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In today’s fast-paced market, agility is the key to success. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need an AI solution that helps them work smarter.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s world, sellers struggle to meet their goals due to competing priorities, manual processes and increased customer expectations. Most spend their time on administrative and non-selling tasks. However, it’s now the age of AI. Agents help free up sellers’ time to focus on higher value activities, engaging customers and moving them through sales cycles faster. For example, the recently announced Sales Qualification Agent (available soon in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) automatically researches and prioritizes inbound leads and develops personalized sales emails to initiate sales conversations.
This week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced new capabilities to further enhance agents in Dynamics 365 Sales by grounding them in your company’s unique data and taxonomy, as well as enriching the agents’ knowledge with third-party data. This allows the agent to assess a lead’s intent to buy with greater precision, while saving sellers precious time they may currently spend piecing together information from disparate sources. These capabilities will be rolling out in early 2025.
Enhance Copilot and agents with your business terminology and knowledge sources
Organizations will be able to enhance their interactions with Copilot and agents by training them to understand and use specific business acronyms and terms through a customized glossary. This means tailoring AI to the unique language and terminology of a particular business or industry, improving interactions with Copilot and enabling agents to perform tasks on your behalf with higher relevancy.
For example, if a company frequently uses the acronym “TCV” to refer to “total contract value,” they can train the agent to recognize and use this term instead of the more generic “estimated revenue for opportunities.” This customization ensures that the agent’s work aligns with the company’s internal language, improving communication and reducing misunderstandings.
Additionally, organizations will be able to add various knowledge sources to Copilot and agents, such as documents created in Word or Excel, files from SharePoint and tables from databases and lake houses such as Microsoft Fabric or Azure SQL, to complement the Sales data in Dataverse. Agents are built on Microsoft Copilot Studio, which announced new knowledge integrations this week at Ignite and will continue expanding the portfolio–meaning access to even more options over time. This allows the agent to leverage the full power of your organizational data, no matter where it is stored or which apps you use.
By incorporating a business-specific glossary and relevant knowledge sources, the agent becomes more powerful, capable of understanding and responding in a way that is consistent with the company’s unique terminology and data needs.
Enrich your CRM with data from third party enrichment providers
Integrations with third-party data providers and Dynamics 365 Sales, as listed on AppSource, provide data and insights to augment the agents’ customer understanding beyond conventional sources.
We announced a new data integration with Clay, a leading enrichment and orchestration provider. Clay combines first-party data with over 100 enrichment providers and an AI research agent, maximizing data coverage to create a more comprehensive view of the customer.
Through the integration between Microsoft and Clay, Dynamics 365 Sales customers can add insights that would typically not be available in first party sources, such as valuation of private companies, headcount, key competitors and more. With these additional insights seamlessly synced back to Dynamics 365 Sales, agents can perform tasks with more precision, such as identifying leads that fit your ideal customer profile or their intent to buy.
We’ve designed this integration to be user-friendly and efficient. Here’s how it works:
Setting Up Connection: You can easily connect Dynamics 365 Sales to Clay using the out-of-the-box integration and select the specific data tables and fields you want to enrich.
Populating Insights: Once set up, you can enrich your selected Dynamics tables with a variety of insights that can help your sales teams – either from one of 100+ data providers or from scraping public web sources through Clay’s AI agent.
Automatic Synchronization: The enriched data is then synchronized back to Dynamics 365 Sales automatically, ensuring that your agents always have access to accurate and up-to-date information.
Clay joins other integrations already available on Microsoft’s AppSource that can similarly augment your first party data. While data-hungry autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 Sales work tirelessly on behalf of your sales team to reduce time spent while increasing the number of closed deals, these integrations feed unique insights to them to power even the most complex sales playbooks.
Summary
In summary, you can customize your agent to meet your business needs by integrating relevant data sources that are bespoke to your business. You can configure the agent to use your business-specific terminology and response styles, ensuring it aligns with your internal language. Finally, enrich your data with one of the many data enrichment integrations and ensure a perfectly optimized agent for your requirements.
Take the next step
Today’s sellers need the right data and tools to find, qualify, and close deals – all while offering personalized engagement at every step. The innovations introduced this week at Microsoft Ignite can not only help sellers with time-consuming sales activities but also provide access to actionable insights and superior agent performance to build stronger customer relationships and win more business.
To learn more about these updates and how they can benefit your organization, be sure to explore the resources below:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is becoming a daily habit for people around the world—already, nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using it. Dow anticipates that Copilot will save it millions of dollars on shipping operations in the first year; at Bank of Queensland Group, 70% of users are saving two and a half to five hours per week; Eaton is speeding up internal documentation processes by 83%; and Accenture is going big, rolling out Copilot to 100,000 employees.
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Sellers often need to manage numerous long documents to understand customers’ unique requirements and deliver the personalized attention advancing deals. These documents require sellers to invest significant time reviewing and understanding them, leaving sales team less time for their customers. With the summarization capabilities provided by Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can now obtain pertinent details from sales documents in minutes. Sellers quickly gain insights into customer requirements, budget details, timelines, and main decision makers, enabling them to prepare for prospect meetings more effectively and engage in more informed and meaningful conversations.
Close deals faster with seller-specific document summary
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales can create summaries of sales documents that include insights specific to your sales team’s needs. For example, sellers can quickly get details about the issuing organization, items to be procured, deadlines and timelines for submitting a proposal, contact information and meetings with stakeholders mentioned in the document, and other important information needed to move a deal forward, such as compliance and legal considerations.
Sellers can ask Copilot to summarize sales documents stored in SharePoint or associated with any lead, contact, opportunity, and account in Dynamics 365 Sales.
Next steps
Learn more about summarizing documents linked to records in Dynamics 365 Sales.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
For Microsoft and our customers, work is changing at the speed of AI. To help you stay ahead, we’ll share monthly highlights of new Microsoft Copilot innovations, plus the latest from our customers on how they’re getting the most value from Copilot.
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Revolutionizing Your Scheduling Experience
Welcome to the next chapter in scheduling. Today, we are thrilled to unveil the dramatically enhanced Schedule Board on Universal Resource Scheduling.
A Seamless Transition
At the core of this update, we are moving from the legacy ExtJS to a modern React component for the schedule board. Our guiding principle for this upgrade has been visual parity. The Resource panel, Requirements panel, Filters, and Views are all exactly as you know and love. But look closer, and you’ll discover the subtle enhancements we’ve made based on your valued feedback.
Performance You’ll Feel
You’ll notice that everything feels a little bit snappier, and that’s because it is! A more efficient React infrastructure means
a 30% reduction in load times when navigating through pages in the resource panel
a 40% reduction in load times when switching views
a 55% reduction in load times when saving bookings
a staggering 68% reduction in load times when switching tabs
and more.
This isn’t just performance improvement; it’s a performance revolution.
Intuitive Usability Enhancements
We’ve heard your feedback and incorporated your top requested usability improvements:
1) Days of the Week: With the new React board, you can now filter which days of the week you want to have displayed on your board’s hourly view. For example, if your technicians only work Monday to Friday, you can exclude the non-working days Saturday and Sunday for a more space-efficient board.
2) Reorder Tabs Control: Another top request from you was the ability to reorder tabs. For example, you can now prioritize your frequently used tab to load first when you open the schedule board. You can also multi-select more than one tab and move them all at once! This additional flexibility streamlines your day-to-day operations, making your workflow smoother and more intuitive.
3) Ellipsis control: In the past, your dispatchers may not have known that there was other capabilities off the resource panel such as View resource card or Get driving directions. Now with the new ellipsis (3 dot) control, they can access these options quickly and intuitively.
4) Dayline: On the previous schedule board, locating your current time and day position on a dense board was be a challenge. The new dayline makes it easier than ever to navigate the schedule board with precision and ease.
Experience the Next Chapter Today
The new Schedule Board on Universal Resource Scheduling is not just an upgrade; it’s a transformation. It’s faster, smarter, and more flexible, all while maintaining the familiarity you rely on. We can’t wait for you to experience the new level of efficiency and usability it brings to your scheduling tasks.
Join us in embracing this leap forward on 1 Nov 2024. Your scheduling, reimagined.
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