This post was co-authored by Lax Gopisetty, Vice President, Global Practice Head, Microsoft Business Applications & Digital Workplace Services, Infosys Ltd.

In an age defined by single-click purchases, instant deliveries, and personalized experiences, customer expectations continue to rise, and frontline technicians are expected to meet these ever-changing demands. When customers face a problem, they want it fixed fast and right the first time. For many organizations, customer experience is both a challenge and an opportunity to differentiate from the competition.

It is no longer acceptable for technicians to operate on disparate technologies that individually are good enough to execute work orders, manage assets, and dispatch resources with real-time support. Timely resolution is key in field service, and arming frontline technicians with intuitive solutions that combine workflow automation, scheduling algorithms, and mobility can significantly enhance the customer experience. Tools that empower field technicians with timely inputs to focus on their core responsibilities and enable processes to track each work order closure, along with billing, are now becoming existential.

For example, solutions that unlock efficiencies for telecommunications providers with field service automation, empower medical device service technicians with improved downtime, maintain safe and highly automated facility management operations, and manage smart elevator service with Internet of Things (IoT)-driven field service are all recipes for greater customer satisfaction.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Transform your service operations and deliver exceptional service.

Learn about Field Service

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service integration supports positive customer experiences

Dynamics 365 Field Service integrates with Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Viva Connections so that frontline workers and managers can create, view, and manage work orders within Outlook and Teams. This integration enhances collaboration between dispatchers, frontline technicians, and managers by enabling work order data to sync automatically between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. Additionally, frontline technicians can quickly start their day with access to key workday information at a glance, with work orders visible as Tasks from the Viva Connections homepage in Teams. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 empower technicians with the right information to resolve issues the first time, which adds a great deal to creating a positive customer experience.

For example, a leading energy supplier based out of the UK partnered with Infosys to establish itself as a leader in the energy-as-a-service market by offering best-in-class customer experience. The connected field service-based solution unified the capabilities of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 to unlock a leaner and flexible business model that also enabled future scalability to ensure:

• Better workforce management through flexible scheduling, route optimization, and quota management.
• Field job execution via remote supervision, site awareness/recording, and offline mode.
• Customer intimacy powered by service history management, technician visibility, voice of customer, and closed loop tracking.
• Superior job outcomes powered by higher first-time resolution rates and reduced job aborts.

Connected field service helped redefine the leading energy supplier’s customer engagement model with a seamless work order management process. From streamlining work order creation, scheduling the best suited frontline technician, receiving remote expert assistance, and integrating asset management, Dynamics 365 enabled the customer to transform their field operations. Additional engagement highlights include:

• Seamless migration from more than 20 legacy disparate business apps onto Dynamics 365.
• Implemented core business functionalities with over 75 percent out-of-the-box feature fitment.
• Six phased incremental rollouts to enable more than 1,500 field technicians and more than 600 internal users.
• On track to reduce overall cost of IT operations by over 25 percent.

The leaner, AI-powered, and truly automated business, has unleashed novel revenue streams with infinite potential for the client:

This UK-based leading energy supplier is now well-positioned to drive its future growth. The organization is supported by a skilled and engaged workforce that works seamlessly with connected and leaner processes that together offer a sustainable competitive advantage.

Standardizing and automating processes through connected field service

Field Service continues to break ground into unexplored industries. Capabilities like GPS and routing, which enable timely visits and quicker resolution, are saving the day for thousands of field service professionals. They are now able to summarize completed tasks with inline Microsoft Power Apps component framework (PCF) capability.

Field service solutions must always be driven by an organization’s unique priorities, pain points, and process nuances. Partners like Infosys are co-innovating with clients to address these challenges with Microsoft Power Platform and its extensibility components. They are enabling nontechnical business users to build applications that cater to their unique requirements without the aid of IT experts.

The emergence of AI-embedded innovations like Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service will enhance service further. From creating work orders with the right information and assigning them to the right technicians, to equipping technicians with sufficient support to successfully complete jobs, Copilot will help streamline critical frontline tasks. These advanced functionalities will help companies genuinely standardize and automate field service processes.

Organizations competing in a market with high turnover are using mixed reality-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides for remote support and collaboration. This results in accelerated training with context and seamless transfer of information, insights, and skills, which help in lowering overall costs.

Technology is key to building a scalable and efficient field service operation. However, a significant portion of success still rides on the technician who is delivering the service. So, it is imperative for service organizations to unify field operations, frontline technicians, and customers with connected digital platforms, to unlock value—because service is no longer a cost center for organizations.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Field Service

Learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you transform your service operations and deliver exceptional service. And read how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service can accelerate service delivery, boost technician productivity, and streamline work order management with next-generation AI. Watch the video below to see it in action.

The post Unlocking customer value with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service through connected services appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Field Service Mobile is a Dynamics Power Platform Model Driven Application. This offers several advantages to the mobile application, including re-use of forms and views and consistency of user experience while accessing on the web, mobile, or tablet.  

The Power Platform also offers significant customization opportunities, both when customizing forms, adding business logic or integrations with other Power Platform capabilities like Power Automate, Canvas, or PCF Controls.  These capabilities make the Field Service Mobile application uniquely positioned to streamline your workflows, improve data quality and enhance your user experience.  

Customization Best Practices 

Customizing the Field Service Mobile application is a balance of enabling an ideal workflow for your business and providing the best possible user experience for your Frontline Workers. This balance must consider data availability of the mobile workforce, along with application performance and the overall user experience.  

In this blog post we’ll share some of the key best practices when evaluating and implementing customizations. 

1. Use the default Field Service Mobile app module. The out-of-the-box Field Service Mobile app module has all the basic features and functionality your frontline workers require to get started with Field Service. Custom app modules can be used with the Field Service Mobile application but will not include some of the internal business logic such as Travel Calculations. Another advantage of using the default app module is that it will automatically receive product updates over time, while additional effort would be required to merge the same enhancements into a custom app module.  
2. Avoid using HTML Web Resources.  Web Resources have many limitations on a mobile application when working with offline mode. It is highly recommended to use PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) controls, which are a better option for a more consistent cross-platform experience without the same limitations. 
   • Tip: If your situation necessitates the use of custom web resources, use code splitting and check code coverage in a browser to ensure only the minimum amount of code is loaded. Package shared code in their own shared web resource library instead of duplicating in each consuming resource. 
   • Tip: Be sure to define a unique namespace for custom JavaScript libraries to avoid having functions overwritten by other functions in another library. Learn how to write your first client script in model-driven apps. 
   • Tip: If using Offline mode, be sure to test your customizations on the mobile device in Airplane mode and variable cellular network conditions.  
3. Handle errors properly and present the right message to end users. When implementing customizations, it is very important to handle edge-cases and errors in a way that provides a positive experience for your end users. This is especially true for async calls and network errors, where the Frontline Worker may have different results depending on devices network state.  
4. Use XRM Web APIs instead of XHR/Fetch calls directly to the server.  XRM Web ApIs will route correctly to the local offline database or server based on offline configuration and network state of the app. 
   • Making direct server calls from the mobile application is not recommended as they can be unreliable and fail unexpectedly with poor network conditions.  By ensuring that all dependencies are in the offline data store by configuring the Mobile Offline profile with the correct data necessary for your user scenarios.   
   • If server calls are necessary, build an appropriate user experience to handle cases when the call may fail, or response is slow to return from the server. Making the network calls trigger based on explicit user actions, with a interface giving visual cues that a network call is happening and a response will be needed, will provide a better experience for the Frontline Worker.  
   • If using onload/onchange/command handlers and fetching data using XRM WebAPis, make sure you test the impact of those calls on application performance while in various network conditions. 
5. Optimized resources for bandwidth. If adding custom JavaScript or images, be sure to optimize files which are downloaded to the device. We recommend to always trim and compress your JavaScript files and using SVG images instead of PNG to save bandwidth.  
6. Declare solution dependencies between commands, web resources, and strings. Dependencies must be used to make a Web Resource available offline. For example, when an entity/form is enabled for offline usage, the JavaScript which is attached to the form for onload/onsave, would also be available offline.  For other files such as localization XML files, they need to be added as a dependency to your JavaScript so these XML files will also be available offline. Learn more about web resource dependencies. 
7. Be aware of timing issues or race conditions. This is especially relevant when dealing with async calls. Test by adding network latency and CPU throttling to ensure a positive experience in real-world conditions. 
8. Use Business Rules as first choice over custom client-side JavaScript. Business rules provide a mechanism to implement business logic with some guardrails to avoid some of the complexity that comes with custom JavaScript code. Please be aware there are some limitations with business rules, such as cases when OnChange events are required.  It is good to evaluate your business scenarios and choose the best path for your organization. 
   • Tip: If using JavaScript-based business logic, make sure you fetch minimal data and avoid joins/sorting if not needed.  
9. Leverage out of box controls. As much as possible use out of the box controls, such as the Booking Calendar Control, which will be easier to support and receive product enhancements over time. 
10. When enabling offline mode, make sure forms and views are aligned with configuration of the mobile offline profile. The individual configuring the forms and views should work closely with the person who will configure the mobile offline profile to ensure tables which are enabled on views will be available while running in offline mode. Be sure to include error handling if there are instances when an entity will not be available while offline.  
11. Leverage tools to debug customizations. Debugging is important when introducing JavaScript customizations to your experience. Debugging a mobile app has unique challenges versus a web browser. This is especially true with capabilities like Offline mode are enabled on the mobile app. To meet this need, leverage debugging tools shipped with the Android and Windows model driven apps. Detailed steps to debug are found in Power Apps documentation.  

Customizing a model driven application can be a powerful way to enhance the user experience and functionality of your solution. However, it also requires careful planning and testing to ensure optimal performance, usability, and compatibility. In this blog post, we have shared some best practices and tips on how to customize your model driven application effectively. We hope you have found this information useful and that you will apply it to your own projects. Thank you for reading and happy customizing! 

Additional Resources 

• Customization best practices – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn 
• Customize commands and the ribbon (model-driven apps) – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn 
• Example: Create and customize a model-driven app form – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn 
• Get started with model-driven apps customization using code – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn 

The post Working With Field Service Mobile Customizations  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In the fast-paced world of customer service, efficient outbound calling communication is the cornerstone of success. Dynamics 365 Customer Service has long been a trusted platform for managing customer interactions. With the upcoming October release, we’ve listened to your feedback and delivered a significant enhancement that is set to transform outbound dialing.  

Currently, modifying the dialed number proves to be cumbersome given the inability to edit a digit. Additionally, the absence of number validation increases the risk of agents dialing incorrect numbers. This is especially true in the event of missing country codes. 

In the October release, you will find a more intuitive, streamlined, and efficient outbound dialing experience.

Editing flexibility

In the new outbound dialing experience, agents can continue to initiate calls from customer records. What’s changed? Now, modifying the dialed number is a breeze. The enhanced interface empowers agents to effortlessly edit the number before placing the call. This new experience also introduces auto-formatting, automatically structuring the number as agents type it. This functionality not only reduces errors but also highlights incomplete or invalid numbers. This newfound flexibility ensures accurate and effective outbound calling experiences.

Smart use of screen real estate

The improved interface is designed to optimize the available screen space. By default, the keypad is hidden, given most agents prefer to use the keyboard, which also allows for a clearer view of essential information. However, should agents need to utilize the keypad, it’s just a click away.

Recall recent numbers

Agents now have the power to swiftly call back recent numbers. With the ability to access the last 20 numbers dialed or received calls, agents can easily reconnect with customers. This feature is a time-saver and helps maintain a seamless communication flow.

Country and region support for outbound dialing

A significant advancement for administrators and agents alike is the support for specific countries and regions. Administrators can customize outbound profiles to allow calls only to selected countries or regions. This prevents accidental calls to unintended destinations, reinforcing precision in customer communication.

Intuitive profile selection and profile matching

Agents with multiple outbound profiles will appreciate the intuitive profile selection process. The dropdown menu displays the collective list of supported countries and regions from all profiles. Simplifying the process even further, agents need only enter the number they wish to dial. The system intelligently identifies the outbound profile supporting the dialed number’s country or region. This feature is coming as a fast follow in October.

The October release of Dynamics 365 Customer Service brings an outbound dialing experience with enhanced editing capabilities, smarter interface design, call history, number auto-formatting and validation, and refined country and region support. Agents can confidently and efficiently connect with customers, bolstering the delivery of exceptional customer service.

Learn more about outbound dialing

Watch a quick video demonstration.

To preview this feature, administrators should update the Settings definition for Enhanced outbound dialer experience to set the environment value to Yes. To learn more, see Call a customer in the voice channel | Microsoft Learn.

The post Try the new outbound dialing experience in Dynamics 365 Customer Service  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Note: As announced at Microsoft Inspire 2023, as of September 1, 2023, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights have been brought together into one offering. We are retaining the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights name to encompass this new offer of both applications. Customers can start with one or both applications and then further invest in the application they want to scale by buying the capacity they need.

In today’s turbulent economic times, companies are facing critical business challenges such as customer acquisition, increasing customer loyalty, and maximizing lifetime value. Often, to save time, they follow a one-size-fits-all approach—resulting in impersonal marketing strategies with low customer engagement. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 89 percent of marketers say they struggle with having time to do their jobs.

To meet these complex challenges, it is crucial for companies to shift their approach from traditional mass communication to personalized engagement based on a deep understanding of each customer’s preferences and actions while ensuring their marketers have more time to leverage their creative and strategic skills to engage their customers. With this very goal in mind, Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2018.

We are pleased and honored to share that in a short span of five years in market, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms* for the second consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

For Microsoft, this placement recognizes our commitment to help companies better connect with their customers at scale, across all departments, to make this simple and easy for any company with a broad range of skillsets to employ.

Accelerating the journey to more personalized customer engagement

We started our Dynamics 365 Marketing journey in April 2018. Since then, we’ve gathered feedback and continued to learn at a rapid pace to help our customers on their journey to drive meaningful customer engagement, ensure long-term loyalty, and accelerate business success. To be competitive in today’s market, organizations must harness the power of data to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft one-on-one personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions. Generative AI makes these capabilities within reach for every company. That’s why we’ve brought together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI-led solution to revolutionize customer experience. The new Customer Insights enables our customers to be more flexible by giving them access to both a modern, AI-driven customer data platform (Customer Insights data application) and real-time marketing with customer journey orchestration (Customer Insights journeys application). Customers can start with one or both applications and invest in the areas where they most want to scale.

To drive the necessary customer experience (CX) transformation, companies cannot rely on piecemeal integration of sales, service, and marketing products. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 50 percent of replacement customer relationship management (CRM) sales technology decisions will involve solutions including non-sales software comprising other modules from a CRM or a CX suite.^[1] However, the reality is that only a few companies are currently delivering on these expectations. Customer experiences often remain fragmented across channels and departments, leading to inconsistencies. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help customers overcome these challenges, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was built exactly for this purpose—to support customers throughout their end-to-end CX journeys.

Like all Dynamics 365 offerings, Customer Insights relies on Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM software data, which enables our customers to securely store and manage their data and harness the true power of that data by removing silos across sales, service, and marketing via a unified platform approach. Customer Insights helps marketers and customer engagement professionals gain a holistic view of their customers, anticipate their needs, and discover growth opportunities. Marketers can also deliver more relevant, contextual, customer-triggered engagements through the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Some of our most recent Copilot capabilities in Customer Insights enable marketers to:

• Deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience with emails, forms, and event registration pages that align to their organization’s branding guidelines.
• Easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, to respond to customers quickly, generate sales leads, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Quickly build, summarize, and simplify targeted segments using conversational, everyday language, enabling more time for building customer relationships and reducing time to build complex segments from scratch.
• Discover new customer insights by using natural language to ask questions and gather information and suggestions for forming additional, deeper questions.
• Get help developing content for emails, social posts, and other text with a tone of voice that matches their brand and campaign.

Enabling our customers to increase their reach

Zurich Insurance Group, a global insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries, wanted to optimize marketing processes to help create more personalized customer experiences. Its Switzerland business unit connects to its customers through hosting online and in-person events—but to drive the highest impact, it must be sure it invites the right customers to the right events. It wanted to improve its ability to track if customers opened event invitations—or even received them, as well as the connection to registration and attendance. It also wanted a formalized way to collect feedback or easily use engagement data to continue to optimize the sales process after the event. Zurich selected Dynamics 365 Marketing to give it the flexibility to reach customers in new ways and drive more effective follow-ups to help shape their journeys. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, Zurich increased its lead quality by over 40 percent.

Over the past decade, Natuzzi, a globally hailed creator of exceptional luxury furniture that delivers a harmonious combination of design, function, aesthetics, and ethics, has seen a rapid global expansion of its heralded luxury brand. Natuzzi lacked a customer engagement platform capable of unifying data from its retail point of sale (POS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and CRM systems. The company also wanted a way to bring together its business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) related data sets to drive greater insight between audiences. Adopting Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Natuzzi implemented an extensive customer experience platform to transform how its luxury brand discovers and sustains its customers. It uses customer data and insights to nurture customers and prospects through personalized campaigns, delivering emails, SMS texts, promotions, events, sales appointment reminders, and other relationship-building messages.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping our customers unify and enrich their customer data to deliver personalized, connected, end-to-end customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service. We truly believe that bringing together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables us to continue investing in capabilities that will enable stronger, insights-based marketing that helps marketers and data analysts glean insights from customer data.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offer.

1. Gartner Forecast Analysis: CRM Sales Software, Worldwide, Roland Johnson, Amarendra, Julian Poulter, 12 December 2022.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Antin, 20 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

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