As a seller, you know you need to focus on building relationships with your customers and getting the details you need to close the deal. The challenge is that like most sellers, you spend less than 30% of your time selling.^[1] Most of your day goes to searching for information and administrative duties like composing emails and keeping your CRM system up to date. You need more from your technology—and we delivered. In February, we introduced the world’s first AI copilot in CRM with the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot. And today, we’re announcing Microsoft Sales Copilot, a role-based copilot designed to improve sales productivity by empowering sellers with the data and insights they need, when and where they’re needed, allowing them to focus on what they do best—selling.

Sales Copilot brings new capabilities to Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to increase their productivity and personalize every customer interaction. And it works out of the box—not just with Dynamics 365 Sales, but with Salesforce, too.

The following Sales Copilot capabilities are now available for preview^[2]:

• AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries to streamline your sales process and close deals faster
• A customer meeting preparation summary view that includes auto-generated summaries of previous meetings, recent notes, highlights of issues and concerns, and CRM information
• Real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings, prompted by the customer’s mention of a competitor or brand
• Customer email summary and follow-up, with contextual replies and actions based on Outlook emails and CRM data

Additionally, we recently announced the general availability of collaboration spaces in Sales Copilot. Collaboration spaces in Teams can easily be created from Sales Copilot in Outlook to help sellers stay better connected with their customers and colleagues.

Watch this brief video to learn how Microsoft Sales Copilot can help you improve your sales productivity:

AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries

Sales Copilot uses generative AI to quickly summarize leads and opportunities for you. An opportunity summary is a concise overview of the status, progress, and potential of a prospective sale or deal. A “catch up” section highlights key updates since the last visit. An opportunity summary is also available in Outlook, where sellers can view a brief background of the opportunity and the latest activities.

Similarly, a lead summary gives sellers an overview that seamlessly combines data from multiple sources, such as CRM information, contact profiles from LinkedIn^[3], and the latest news from Bing to expedite the lead qualification process.

Meeting preparation and summaries

Being prepared for customer meetings is vital for sales productivity. It facilitates informed decision-making and fosters productive discussions, ultimately yielding improved sales outcomes. Sales Copilot detects meetings coming up in the next 24 hours and offers a summary of recent email exchanges and the last three seller notes to help you prepare.

After the meeting, Sales Copilot in both Outlook and Dynamics 365 Sales generates a professional and friendly meeting summary email, making follow-up as easy as clicking a button.

Real-time tips in Teams meetings

In Teams, sellers receive real-time coaching tips (currently in private preview) during meetings right in the Sales Copilot Teams panel, to help them respond to customer inquiries and competitor or brand mentions. It’s easier to overcome objections and demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable and prepared when the information you need is right in front of you.

Summary, follow-up, and contextual emails

Sales Copilot lets you spend less time composing email. Select a pre-defined category or enter your own text, and Sales Copilot suggests content with specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data, helping sellers quickly follow up, reply to inquiries, and move deals forward. Adjust the tone and length of the message to better resonate with your customers, fostering stronger connections. You can further customize the suggested content before you send it.

Sales Copilot is equally invaluable on the receiving end, summarizing lengthy email threads when you respond to incoming messages and enabling you to save the summary to your CRM with one click. By condensing complex discussions, it streamlines the communication process and ensures comprehension. It also helps to keep you on track by identifying action items and key customer requests in your incoming emails that you might have missed. It continuously monitors your inbox so you don’t have to.

Collaboration spaces

Sellers can easily work with colleagues and customers in collaboration spaces—predefined Teams channels with pinned apps designed for collaboration. Collaboration spaces link to your CRM system and are accessible from Teams, the Sales Copilot app in Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. Learn more about collaboration spaces.

Responsible AI

Microsoft is committed to investing in features that reduce or eliminate unsafe output from generative AI capabilities in products like Sales Copilot.

Sales Copilot inherits your organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies and enforces two-factor authentication, making Sales Copilot a tool you can trust.

Because we know that data leakage is a concern for our customers, as it is for us, the language models that underlie Sales Copilot aren’t trained on and don’t learn from your company’s business, tenant, or individual data. Sales Copilot is part of the Azure ecosystem and employs the same safeguards, compliance boundaries, and enterprise-grade security.

Microsoft copilot AI adheres to our commitment to responsible AI. Engineering teams at Microsoft are continuously working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety, and promotion of harmful content, guided always by our responsible AI principles.

Users have access to specific guidance that helps to reinforce the responsible use of generative AI content. For instance, we provide guidance and prompts through informational elements that instruct the user:

• How to responsibly use suggested content and actions, including prompts
• How to review and edit responses as needed
• How to manually check facts, data, and text for accuracy

Sales Copilot also cites public sources wherever relevant, so the user can easily find the web content it references.

More innovations to transform the customer experience

In addition to Sales Copilot, we’re announcing copilot innovations across Dynamics 365 to empower organizations to deliver exceptional experiences throughout their customer journeys.

• We’re adding copilot capabilities to the newly unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and continuing our innovations in real-time marketing. Along with the copilot capabilities that are in public preview (Content Ideas, Query Assist, and Dialogue with Data), soon you’ll be able to use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys as well as style emails, forms, and event registration pages to match your brand guidelines.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce Copilot can craft compelling, persuasive, and engaging content for product listings for online commerce, with an aim to drive discoverability and conversion. It allows merchandisers to optimize for search engines while tailoring the content for their customers, brand, and voice.

Next steps

Try Microsoft Sales Copilot today to see how it can improve your sales productivity by enabling sellers to engage with customers more effectively and close more deals faster.

Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Outlook and Teams: Microsoft Sales Copilot deployment guide for Dynamics 365 customers

Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: Enable and set up copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales

Learn more about all the upcoming Dynamics 365 Sales Wave 2 2023 features: Overview of Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 release wave 2 | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Visit the Dynamics 365 Sales website to take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial.

Footnotes:

[1] Global State of Sales Report 2022 (linkedin.com)

[2] At preview, capabilities available in English in geographies that support Dynamics 365 Sales.

[3] A Sales Navigator license is required to access contact profiles from LinkedIn.

The post Improve sales productivity and close more deals with Microsoft Sales Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Adapting to evolving customer expectations: staying ahead in the new marketing landscape

Customer experience has significantly transformed in recent years, moving away from linear buying journeys and one-size-fits-all approaches. Nowadays, customers expect digitally enabled, hyper-personalized experiences. To stay competitive, organizations must embrace a customer-first approach, bridging departmental gaps to deliver cohesive experiences. By harnessing the power of their data, organizations can gain a deep understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft 1:1 personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions to drive better customer engagement and long-term loyalty. However, that is not enough, to become or stay leaders in their industries, organizations need to take advantage of generative AI to unlock capabilities and levels of productivity that were previously out of reach.

We are making it easier than ever to acquire these capabilities. Today, at Inspire, we announced, that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing are coming together as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI driven solution which will revolutionize your customers experiences. Within this solution are two apps: Customer Insights – Data (currently known as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) that empowers you to effectively build a unified, real time 360-degree profile of your customers, and Customer Insights – Journeys (currently known as Dynamics 365 Marketing) that allows you to act on this comprehensive understanding to deliver highly personalized experiences. These two apps allow you to start with data or journeys and purchase what you want while providing a 40 percent savings on the base license offer compared to previous packaging.

To learn more please visit Dynamics 365 Customer Insights FAQs.

Transforming customer experiences with real-time marketing and Copilot generative AI capabilities

Recognizing the need for a modern approach to address the high level of engagement demanded by customers, over the next year we will be transitioning all customers of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys from outbound to real-time marketing. Transitioning to real-time marketing enables you to do more with less, drives superior business results, caters to the evolving customer experience landscape, and will propel your businesses into the future of marketing. Real-time marketing has already surpassed traditional outbound marketing in functionality, effectiveness, usability testing results, satisfaction surveys. Moreover, our innovations and upcoming AI features are available exclusively in real-time marketing.

Starting August 2023, new customer environments will only include real-time marketing and event management. Existing customers, if necessary, will be able to add outbound marketing through a self-serve interface. We will continue to support outbound marketing but will not be adding new enhancements.

Transition to real-time marketing

Get started

By transitioning to real-time marketing now, you can gain the following benefits:

Leverage AI to do more with less

Embrace generative AI to ensure long-term success by increasing your productivity while delivering superior customer experiences. You can already leverage Copilot features to assist you in targeting the right audience simply by describing your segments using everyday words – without having to learn the underlying data model or construct queries. With content ideas, you can provide key points or select a topic and a tone of voice matching your message to generate engaging email content within seconds. Furthermore, to complement your message, you can easily choose images from your library that resonate with your audience without having to spend time searching for them.
In the upcoming months, you will be able to use innovative Copilot capabilities to make your messages more compelling by rewriting your existing content, create journeys just by describing them in simple words, set up quiet times to prevent messages from sending during unwanted times, effortlessly style your emails and forms based on your website design, and receive guidance to authenticate your domains easily. By adopting AI now your organization will be better equipped to stay competitive and thrive in the ever-evolving market landscape, ensuring better business results.

Optimize every interaction

Experience the power of seamless integration between Customer Insights – Data and Customer Insights – Journeys, allowing you to continuously capitalize on customer understanding and insights in real-time, to proactively address customer needs and enhance every interaction. Leverage real-time marketing to craft journeys for contact and lead entities in Dataverse, or profiles from Customer Insights. React to customers’ actions instantly using out-of-the-box triggers, custom triggers, or triggers based on any data change in Dataverse without writing any code. Refine your audience targeting with advanced segmentation capabilities, and an unlimited number of segments. Deliver your messages through out-of-the-box text messages, push notifications, custom channels and benefit from AI-powered channel optimization to reach customers on the most effective channel. Embrace hyper-personalization features like dynamic text and no-code conditional content to support 1:1 responsive campaigns tailored to individual preferences with real-time marketing.

Unify sales and marketing

To win deals, sales and marketing teams must work together – break down silos between these teams to fuel revenue growth and increase pipeline. As a marketer, use our new and improved UX across all capabilities! As part of the enhanced upcoming lead scoring builder, you will be able to define granular qualification criteria to better identify and prioritize leads. Thanks to the deep integration with Dynamics 365 Sales, you can align your efforts with sellers by sharing a unified timeline of customer activities, seamlessly transfer qualified leads to the sales team or engage sales representatives within your customer journey exactly at the right time by assigning a sales call or triggering a sales sequence to further increase the likelihood of closing deals. Continuously optimize your marketing efforts by using AI-powered attribution analytics to understand how your marketing activities contribute to your defined milestones.

Scale your business

Real-time marketing unlocks new opportunities for growth and success. Thanks to business units, brand profiles, and a new consent center you can tailor real-time marketing to cater to your business’ unique requirements. As a scalable, customizable solution, real-time supports up to 100 million marketing contacts with 300 million monthly interactions so you can grow your customer base in new markets, reach additional geographies, promote new products, or expand your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.

The future is now: the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and real-time marketing

To make sure your transition to real-time marketing is a success, we have designed a user-friendly interface that does not require extensive retraining – you will experience UI enhancements that significantly improve usability and efficiency.
To easily kick start delivering experiences using real-time marketing, we have designed an email transition tool, made outbound segments available directly in real-time, and empowered you to generate more engaging content and revisit or create new journeys within minutes thanks to our new AI Copilot features.

Please visit for detailed guidance and resources for transitioning to the real-time marketing.

We are excited about how this change to an AI powered, unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, with a generative AI interface coming to every capability will fundamentally change what your company can achieve and how easily you will be able to achieve it.
We look forward to building the future of customer experiences together and have big plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in the coming year and beyond.

Read our real-time marketing FAQ

Discover the upcoming Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Data and Journey wave 2 2023 features:

• Video of release wave 2 2023
• Release planner wave 2 2023 Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data
• Release planner wave 2 2023 Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys

The post Transition to real-time marketing and transform your Customer Experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

On July 18, 2023, we published the 2023 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, a compilation of new capabilities planned to be released between October 2023 and March 2024. This second release wave of the year offers hundreds of new features, including AI capabilities and enhancements, demonstrating our continued investment to power digital transformation for our customers and partners.

This release wave builds on our commitment to create applications and experiences that add value to every role by breaking down silos between data, insights, and people. New capabilities empower new ways to make informed decisions with AI-guided insights and suggested actions, easier ways to automate tasks and processes, and collaboration seamlessly integrated into the flow of work, plus, new low-code ways for anyone to build solutions.

Discover a whole new level of convenience in reviewing release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform with the release planner. Experience unparalleled flexibility as you personalize, filter, sort, and effortlessly share plans according to your preferences. Stay organized, stay informed, and stay in control as you effortlessly navigate through multiple active waves of plans. For more information, visit releaseplans.microsoft.com.

Highlights from Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 Marketing will bring enhancements to Copilot features empowering marketers to quickly create new experiences and will bring unprecedented levels of personalization to email content, images, and layouts. Additionally, business-to-business (B2B) dashboards and directly assigning leads to the right sales rep will align marketers and sellers, enabling them to act as a unified team across the buying journey.

Dynamics 365 Sales will focus on enabling sales organizations to prioritize and manage digital sales processes through enhanced sequence capabilities. We will allow users to assign and monitor lead assignment status with enhanced lead assignment capabilities by providing recommendations, summarizing data, retrieving information, and performing actions in context and within flow of work.

Viva Sales is reimagining how sellers work by delivering advanced AI capabilities like email summarization, CRM recommendations, sales email composition, meeting summarization, and real-time sales tips. Additionally, we are making further investments to collaboration spaces in Microsoft Teams and will deliver new sales Copilot experiences that accelerate deal progression and close sales faster.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service will continue to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot capabilities, Join me On Teams, and visual enhancements to the agent workspace, ability to see live chats and voice calls in Inbox and personalizing size of conversational control. Additionally, we are making enhancements to the voice channel, call dialer improvements, and routing calls to agents with longest idle time.

Dynamics 365 Field Service updates will include new capabilities for frontline workers, service managers, and dispatchers. We are delivering several top requests such as converting quotes to work orders, enhancing inspections, and evolving our resource scheduling capabilities.

Dynamics 365 Finance is focused on enhancing organizations’ visibility into their data, continued enhancements for accounts payable and bank statement automation, and expanding out-of-the-box country coverage in Latin America. Additionally, the team will deliver further automation of complex tax scenarios and e-invoicing requirements for new countries and provide organizations ability for business model expansion and agility.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to improve and optimize business processes to deliver the agility and resilience needed for businesses to thrive in an increasingly complex business environment. The sales and procurement processes will be further enhanced, manufacturers will enjoy greater flexibility, and warehouse processes related to counting, customer returns, and product receipts will be improved.

Dynamics 365 Project Operations is investing in enhancements to services procurement scenarios and project contracting and new functionalities and scenarios in pricing models will support the evolving patterns in the service-centric economy. Additionally, improvements to intelligent resource recommendations will provide suggestions based on experience, cost, and utilization across employees and subcontractors.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources will be improving recruiting experiences with functionally rich and intuitive experiences that target recruiters, candidates, and hiring managers. We will expand the human capital management ecosystem to include learning management system integration through public APIs using Microsoft Dataverse along with expanding our payroll partner network.

Dynamics 365 Guides is bringing several new capabilities and enhancements including Object Anchors, Azure Remote Rendering, and availability on Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High. Additionally, we are focusing on features allowing seamless integration with systems of record allowing customers to build mixed reality workflows that are integrated with their business data.

Dynamics 365 Commerce is using the power of AI to enable the effortless creation of engaging product content for digital commerce sites. New B2B investments allow distributors to view, accept, and reject orders from a centralized dashboard that enables B2B sellers, distributors, and buyers to all work in the same place.

Dynamics 365 Business Central will focus on core functionality to help companies manage their intercompany and consolidations across environments. We will continue to enhance our Copilot capabilities and will further improve our warehouse capabilities, create more Power Automate templates, and provide developers with more capabilities for automating testing of dependent apps.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is enhancing our Copilot features to allow you to ask questions in simple words, to quickly receive insights, and action these immediately. New capabilities in real-time data management will provide the latest view of your customers and easy access to insights within Dynamics 365 apps will allow your team to deliver seamless, personalized experiences across the customer’s lifecycle.

Microsoft Supply Chain Center is enabling resilient supply chain with enhancements in key areas such as Intelligent Order Management for purchase order orchestration, seamless collaboration with external partners via Supplier portal, and Copilot. Additionally, the team will be bringing Advanced Data Analytics to enable Insights to Action as well as new Network Inventory Optimization capabilities.

Highlights from Microsoft Power Platform

Power BI is improving the creation experience for individuals by improving and aligning our experiences with Microsoft 365, bringing more parity on the web, and bringing the Power Query diagram view into Power BI Desktop. For teams, we are bringing enhancements to meetings and multitasking. For organizations, we are enabling Git and source control integration to help developers maintain and collaborate on their business intelligence solutions.

Power Apps is expanding the use of Copilot to bring AI-assisted experiences to increase developer productivity, bring natural language to all users, and give insights to admins. We will bring modern controls and rich collaborative experiences to users, as well as improved deployment and governance support to ensure low-code can be enabled organization wide.

Power Pages continues to make strides in the Copilot maker experience to enable building a site. Managed environments will include Power Pages capabilities for maker usage and onboarding. For data, you can connect easily to data where it exists today. Low-code makers can collaborate and detect co-presence.

Power Automate will continue to make it easier to get started building new flows by using natural language across cloud flows and desktop flows, and by improving process mining to jumpstart creation of automation and authoring experiences. Additionally, we’re making it easier to manage work at scale by introducing unified activity view and deeper notifications on capabilities across the product. 

Power Virtual Agents will bring general availability for capabilities including Multi-Lingual bot support, Generative Answers and Actions, Standalone interactive voice response (IVR) and IVR integration with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and our integration with the Conversational Language Understanding service. Additionally, we will continue to enhance our offering for customers by delivering on new Enterprise Trust capabilities.

AI Builder will allow makers to easily process structured and unstructured documents. Using the power of GPT, responses to customer requests can be pre-generated according to enterprise guidelines and will be available in a human validation station allowing makers to easily review and enhance content that is automatically generated from intelligent copilots.

2023 release wave 2 early access period

Starting July 31, 2023, customers and partners will be able to validate the latest features in a non-production environment. These features include user experience enhancements that will be automatically enabled for users in production environments during October 2023. To take advantage of the early access period, try out the latest updates in a non-production environment, and effectively plan for your customer rollout. Check out the 2023 release wave 2 early access features for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, or visit the early access FAQ page. 

Release planner

Personalize, filter, sort, and effortlessly share plans according to your preferences.

View the release planner

The post 2023 release wave 2 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Copilot is breaking down data silos, turning insights into actions, and giving customers a new reason to embrace the cloud.

Since March, when we introduced Dynamics 365 Copilot—the world’s first copilot for both customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)—and Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform, we’ve seen an incredible response with more than 63,000 organizations experiencing Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Customers like Campari Group, Leatherman Tool Group, and Northrop & Johnson are able to transform how work is done, from the front office to the back office. Copilot assists employees wherever they are working, surfacing valuable business data and delivering business insights so they can focus on the most meaningful parts of their jobs. And with this momentum in AI, it’s a great time for our customers to move to the cloud.

Microsoft Sales Copilot

Empowering sellers to increase productivity and personalize customer interactions.

Learn more

Introducing Microsoft Sales Copilot

Today, we are announcing Microsoft Sales Copilot—a role-based copilot designed for sellers that empowers them to increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction so they can close more deals. Designed to be a seller companion, Sales Copilot can be accessed in the tools where sellers work, whether that is Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems like Salesforce.

Sales Copilot saves sellers time with CRM task automation, auto-generated email or meeting summaries, and more. Sellers can go from one customer meeting to the next feeling prepared, armed with AI-powered, real-time insights such as top opportunities and customer opportunity summaries. Sales Copilot also helps sellers with customer follow-up by generating AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as contextual emails based on Outlook and CRM data.

Microsoft Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, kick-started our work of transforming seller experiences, and these capabilities are now part of Sales Copilot. In our own sales organization at Microsoft, more than 10,000 sellers have been using Sales Copilot. Early results show that 85 percent of surveyed sellers report completing one or more tasks faster, and 70 percent stated that Sales Copilot helped them improve productivity.

Today, we’re also announcing new Sales Copilot capabilities. Sellers can now: 

• Get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Create contextual emails that utilize customer CRM data to pull in product, customer, and opportunity information, inside Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Prepare for customer meetings with a summary view including account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news, and more—in Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Get real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings prompted by competitor or brand mentions by the customers to stay ready to handle objections.

“Opportunity summary in Microsoft Sales Copilot is a huge and important leap in our direction to save more time for our sales personnel. With this capability in the hands of our sellers, they can spend more time equipping organizations with best-in-class security solutions to help make our world a safer place.”

—Philip Eklund, Vice President of Client Engagement Platform, Securitas

“At Investec, we are very excited to see how we can leverage Microsoft Sales Copilot and AI within the Microsoft stack to connect our internal teams and to enhance our understanding further of prospective and current clients to ensure we are providing a best-in-class experience.”

—Dan Speirits, CRM Product Manager, Investec

Sales Copilot is generally available today both as a standalone subscription and included as part of customers’ existing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses at no additional cost, with the new capabilities above rolling out this month.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: AI-powered customer insights and journeys

Delivering exceptional customer experiences is at the heart of what sellers, marketers, and customer service agents do. From building brand loyalty and generating leads to addressing customer issues and closing deals, these roles all rely on knowing the customer in the context of their journey with the brand. Yet, limitations in managing and harnessing customer data in meaningful ways, coupled with organizational silos, have prevented organizations from delivering and realizing the value of a truly connected customer journey.

To help organizations increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalized customer journeys, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution and continue investments into real-time marketing. In March, we announced content ideas, query assist, and dialogue with data—copilot capabilities for brainstorming marketing copy for email campaigns, creating new targeted marketing segments, and using natural language to infer key insights from your customer data and support better business outcomes. These copilot capabilities are available now for use, and we’re adding enhancements in the coming months to include the ability to refresh and improve existing marketing content as well as to summarize audience definitions and suggest improvements to simplify definition.

Today, we also announce two new copilot capabilities for marketers—all included in the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights subscription. The new capabilities help you:

• Easily style your email, forms, and event registration pages to perfectly match brand guidelines (as simple as using an existing website) using natural language, so you can deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience.
• Use natural language to easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, so customer actions can be responded to appropriately and quickly, generating sales leads or increasing customer satisfaction.

These new capabilities will start rolling out in preview next month. The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering will be generally available on September 1, 2023.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unlocks the full potential of your customer data and elevates customer experiences with predictive real-time insights, contextual and relevant customer journeys, and built-in next-generation AI. When customers combine the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they can create even more seamless leads-to-sales-to-retention cycles with differentiated capabilities, including these features that are available today:

• A 360-degree view of the customer profile, associated marketing interactions, and predicted customer lifetime value to guide both sellers and service agents in their customer interactions.
• Ability to surface the next best action to the sales team or service team when a lead engages with the marketing team.

“Super exciting—it’s the right move to bring together the customer data and journey capabilities into a single solution”… “this will enable our team to deliver more cohesive experiences quicker and easier.”

—Keith Perfect, Director of Technology & Intelligence, Northrop & Johnson

“At Leatherman, we are thrilled about the potential of generative AI and Microsoft Copilots to advance our business. We are beginning to realize the benefits of improved productivity, streamlined processes, and personalized customer experiences. This technology will undoubtedly propel us towards greater innovation and success.”

—Liz Lee, IT Director, Leatherman Tool Group

Customer service organizations around the globe are using AI technologies to improve service delivery and customer experiences. As examples, AB InBev and Virgin Money are empowering their customer service departments with tailored chatbots built with Copilot in Power Virtual Agents. Within minutes, businesses can train a bot using natural language to reference internal and external knowledge sources, customer service applications, and web data through Bing. Virgin Money’s chatbot addresses more than 195,000 customer interactions a month, helping their service agents to focus on more complex customer inquiries. In the next few months, we’ll be rolling out additional role-based copilots, similar to Microsoft Sales Copilot, that will help customer service agents be more productive and better engage with their customers using the innovation of Copilot in Power Virtual Agents. Learn more about Power Virtual Agents.

AIM for the future with Microsoft

Copilot is redefining productivity, efficiency, and collaboration across business workflows. However, today many businesses are challenged to access new technology innovations, like AI, to improve profitability and maintain a competitive edge because they are still operating on legacy on-premises solutions. At Microsoft, we are committed to helping customers gain access to and take advantage of AI capabilities, starting now.

So, today, we’re also announcing AIM (Accelerate, Innovate, Move), a brand-new program that offers a tailored path for our customers to move from on-premises to cloud-first Microsoft Dynamics 365 business applications.

With AIM, customers of all sizes can accelerate their migration to the cloud to adopt AI-powered technologies starting with AIM assessments. These assessments are designed to help customers understand the business value, expected outcomes, and key steps and dependencies for moving their on-premises business applications. Customers can innovate faster to stay ahead by using the proven Success by Design methodology from Microsoft to implement Dynamics 365 and go live with confidence. Customers get expert implementation guidance and services from FastTrack and its certified partners. And finally, they’ll also be able to move with agility and scale as their business grows. AIM provides exclusive offers that help customers optimize their investments and transform the business processes in an incremental manner.

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. AIM provides access to a dedicated team of migration advisors, assessments, offers, tools, and support to give customers a faster route to innovation and success.

Get started today with AIM and future-proof your business.

Looking forward to Dynamics 365 solutions

• Learn more about Microsoft Sales Copilot.
• If you are an existing Dynamics 365 Sales or Marketing or Customer Insights customer, start using the new capabilities in preview. To learn more about the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering, read more here.
• If you are not a customer yet, learn more and sign up for a trial on our website.
• If you are a customer using ERP and CRM systems on-premises, and want to migrate to Dynamics 365 in the cloud to accelerate adoption of AI-powered technologies, get started today with AIM.

The post Reshaping the future of business with Microsoft Sales Copilot, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and a new cloud migration program appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Field Service Mobile is a robust and scalable mobile application created for your frontline workers. With the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse, you can customize and configure the mobile application to meet your unique business needs. In this post, we’ll explore the most important things you can do—and not do—to create the best possible experience for your frontline workers when you implement Field Service Mobile.

5 “Dos” when you implement Field Service Mobile

Do use “mobile offline“ for frontline workers

Frontline workers often perform tasks in areas with variable network connectivity. Online-only applications can experience slow performance when network connections are poor. Responses can be delayed or even fail when the network isn’t available.

Using offline-first mode with Field Service Mobile provides a consistent user experience for frontline workers regardless of network conditions. Even if the network is often available, offline mode has advantages for your organization.

• The offline-enabled application stores and retrieves data from a local database on the device. App performance improves without the dependency on network calls to fetch data from the server.
• When a network is available, the offline application automatically synchronizes data with the server. Without a network connection, the sync pauses until the device is back online. Frontline workers can focus on completing their tasks without worrying about network connectivity.
• Frontline workers’ job progress is not delayed by long waits or networking errors in cases when they temporarily lose network access.

Learn more about offline mode:

• Field Service offline overview
• Offline profile guidelines
• Offline capabilities and limitations

Do keep the mobile workflow simple

When configuring Field Service Mobile, you have control over the precise layout of forms and fields. It’s important to keep core user scenarios in mind when defining the layout of your forms to create a streamlined experience. Focus your customizations on making the interface intuitive and efficient. This is especially useful for new employees to help them familiarize themselves with the necessary processes and steps to complete their work.

Here are some suggestions to simplify the application:

• Use fields in a logical sequence. Avoid forcing users to move between forms.

• Consider performance when you lay out form fields and tabs. Fields that are off-screen are loaded on a delay to avoid impacting the user accessing data that’s visible on the screen. However, sub-grids and charts are loaded with the initial form and can have an impact on performance if they’re added to the form’s default tab.

• Use Work Order Service Tasks, Services, and Products. These out-of-the-box tables help guide frontline workers to complete a work order.

Do minimize customizations

Field Service Mobile provides much of the necessary app experience out of the box, but there are times when business requirements necessitate business logic unique to your organization.  When customizations are necessary, follow best practices and use common Power Platform capabilities. This enables your organization to get the latest new features and enhancements sooner. It also helps to improve supportability and lower maintenance costs.

We recommend documenting your customizations. This helps you to understand changes and set yourself up for success when making future revisions.

Do train users and use feedback for improvements

Training your users on how to use the app and any unique workflows leads to higher productivity and satisfaction. Training should include a feedback loop to assess user satisfaction and be responsive to misunderstandings or requested changes that will improve the frontline workers’ workflow.

Do take advantage of documentation and the Field Service community 

A wealth of information is available in Field Service documentation and learning sites. Help is also available in the community-driven Field Service forum. Use these resources to build solid understanding of Field Service, Dynamics 365, and the Power Platform.

General documentation:

• Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app overview

Customization:

• API reference for model-driven apps
• Debug JavaScript code for model-driven apps
• Client-side scripting for model-driven apps
• Best practices for client-side scripting

Community support and feature requests:

• Dynamics 365 Field Service – Forums, Blogs, Support
• Field Service Mobile ideas

5 “Don’ts” when you implement Field Service Mobile

Don’t skip user acceptance testing 

Assessing the end-to-end application in real-world scenarios with your organization’s customizations and data is critical to a successful rollout. This can be a challenge when introducing diverse Field Service scenarios in addition to complex online and offline capabilities.

• Focus testing on the “happy path” workflow through the application. Make sure frontline workers can complete that workflow without error in various situations.
• Test with the same set of devices that users will have.
• Test with the same security role and data access that users will have.
• Test with production-level amounts of data.
• Test offline mode in variable network conditions emulating real-world usage.
  • Strong network access: Wi-Fi or stable cellular networkNo network access: Device disconnected
  • Intermittent or ‘flaky’ network access: Weak or variable cellular signal or areas of high latency
• Test customizations and make sure they work well on different devices with the network and in offline scenarios.
• Enable a feedback loop with your tests. Listen closely to actual users who are taking part in user acceptance testing. Plan a phase to incorporate feedback, which will help users during the final rollout.

Don’t use low-performance hardware or outdated software 

Mobile devices evolve quickly, and it’s best to keep up to date by using recent hardware with sufficient memory and processing power. Using modern, high-performance mobile devices increases productivity through faster access to data and better battery life. Additionally, apps on modern devices are more reliable and less prone to slowdowns or crashes.  

Field Service Mobile recommends evaluating the device based on CPU benchmark scores as given in the system requirements documentation.  

Don’t implement offline mode without understanding data needs

It’s highly recommended that you use offline mode with Field Service Mobile. When implementing offline mode, plan based on your scenarios and data needs for a successful experience for your users.

Include only the required data. It’s important to take a minimal amount of data offline as required for frontline workers to perform their work. Reducing data helps with the sync time, cellular data usage, device battery usage, and device storage. It’s important to understand users’ true data needs and how security roles influence data access.

Minimize the number of relationships between tables to reduce query complexity. The amount of data isn’t the only factor to consider. Complex queries with multiple joins against large tables can also have a high impact on offline sync time.

Avoid frequent schema changes. Schema changes may force the redownload of tables that had changes, resulting in longer sync times.

Be aware of server-side business logic. The offline-enabled Field Server Mobile application syncs data from the server at regular intervals. If part of a workflow depends on interaction with the server, the response may take minutes to return to the client when the network is available and not at all if the user is truly offline. It’s recommended that you move as much business logic to the client as possible to reduce wait time and dependency on the network.

Understand limitations. There are limitations on the offline capabilities of the Power Platform.

Refer to the offline profile guidelines for more information.

Don’t design a workflow that includes switching applications or context 

Try to bring as much of the Field Service workflow into the Field Service Mobile application as possible so frontline workers don’t need to switch between multiple applications. Maintaining multiple applications is time-consuming and frustrating for the user and increases organizational overhead. Use the Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) to build custom experiences, bringing in other data sources when necessary.

If alternate applications are required, try to ease the burden of context switching by using deep links to navigate between the apps.

Don’t reuse web forms on mobile devices 

A benefit of working on the Power Platform is being able to reuse forms on both web and mobile. This capability can make development of your form more efficient, reduce maintenance, and provide a common user experience regardless of how the form is accessed.

However, a form intended for use on a larger-screen device may have information that’s not necessary for a technician using the mobile application. For this reason, we recommend creating mobile-specific forms in some cases to provide an optimized experience that contains only the data that’s necessary for the user.

Conclusion

Field Service Mobile is a powerful application that brings the robust capabilities of Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform into the field. Following these best practices and avoiding common mistakes will help you implement Field Service Mobile successfully.

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