This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Over the past year, generative AI has seen tremendous growth in popularity and is increasingly being adopted by people and organizations. At Microsoft, we are deeply focused on minimizing the risks of harmful use of these technologies and are committed to keeping these tools even more reliable and safer.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As Microsoft continues to invest in AI technologies across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, many enterprise organizations are rapidly adopting Copilot in Microsoft apps such as Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Unlike solutions in other business areas, customer service solutions are particularly sensitive for a couple of reasons.
First, the customer service team acts as the organization’s frontline, dealing directly with customer inquiries and issues. Moreover, most interactions between support agents and customers occur in real-time, leaving zero tolerance for error. Any customer frustration can easily impact the customer satisfaction rate.
Additionally, introducing a new tool like Copilot in Customer Service to customer service agents must be well-tested and validated. In the era of AI and generative AI, organizations face the critical question of how to build their testing strategy for these innovative tools.
Copilot business value
Before delving into Copilot test cases, let’s quickly discuss the business value of Copilot in Customer Service. Copilot and AI features in the customer service world act as an agent assistant. Copilot helps agents with tasks such as retrieving information from the knowledge base, drafting emails, or providing quick summaries of customer conversations or cases with long threads, multiple notes, and emails.
Leveraging Copilot in Customer Service brings quick wins to the business. For instance, reduced handle times for customer requests allow agents to focus on core tasks. And since agents can provide more accurate and timely responses, organizations see improved customer satisfaction levels.
A closer look at each Copilot feature reveals the need for agent review before presenting any information to the customer. Take, for example, the case summary feature. A disclaimer indicates that this is an AI-generated summary, emphasizing the need to “Make sure it’s appropriate and accurate before using it.” This highlights the critical role of human oversight in ensuring the accuracy and appropriateness of AI-generated content. It reinforces the value of Copilot as a supportive tool rather than a replacement for human judgment and expertise.
Defining success metrics
Having covered the basics, it’s crucial to establish a success matrix for implementing Copilot in Customer Service. Most enterprise customers follow a standard process for introducing new tools or features. While this approach is recommended and applicable to almost all new Dynamics 365 features, the success criteria for Copilot should address several specific factors, due to its unique functionalities and impact:
Time efficiency: Measure the amount of time Copilot saves agents in performing their tasks. This can be quantified by comparing the time taken to complete tasks with and without the assistance of Copilot.
Relevance and helpfulness of responses: Evaluating Copilot’s responses isn’t as straightforward as saying they’re right or wrong. Measure their effectiveness with a percentage that shows how relevant and helpful these responses really are. When it comes to measuring Copilot’s impact, we look at it like this:
Totally irrelevant: Assistance that does not address the agent’s inquiry at all, providing no useful information for handling customer queries.
Partially helpful: Responses that offer some relevant information but may not fully equip the agent to resolve the customer’s issue, possibly requiring further clarification or additional resources.
Mostly helpful: Assistance that is largely on point, providing substantial information and guidance towards resolving the inquiry, with minimal need for further action.
Completely helpful: Responses that fully equip the agent with the necessary information and resources to address and resolve the customer’s issue without any need for additional support or clarification.
Agent satisfaction and ease of use: Assess how user-friendly and intuitive Copilot is for customer service agents. Agent satisfaction with the tool can be a key indicator of its usability and effectiveness in a real-world setting.
Impact on customer satisfaction: Monitor changes in customer satisfaction metrics. You can do this through surveys or analyzing customer feedback. See if there is a noticeable improvement due to the implementation of Copilot.
Return on investment: Consider the overall costs versus the benefits of implementing Copilot. This evaluation is crucial, as it is important to test and evaluate any feature intended for user adoption. Remember, Copilot is not a new product but a feature within Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It incurs no extra cost for most customers.
Start your Copilot journey with confidence
The best way to test and measure Copilot’s success is through real scenarios, real agents, and real customers in a production environment. This is why we recommend starting quickly with a pilot or initial phase and gradually rolling out Copilot capabilities. You can closely monitor the results and feedback during the initial phase.
We use the name ‘Copilot’ and not ‘Autopilot’ for a good reason. Essentially, Copilot in Customer Service acts as an assistant to the agents. While it proves useful in some situations, there are instances when questions or requests become too complex, requiring human expertise. However, even in these scenarios, business operations continue seamlessly, thanks to the human agents.
In Customer Service, think of each Copilot feature as being in one of two categories: those that do not rely on the knowledge base and those that do.
The easiest way to begin is with the first category, which includes summarization features. This category has minimal risk and requires less change management effort. This article provides in-depth information on this.
Test and optimize Copilot
A pilot phase is vital for testing Copilot, where you will document the results and collect feedback from your agents. The best candidates for the pilot phase are the highly skilled agents. They have the expertise to deal with customer questions efficiently, allowing them to give thorough feedback without affecting the normal call center functions. Moreover, they help ensure the proper use of Copilot, avoiding any incorrect or unverified information being passed from Copilot to customers.
During the pilot phase, you need to keep track of your success metrics and aim for ongoing improvement. This mainly involves improving the knowledge base articles. Copilot in Customer Service is not a magic tool; its performance depends on the quality of the information it can access. Providing Copilot with clear and complete knowledge articles will help it to produce clear and correct results.
Microsoft is heavily investing in integrating AI capabilities into Dynamics 365. Organizations with live implementations of Dynamics 365 Customer Service should view this as an opportunity to enhance their customer service operations. While testing remains essential, they should not hesitate to deploy these native capabilities in production mode, especially since Copilot in Customer Service comes without any extra licensing costs.
Generative AI is evolving rapidly, and organizations that start to adopt and utilize it early will secure a competitive advantage in the future!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The pace of business operations continues to accelerate daily, presenting an ongoing challenge for employees who increasingly struggle to keep up. They often find themselves overwhelmed by the very tools designed to enhance their work, leading to frequent switching between various documents, apps, and websites as they hunt for data.
Harvard Business Review addresses this issue in its article How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications?, where it describes the prevalent “swivel chair” approach to work, which has become the norm for most employees. This is primarily because many software applications weren’t originally designed to connect with each other. Consequently, employees often serve as the connective tissue bridging the gap between these disparate applications. They engage in manual processes of fetching, transforming, and submitting data from one system to another, constantly shifting between apps. This practice is both time-consuming and mentally draining.
The true cost of this constant app-switching becomes apparent when we consider that the average user toggles between different apps nearly 1,200 times each day, spending approximately four hours per week reorienting themselves after switching to a new application. Annually, this adds up to a staggering five working weeks, accounting for a significant 9% of their total work time.1
What’s the solution to this productivity-sapping dilemma? The answer lies in connecting business systems and productivity tools, providing employees with easy access to the information they need without switching between applications. Seamless sharing of data across tools and applications not only simplifies access for employees but also lays the foundation for AI and Microsoft Copilot to offer proactive insights and assistance within their everyday tools.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft 365, businesses can establish a unified experience where data seamlessly connects with productivity apps including Excel, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. This connectivity ensures that employees can access timely information, gain valuable insights, and collaborate directly within the tools they use daily—all without the need to switch between applications.
By harnessing connected solutions powered by real-time data, businesses can begin to unlock the full potential of AI-enabled productivity with Microsoft Copilot. With Copilot, businesses can automate tasks and guide users through assisted workflows—saving them time, improving collaboration, enhancing decision-making, and allowing employees to focus on what truly matters—driving business success.
More collaboration with Business Central and Teams
Modern workplaces are challenged by fragmented data and communication tools—employees often find themselves juggling various apps and struggling to disseminate timely information, making collaboration difficult. With Teams connected to Business Central, your organization can efficiently share and interact with real-time data, transforming Teams into a centralized hub for your daily operations.
With Business Central and Teams, employees can:
Make data accessible and collaborative. With Teams connected to Business Central, timely data can be shared in group chats or channels, transforming Teams into the hub for all and daily operations that unite employees, processes, and the data they need to work together.
Take action from the app they prefer. From Business Central, quickly share data to jumpstart conversations in Teams. From Teams, stay in the flow of work by viewing and editing business data without having to switch apps.
Streamline collaboration across departments. Empower each department to self-serve by unlocking the data they need to work better together—even without a Business Central license. Get read-only access to Business Central data in Teams at no additional cost with your Microsoft 365 license.
More productivity with Business Central and Excel
Employees often find themselves working in specific applications that align with their roles and responsibilities. For finance and operations teams, Excel is a fundamental tool that plays a pivotal role in their daily tasks. Enabling these teams to maximize their productivity within their preferred application can lead to significant productivity gains.
With Business Central and Excel, employees can:
Simplify daily tasks. Export any Business Central data to an Excel worksheet to capture data snapshots or share for review. Save time by updating records in bulk in Excel and uploading the revised records to Business Central with just a few clicks.
Go from raw data to insights faster. Get timely operational insights from Business Central as Excel reports and adapt quickly by customizing report layouts as Excel worksheets. Easily analyze transactions and business data using pivot tables, charts, and calculations to get answers quickly.
Collaborate in the tools where teams work best. Streamline team-based activities like budgeting and planning with multi-player co-authorship and functionality. Create, edit, and access Excel documents as a team, then publish the final outcomes back to Business Central.
More impact with Business Central and Outlook
At the core of most businesses lies the unwavering commitment to deliver exceptional products and services to its customers. To achieve this goal, businesses must foster strong and meaningful relationships with their clients, vendors, and stakeholders. With Business Central and Outlook working together, employees gain valuable business insights delivered directly to their inbox, so they can save time while staying focused on delivering extraordinary experiences.
With Business Central and Outlook, employees can:
Enhance customer experience directly from their inbox. Connect real-time data from Business Central to Outlook. Save time with visibility into customer and vendor information like sales, purchase details, and more without leaving their inbox.
Stay in the flow of work. Use templates to quickly send payment reminders, order confirmations, and other emails directly from Business Central connected to a shared mailbox.
Go from quote to cash without leaving Outlook. Set up customers or vendors, create quotes, submit invoices, and more from within Outlook so employees can focus on the task at hand.
Embrace the future of work with AI and Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft 365
When Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft 365 work together, small and medium-sized businesses can boost productivity and redefine how work gets done. With data delivered directly to familiar apps like Excel, Outlook, and Teams, employees get the information they need without switching between applications. Using next-generation AI with Microsoft Copilot, employees can further streamline routine tasks like drafting content, summarizing meetings, providing email follow up, and quickly finding answers to questions—all within the tools where they work best.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
In today’s dynamic work environment, managing employee leave and absence efficiently is crucial for maintaining a productive and harmonious workplace. For this reason, we are announcing the public preview of the Human Resources app for Dynamics 365 Human Resources on Finance and Operations environments.
With the announcement of the infrastructure merge, the Human Resources app will be the go-forward solution for the former Teams app for leave and absence.
The application is designed to be used within Microsoft Teams or in a web browser and it provides an overall view of employees leave requests, leave balances, draft leave requests, and leave requests taken in the past.
The Human Resources app can be used both on Mobile and Desktop.
Benefits of the Human Resources app
Human Resources is an app that is integrated with Dynamics 365 Human Resources on Finance and Operations environments. It is designed and developed for organizations to ensure their employees can request, edit, and cancel time off and leave of absence requests seamlessly. Employees can now view their leave balances, upcoming leaves and leave history using the same application. In addition to this, managers can also efficiently view and approve or reject requests in one intuitive interface.
Next Steps
The Human Resources app is now available for public preview and we’re looking forward to hearing your feedback and how the app is helping your organization. Enable the Human Resources (Preview) app for Dynamics 365 Human Resources from the AppSource.
To learn more about these exciting new capabilities and on how to use the app, refer to the Human Resources app.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In the fast-paced world of sales, sellers are now expected to be adept multitaskers. As they engage with customers, the demands of various tasks and follow-ups can quickly accumulate. Effectively managing these aspects is crucial for streamlining processes, minimizing manual intervention and significantly enhancing the overall customer experience. By staying organized and leveraging tools to keep track, sellers can meet their goals more effectively. When we released focused view in April 2023, we had precisely this goal in mind – to transform the current user experience while working on records within Dynamics 365 Sales.
Since its launch, focused view has not only achieved remarkable success but has also gained widespread user adoption. Thousands of sellers now rely on it as a swift solution to navigate records efficiently and address open tasks promptly. A closer look at our usage analysis indicated around a 50% reduction in overall task execution time compared to the current grid view for the same set of actions.
With the new enhancements, our commitment is to further elevate the overall user experience, aiming to provide a comprehensive set of capabilities within focused view. This ensures that users can accomplish all tasks seamlessly without the need to switch contexts across multiple views.
This blog delves into the introduced changes, detailing how users can leverage these updates to streamline their daily tasks.
What is focused view?
Focused view is a new work surface which allows users to view all their records as a list, while being able to work on any of them without having to switch context multiple times between the record form and the list of records. It supports easy filtering, sorting, and card customization capabilities to ensure you see the data that matters to you.
Focused view
What are the new enhancements?
Expanding the reach of focused view
As part of the current release, we are introducing focused view for Dynamics 365 entities. It’s now enabled automatically for all users, with no set up. Thus, Dynamics 365 users can leverage it for any out of the box or custom entities that they work on. Users should be able to see the focused view button or find it within the “show as” dropdown for all their entities, as the first button of the ribbon command bar.
Maintaining user preferences
We are committed to respecting our users’ preferences to ensure they always see the view they use the most first. To achieve this, our system now seamlessly retains the last-used work surface for each user every time they log into Dynamics 365 Sales. This enables users to effortlessly pick up right where they left off, regardless of any system default settings for a given entity. At our core, we prioritize our users’ individual choices, ensuring that their preferred work surface always takes the lead.
Introducing new capabilities
We are leaving no stone unturned to make focused view the ultimate work surface to cater to all our users’ needs! With the new release, we are introducing several new capabilities to ensure users can complete all their required tasks from a single place:
Multi-select records: With the enhanced focused view, users can now multi-select records and execute bulk functionalities in a seamless manner.
Support the view level ribbon command bar: Within the focused view, users no longer need to navigate to a grid experience to make updates. Instead, we have now made available an easy access point through the ribbon command bar. It now allows users to take instant action on any record(s) without any additional navigation.
Multi-select and ribbon command bar
Advanced filtering capability: We have introduced the ability for users to create their own filter query. In addition, users can save it as a custom view from within focused view. This helps them view and work on records that matter.
Advanced filter query
How can I make focused view the default landing page?
With all the new capabilities and ease of use, users will likely want to make focused view their default worksurface. To help achieve that, we are making it the default landing page for Lead entity as an out of the box option. For the other core entities, namely Account, Contact and Opportunity, we are providing an easy option for admins to make it the default option for their org from within the focused view specific settings. These can easily be adjusted for an organization’s specific needs.
Making focused view default for Lead, Opportunity, Account and Contact
For other entities, users can use the existing custom settings option within advanced settings. They simply need to choose the relevant entity and then select focused view from the list of available controls.
Conclusion
With these updates, focused view becomes the worksurface where users can view, plan and execute all their sales related tasks in a seamless and efficient manner. It helps them with greater task success rate and faster execution speed.
We are simplifying the ability for a users to get started. There’s now no setup required at either their or admin level. With these enhancements, users will find focused view readily available as the primary option on the ribbon command bar when navigating the entity grid. This streamlined accessibility ensures a hassle-free initiation, allowing users to effortlessly view and utilize focused view as their default choice.
So go ahead and start leveraging focused view as the go-to workspace for all sales related tasks and save time to concentrate building relations and closing deals!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
According to our Forrester Consulting study, software that helps organizations elevate field service delivery can improve financial performance in two ways: by helping increase customer retention and expansion by exceeding service expectations, and by increasing productivity. We are pleased to share the results of a December 2023 Forrester Consulting Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) Study commissioned by Microsoft. Forrester calculates Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service delivered benefits of $42.65 million over three years to a composite organization. The total investment required was $9.5 million and provided a ROI of 346% with a payback period of less than six months.
Methodology and purpose
TEI is a methodology developed by Forrester Research to assist companies with technology-related purchase decisions by providing business decision-makers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the technology on the entire organization.
Forrester Consulting interviewed 11 representatives from seven organizations with experience using Dynamics 365 Field Service to conduct this TEI study. The characteristics of these businesses and the results of the interviews were then aggregated to develop a composite organization. The key findings of the study are based on the composite organization and are summarized below.
Key challenges
The organizations that were interviewed for the study shared the following challenges prior to adopting Dynamics 365:
Lack of visibility into field service status
Communication issues among management, sales, and service teams
Technicians’ inability to complete work orders in a timely fashion
With these challenges top of mind, the interviewees sought to invest in a solution that could improve the productivity and efficiency of their field service teams, enable cost savings, and lead to customer retention and profitability.
Key findings
Dynamics 365 Field Service helps organizations deliver onsite service to customer locations. The application includes work order automation, scheduling algorithms, asset servicing, mobility, Microsoft 365 integration, and infusion of generative AI through Copilot to set up frontline workers for success when they are onsite providing service for customers. It is part of the larger Dynamics 365 portfolio of applications designed to work together to deliver efficiency and improve customer experience.
Forrester’s study revealed seven quantifiable impact areas: increased first-time fix rate, increased field technician productivity, eliminated standard time-to-invoice delays, avoided travel time, improved dispatcher productivity, enhanced management productivity, and retired legacy solutions.
We examine each of these areas below in more detail to understand how Dynamics 365 Field Service delivers value across field service organizations.
Increased first-time fix rate
Sending out field technicians to resolve customer issues is expensive even for the first visit, so many organizations want to do everything they can to avoid a second truck roll to resolve a problem. Deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service helped the organizations to increase their first-time fix rates by ensuring that technicians could quickly locate equipment, understand history and problems, tap into institutional knowledge about problems, and ensuring they had stocked the appropriate parts for service. Increasing the first-time fix rates also helped these organizations avoid 12% of second visits by additional technicians to complete a service call.
Increased technician productivity
Interviewees found that Dynamics 365 Field Service helped to remove many administrative tasks, so field technicians could spend more of their time focusing on addressing customer issues. Organizations were also able to use the solution to find the best field technician for each job, determine the most efficient route for getting to a customer site, and ensuring that technicians were carrying the right parts and tools to fix the problems. In addition, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist feature helped technicians use institutional knowledge, rather than having to spend time tracking down a peer or documentation. And both managers and technicians had greater visibility into technicians’ service calls, which helped them to plan for greater efficiency when scheduling customer work orders. All of this resulted in increasing field technician productivity by up to 14% once Dynamics 365 Field Service and Remote Assist were fully implemented.
Decreased time to invoice customers
An inability to integrate field service applications with key applications in finance often meant considerable time gaps between when a service order was completed and a customer was billed for service. One interviewee noted that using paper-based processes for invoicing service calls meant up to a month could go by before an invoice was sent, but after implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service, customers could be invoiced for work orders on the same day. For the composite organization, eliminating standard time-to-invoice delays resulted in $2.8 million savings in interest on accounts receivable.
Avoided travel time
One key challenge interviewees shared was that field technicians could lose significant time due to traffic delays or inefficient job routing, which required them to go out of their way to get to customer sites. With Dynamics 365 Field Service, dispatchers could ensure that planned routes were the most efficient and economical and that technicians’ routes were updated constantly to avoid potential slowdowns from traffic or road construction. The availability of mixed reality apps like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Guides also meant that field technicians could get assistance without subject matter experts needing to be on-site.
By using routing algorithms and traffic updates provided by Dynamics 365 Field Service, the composite organization can create more efficient schedules for technicians and save $2.1 million over three years.
Improved dispatcher productivity
Service dispatchers were often relying on highly manual processes to assign field technicians to jobs. Any change in staffing or scheduling increased inefficiency, especially since schedules were shared across whiteboards, spreadsheets, and calendar apps, meaning mistakes and deletions could be made. Dynamics 365 Field Service enables service organizations to automate scheduling and rescheduling for customer service calls. It also helps service managers match the best service technician for a work order based on time or expertise. One project manager interviewed for the study stated that having everything in one place provided better visibility for schedulers that helped them understand job progress and seamlessly include everyone in the workflow.
Overall, the composite organization saw a 40% improvement in dispatcher productivity as well as cost savings of $1.6 million.
Enhanced management productivity
optimize your field service management with proven solutions
Some interviewees had reported that field service managers spent a lot of time resolving scheduling issues, tracking missing parts inventory, and following up on incomplete jobs. With the ability to automate more processes in Dynamics 365 Field Service, those field service managers found they had more time to focus on strategic tasks that help their teams improve in other ways. Because reporting provided managers with information they didn’t have access to before, they were able to get a clearer view into technician productivity, work order status, parts inventory, and other metrics that helped them discover and address gaps so they could meet monthly targets. Service managers also had greater visibility into areas where field technicians needed more training and support, so they could improve team performance overall.
Service managers enhanced management productivity by 100 hours per year.
Retired legacy solutions
In the past, participant organizations used various combinations of email, calendar and scheduling apps, spreadsheets, or third-party field service tools to manage their field service efforts. Implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service, which integrates with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook and Microsoft Teams, helped to reduce licensing, administration, and maintenance costs for maintaining separate applications to support field service teams.
Other benefits
Beyond the quantified benefits detailed above, the organizations participating in the TEI study also experienced other benefits, including:
Improved customer experience through increased efficiency and more accurate updates about service calls.
Enhanced employee experience by enabling field technicians to use their mobile phones to complete most of their work tasks.
Improve service delivery speed and quality by using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service in their field service operations.
Access to mixed reality applications such as Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides to help support field technicians on service calls.
Next steps
As we have seen here, Forrester’s study uncovered seven quantifiable impact areas along with several other significant unquantifiable benefits. When combined, these factors resulted in benefits of $42.65 million over three years for the composite organization. The total investment required was $9.5 million, leading to a 346% ROI with a payback period of less than six months.
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