With global volatility and inflation impacting organizations across all industries, business agility has never been more important. Leaders turn to finance teams to get real-time insight into business performance and recommendations on future initiatives that will help them thrive amid disruption. But finance teams are overwhelmed with manual tasks, cobbling together data, and disconnected teams. Achieving game-changing business agility begins with augmenting the human ingenuity of your people with intelligent process automation.

When it comes to reimagining processes with AI, automation, and analytics, many finance leaders don’t know where to start. This year, at the third annual Finance Reimagined digital event, we will delve into real-world best practices from Microsoft and industry leaders that will help you prioritize the right cost optimization, growth acceleration, and workforce transformation initiatives.

Finance Reimagined 2023

Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 9:00 AM to 10:15 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

Register now!

Finance Reimagined: Bringing the future of finance into focus

Finance Reimagined is a virtual event bringing together finance leaders from around the world. On February 28, 2023, from 9:00 AM to10:15 AM PT, you can unpack the latest trends shaping the future of finance including the strategic evolution of the role of CFO within organizations, maintaining commitments to multiple stakeholders and bottom lines against a challenging economic environment, and the opportunities to drive transformation through the partnership of human ingenuity and AI.

Learn more and register for Finance Reimagined 2023.

Discover what’s top of mind for CFOs and financial leaders

You’ll discover best practices, trends, and priorities that are top of mind for CFOs and finance leaders. We’ve lined up experts from Microsoft, IDC, Avanade, EY, HSO, KPMG, and PwC to deliver actionable insights on how to strike the right balance between the following:

Human and AI

Find harmony between automation and your organization’s most important assetyour people. We will tackle one of the top concerns for CFOs today: workforce optimization. The heart of productivity sits in employee well-beingor the organization’s ability to increase creativity, job satisfaction, and ultimately, happiness. Human ingenuity is now business’ greatest investment to drive long-term vision and needs to be incentivized. Automation changes the way we work, thus organizational structures, required competencies, and roles must change as well. Get tips at Finance Reimagined on how to prioritize automation initiatives and how to use them to augment your people resources.

Cost optimization and growth acceleration

Embrace a dual role of gatekeeper and innovator to bring more strategic value to your organization. You’ll hear from a panel of finance leaders at Microsoft as they respond to trends from a recent study of more than 500 senior finance leaders from across all industries. Learn how Microsoft is empowering our finance leaders to do more with less to guide teams through these uncertain times. We will discuss tactics to optimize cash flow, increase operational effectiveness, and reinvest to meet growth expectations.

The speed of business and risk mitigation

Organizational health has become increasingly dependent on data and tools to facilitate agile, data-driven decision making. Finance teams are doubling down on their efforts to keep up with our world’s increasingly volatile and interconnected markets that demand more fluid operating models, extending beyond the walls of an organization. This means that the role of the finance leader has evolved from being an economic guardian inside the walls of an enterprise to designing new business models that focus on delivering customer value outside of an enterprise. This evolution is only possible through a tight partnership between the CFO and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure data security while activating insights at every level of the organization. Join us for a discussion with the CFO and CTO at Robert Walters, a global recruitment and talent management company with a team of experts spanning 31 countries and serving more than 4,300 clients, to hear how they partnered to speed the time to insight within their organization.

Register today to attend Finance Reimagined for your look ahead at the emerging trends and essential insights defining how tomorrow’s businesses will thrive. We hope to see you there.

The post Leap into the future of finance at Finance Reimagined 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Service leaders face continual challenges in evolving the service organization to meet customer expectations, putting their brand value and customer loyalty at riskas a recent study shows, 96 percent of customers will leave a business after a bad customer experience.¹ They feel either lost with disruptive changes in the contact center and customer service marketplace, or helpless on where to start, or confused on what to adopt and what to disregard, or fear being all over the map while making investments aligned with the business goals.

Service sophistication model

Assess and improve the effectiveness of your organization’s current service experiences.

Start the assessment

Evolve service organizations to meet customer expectations

The business goals differ across service organizations, as some are managed as a siloed cost-center, some are intent on matching up with industry peers on competitive metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), some have embraced digital transformation to the extent that it enables data visibility and automation across the organization, and a few view them as profit centers, ready for the future with AI-powered experiences.

Regardless of where they are in this spectrum, service leaders always want to know:

• What is happening in the customer service and contact center market today, and how does it matter to us as a service organization?
• How can I assess where our service level is positioned, and how can we prepare for the future?
• What service solutions are available to help us?

We had a chance to discuss this topic with a leading analyst. Watch our guest Kate Leggett of Forrester discuss the state of service and how to elevate and deliver more sophisticated customer service:

Deliver the best customer service experience with consolidated solutions

As they say, change is the only constant, and it aptly applies to the different categories that define the contact center and customer service market today. Broadly speaking, the lines are no longer distinct between unified communications as a service (UCaaS), contact center, and the customer relationship management (CRM) market categories. They are all transitioning to cloud, and the capabilities are overlapping to the extent possible. They are powered by contact center AI (CCAI) and carrier voice technology innovations that drive the efficiency and experience of customer service interactions. This also shifts the preference from best-of-breed solutions which have a side effect of fragmentation, to the possibility of consolidated solutions that can deliver the best experience.

Given the myriad capabilities from the technology innovations and market categories, and the fact that service organizations are across the spectrum, what service leaders need is a convenient way to map them to different service levels of sophistication. Essentially, a service maturity model that groups major capabilities and maps them to appropriate levels in the spectrum. This allows service leaders to visualize where they are relative to the market and determine at what level they’d like to be based on their business goals, investment, and timeline. In addition, they can decide practically and prioritize on the capabilities that matter to themacross voice and digital channels, self-service, agent productivity, and service operations.

Receive a customized service level guidance report

We are with you on this evolution. Microsoft is pleased to provide the service sophistication model to help service leaders chart their course. It is a simple web-experience that should take less than five minutes. The model groups capabilities into personalized customer engagement, including omnichannel access and routing, scale, and automation with self-service, empowering agents with productivity tools and AI-powered and analytics-driven service processes and workflows. And the service leader would look at four different levels of service in each group and pick the option that best describes their organization. As an example, do they have just a call center, or do they include some self-service capabilities, or do they already deploy a contact center with digital channels, or are they ahead with AI-powered personalized experiences? Once they answer a few questions, they will receive a customized guidance report on where they are and where they can go incrementally to the next level.

To learn more about how Microsoft can help service organizations evolve, or to take the assessment, visit Microsoft Dynamics 365 service levels.

Transform your customer service journeys with the leading capabilities

Sometimes, evolution is about leaping ahead rather than taking incremental steps. What if you want your organization to transition to an altogether new experience? We also offer you the full picture on the possibilitiesjust take a moment to register and download the service sophistication model whitepaper. It’s worth the read to understand comprehensively the spectrum of service levels and capabilities, the pain points and metrics that matter, where the industry is going, and where service leaders can take their organizations.

Personalize the customer service journey with Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Microsoft is in a unique position to bring together the service solution that addresses the different categories and the spectrum of capabilitieswith Microsoft Teams for unified communications and collaboration, omnichannel and CRM capabilities with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and CCAI with Nuance, along with Azure cloud.

Evolve at your pace with an architecture that fits your service experience

The Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform brings these products together, along with partner innovations, as an open, flexible, and collaborative platform that allows service organizations to keep their existing contact center infrastructure, and create the best experience for their customers.

Learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers your agents to personalize the customer service journey.

On a final note, our guidance is not just about service levels of sophisticationwe also have an array of reference architectures to fit different customer scenarios.

Be sure to check out Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform documentation, including a link to reference architectures to guide the deployment that can make the service experience you have in mind into reality.

¹Shep Hyken

The post Evolve the service level of sophistication with Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Marketers design customer journeys to provide the right message at the right time for customers to take the next step. With more opportunities than ever for interaction, you must take care not to overwhelm customers with unwanted messages. That’s why we’re delighted to introduce advanced real-time customer journey orchestration tools in Dynamics 365 Marketing that help you engage customers at key moments without bombarding them with spam.

Engage the right audience effortlessly with the new segment builder

Targeting the right audience is critical for creating highly personalized marketing campaigns that yield high conversion rates and improve engagement. Previously, the segment builder in Dynamics 365 Marketing required a deep understanding of database schemas. The new real-time segment builder in customer journey orchestration is marketer friendly. Easily reach customers through segmenting on demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data.

Here are some of the benefits of the new real-time marketing segment builder:

• It’s powered by artificial intelligence. Just describe, in plain English, how you’d like to create the segment, then review and use it.
• There’s no need to memorize relationships between tables. The builder automatically populates all the possible paths between customer profiles and the selected data table for you.
• View segment size and membership estimates before publishing.
• Enjoy a consistent creation experience between static and dynamic segments.
• Include or exclude individual members.
• Query segments based on their customer data in a consistent manner, without having to worry about which segment type to choose first.
• Adjust segment refresh frequency after publication.

Test your journey triggers to provide seamless experiences

Customers expect consistent and uninterrupted experiences in their interactions with brands. With custom trigger testing, marketers can simulate a customer’s experience, using themselves as a test subject. They can evaluate the journey based on the attributes defined in the custom trigger to identify and address issues before they affect real customers.

Boost your productivity when sending journey reminders

To improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to remind customers to take action on key tasks such as filling out a registration form or completing a purchase.

With enhanced real-time customer journey orchestration, it’s easy to set up recurring reminders to streamline the process of moving customers down the funnel. The reminder feature allows sending emails, text messages, and push notifications to increase engagement chances, instead of simply repeating the same marketing messages in the same channels. You can even set the number of repetitions or a time limit to make sure that messages aren’t sent indefinitely.

Track the customer’s exit from the reminder loop, too. By capturing different branches separately, such as cart checked out, cart not checked out, and cart expired, you can target and follow up with each segment appropriately.

Optimize customer engagement by controlling the number of messages sent

Consumers’ mailboxes are overflowing. Marketers must be careful not to overwhelm their customers with email, which can result in lower message engagement rates, increased unsubscribe rates, spam reports, or important messages being missed. With frequency capping, you can optimize engagement by controlling how many messages are sent.

Frequency capping allows marketers to define the maximum number of messages their customers receive through a particular channel per day, week, and month. Transactional messages are always excluded, and individual journeys can be left out of the cap so that important messages can be received. You can view whether a message was blocked by the frequency cap and for which users.

By monitoring engagement rates with marketing messages, you can fine-tune your message frequency. You’ll make sure that you’re striking the right balance between keeping the brand top-of-mind and overwhelming customers with too many messages.

Deliver personalized experiences at scale with advanced customer journey orchestration tools

Real-time journey orchestration now has interactions capabilities to deliver personalized experiences at scale. Reach up to 100 million contacts and deliver up to 300 million monthly interactions through email, text messages, push notifications, or custom channels, and create segments of up to 30 million contacts. That’s up from the previous limit of 100 million outbound interactions to 30 million contacts and 10 million contacts per segment.

Key takeaways about advanced real-time customer journey orchestration

Get greater engagement from your customers in 2023 with Dynamics 365 Marketing. Thanks to our advanced customer journey orchestration features, you’ll interact with customers on their terms, engaging them when and how they expect, without delivering disjointed experiences or spamming them. You’ll spend less time designing and maintaining your customer journeys and feel more confident that you’re delivering seamless, high-quality experiences.

Next steps

Start using our new features and get ready for the ones coming soon:

• Target the right audience using the new segment builder | Microsoft Learn
• Test all paths customers take before publishing journeys | Microsoft Learn
• Send reminders within journeys to drive customer actions | Microsoft Learn
• Prevent message fatigue with message limits | Microsoft Learn
• Scale your business with confidence with 300M maximum monthly interactions | Microsoft Learn

Consult the release notes to learn more about exciting updates to Dynamics 365 Marketing, including preview and general availability dates.

Not yet a Dynamics 365 Marketing customer? Take a guided tour and get a free trial!

The post Customer journey orchestration levels up with advanced tools in Dynamics 365 Marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Starting Saturday, April 1, 2023, we will be deprecating the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service application and encouraging customers to migrate to the Customer Service workspace application. This upcoming change will affect your multi-session agents currently using the Omnichannel for Customer Service application in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

We have decided to consolidate our two multi-session customer service applications, Omnichannel for Customer Service and Customer Service workspace. This change is being made to ensure that our customers benefit from all Dynamics 365 Customer Service capabilities in a single multi-session application. To this end, we will be focusing our future developments on the Customer Service workspace application.

Key Dates

• Disclosure Date: January 11, 2023 
  We sent communication to affected customers and partners that we are planning to deprecate the Omnichannel for Customer Service app. 

• Deprecation Date: April 1, 2023
  After this date, we are no longer going to invest in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app.

• End of Support: June 2024  
  After this date, we are no longer going to support the Omnichannel for Customer Service app. 

• End of Life: December 2024   
  The Omnichannel for Customer Service app will be taken out of service.  

Next Steps

Starting Saturday, April 1, 2023, we will no longer provide updates to the Omnichannel for Customer Service application. We will continue to support the Omnichannel for Customer Service application, and there will be no change to product availability. 

To help with this transition and prevent potential interruption of service, we have developed a migration guide detailing the steps to move your configurations from the Omnichannel for Customer Service application to Customer Service workspace. You can also refer to our migration frequently asked questions document to help answer any questions you may have about the migration process. 

Please contact your Success Manager, FastTrack representative, or Microsoft Support if you have any additional questions.

The post Use the Customer Service workspace app for omnichannel interactions appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.