpoints in a customer’s journey and build deeper customer relationships with more meaningful engagement across both digital and physical channels.

Agencies bring customer-first approach to journey creation

Developing highly impactful and personalized experiences across the customer journey requires a fresh approach. We are excited to be working with a number of leading agencies that have expertise in transforming customer experiences to deliver stronger connections to leading brands and measurable business impact.

“VMLY&R is excited to partner with Microsoft, helping empower organizations to reimagine and transform customer experiences. Harnessing the power of AI, data, and insights to create connected customer and brand experiences have never been more important. We look forward to collaborating with Microsoft and the Dynamics 365 team to deliver amazing customer experiences for organizations around the world,” says David Mitchell, Chief Technology Officer, VMLY&R.

Agencies such as VMLY&R (a WPP company) and Kin + Carta use creativity, technology, and culture to create experiences that engage customers one-on-one across every touchpoint from marketing through service, across both digital and physical experiences.

“As people have more and more ways to interact with brands, it’s never been more vital to deliver a consistent, seamless experience for customers and to look towards the future to find innovative ways to meet their needs,” says Rob McGowan, Managing Director of Edit, part of the Kin+Carta connective. “It’s this challenge that we believe the new customer journey orchestration features in Dynamics 365 Marketing are ideally placed to answer.”

Learn more and get started

To learn more about how your organization can elevate your customer experiences, visit the Dynamics 365 Marketing webpage and sign up for a free trial to explore all capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing and the preview of real-time customer journey orchestration capabilities planned to be released in North America and EMEA April 2021.

The post Drive personalized interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

To help boost your fraud protection strategy, we’ve released an improved data upload experience in Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. The centralized interface guides you through importing historical data for purchase protection and loss prevention.

For details about this feature, refer to the schema for purchase protection and loss prevention. If some fields are not applicable to your industry, you can leave them blank. We recommend that you upload as much information as possible to capitalize on the adaptive machine learning capabilities.

Steps to improve your data uploadexperience

1. Export data from your data warehouse and prepare your data to match the schema.
We recommend uploading 3 to 6 months of historical data for optimal results.Upload data from at least 10 unique staff/POS devices to generate your first Loss Prevention report. For Purchase Protection, we suggest loading 3 to 6 months of mature data where refunds and label data are present.

2.Prepare your data to match the schema. Pay attention to the date format, which requires ISO 8601 in UTC time.

You can use DateTime.UtcNow.ToString(“o”) to convert datetime format.

For SQL, you can use SELECT: CONVERT(VARCHAR(33), DateColumn, 127) FROM MyTable.

Or, you can use the Excel function =CONCAT(TEXT([cell],”yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss”),”.0000000Z”) to make the conversion.

Be sure to review and remove all escaped characters, such as commas, new line characters, and multi-line characters.

3. Prepare data files to upload.

Save the data in UTF-8 encoding.You can split a file that exceeds 10 GB into multiple uploads. Try to make the column header the same as what is specified in the schema to leverage the auto-mapping capability.

4. Upload the file in the Fraud Protection portal.

Follow the directions for purchase protection and loss prevention, upload the data file, and then map the data columns accordingly. When data upload and mapping is complete, you can start processing the data.

The processing may take some time depending on the size of data. A loss prevention report will be generated and ready to view after data processing is complete. For purchase assessments, the assessments are ready to use when data upload is complete. You can integrate purchase APIs, if you have not already done so, and then use the assessment scores to make decisions about your transactions.

To upload historical data and enhance your fraud prevention journey, feel free tosign in now. If you’re not currently using Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection, you cansign up for a free trial.

The post Import historical data to optimize fraud protection appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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.