While we may not have adequate measurement, one of the lasting repercussions of shutdowns, closings, quarantines, and widespread work-from-homes due to the pandemic will be to propel a shift toward a B2C-type experience within B2B impacting how customers expect to be understood and communicated with. It will also compel chief marketing officers (CMO) and marketing operations leaders to re-examine the value proposition offered to their customers and demonstrate how agile they can be in responding to deep, widespread changes in their selling environments.

CMOs: success requires reinvention

A recent Forrester report examining the concerns of European business and technology leaders underscores the need for CMOs to increase their focus on customersensuring that the customer experience is always at the core of leadership, strategy, and operations. Reinvention of marketing leaders’ roles, their teams, and marketing functions will be the theme for successful CMOs in 2021.

The pandemic conditions that disrupted normal marketing and sales created disjointed customer experiences that translated into lost customers and decreased revenue. The challenge ahead is to utilize and optimize new ways to discover, nurture, and gain long-term loyalty from customers.

Forrester states that CMOs will re-emphasize customer loyalty and the programs that strengthen it. The study also predicts that the spend on loyalty and retention marketing will increase by 30 percent in 2021.

30 percent increase in loyalty and retention marketing spending in 2021Forrester Predictions 2021

Move confidently in an unsettled environment

The competitive advantage will go to marketing organizations that can quickly address the new realities and implement solutions that succeed both now and throughout the settling process that will occur in this unsettled environment. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, in concert with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 products and Microsoft Teams, offers powerful but easy-to-use technology to achieve:

• Greater personalization
• Optimized virtual events

Both capabilities are improving the ability of the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) agency to help New Zealand businesses compete around the globe.

An island nation extends its business reach

NZTE is a government agency with a mission to spur trade and help grow the island nation’s economy. The agency works across 50 countries and currently works with more than 6,000 businesses across all industries, ranging from food producers, tech startups, service providers, and manufacturers.

“By using the Dynamics 365 Marketing event management feature, we created a better customer experience and personalized the interactions, resulting in a 400 percent increase in engagement.”Jonathan Southee, Director Digital Delivery, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise

Deeper understanding for greater personalization

Data is the key to a deeper understanding. NZTE is using Dynamics 365 Marketing for email communications, campaigns, and a host of other marketing activities. The agency takes advantage of the Dynamics 365 common platform to make sure its data is fully utilized across Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service applications. This data is the foundation for the design of orchestrated customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing that help guide the customer and continually strengthen business relationships.

Dynamics 365 Marketing also extends the usefulness of customer data through integrated analytics. An organization such as NTZE can set the business goals for journeys and measure the progress toward those goals. Built-in analytics dashboards provide cross-journey insights and companies provide the ability to monitor customer journeys and channel KPIs in real time. To help organizations respond to changing circumstances during a campaign, Dynamics 365 Marketing provides customizable out- of-the-box templates to target segments and content to get the word out quickly.

In a period when many analysts, including Deloitte, raise concerns about uncertainties in CMO budgets, Dynamics 365 has also helped NZTE reduce operational costs. By consolidating its marketing, sales, event management, and other tools, NZTE has fewer systems to license and maintain. In fact, it allowed the agency to reduce the number of systems it supports to only one, reducing its overall licensing bill by NZD50,000.

Greater results from events

NTZE, including its regional teams, holds more than 300 events a year. In order to optimize how it runs events and utilize the data involved, it began using the Dynamics 365 Marketing event management capabilities. They created a customer-facing, web-based portal that synchs with its Dynamics 365 apps. Through myNZTE, customers can learn about and choose events they want to attend, register online, and access a wide variety of content. Jonathan Southlee, Director Digital Delivery for NTZE, observes that, “Our customers highly value our events, and it’s critical that we provide them with the best experience possible because events can lead directly to trade deals.”

CMOs: focus on customer loyalty

Building and strengthening customer relationships is imperative to a marketing organization’s success, especially in an environment where the customer base is dispersed and often distracted. Gartner reports that loyalty will be a key factor: 79 percent of CMOs surveyed will look to existing customers to fuel growth in a post-Covid-19 environment. Deeper customer understanding, customer journeys that reflect that understanding, and bringing people together without person-to-person interactions are essential to achieving that goal.

Learn more

• Gain an overview into Dynamics 365 Marketing and other products in Dynamics 365.
• Explore additional business continuity solutions and resources from Microsoft.
• Contact your Microsoft sales representative or our sales team.

The post Changing the customer experience for better customer connections appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the past, many sales organizations looked at customer relationship management applications simply as process-driven data repositories or systems of record. Sales reps spent hours manually entering data and had less time to build profitable relationships and actually sell. However, this approach has become increasingly untenable for businesses now that the norm is for savvy, modern buyers who expect sellers to engage with them in real time across almost every digital channel and platform.

Sales accelerator, a digital selling capability of Dynamics 365 Sales, helps sellers transform the way they work in today’s digital world. Instead of spending so much time on manual data input, sellers rely on the system to gather relevant information from multiple sources, create a prioritized pipeline, offer more context, and surface automated recommendations throughout the sales process. They’re also able to engage with customers on their preferred channels using integrated email and phone calling.

Example screenshot showing the intelligent work list and ‘up next’ widget in sales accelerator

Focus on the right deals with an intelligent work list

A typical seller starts the day working on multiple leads and opportunities, with several important tasks competing for their attention at once. With the sales accelerator, all the tasks and activities for their leads and opportunities that are due today, plus upcoming activities, are prioritized and organized in a work queue, enabling these sellers to be more efficient:

• Work from a prioritized list of customers. With a prioritized work list, sellers can identify the next best lead or opportunity to work on. The intelligent work list surfaces a sorted list of customers with associated next tasks due. Default sorting relies on a composite score, presenting the next best action based on organizational sales sequences.
• Tailor the intelligent list to meet your needs. Sort, filter, or group by entity attributes (main fields) to meet your needs, like reaching out to customers from a specific source.
• Identify new leads or opportunities in your pipeline. Identify whenever a new lead or opportunity enters the work list or is reassigned to you, so nothing is accidentally overlooked.

Learn more about how to prioritize the pipeline through work lists

Gain context on customers in one place

As sellers run through a long list of potential customers, they often struggle to gain a holistic view, including history of communications, customer needs, and special circumstances. However, having this type of view is necessary for crafting a relevant sales pitch that’s most likely to achieve a positive outcome. To address this issue, the sales accelerator helps sellers:

• Get all relevant information in a single place. Benefit from a comprehensive entity form that collects and surfaces customer information and insights from related entities to help craft winning messages for every communication.
• View historical context for every customer. See past and present activities via an “up next” widget, timeline, notes, and additional details through integrated data across the system, all available with tabs on the entity form.

Use sales sequences to ensure your sales team follows best practices

Consistent experiences and clear communications are a critical aspect of achieving successful outcomes. Best practices from sales enablement managers help to propagate and reinforce winning selling strategies. Infusing suggestions and insights throughout the sales motion helps to keep sellers on track, makes the most out of every customer interaction, and increases the likelihood of successful outcomes.

With sequences, sellers receive in-the-moment guidance toward the correct activity, on time, using an appropriate communication channel with the necessary content. Everyone on the team adheres to organizational best practices, while sales enablement managers are empowered to optimize sales practices for better outcomes through a frictionless cycle and can easily distribute sales strategies.

• Build sales sequences. Build sales sequences that reflect organizational best practices and sales strategies to help sellers in the moment.
• Guide sellers in the moment. Offer guidance to sellers toward the next step they need to take. Guidance includes recommending the most suitable channel to reach out to the customer and the best time.

Learn more about the “up next” widget for recommendations

Connect with customers across multiple channels

Sellers can communicate with contacts without leaving Dynamics 365 Sales, using integrated communications across multiple channels that leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework.

• Connect with customers easily via email or phone. Benefit from multichannel communications, connecting with customers via email or phone with an integrated dialer, without switching context.
• Compose emails with templates. Take advantage of email templates aligned with sales sequences to communicate simply and consistently with customers.
• Call customers with real-time insights using Microsoft Teams. Sellers can place customer calls using an integrated dialer and receive real-time conversation intelligence insights that will boost their productivity on top of those calls.

What’s next

We’re working on some exciting capabilities to be released in public preview in the coming months:

• Automatic assignment of leads
• Adaptive sequences for non-linear scenarios
• Monitoring sequence performance
• Automated process of capturing call summary with conversation intelligence

Get started with sales accelerator

The sales accelerator is part of Dynamics 365 Sales Premium licenses. Sign up for a free trial and get started with just a few clicks.

Learn how to enable the sales accelerator

Next steps

If you have already tried the sales accelerator and have feedback, questions, or new needs, please share your feedback on our Ideas Portal.

The post Enable digital selling with the sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Most of us know at least one college student who is attending some or all of their classes online to cope with current circumstances. With many schools operating primarily online or in a hybrid mode, millions of students are cut off from the traditional sources of support that colleges offer.

To help students navigate these challenges, we’re continuing to add new capabilities to the Dynamics 365 education accelerator, including a recent update that enables tele-advising to help students connect with their academic advisors online or in person, and an easy-to-read student success path that helps them monitor progress toward their academic goals.

The January 29, 2021 update includes:

• An updated student portal with an improved user interface and user experience.
• Advisor connection, allowing students to request in-person or online meetings with their advisor.
• Student success path to give students an at-a-glance view of their progress toward completion of program requirements.
• Personalized progress with details about their academics, such as current courses, assignments, appointments, and notifications.
• An advisor dashboard with a comprehensive view of top- and bottom-performing students, and upcoming appointments with students.

Student portal

Student success path

Delivering success through the partner ecosystem

Microsoft partners have already been helping higher education institutions make great use of these capabilities for their students.

The latest release of the accelerator focuses on ensuring that students continue to have access to advisors and key student success resources, even when they are not able to meet in person. Even when we all return to in person meetings, these tools will continue to ensure that advisors and students remain aligned and working to help each student achieve their goals.

—Dr. Jennifer Beyer, Vice President, Product Management, Anthology

With the January 2021 release, the Dynamics 365 education accelerator has truly transformed into a usable, functional and relevant extension of the Microsoft Dataverse for partners like the Frequency Foundry to continue to adopt into our ISV solutions.

With the introduction of features such as tele-advising, assisting students in understanding their graduation goals through the success path, and the updated student portal, the higher education accelerator provides a solid data architecture foundation for our CRM solution, greymatter.

With these great additions, we’ve been able to successfully extend our offering from our niche higher education marketplace to school districts with greymatter for K12. We’re stoked about the possibilities for us and for what it means for our higher education and K-12 customers.

—Shekar Kadaba, Chief Experience Officer | Chief Product Officer, Frequency Foundry

Ready to build your own education solution?

The education accelerator takes the unified data approach of Microsoft Power Platform a step further to help you build solutions for schools more quickly. To get started, download the education accelerator, which includes a higher education component and a K-12 component, from AppSource.

Read the documentation to learn more, or reach out to our team with your questions.

The post Support student success with the Dynamics 365 education accelerator appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As today’s world expands with a massive wealth of customer information gleaned from brand interactions, purchases, services, and experiencestruly understanding your customers is of the upmost importance. The traditional approach of analyzing one piece of purchase data or one simple survey is insufficient for businesses looking to make an impact on the bottom line. With more information comes more opportunity to increase sales with effective marketing, but it also comes with a challenge: privacy.

According to a 2020 study conducted by Forrester¹, protecting customers’ personal information and privacy was the top priority for marketing decision makers when considering customer analytics.

Today, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, we are empowering organizations to collect direct customer feedback through semi-anonymous surveys and keep personal information anonymous.

Semi-anonymous surveys

Gathering and tracking customer metrics is critical for a business to build better customer experiences and respond in the moments that matter. With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, organizations can send direct surveys and collect customer feedback, then analyze it using powerful, built-in artificial intelligence to uncover key customer insights. Now, semi-anonymous surveys create peace of mind for customers when responding to surveys so you can receive more reliable feedback while protecting privacy.

Not only do semi-anonymous surveys enable you to understand your customers, but they can also be an important tool in listening to your employees. With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, you can capture internal feedback and monitor responses only by title, department, and work location, keeping personal identifiers out.

Watch the video below for additional details on how to collect anonymous employee feedback with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

The new semi-anonymous survey feature allows organizations to select which fields they want to keep anonymous, and which fields to track. For example, you can select to keep relevant location such as location of purchase but exclude personal information such as name and email. This gives organizations even more power managing their data. With rich data now at organizations’ fingertips, departments can align on marketing decisions to build better experiences and lifelong fans.

The value of customer data

Your business is only as successful as your understanding of your customers and data.

A Forrester study in 2018² found that data-driven organizations are growing at an average of 30 percent or more annually.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, the customer understanding process is simplified with easy-to-use survey creation, data analysis, integration with your other applications, and automatic notifications so you can meet the customer at every moment. Now, with added functionality for survey reminders, you can be sure to capture all relevant feedback and information to uncover rich insights.

Ultimately, data-driven and customer-centric organizations are at a competitive advantage because they understand the value of how better insights lead to more sales. Many organizations are missing the key piece of an easy-to-use direct feedback management solution, holding them back from creating a holistic view of the customer and maximizing data’s value. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers a complete understanding of your data, linking together direct and indirect feedback directly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and enabling better customer experiences.

Get started today

Customer privacy is key when collecting data and making decisions. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice empowers you to bridge the gap between uncovering key customer insights and protecting personal information, allowing you to build meaningful relationships for long-term success. With unified customer profiles linked across your business applications, customer-first and employee-first organizations can act quickly on feedback and drive great experiences.

Gain an overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

Ready to start connecting with your customers and listening to your employees? Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Voice.

¹Forrester Analytics, Business Technographics Marketing Survey, 2020.

²Brian Hopkins, James McCormick, and Ted Schadler, Insights-Driven Businesses Set the Pace for Global Growth, Forrester, October 19, 2018.

The post How you can collect feedback and protect customer information appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.