Customer service is a (Microsoft) Teams sport 

Customer service is a (Microsoft) Teams sport 

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

The customer service world has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. With the rise of digitalization and advanced technologies, customers now expect seamless and personalized experiences across multiple channels. Automation and AI have become integral to customer support teams, enabling faster response times and more efficient issue resolution.  

Moreover, post-pandemic, remote work and virtual communication have become the norm, reshaping the way customer support teams operate and collaborate. Agents find themselves in silos, unable to seek immediate help from colleagues in neighboring cubicles like in traditional office settings. 

As businesses strive to meet the escalating demands of customers, contact center leaders must be strategic about agent productivity. They must enhance agent collaboration and efficiency, ensuring the delivery of high-quality customer service even in a dispersed working environment. 

We acknowledge customer service is a collective effort. Hence, by bringing together Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Teams, we aim to provide agents with a cohesive environment to get help from experts across the entire company to resolve complex customer issues which they might not have expertise on.  Both experts and agents can use their preferred tools; Dynamics 365 Customer Service for agents and Microsoft Teams for experts. Experts don’t have to be Dynamics users; a Teams license is all they need to participate and collaborate effectively. 

With the enhancements in this release wave, Teams collaboration features (embedded chat, swarming, and Teams meeting integration) are even more robust. Let’s dive into the details of these exciting advancements. 

Keep Teams chat participants informed of updated fields

Reduce overhead for agents by automatically updating all chat participants when an essential field on a connected record is updated. This time-saving feature helps keep everyone in the know without any manual effort. This allows agents to focus on what’s important and helping experts in the chat be aware of pertinent updates.

Send a bot event update in the connected Teams chat to inform participants of an updated field on the connected record. With the suite of Teams collaboration features, not only you can start a chat with the users who are connected with Dynamics 365 records, now you can keep them informed when the record changes, without any manual effort. For example, when the priority of a case changes, all the chat participants are notified. 

Microsoft Teams chat showing an update to the priority of a linked case

Dynamics links unfurled in Teams chat

Links to Dynamics 365 and Power Apps records are unfurled when pasted in Microsoft Teams chats and meetings. See the details of your business data in your Microsoft Teams chats and feel confident that the link you’re selecting is an authentic Power Apps link. Now, when you paste a Dynamics 365 Customer Service link into a Microsoft Teams chat, meeting, or channel, participants will see an adaptive card with more details about the shared link. Links to canvas apps will show the app name and record name. Model-driven app links to records show the entity type. The user pasting the link can delete the card in the message compose window before sending the message if they don’t want to send the link as a card. 

Timeline integration

When you start a connected chat or connect an existing chat to a record, you can see it as an activity on the connected record’s timeline. This makes it easy for agents to get the full case view by allowing them to see any chats related to the case or record directly on the timeline. 

If there is an agent hand-off, the next agent, who may not have been a part of the chat initially, can also see the conversation on the timeline. The next agent can directly join the discussion as a chat participant to see the entire chat exchange.  

To enable the feature, the admin can turn on the Join chat toggle in the Customer Service admin center app. This gives users with read and write privileges the ability to join a connected chat. 

Swarming enhancements

Customer support swarming helps agents connect with experts in their organization to solve cases faster. We made the following enhancements to swarming: 

  • Guided admin setup: The guided, step-by-step setup makes it easy for admins to configure and onboard their agents. It significantly reduces the time for admins to configure swarming in their organizations, helping make the onboarding experience more efficient. Now agents can more quickly get the help they need from experts across the organization.
  • Swarm form UI: Administrators can add a tab, section, or field to the swarm form and customize it as needed. The changes they make will promptly reflect in the agent workspace. The swarm creation form now comes with an advanced look and feel. With the visual indicator, agents can view the progress of swarm creation and see the steps completed and those remaining. 
  • Auto resolve swarm: When a case is closed (that is, canceled or resolved), associated swarms are automatically resolved. 
Pop-up window in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to enable the agent to resolve a case and the associated swarm

With Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, collaborating with colleagues is easier than ever. Both agents and experts can stay informed about important case details without making a lot of manual updates and circling back. Try these features and more with the latest updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, read the documentation: Overview of collaboration in Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

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Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Introducing Microsoft Clipchamp: Unlock the power of video at work

Introducing Microsoft Clipchamp: Unlock the power of video at work

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

With Clipchamp as part of Microsoft 365, it’s easy to know where to turn to make videos and get started. Anyone can confidently create and publish videos, using an intuitive interface and harnessing useful tools. Clipchamp empowers anyone to produce high-quality videos they can be proud of.  

The post Introducing Microsoft Clipchamp: Unlock the power of video at work appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

How to improve business KPIs with Connected Field Service

How to improve business KPIs with Connected Field Service

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Harness the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) to revolutionize your organization’s service delivery with Field Service. Connected field service refers to IoT connected devices sending information about their performance to a field service organization. This allows the field service organization to perform proactive and predictive maintenance for their clients moving from a break-fix model. Instead of the client calling you and saying, “This machine is broken,” you call the client and say, “We see your machine might be performing less than optimally. We will come in later today to service it.” Based on the service alert, the best-suited technician with the right skill and proximity to customer location is dispatched to resolve the issue resulting in reduced asset downtime.

How does connected field service improve your key performance indicators (KPIs), you ask? Let’s discuss seven KPIs that will improve with connected field service.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Deliver exceptional service

1. First-time fix rate

This is an important field service KPI related to customer experience. According to Aberdeen, the average first-time fix rate for an organization is around 75 percent.1 That means three out of four service calls are resolved on the first visit by a technician. With connected field service, you notify the customer when things need to be fixed or adjusted. You can funnel information about the problem, as well as customer information, to a technician in real time, and the technician arrives on-site with all relevant customer history.

First-time fix rates remain consistently high in connected field service organizations. This improves customer experience, which increases retention and referral in most organizations. Keeping your customers informed throughout the resolution process builds confidence and trust and leads to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. More importantly, customers want their problems fixed the first time to minimize disruption.

2. Customer retention

This is a standard field service KPI. Think about it along these lines: there is a cost for most of your clients to switch to a different field service provider. They need to do a lot of research, break your contract, initiate a new contract, and so on. In a predictive maintenance context, customer retention tends to be very high because equipment malfunctions are addressed even before customers have the chance to call it in. Remote monitoring of IoT devices enables organizations to enhance their responsiveness to customer needs. With continuous monitoring, you can quickly detect issues and notify customers about service disruptions or necessary actions. Keeping your customers informed throughout the resolution process builds confidence and trust and leads to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. By using Connected Field Service, the client has “one less thing to worry about,” and they are not likely to walk away from those contracts.

3. Percentage of billable hours

Percentage of billable hours is a measure of productivity because it refers to the percentage of time your technicians are doing work that is directly billable to a client. For productivity to increase on the technician side, technicians need tools, guidance, and data they can pull up in real time. Percentage of billable hours typically drops when technicians need to spend a large portion of time on non-essential, more logistical business tasks. When all the resources are transparent within the same customer relationship management (CRM) system—which happens at the intersection of the cloud, IoT, and connected field service—technicians’ time becomes more productive.

4. Completed vs. invoiced jobs

This KPI goes right to your revenue stream, as you typically cannot get paid for a job without invoicing it. You are looking for integrative, intelligence-driven solutions whereby customer information is “speaking” directly to invoicing within your CRM. The goal is to create a seamless loop for the client: you solve a problem they were not even aware of by using information from connected devices, and once the problem is solved, the invoice arrives ready to go. There are no lags. Connected field service can help keep your financials consistent.

5. Cost reduction

IoT-powered Field Service enables organizations to streamline their operations and reduce costs. Remote monitoring and predictive maintenance reduce the need for frequent physical inspections and unnecessary maintenance visits, resulting in efficient resource utilization and reduced operational expenses. Proactive problem diagnosis and maintenance prevent major breakdowns and extensive repairs. Prevented issues lead to cost savings by minimizing downtime, eliminating emergency service calls, and optimizing resource allocation. 

6. Employee retention

Customer retention is crucial to your bottom line, yes, but employee retention is a good measure of how functional your organization is in terms of leadership, managers, and processes. One of the core issues when employees leave any field service organization is lack of communication and collaboration; connected field service can help solve collaboration problems by allowing everyone in your organization open access to the same sets of resources and data. (You can restrict some access to the most senior levels, too.) If employees feel like a valuable part of the business, they are less likely to leave.

7. Resource allocation

With device data and service maintenance information gathered through IoT, organizations can make informed decisions when dispatching technicians. Factors such as device performance data, historical maintenance records, technician expertise, availability, and proximity help to optimize resource allocation. Assigning the right technician with the appropriate skills and proximity to the job ensures efficient service delivery and reduces response and resolution times.

Learn more about connected field service

Connected Field Service can impact almost any KPI. This is a look at seven of them, but there’s more to explore—learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you deliver exceptional service.


Sources

1The Numbers Behind First-Time Fix Rates You Should Know About, Fieldpoint.

The post How to improve business KPIs with Connected Field Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Power Automate Process Mining empowers warehouses to boost their efficiency significantly

Power Automate Process Mining empowers warehouses to boost their efficiency significantly

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Introduction

 Every warehouse manager is keen on improving the processes on the warehouse floor. But where to start? What to optimize? It is far from easy to discover the bottlenecks. This is where the Power Automate Process Mining comes really handy. In the 10.0.35 release we ship the integration of Supply Chain Management Warehouse module with Power Automate Process Mining. This integration gives some really valuable insight into the material movement in the warehouse. 

What is Power Automate Process Mining?

 Power Automate Process Mining is a tool which exists exactly to help you gain insights, find bottlenecks and continuously improve business processes. It offers rich visualizations and deep analytics so one can get clear insights into the data. 

 There is an online version of it – part of the Power Automate offering. Using Power Query Online one can load data about the processes from various sources – starting from the Excel file, SQL databases and even calling custom APIs. Users can also connect to the already prepared data in Azure Data Lake and utilize powerful tools like Azure Data Factory for data preparation. The online version offers a customizable Power BI report with detailed process insights. However, one can download a desktop application which allows to perform deep process analysis. The desktop version reuses the same backend – same data and process definition – as an online version. 

 When working with Power Automate Process Mining you have to know some terminology – cases and activities. In the context of the warehouse material movement process analysis, Case is a closed warehouse work and Activity is a single work line (pick or put). Thus, a single case consists of activities – each of them is a “visit” to a certain location in the warehouse. 

How to analyze material movement process in the warehouse using the Power Automate Process Mining? 

 In the 10.0.35 release we ship the integration of Supply Chain Management Warehouse module with the Power Automate Process Mining. It allows you to: 

  • Easily load warehouse material movement data into the Power Automate Process Mining. Users can choose how much data to load and so forth. 
  • The resulting Power Automate Process Mining Power BI report is integrated right into Supply Chain Management. Users can gain process insights without leaving Supply Chain Management – similar to embedded Power Bi reports experience. 

 In order to get insights, the user should first upload the data to Power Automate Process Mining. Our integration allows to achieve that right from Supply Chain Management UI: 

  • Go to Warehouse management > Setup > Process mining > Warehouse material movement process configuration. 
  • On the Action Pane, select Deploy process to open the deployment wizard and follow the on-screen instructions. 

Note that for sake of integration with Power Automate Process Mining a staging table is created on the Supply Chain Management side. It contains data which is then read by Power Automate Process Mining. As part of the deployment wizard execution, the system will load only 200 cases (closed warehouse works) into the staging table and thus into the Power Automate Process Mining. Below we show how to load a full set of data. 

After the successful deployment user will see a page like this: 

Here user can see the processing history – “Processing log” section will show events related to the staging table population and cleanup. Users can refresh the staging table manually by clicking the “Refresh staging table”. One can also set an automatic refresh schedule. But remember that it will only refresh data in the staging table in Supply Chain Management. After the staging table in Supply Chain Management is updated, you would normally want to refresh the Power Automate Process Mining process as well. You can do that by clicking the “Configure in Power Automate” button and trigger a refresh there (you can also setup an automatic refresh there as well). 

You can find more details regarding the setup in the docs here: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2235867&clcid=0x409

Let’s now see what insights you can get from this. 

What kind of insights are available? 

 Take a look at this short video to get a feel of the possibilities:

After the deployment is done, users can go to “Warehouse management > Setup > Process mining > Warehouse material movement process configuration” and view the process report.

 

On the “Case summary” page one can get a quick overview of the material movements in the warehouse which can feed furthermore detailed investigation. The map control at the left basically shows you how material flows in the warehouse. Depending on your selection during the process deployment nodes can represent either Location Profile, Warehouse Zone or the Warehouse Location. On the map control you can choose if you want to look at frequencies or performance. Other KPIs on page are self-describing – they aim to give you an overview of the overall state of the process and also give you a feeling of the slowest cases (works) and activities (locations). 

“Variant summary” and “Variant DNA” pages deal with the concept of variants. Several cases (works) could basically repeat the same route through the warehouse. Each unique route is a variant. So by looking at statistic related to variants you could find the most common ones and optimize for those. Or you could find unexpected outliers and further investigate the reason behind them. 

But let’s take a sneak peek into a more advance process mining scenarios available with the desktop application. First you need to download and install it by clicking on the “Open in Power Automate Process Mining” button. 

“Process map” visualization also is a prominent part of the tool. After all, it is very natural to represent processes as graphs. But here you have much richer possibilities about what metrics to show, how to highlight and cluster nodes: 

You could even define your own business rules which would influence the process map visualization by directly showing if process violates expected process behavior. For example, here I have created a business rule which highlights where short picking has happened: 

We have met the concept of variants when looking into the Power BI report. But in the desktop application you can get much more insights and statistics around the variants: 

Most of the features we have seen so far are helping at discovering, visualizing and analyzing the processes. But AI powered Root Cause Analysis feature goes beyond that. It allows you to analyze what and how different business factors influence business process performance. For example, you may want to find out which factors are influencing warehouse work execution time the most. Remember though that tool requires the case level attributes to be used in RCA analysis. You can define your own custom metrics (like “Number of short picked lines”) and use those in the RCA. 

Conclusion 

Usage of Power Automate Process Mining for sake of getting insights into the warehouse material movement definitely enriches analytical toolset and allows to get insights which were pretty hard to get before.  


To learn more about this feature and Supply Chain at Microsoft,
click below:

Feature Insights:

Work with added efficiency in quote-to-cash with Dynamics 365 Sales – Finance & Operations | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

Supply Chain at Microsoft

Take a tour – Supply Chain Management | Microsoft Dynamics 365

We’re excited to launch Free Trial | Microsoft Supply Chain Center Preview ,  which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news

The post Power Automate Process Mining empowers warehouses to boost their efficiency significantly appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Deciphering consumer desires: Elevating customer journeys in retail CPG

Deciphering consumer desires: Elevating customer journeys in retail CPG

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

What do customers want? They want the consumer goods brands they buy and love to deliver a total experience. One that is transparent across the product lifecycle and is personalized at every touchpoint, regardless of whether it’s the ever-demanding business-to-consumer (B2C) realm or the not-so-different-anymore business-to-business (B2B) landscape of consumer packaged goods (CPG) distributors and retailers.

According to Gartner® Top Strategic Technology Trends in Consumer Goods Manufacturing for 2023, the top CG technology trends in 2023 focus on customers, technology, and sustainability. This translates to consumer behaviors evaluating three primary areas:

  • Financial impact and uncertainty. What is the value of this product? Is it worth the money? Does it work?
  • Trust in manufacturer integrity. Is the manufacturer doing what it says it is doing?
  • The experience working with and for a company. How do consumer goods manufacturers treat suppliers, employees, and consumers? Are they providing and participating in current platforms and technologies?

The pressure is on CPG brands to meet these accelerating expectations and answer these unspoken questions that are top of mind for consumers.

How can brands accomplish this when not all customer journeys are alike and consumers are in control?

Connect your brands, employees, and consumers

Evolve with changing consumer preferences

Explore solutions 

Evolving with the customer is essential

Journeys are no longer linear and are driven by the customer—be it the consumer, retailer, or distributor—who determines the preferred path including any stops, starts, and detours along the way. Giving them the option to choose what messages they want to receive along with when and how they receive them is essential for creating a successful journey. Some customers prefer human interaction, others self-service across digital channels, and many require a combination of physical and digital. Others prefer to avoid personal interaction and choose a tech interface whenever possible. Giving customers these choices require brands to have synergy across multiple experience disciplines. It requires a shift from customer experience (CX) to what Gartner® calls total experience (TX). According to Gartner®, “TX is a strategy that creates superior shared experiences by intertwining the multi-experience (MX), CX, employee experience (EX), and user experience (UX) disciplines.” A sophisticated customer experience is the goal, but more importantly, it is delivering a total experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations. Research on this topic brings home how critical this is. 

A recent Harvard Business Review article brings home how critical this is.

Our recent survey of 6,200 customers in China, France, and the United States uncovered seven CX factors that directly influence customer satisfaction. The first four—convenience, choice, navigation, and payments—are indispensable. That is, the presence or absence of these factors determines whether a customer judges a particular experience as good or bad. Think of them as table stakes. The remainder—ambiance, expertise, and touch-and-feel—amplify the baseline level of satisfaction. While their presence boosts satisfaction from “good” to “very good” 70 percent of the time, their absence turns a “bad” experience into a “very bad one” 89 percent of the time.”

Identifying ways to understand and adapt to evolving consumer preferences along with delivering direct-to-consumer engagement is integral to enhancing the customer journey.

Our approach

It starts with data 

Brands are looking for ways to understand consumers better. They need insights in order to know them and orchestrate customer journeys as well as identify interactions that contribute to customer lifetime value (CLTV), churn, and loyalty. This requires CPG brands to gain a holistic understanding of consumers and build brand equity through tailored data-driven marketing and experiences.  

To achieve this, CPG brands need to leverage data from multiple sources, such as point-of-sale, e-commerce, social media, loyalty programs, surveys, and third-party providers, and combine them into a single view of the consumer. This improves consumer understanding, empowering brands to directly engage with individuals and target their personal needs, all powered by AI.

It requires elevating the consumer experience

In today’s uncertain times, consumers demand an end-to-end experience that provides value, quality, convenience, inclusivity, and sustainability. Brands must not only meet these expectations but also elevate the experience to the next level. This requires real-time personalization throughout the customer’s journey. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing utilizes insights about the consumer and activates them in real-time to optimize journey workflows, to create generative AI-powered segments and content to deliver hyper-personalized experiences that drive customer engagement. For example, Campari Group, a worldwide leader in spirits, wines, and non-alcoholic apéritifs industry is using our solution to increase awareness of Negroni week, an event that celebrates one of the world’s greatest cocktails and raises money for global charitable causes. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing generative AI Copilot is being used to send personalized emails to venue owners to get them involved. With generative AI targeting, Campari uses natural language to describe segments and uses generative AI Copilot for content ideas using key points to generate text suggestions expediting campaign creation and increasing marketer productivity. Watch Campari Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to learn more.

It’s collaborative

Whether it’s brand building, product development, supply chain, or customer care, everyone is responsible for customer experience and optimizing the customer journey. It is a collaborative effort to deliver a great customer experience and requires breaking down data, technical, and people. Customer data needs to be combined with business operations data, marketing, sales, service, and supply chain should work in unison and be seamlessly integrated.

Collaborative intelligence can help CPG brands and retailers:

  1. Understand customer behavior, preferences, and needs better, and tailor their offerings accordingly.
  2. Optimize their assortment, pricing, and merchandising strategies, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  3. Innovate faster and launch new products that meet customer demand.
  4. Build trust and transparency with each other and with customers.

This is exactly what Natuzzi is doing using our solution to bring beauty and timeless harmony to people around the world. Working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables Natuzzi to deliver a well-crafted experience across both B2C and B2B lines of business and empowers their entire global team spanning marketing, sales, field service, and customer care to deliver a seamless total experience. In a disjointed selling environment, Natuzzi can communicate better and more consistently with each customer with improved ongoing messaging, promotions, and events. With targeted campaigns, they are moving contacts to prospects and prospects to customers. Luxury furniture is a complicated market, and our solution keeps Natuzzi close to its customers and on top of market trends.

Learn more

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer InsightsDynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Sales to meet your customers’ expectations and bring your customers into focus.

You can also download a free trial of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. And for the latest on how Microsoft and our partners are helping retailers elevate the customer experience, download the e-book Reimagine Retail in the Digital Age.

Discover more Microsoft solutions for the consumer goods industry.


GARTNER® is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.

Introducing AIM from Microsoft: Future-proof your business in the cloud

Introducing AIM from Microsoft: Future-proof your business in the cloud

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Microsoft recently introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first AI copilot integrated into customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications in the cloud, that is designed to augment workflows, uncover insights, identify the next best actions, and reduce time spent on administrative tasks. Organizations relying on on-premises applications will struggle to compete with peers embracing these AI-powered technologies in the cloud. It is paramount for companies to migrate their critical business processes to the cloud now.

We at Microsoft want to empower every organization of any size to adopt these innovative AI-powered technologies so that no one is left behind, and that is why we are introducing AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move).

AIM offers organizations a tailored path to move critical processes to the cloud with confidence. It provides qualified customers with access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, expert assessments, investment offers, tools, and migration support.

AIM’s coverage extends to a broad range of on-premises business applications from Microsoft, including Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics SL, and Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises. It truly reflects Microsoft’s commitment to guiding on-premises business application customers into the era of AI-guided productivity.

Let’s dive deeper into the AIM offering.

Accelerate now by starting with AIM assessments

Before embarking on a cloud migration journey, businesses want to understand the business value, expected outcomes, and key steps and dependencies for moving their on-premises business applications to the cloud. We designed AIM assessments to help customers answer these foundational questions. Our partner ecosystem plays a vital role in delivering these assessments, and now with AIM, we are expanding the coverage of the partner activities program to include AIM assessments for a broad portfolio of on-premises products.

Innovate faster and stay ahead of the competition

When migrating to the cloud, accelerating time to value while minimizing risks is crucial for project success. AIM offers expert implementation guidance and services from Microsoft and its certified partners. Success by Design, a systematic approach for successful cloud deployments, provides prescriptive guidance for designing, building, and deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions, as well as transitioning from on-premises to the cloud.

AIM provides partners with access to additional Success by Design tools and guidance, such as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Implementation Portal, which offers tailored implementation guidance for successful cloud deployment. FastTrack solution architects from Microsoft are available to collaborate with eligible customers, validating solution architectures, mitigating risks, and overcoming deployment blockers. These architects work closely with the partner ecosystem to ensure seamless transitions. And as part of our Unified Support offerings, we’re launching new project quality advisory services that help support a successful cloud transformation.

Partners that want to accelerate their customers’ move to the cloud can work together with AIM Modernization Centers. These service providers bring tools, assessments, and expert migration guidance to other Microsoft partners and their customers, allowing partners to build migration expertise while focusing on delivering business outcomes for their customers. 

Move with agility and scale as your business grows.

Transforming your business through the cloud is an incremental process. AIM provides exclusive offers that help customers optimize their investments. The recently expanded Bridge to the Cloud 2 (BTTC2) promotional offer enables on-premises customers to utilize discounted subscription pricing as part of migrating to the cloud.*

In summary, AIM is a comprehensive offering that unlocks the potential of AI-powered business systems while reducing costs, providing agility for business model innovation, and operating securely with resilience. Let’s explore how some customers have benefited from moving their legacy on-premises business applications to Dynamics 365 in the cloud.

Reducing costs and driving efficiency

United Kingdom-based energy company Viridor experienced immediate cost savings and a 50 percent reduction in legacy apps after migrating to Dynamics 365, resulting in reduced IT support costs. It further experienced a 30 percent reduction in reporting effort across the organization and is saving 400 hours a month through streamlined account processes. Similarly, UK-based manufacturer Kodak Alaris projected a 25 percent cost reduction by migrating to Dynamics 365, driven by decreased customizations and ISV costs.

Driving agility and scale

Manor AG, burdened by aging applications and on-premises infrastructure, initiated a cloud migration project that improved resiliency, efficiency, and overall customer experience. With Dynamics 365, Manor AG gained greater visibility into operations, allowing for optimization of procurement, sales, pricing, and stock monitoring. Similarly, Azelis, a specialty chemicals and food ingredients service provider, improved scalability by deploying Dynamics 365 across 71 entities, leading to increased productivity and meeting carbon reduction goals.

Improving extensibility, reliability, and security

Dynamics 365 offers a 360-degree view of your business by connecting data from ERP and CRM systems. It provides actionable insights through unified data accessible via Microsoft 365 and Power BI. With more than 5,000 developer extensibility points, Dynamics 365 is flexible and can be personalized to meet industry-specific needs. Microsoft Security ensures the reliability and security of Dynamics 365 in the cloud, protecting data and applications with multiple layers of cybersecurity.

AIM for the future with Microsoft today

Microsoft is committed to empowering customers to take advantage of AI capabilities in every line of business, and with AIM, organizations can start now to move to the cloud, making it easier than ever to adopt AI-guided productivity and realize the full potential of AI-powered technologies. Get started with AIM today and unlock a brighter future for your business. Watch the on-demand Inspire 2023 session to learn more. 

Colorful graphic design

AIM for the future with Microsoft

Adopt innovative AI-powered technologies

To learn about how AI copilot is breaking down data silos, turning insights into actions, and giving customers a new reason to embrace the cloud, check out this blog post: Reshaping the future of business with Microsoft Sales Copilot, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and a new cloud migration program.


*This offer is subject to change.

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Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.