In the ever-evolving landscape of generative AI, a copilot isn’t just a companion that makes tasks that you’re already doing at work easier, but it’s quickly becoming a transformative force reshaping the very core of how things are done.

After shipping 13 publicly available Microsoft Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that enable marketing teams to ask Copilot questions about their data, receive ideas for content from key points they want to make, define audiences and journeys in everyday words, understand their data quality, or get a summarized answer from multiple sources on how to use a feature within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (to name a few), we realized that Copilot can help our marketing teams not just with tasks, but can completely change their workflow.  

This workflow in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will enable marketers to deliver unparalleled customer experiences (CXs). This could encompass a myriad of scenarios, from a marketing campaign for a new product or promotion, to managing how companies interact with their customers in key moments at scale.

The new Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

The new Copilot in Customer Insights in now available in preview.

Register and try it

Take for example a theme park—as customers scan their tickets to ride attractions, they can receive personalized messages and notifications across their preferred channels be it: in-app, web, text message, or email. This not only enhances customer experience by making the most out of their visit but also enables the company to maximize customer spending.

Companies often spend a tremendous amount of time building these campaigns and experiences. With the growing demand for digital and mobile experiences, coupled with the need to use customer data from an expanding array of disconnected systems to personalize and trigger the experiences, the time and cost to deliver continues to rise.

Our conversations with numerous companies illuminated a common pain point—the process to deliver a CX project or campaign can extend from 12 to 15 weeks (about three and a half months). There are no signs this will decrease in length.

It’s not surprising why. The current marketing workflow resembles a complex team sport, requiring multiple contributors focused on different aspects—audience, journey, content, and the delivery channel.

Most teams create campaigns starting with a blank canvas; assembling, testing, and going live; then tracking the analytics to ensure everything is going well and any drop-off points are addressed. The complexity and coordination across people affect more than the time to market, it affects the quality and level of personalization delivered to the end customer.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will completely change the game.

“At Campari Group, we’re excited by the opportunities these new Copilot capabilities will bring us to streamline our digital marketing processes—driving collaboration and enhancing our ability to deliver a truly engaging consumer experience, whilst staying one step ahead of the competition!”

David Hand – Global IT Manager, CRM, Campari

Companies have data that ground Copilot in brand styles, tone, language, and imagery. Briefs contain a lot of key information about the intent, success, branding, and key points. Over time, data from prior projects or campaigns will drive the continuous improvement of business results.

Armed with this data, what if you could describe the outcomes you want,
and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights could take the lead?

Our vision has four key areas of innovation:

1. We’re removing complex UIs that are difficult to navigate and use, instead Copilot will provide dynamic user experiences (UX) that come to you based on what you are trying to achieve. Examples of this are the dynamic project board and analytics.
2. Instead of marketers having to start from a word or pixel for every element of the project or campaign, Copilot provides data-driven suggestions that allows you to curate your project instead of having to create every piece. Everything starts connected and Copilot keeps it connected and in sync making any downstream changes saving the marketer time and eliminating a class of errors due to partial changes. Choose from suggested images, emails, audiences, journeys, and more instead of having to create each element from scratch. We don’t believe any of the suggestions will be 100% of what the marketing team needs, what we do know is that even if it’s only 60% the way there, it will save 60% of the time needed to launch the project.
3. We’re removing the constraint of resources limiting the quality of experience and depth of personalization. Instead of personalizing to four cohorts, Copilot will personalize to 64 cohorts or more. But then, you need confidence in what you’re delivering to customers. We are innovating in new UX and Copilot capabilities that will allow marketing teams to review and approve at Copilot scale where instead of having to review 100 variations across the journey, Copilot will tell you the key variations to review and tweak and make corrections on your behalf.
4. Today, after a project or campaign goes live, you need to assign a person to track the analytics and find where customers are dropping off. That person then needs to work with the right people to improve the results. Now, Copilot can track the analytics on behalf of the marketing team and proactively notify of optimizations with suggested options that allow the team to curate rather than create and deliver business success.

We’re partnering with Typeface to deliver this vision, and it plays a key role in enabling scaling on-brand multimodal content personalization in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Typeface understands your brand in depth and utilizes that understanding to deliver text and images that align to companies’ brand guidelines enabling one-on-one personalization with on-brand images at a scale that wasn’t viable in terms of time and cost before.

“Copilot holds the potential to be a real game-changer. Its ability to seamlessly align our business goals with community values has the potential to save us valuable time on internal processes. This efficiency translates to quicker iterations and more frequent connections with our audience. It’s not just shaping up to be a tool but a strategic advantage.”

Martin Nicholson – Digital Engagement Manager,  Rare Ltd.,
Xbox – Sea of Thieves

This innovation is not years away, not months, not even weeks. Today, we’re happy to announce that our first public preview focusing on curation rather than creation is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in English, in all regions. Sign up to be one of the first to preview and experience the new capabilities.

We invite you to explore this transformative journey as Copilot takes the reins, opening a new era in marketing workflows. Join us in redefining how work gets done.

Learn more:

• Register and access Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Watch our latest webinar on Streamlining Marketing with AI in Microsoft Copilot!
• Watch the New Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Read the release note on Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Check the release W1 2024 video for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Discover more about Typeface.
• Read Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

The post Revolutionizing marketing workflows with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Getting customer signoff on a completed Work Order is a key job to be done for any service technician. Earlier this year, Dynamics 365 Field Service released a new and improved signature control to capture customer signatures on mobile devices. It supports drawing a signature on the screen as well as typing a name in lieu of a drawn signature. This enhancement was a key customer request, and also helps the scenario to be more accessible for our users.

How it works

Technicians in the field can open the form that has been configured to capture the customer signature on the Field Service mobile app and hand over the device to the customer.

Drawing the signature on the screen

Technicians will then be able to choose how they want to enter the signature, either drawing it on the screen with their finger or stylus pen, or by typing it on the keyboard.

Typing the signature using keyboard

How to configure a form to add the control

If you use default forms provided by Microsoft, the existing signature controls have already been updated, and there’s no action needed to configure it.

For example, the Booking and Work Order Form in the Bookable Resource Booking entity, contains the Signature field in the Notes tab. By opening this form in Power Apps, you find the associated component Signature Control

Add the signature control to a custom form

Follow these steps to add the new control to a custom form.

• Edit a custom form and add the Signature field (or your custom Multiline text field where you store the customer signature) on your form. Optionally, hide the label, so the control can use all the available space on screen.

• Expand the Components section at the bottom of the field detail pane and add the Signature Control component.

• If the Signature Control is not in the list, select Get more components.

Note:  The new Signature Control replaces the Pen input control.

• Select the Signature Control in the list of controls to add it.

• Save and Publish your form to make it available to your technicians.

We hope that these new enhancements in Field Service mobile will make your work even more productive. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on how to improve the product. Please feel free to leave comments in the Dynamics 365 Community Forum or suggest features in the Ideas portal.  

The post Capture customer signatures with the new Signature control in Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s dynamic business environment, efficient resource allocation and planning are paramount for the success of any organization. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service brings a powerful forecasting feature that empowers businesses to predict and manage their service volumes and agent demands effectively. Leveraging AI-based algorithms, this intelligent forecasting model runs behind the scenes, analyzing historical data and trends to provide accurate predictions. With the ability to forecast both volume and agent demand, organizations can streamline their operations, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction. This blog post focuses on volume forecasting for cases and conversations as well as agent forecasting for conversations. 

Front-office and back-office forecasting 

Dynamics 365 Customer Service recognizes the diverse nature of service channels, distinguishing between front office and back-office operations. Front office channels encompass voice, chat, email, messaging, and social channels, representing direct interactions with customers referred to as conversations in Dynamics 365. Back-office operations, on the other hand, refer to cases that require internal processing and resolution. Customer Service offers flexibility in forecasting front-office, back-office, or blended agents. This capability enables organizations to tailor their strategies to the specific needs of each operational area, ensuring optimal resource utilization and service delivery. 

Volume forecasting 

Forecasting provides daily forecasts for case and conversation volumes for up to six months into the future. Daily forecasts enable organizations to anticipate and prepare for fluctuations in service demand. Additionally, the system offers intraday forecasts at 15-minute intervals. Intraday forecasts allow for granular planning up to six weeks ahead. This level of foresight empowers businesses to allocate resources efficiently, ensuring optimal service levels. 

Agent Forecasting 

In addition to volume forecasting, organizations can forecast agent demand for conversations on a daily interval for up to six months into the future. Like volume forecasting, the system provides intraday forecasts at 15-minute intervals, allowing for precise resource allocation and scheduling. 

Incorporating service-level metrics 

The feature considers operational metrics such as service level, shrinkage, and concurrency when forecasting agent demand. By considering these factors, organizations can ensure that the agent capacity forecast aligns with service level agreements and operational constraints, maximizing efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

Auto-detection of seasonality 

By analyzing historical traffic patterns, our AI model automatically detects seasonality, enabling more accurate forecasts. This feature helps organizations adapt their operations to seasonal variations in service demand. Addressing these variations helps organizations maintain high service levels regardless of fluctuations in customer activity. 

Auto-detection of holidays 

Our forecasting model utilizes historical traffic patterns to automatically identify holidays, which leads to more precise predictions. This functionality assists organizations in adjusting their operations according to holiday-related changes in service demand across various regions, guaranteeing that they can maintain optimal service levels despite fluctuations in customer activity during holidays. 

Forecast vs. actual charts 

User-friendly charts are available to visually represent service volume and agent demand forecasts alongside actual performance across daily, weekly, and monthly intervals for up to six months. This comparison enables organizations to assess the accuracy of their forecasts and identify areas for improvement.

Customizable slicing and exporting 

The flexibility of forecasting extends to its ability to slice forecast data by channels and queues, providing insights tailored to specific operational needs. Moreover, users can export forecast data into a spreadsheet for further analysis or integration with other tools, enhancing the usability and accessibility of the forecasting feature. 

Key considerations for accuracy 

We recommend the following criteria for using historical data to generate accurate forecasts. 

Non-sparse data: The dataset contains information for every day, ensuring that there isn’t missing or incomplete data. Each day has a recorded volume, providing a comprehensive set of observations. 

Clear weekly pattern: The data shows a weekly pattern, wherein the volume consistently follows a specific trend. For instance, weekends consistently have low volumes, while workdays show higher volumes, and vice versa. This pattern helps establish a reliable basis for forecasting. 

Volume-based accuracy: If the criteria are met, the forecast quality improves with larger volume inputs. Higher volumes of data contribute to a more accurate and robust forecast. 

Absence of level shift: Recent days and future periods don’t experience any sudden or significant shifts in volume levels. This absence of sudden changes ensures that the historical patterns stay relevant and dependable for forecasting purposes. 

Longer historical data set: If all the above criteria are met, a longer history of data further improves the forecast accuracy. A greater historical data set provides a more comprehensive understanding of the patterns and trends over time. With an extended history, the forecast model can capture and incorporate more variations, leading to more accurate predictions. 

Weighting recent forecast accuracy: When considering future periods, understand the forecast’s accuracy tends to be higher for more immediate timeframes. As time progresses, the certainty and precision of the forecast may decrease. Therefore, the most recent forecast should be given more weight and considered to have better accuracy compared to future forecasts. 

Stay ahead of the curve

In conclusion, forecasting offers a comprehensive solution for predicting support volumes and agent demand, empowering organizations to optimize their operations and enhance customer satisfaction. With daily and intraday forecasts, and auto-detection of seasonality, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and agility in their service delivery. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations are driving success and growth through effective resource planning and management. 

Learn more about forecasting

To learn more about forecasting, read the documentation: Forecast agent, case, and conversation volumes in Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

The post Maximize efficiency with forecasting in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Great customer service is absolutely critical to any organization’s success. Today, organizations require modern solutions that can help them support customers on the channels and touchpoints of their choice, by providing customers with self-service options and arming customer support agents with access to information and experts to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. We are pleased to share the results of a March 2024 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact^TM (TEI) Study commissioned by Microsoft. Forrester calculates Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered benefits of $14.70 million over three years to a composite organization. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315% with a payback period of less than six months.

Methodology and purpose

Forrester’s TEI study is a methodology developed specifically to assist companies with the complexities of procuring technology solutions. The TEI study also aids technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value proposition. To these ends, the TEI study discussed here provides a framework for business-decision-makers to assess the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Ultimately, the financial impact of the 2023 study is a projection for a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses that currently use Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These businesses’ experiences and the interview results are aggregated to create a composite organization to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks. For this study, the composite organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic organization that operates at multiple locations around the world. It has 5,000 employees total, and 500 of those are customer support agents who support a growing customer base. Each agent works an average of six hours a day and spends 75% of that time on support interactions.

Continue reading to learn what key challenges the composite organization faces and the study’s critical findings.

Key challenges

In the interviews conducted for this TEI study, the organizations shared the following common challenges:

• A disparate stack of aging customer support and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
• Siloed customer data, which led to suboptimal support.
• Increasing support capacity requirements.
• An inconsistent and one-sized customer experience.

With these challenges top of mind, the organizations wanted to find and invest in a customer service solution that could:

• Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams.
• Deliver automation and AI-driven insights to the customer support function to enable agents to deliver a better support experience while limiting the requirements for additional support agents.
• Help establish and curate a knowledgebase to help agents further support the customer experience.

Key findings

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides service organizations’ agents the tools they need to deliver faster, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service simplifies and automates support agent processes with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service while delivering faster support experiences to organizations’ customers, which can improve customer satisfaction and lead to additional revenue and profit.

Forrester’s study revealed four quantifiable impact areas: improved handling times leading to greater agent productivity, improvements to first-call resolution and misrouted calls, improvement to sales pipeline generation leading to revenue increases, and cost savings after retiring other customer service solutions.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas below to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value for customer support organizations.

Reduced call handling time by 40%

Interviewees noted several inefficiencies across their organizations’ previous customer service solutions that increased agents’ interaction time with customers:

• Multiple solutions for different support functions, leading to siloed customer data and relevant support information.
• Lack of visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and resolution.
• A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing.
• No automation for common support tasks.

Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled their organizations to automate manual aspects of their agents’ daily responsibilities, which helped to reduce the time they spent searching for customer information and best practices. Because agents were able to have shorter, more efficient interactions with customers, the composite organization saved an average of 468 hours per agent each year.

Improved first-call resolution by 20%—and decreased misroutes by 15%

With their legacy customer support tools, agents at the study’s participant organizations had no easily accessible customer knowledge base with records of common support issues. They also had no easy way to locate specialists who could help resolve issues, so calls were frequently misrouted to the wrong specialists.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they found they could automatically route support cases to the best specialists depending on the nature of the case. This helped them to both increase first-call resolution rates by 20% and shorten the overall time of interactions. They also decreased the times agents misrouted calls to the wrong specialists by 15%. Overall, the composite organization’s agents saved up to 292 hours per year.

Increased sales pipeline generation to drive additional profitability

Some interviewees shared revenue impact to their organizations’ revenue based on the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. A CRM product manager at a travel and hospitality organization explained that because Dynamics 365 Customer service automates the majority of searches performed by agents, they can spend more time on revenue-linked interactions. Another interviewee at a manufacturing organization said that customer information and leads are shared between support agents using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling salespeople to see customer interactions and identify opportunities for new revenue.

Saved up to $978,000 in costs on retired customer service solution(s)

By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, participant organizations were able to retire their previous customer service solutions, saving costs on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. Interviewees from one manufacturing organization said their company reclaimed nearly $100,000 annually by decommissioning two third-party customer service solutions made redundant by Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Other benefits

Forrester Consulting Total Impact Study

See the total economic impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Read here

Study participants mentioned additional benefits to their organizations that were not quantified for this report, including:

• Integration with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Power BI for discovering and predicting common support issues and Teams for easy collaboration between support agents and specialists to help resolve issues.
• An improved customer support experience with reductions in key support metrics such as handle time, hold time, and resolution rates—and the ability to deliver faster, more personalized, and more nuanced support experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Next steps

Forrester’s TEI study of Dynamics 365 Customer Service found four primary quantifiable impact areas and several soft benefits. Taken together, the study found that Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered a total economic impact of $14.7 million in financial savings over three years. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315%.

To get a closer look at the study’s results and a better understanding of how Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help your organization, download and read the full study: The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

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