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Frontline workers are the backbone of the global workforce and often the first to interact with customers and manage on-the-ground operations. When organizations invest in fast time to value technology for their frontline workers, it not only drives positive outcomes for businesses’ bottom lines but also for frontline employees.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Delivering exceptional service is key for building customer preference and loyalty. But timely resolution can get challenging when fragmented tools make it hard to find the right information and service delivery gets delayed with lengthy data-entry processes. Today, we’re introducing Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service, bringing the power of next-generation AI to service professionals on the frontline to speed time to resolution. From creating work orders with the right information and assigning them to the right technicians, to equipping the technicians with sufficient support to successfully complete jobs—Copilot will help streamline critical frontline tasks.
New data from Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index Annual Report1 reveals 63 percent of frontline workers struggle with having to do repetitive or menial tasks that take time away from more meaningful work, and 66 percent feel that they don’t have enough time to complete work tasks. The number one thing that frontline leaders value from AI is helping employees with necessary but repetitive/mundane tasks. Whether it’s for a facility inspection, equipment installation, or a maintenance request, frontline service managers want to spend their time figuring out how to improve their team’s efficiency rather than on repetitive tasks such as copying and pasting information from one system to another to create work orders and dispatch technicians. And frontline technicians want the right information at the right time to complete the job, the first time.
Accelerating service delivery
With the preview of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service today, frontline managers who receive service requests or questions via emails can use next-generation AI to streamline work order creation directly within Outlook. Copilot prepopulates relevant data including summaries of customer escalations into draft work orders for managers to review in their flow of work. Once saved, these work orders automatically sync to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service. Additionally, with updates coming this fall, Copilot will streamline technician scheduling by offering data-driven recommendations based on travel time, availability, skill set, and other factors as well as accelerate responses to customer messages by summarizing key details and next steps in email drafts. Copilot will also become available to assist frontline managers in their flow of work within Microsoft Teams.
“I am really excited about working with Copilot capabilities as I believe it will completely change the way our employees at G&J Pepsi interact with Dynamics 365 Field Service. It will be a game changer for our field service and frontline teams, allowing them to enhance their best-in-class service by getting access to the information they need faster than ever before.”
Eric McKinney, Director of Enterprise Infrastructure at G&J Pepsi
Boosting technician productivity
Today, we’re also introducing the preview of a new Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile experience for frontline technicians to swiftly access all the information they need on the go. This modern user experience supports familiar mobile navigation, gestures, and controls to streamline managing work order Tasks, Services, and Products. From changing the status of a booking with a quick swipe to accessing driving directions to a customer site with one tap, the redesign saves valuable technician time for daily work—cutting down the number of taps for key tasks in half. Technicians can not only easily pick, change, or complete work order details, but also add notes with multiple inline images. Technicians who need additional support can now also use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides embedded in Field Service mobile. Embedded Dynamics 365 Guides in Field Service provides technicians with step-by-step guided instructions, pictures, and videos explaining the immediate task.
Additionally, with the preview of the Dynamics 365 Field Service app in Teams starting today, frontline technicians can now see upcoming work orders at-a-glance as Tasks in their Microsoft Viva Connections home experience and can easily drill into details such as location or issue type. Frontline technicians can also now share full work order details through cards in Teams and access the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist app in one click via their home experience in Teams mobile to problem solve with remote experts in real time using 3D spatial annotations that lock to the physical world.
“Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service will support a faster way of working for our organization by simplifying our transactional work order management process. The ease with which an email can be translated into a work order and planned will increase the speed of our customer responses and improve our customer journey. We are also excited to improve the experience for our customer-facing colleagues with the Microsoft 365 integrations. Microsoft Teams is our main internal communication method, and the integration of Field Service into Teams will greatly simplify the communication about a specific work order, account, or other customer case and improve the case lead time.”
Sven van Veldhuizen, CIO/CDO at Joulz
Streamlining work order management
A redesigned Dynamics 365 Field Service work order management experience is now available for early access, featuring a simplified web experience that brings important information front and center—reducing the number of clicks for key tasks by more than a third. The experience not only offers concise information about the work order but also provides relevant next steps based on booking statuses, and supports making quick updates inline or in a side panel to not lose context. Copilot will provide intelligent recaps within this experience to help frontline managers stay up-to-date without having to navigate through all the information in a work order.
Partnering with our ecosystem
Partners have played a key role in helping us refine Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service ahead of its public preview and we are excited to share some of their observations as early adopters.
“We are excited to bring Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft 365 integrations to augment our sustainable energy customers’ field service workforce—enabling them to stay ahead of the game with increased productivity. Just imagine the productivity gain your service department can realize by having a service-related email translated by AI into a field service work order with the right information, and what field service technicians can accomplish when they get a clear and simple view of all the information they need to focus on in whatever Microsoft 365 tool supports their daily tasks the best.”
Filip Bossuyt, Founder & CEO at 9altitudes Group
“Hitachi Solutions has been working with Microsoft to preview Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service and is already seeing how field service organizations will greatly benefit from AI. Our field service customers want solutions fast. With Copilot work order capabilities in Outlook, our customer’s field service managers can stay in the flow of work and immediately assign resources to solve problems, leading to quicker response times and enhanced service delivery.”
Michael Mendoza, Director of Service Transformation at Hitachi Solutions
“Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service is like a window into the future, nothing like what I’ve seen before. It’s literally taking steps out of my work stream by summarizing emails and coming up with the work order description—saving me seconds each time which add up to minutes each day. This matters a lot when you think about the volume of emails with service requests in today’s world.”
Greg Somogyi, Field Service Senior Consultant at Ludia Consulting
“We are excited to introduce Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service to our facilities clients because we see the power in simplicity. For our clients raising responsive repairs to get the right person with the right skill to the right properties at the right time, Copilot enables frontline teams to go from issue to resolution in just a few clicks.”
Matt Hedges, Products Director at TechLabs London
Lastly, we are excited to announce the interoperation of asset performance solutions from ICONICS and Willow with Dynamics 365 Field Service, making it seamless to share critical insights like equipment health and faults in order to proactively detect and resolve asset issues. The IoT-based solutions elevate asset monitoring and service management to new levels of sophistication, empowering frontline workers to make better-informed decisions based on data when providing service and repairs. The new Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Field Service can also help efficiently summarize and update work orders generated based on these IoT-based solutions. This streamlines service workflows, improves response times, and enhances overall service quality for customers. Read about further details on the solutions here.
Learn more about Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service, Microsoft 365 integrations, and more
Today’s announcement builds on recent AI momentum across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform. Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot on the Dynamics 365 AI webpage. With Copilot, you’re in control as it is grounded in your business data and automatically inherits your valuable security, compliance and privacy policies, regulations, and processes. Learn about our AI principles that empower impactful responsible AI practices at Microsoft, as well as provide a framework for implementing responsible AI practices at our customers’ organizations.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service
Next-generation AI helps your frontline deliver exceptional service.
1 The Work Trend Index survey was conducted by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,000 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets, 6,019 of which are frontline workers, between February 1, 2023, and March 14, 2023. This survey was 20 minutes in length and conducted online, in either the English language or translated into a local language across markets. One thousand full-time workers were surveyed in each market, and global results have been aggregated across all responses to provide an average. Each market is evenly weighted within the global average. Each market was sampled to be representative of the full-time workforce across age, gender, and region; each sample included a mix of work environments (in-person, remote vs. non-remote, office settings vs. non-office settings, etc.), industries, company sizes, tenures, and job levels. Markets surveyed include: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce that starting August 7th, 2023, Microsoft Release Planner will support the content in 11 new languages. Users around the world can now view the release plans of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Swedish, and English.
This update underscores our commitment to inclusivity. We at Microsoft strongly believe that language should not be a barrier to accessing tools and information. With this update, we aim to provide a more personalized, standardized, and intuitive user experience regardless of where you are in the world.
How to view and manage plans in your preferred language?
Our user-friendly design ensures that the Release Planner automatically loads in your preferred language based on your browser settings. Additionally, you can switch to your desired language through the language switcher in the header.
The Release Planner advantage
The Release planner for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform allows customers to view and manage release plans across all active release waves in a unified and interactive interface while giving them the option to personalize, filter, sort, and collaborate on release plans.
Under the hood, the Release Planner is powered by the Power Apps portal. It is created based on customer feedback to address the constraints of content suitability, discoverability, and personalization. Our goal is to improve the release planning and change management process where it matters most – help customers identify and track their salient capabilities, included in both the current and upcoming release waves.
Here are some of its key features:
Content personalization through ‘My Release plans’
Create a curated list of release plans you would like to follow. All the release plans across various products can be viewed in a unified view.
Collaborate on plans effortlessly and securely
Share your curated list and effortlessly and securely with your stakeholders. Collaborate on individual plans using notes and comments all within the Release Planner experience. Your comments are displayed only to the stakeholders with whom you have shared the plan. The owner of the comment has complete control over editing and deleting the comment.
Filter, sort and group plans based on multiple criteria
Customize your view by using multiple filters, sorting, and grouping criteria. These criteria are available for both ‘All release plans’ and ‘My release plans’ views. You can also view the plans grouped by product theme or timeline.
Thank you for your continued support as we work to make our product more accessible worldwide. We hope this update sparks more creativity and productivity across our global community! Stay tuned for more exciting updates.
Here’s to breaking down barriers and welcoming a world of new possibilities!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, supply chain disruptions are a common occurrence, leading to rapid shifts in supply and demand. This poses challenges for procurement professionals and buyers, who must deal with a significant volume of purchase order change responses on a daily basis. To address these challenges and streamline the process, intelligent and agile tools are required. To meet this need, Microsoft has introduced Copilot support for procurement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
The Copilot support for procurement is an advanced tool that empowers users to efficiently manage and assess changes to purchase orders on a large scale. By providing insights into the impact and risk associated with these changes, it greatly enhances procurement decision-making. With this tool, users can swiftly identify high-impact or low-impact alterations, enabling prompt actions to mitigate potential risks.
The technology behind Copilot support for procurement offers a concise overview of purchase order modifications, including adjustments in quantities and delivery dates. It also highlights any potential downstream effects that may arise from these changes. Leveraging the powerful Text-davinci-003 generative AI model, Copilot generates natural-language summaries of these modifications, making it easier to understand and communicate their implications through emails and Teams conversations.
Supply Chain Management Copilot in action:
Procurement: Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes
The latest addition to the Copilot support for procurement set of AI-powered tools is the “Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes” workspace. This feature is particularly valuable as it simplifies the identification and reconfirmation of changes that have minimal downstream impact. Procurement managers can efficiently focus their attention on high-impact changes, thoroughly assessing their effects on downstream orders, and directly communicating with vendors to address any potential issues. Overall, this comprehensive set of features helps optimize the entire procurement process and improves collaboration between stakeholders.
Procurement and sourcing > Workspaces > Confirmed purchase orders with changes.
The workspace lists all previously confirmed purchase orders that have been changed since confirmation. It helps the review process by identifying potential impacts on production work, service work orders, and sales orders.
At the top of the workspace, the three tiles summarize groups of changes to confirmed purchase orders and the related downstream impacts.
In preview, the grouping is predefined and limited to pegged orders that have been created by planning.
Low impact changes – This tile highlights changes to purchase orders that have no known impact on downstream orders that have been created by planning, also called pegged orders. A summary of changes is generated to help you review and validate the purchase orders.
High impact changes – This tile highlights purchase orders that have known downstream impacts on pegged orders. These high-risk changes are summarized together with the detected impacts, to help you investigate further and decide what action to take.
Impacted downstream orders – This tile summarizes impacts on pegged orders by the number and type of orders, and it shows the purchase order changes that cause each impact. This information helps you review potential downstream impacts based on the latest master planning run.
Each tile provides a “Show” link, which lets you filter the list of purchase orders and purchase order lines. The list includes columns for the original and new quantities, original and new confirmed delivery dates, and so on.
Review changes to confirmed purchase orders
Purchasers use the workspace to review and accept changes to confirmed purchase orders. They typically follow these steps.
Study all changes to confirmed purchase orders and their downstream impact.
Focus on changes that have a low risk of downstream impact.
Review changes that have a high risk of downstream impact.
Review the remaining downstream impact.
The following subsections describe these steps in more detail.
Step 1: Study all changes to confirmed purchase orders and their downstream impact
The purchaser first opens the Confirmed purchase orders with changes workspace and studies all the changes that have been submitted through the purchase order change management process. Vendors can submit these changes through several channels.
When a purchase order that was previously confirmed is changed, it’s moved back to the Approved state. The workspace shows all purchase orders that have been changed after confirmation.
The workspace shows two lists: one for the purchase orders and one for the purchase order lines.
The purchase order list shows the purchase order number, the vendor, and the requested receipt date from the purchase order header. To view the related records, select the purchase order or vendor link in the list.
The purchase order lines list shows information about each line that has proposed changes. This information includes the item number, product name, original quantity, new quantity, original confirmed delivery date, and new confirmed delivery date. The workspace also provides a hierarchical view of any downstream impact. The Reference field indicates the type of downstream impact, such as a planned kanban for a production order, a sales order, or a maintenance work order.
Step 2: Focus on changes that have a low risk of downstream impact
To take action effectively and efficiently, you typically start by focusing on low-impact changes. These changes have no known downstream impact according to the current plan.
The Low impact changes tile at the top of the workspace provides an AI-generated, natural-language summary of the changes that have a low risk of impact. Select the Show link to open the corresponding filtered view.
The purchaser reviews the changes and can then accept them by selecting individual or multiple purchase orders and then selecting Confirm purchase orders on the toolbar above the list. The procedure for confirming the changes is the same as the procedure for confirming a purchase order for the first time, and it supports batch processing. Any extension that’s registered for purchase order confirmation will also be run.
After the selected purchase orders are reconfirmed, they’re moved back to the Confirmed state.
Step 3: Review changes that have a high risk of downstream impact
The purchaser will spend more time on changes that have a high risk of downstream impact. These changes have downstream orders allocated to them, and the downstream impact has been identified.
The High impact changes tile provides an AI-generated, natural-language summary of the changes that have a high risk of impact. Select the Show link to open a filtered view where you can focus on those impacts and take action.
Note: Only direct downstream impacts are considered. Indirect downstream impacts, such as product work that depends on other production work, aren’t yet considered.
From this view, you can reach out to a vendor using email or Microsoft Teams. Using the contact details of the vendor contact person, the system generates a proposed message text and adds it to a new email message or Microsoft Teams chat. You can then review, update, and send the message.
After you’ve communicated with the vendor, you can update the order further and then send it back to the vendor for confirmation. Alternatively, you might cancel the order and plan for alternative supply.
Step 4: Review the remaining downstream impact
After most of the order changes have been addressed, the purchaser can review the overall downstream impact of the remaining open order changes.
The Impacted downstream orders tile provides a summary of the downstream impact. Select the Show link to open a filtered view where you can focus on those impacts and take action.
In this view, you can analyze the changes from the perspective of downstream impact and identify the purchase order changes that are causing the impact. You can then take action on those purchase orders.
A good way to focus on the most pressing downstream impact is to sort and filter the list by the date of impact (the requested date in the downstream order). You can then take action by communicating with downstream stakeholders. Those stakeholders might, in turn, contact affected customers and replan the downstream orders.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Microsoft’s Copilot support for procurement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers a powerful and intelligent solution to address the challenges of managing purchase order changes in today’s fast-paced business landscape. The tool empowers procurement professionals to efficiently assess and manage changes, identifying high-impact alterations and streamlining collaboration with vendors. With its AI-driven capabilities, Copilot optimizes the procurement process, improves decision-making, and enhances communication between stakeholders, ultimately leading to a more agile and responsive supply chain.
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
Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Customer service agents in a digital contact center interact with a high volume of customers. Often, they handle multiple conversations simultaneously. For example, they might be interacting with three or more customers over chat at the same time.
During customer interactions, they want to capture critical information in quick notes. After wrapping up the conversation, while creating a case, they need to rewrite the information they took already in the note on the customer timeline. Or, after taking notes on the customer’s timeline during the conversation, they need to copy them to the case. Agents must perform this manual process, just to transfer the notes they took onto an existing or a new case.
Now, agents can relate a note on a customer’s timeline to an existing case or create a new case from the note, thus helping them avoid reentering notes during case creation. This expedites conversation wrap-up time and enables agents to create cases quickly.
By linking the note to a case, agents spend less time creating cases and more time helping customers. As a result, agents can have more customer conversations with improved productivity and drive better customer satisfaction.
To ensure agents can create cases quickly, Dynamics 365 Customer Service enables agents to create a new case or associate an existing case with notes they write on the customer timeline during a conversation. This feature is available for the account, contact, and case entities, which means agents can create or associate a note with a new or existing account, contact, or case.
Configure forms to create table records from timeline notes
Administrators can enable this feature from Power Apps by navigating to the form where the timeline is added. They can select one or all the tables (account, contact, or case). Then they can configure the form type and the form to be displayed when an agent creates a new record.
They can also map the notes title and notes description fields to the appropriate table field. For example, they can the map notes title to Case Title. Then they can map the notes description to the case Description. That way, these fields are auto populated when an agent creates a case from the note.
Associate notes from the customer timeline
During the conversation with the customer, the agent might capture a quick note on the customer timeline. Also, while using digital channels, the agent’s notes appear on the customer timeline on the conversation form. The agent can select the note and either search for an existing case (if case table is enabled by the administrator) to associate with it or create a new case.
When they create a new case from the note, the form opens with Case Title and Description fields auto populated with the administrator’s mapping configuration. Upon case creation or case selection, the agent can unlink the note from the current table record. For example, while associating a new or existing case to the note taken on contact timeline, the note will get transferred to case and will be dissociated with the contact. Hence, note will appear on the case timeline and disappear from the contact timeline.
Link the note shown on Conversation form Link a note shown on Contact formCreate a new case from the note and transfer note from the contact to the new case
Based on administrator configuration, agents can associate a note with an existing or a new case, account or contact.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Effective communication is vital in building strong customer relationships and closing deals. Mining actionable insights from customer calls can be a daunting task. Conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales is a game-changer for sales professionals who want to unlock the full potential of their phone calls. Conversation intelligence captures and analyzes every call. Insights are available in real time during the call—in the Sales app when using the integrated Teams dialer or in a Teams meeting—and in the CRM record afterward. Managers can view aggregated data in a dedicated dashboard.
Even more exciting, the integration of third-party telephony systems brings this powerful tool to a wider audience. Businesses of all sizes can now harness the true potential of their phone conversations, equipping their sales teams with invaluable data that drives informed decision-making, elevates customer interactions, and boosts overall sales performance.
Integrate conversation intelligence with your own telephony system
We’re excited to unveil new extensibility options for conversation intelligence in the latest update of Dynamics 365 Sales. Partners and developers can now connect their customers’ third-party telephony systems to conversation intelligence using the Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework (CIF). Phone conversations are recorded and securely stored in either Microsoft-provided storage or the customer’s Azure blob storage and analyzed to glean valuable insights in real time and after the call.
Integrating third-party telephony providers with the conversation intelligence capability in Dynamics 365 Sales involves three key steps, performed by a partner or developer:
Register the provider: Using the conversation intelligence API, an admin registers the phone provider’s details and obtains the list of users to be recorded. This process establishes a connection between the telephony system and Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling seamless data exchange.
Fork the media: The system directs a fork of the audio stream of a call to the conversation intelligence recorder using the Session Recording Protocol (SIPREC). In this step, conversations are recorded, analyzed, and securely stored.
Send real-time events: In the final step, the system sends real-time events from the provider’s client UI to Dynamics 365 conversation intelligence.
Conversation intelligence highlights
Conversation intelligence for third-party phone calls in Dynamics 365 Sales
Allows sellers to focus on what matters most with real-time, AI–powered assistance. Your sellers can record their calls (either manually or automatically) and get real-time call transcription with business-critical insights, automatically detected action items, intelligent note-taking, and an automatic call summary.
Empowers sales managers with post-call analysis. After a call ends, managers can access a rich summary that includes sentiment analysis, automatic segmentation, call playback, and a transcript where they can leave messages for their team members. Conversation intelligence also automatically tags calls, so managers know which calls are important and worth checking.
Lets managers better understand customers with advanced insights and interactions styles. Get a wide perspective view of customer needs and interests in real time. Use aggregated data to analyze market trends, rising competitors, and overall sentiment, and dive into the details where needed.
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