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Discover four goal-setting trends for 2023 and how to use Microsoft Viva Goals to elevate your business and align your teams with OKRs.
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As marketing leaders, one could say that your potential for success is only as good as the data you possess. But is that possession enough? To develop targeted, thoughtful, and inclusive customer experiences, acknowledging that today’s data lacks representation, diversity, and reach is important. That’s true whether you consider gender, race, age, cultural experiences, accessibility, and more.
In today’s data-driven business landscape, it’s important to reflect on the fact that the traditional data sets you’ve come to rely upon only provide part of the answer. To get to the heart of your customers’ decision-making, you need to not only consider data that’s inclusive and representative of the customers you are trying to reach, but also take a fresh look at how you measure this data.
The industry is at an inflection point. Inclusive analytics are where the opportunity for marketing leaders lienot only in terms of building a better, higher-performing business, but also in contributing to building trust and advocacy with your customers.
Purpose is as important now as ever for how brands engage with people.
Customers are more likely to trust, buy from, and champion companies that have or embrace a strong purpose. And we’re not talking just any purpose, but an action-driven one that helps define the business.
That’s largely because the emotional connection and association a person feels toward a brand is informed by their perception of that brand’s reputation, values, responsible business practices, and inclusivity.
“Corporate reputation management hinges on not only a brand’s emotional appeal, but also how it lives, breathes, and behaves in the market. When we add diversity into the equation, we see a heightened need for understanding and integrating the unique wants, needs, and perspectives of differing and evolving audiences.”
Walter Geer, Chief Experience Design Officer, VMLY&R
The “aha” moment, of course, comes down to how inclusivity is defined and an inclusive customer decision journey. We’re talking about a journey that is personalized to the point of being able to make people feel welcomed and included, where they say, “You get me; you’re a brand for someone like me.”1
Take, for example, one dimension of diversitygenderand a story shared by a Microsoft engineer who was in the room as this example unfolded. Several years ago, a new program manager joined the product team. During a planning meeting with several engineers, she brought up the idea that a welcome screen that the team was designing wasn’t particularly welcoming and felt cold and impersonal. As an alternative, she proposed a white background with a colorful, creative flair.
Chewy Chong, Principal of Co-Innovation at Microsoft, said, “Why don’t we test it?” And they did, conducting a small test of the prototype on 500 users. The topline data showed 40 percent increased engagement by women, but men had a 39 percent decrease in engagement. When viewed as an aggregate, these two groups zeroed each other out. Women preferred the designed version, while men equally preferred the blue version.
The insight prompted curiosity and self-reflection by the team but ultimately, they chose not to make a change given the preference of the primary audience. This introduced bias into the sampling or testing by valuing one cohort over others. Businesses often optimize design for the primary audience, which leaves out the opportunity for inclusion of the needs of other customers.
What’s even more interesting is that in the welcome screen test, the team found that the user research panel was overweight in one main demographic. This speaks to the need to really understand the makeup of data sources and research panels, and how a business may be affected by bias potential, preventing that business from leaning into a more inclusive customer decision journeyand preventing the business from growing.
The impact of this reaches beyond just excluding an audience. Overrepresentation of one group and underrepresentation of another can also impact how a company chooses to design and evolve its product(s) and marketing strategy. This is especially true in the technology vertical, where the need and stakes are higher in creating a more equitable future. Some, like Nadia Masri, Founder and CEO of Persky, a next-generation consumer insights platform, view it as not just a need, but an obligation.
“I think every startup and every technology company has an obligation to figure out ways to make a more just and equitable future that is driven by technology. If we’re leading innovation, we have to make sure that that innovation results in fairness and equality for all peopleall genders, all colors, all abilities, etc., so that everyone can be included in the future that we are building.”
Nadia Masri, Founder and CEO, Persky
When you think about inclusion, companies must do more than “talk the talk” without actually learning anything. This comes from trying to optimize for the average customer but resonating with no one. The real opportunity here is to start looking at the customer not accounted for. That means diving into how that customer base is excluded, then solving that issue to grow it and create a more emotional connection.
When you have proximity with the vast diversity of human experience, proximity leads to empathy and empathy leads to insight, which allows you to close the gap between customers who are included and the people who are excluded. When you capture the heart and intention of an audience and build an authentic relationship on shared values and an understanding of their lived experience, it’s much easier to deliver on the conversion-related conversations, such as price and financing.
Take, for example, the decision journey for a new car. At Microsoft Advertising, we used our automotive analytics insights team to help understand how people decide what brand to select, type of car, price, and so on. Historically, it’s well understood that people start their buying process 26 weeks before they make a purchase decision. So, we started looking at the data at that point and then parsed the query path, analyzing more than 500,000 people’s searches over that time.
We initially looked again at gender as a dimension of diversity, discovering what women value versus men. As expected, we saw differences in what women valued during the customer decision journey compared to men at each stage in the process.
But we also did something unexpected. The team realized we had 52 weeks of data we could explore, well beyond the established 26 weeks. What we found were keywords about accessibility. People with disabilities were looking for brands that had great technology and were investing in the best type of robotics and other key attributes related to adaptive cars. Ultimately, we discovered that this audience made a brand decision 52 weeks out before disappearing from the direct query path, likely heading down a query path on financials and returning at 26 weeks.
We found these insights by being open-minded and striving to root out bias toward a long-established “fact” that the automotive customer journey starts at 26 weeks before purchase. A more inclusive customer journey is one that considers all audiences and seeks to understand their journeys from their points of view. By looking at the data 52 weeks out, we discovered that we needed to reexamine our assumptions about how we treat prepurchase data to identify new human intent signals.
Creating more diversity in customer experience and evaluation of the data that informs it starts from within. The meaning of “nothing about us, without us” is simple yet powerful. If you’re designing for people with disabilities, why not try designing with people with disabilities? It becomes a two-dimensional consideration.
First, ensuring more inclusive customer decision journeys requires including the diverse customer base you are trying to reach. It’s about understanding their purchase journey through their experience. That means conducting more qualitative than quantitative research to:
Second, a diverse workforce is also essential in helping create more diversity of thought that reflects your customers’ wants and needs. A plurality of perspectives that includes diversity in gender, age, race, work experience, abilities, cultural background, and more is critical.
A diverse internal team is more likely to have the information needed to provide an empathetic, authentic, and inclusive customer experience. In other words, diverse talent can translate into improved understanding, new markets, and expanded customer bases.
The desire for teams with diversity should extend across the company at large through a supported inclusive environment.
Your company’s potential for innovation, growth, and development ties directly to your employees’ knowledge base. And clearly, a more informed, authentic, and inclusive knowledge basebased on inclusive analytics and lived experience by the breadth of the humanityis what is needed for the best collective future.
Learn more about leveraging data across your organization to create more personalized and relevant customer experiences.
End Notes
1Marketing with Purpose Playbook, Microsoft Advertising, September 2020.
The post The data bias challenge: Creating inclusive customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
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Today, we’re excited to share details about how Microsoft 365 is getting better with lower-cost membership options and simpler experiences that make it easier than ever to achieve your goals.
The post 10 years of Microsoft 365: More benefits at even better prices appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
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National Retail Federation (NRF) 2023: Retail’s Big Show is here, and thousands of people are joining together in New York City to collectively envision what’s next for the future of retail. The lessons and best practices to be shared have important implications for other industries as well. Retailers, operating in a highly competitive environment, are often the first to blaze the trail of innovation in customer experience.
Elevating the consumer shopping experience requires companies to deliver more relevant, streamlined experiences throughout the retail value chain. That delivery starts with unifying disparate data from sources across the end-to-end shopper journey. Driving customer acquisition, retention, and business growth requires a connection between your customers, your people, and your data.
Marketers today are rethinking their data strategies, looking for ways to take ownership of their customer data and to use that resource to create valued customer relationships in a time of tightening privacy legislation. Microsoft continues to make significant investments in helping organizations across industries fulfill customer demands for privacy and personalization while optimizing marketing return on investment (ROI). To that end, we are excited to showcase the Microsoft Customer Experience Platforman opportunity for organizations to jump-start their customer experience transformationsat NRF 2023.
A platform that puts you in control of your customer data
The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform is an end-to-end customer experience platform that brings together industry-leading applications spanning Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft PromoteIQ, Microsoft Clarity, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Purview.
With full ownership of their data, organizations can engage buyers the way they expect. With a deep understanding of customers and rich, out-of-the-box insights, organizations can now maximize the value of their customer data. By determining and predicting intent, they can deliver the right content on the right channel and in the right moment. And, with AI-orchestrated journeys, organizations can engage customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpointall the way from awareness, to purchase, to service.
For Chief Data Officers (CDO) and their data wranglers, the solution delivers on their need to balance technology investments and business productivity demands with the scalability to support ever-changing business complexities. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform integrates seamlessly with your existing Azure Data Lake to remove the complexities of duplicating the ingestion and storage of data, while making it faster to combine data with other sources and deliver unmatched time to insight.
Teams responsible for enterprise-wide data and information strategies, including privacy, governance, and data quality, can feel secure knowing that the solution fulfils their needs while, at the same time, it is helping them create business value. As consumers increasingly adopt digital technology, the data they generate creates both an opportunity for enterprises to improve their consumer engagement and a responsibility to keep consumer data safe. At the same time, consumers are increasingly exercising their rights to privacy, given the growing awareness of data misuse and breaches. The solution safeguards customer privacy and honors customer consent with built-in and configurable tools that automatically store and manage consent.
For Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and their marketing teams, the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform serves as a secure, single source of truth. For marketing leaders who want to elevate customer experiences, the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform is the solution that enables your organization to build deep customer connections while maintaining full control of your data. The consolidated, real-time data powers operational excellence while AI and machine learning capabilities pave a path to competitive advantage. Having the ability to predict customers’ needs and wants means marketers can turn insights into true understanding of their prospects and customers. By leaning on their data with the magic of AI, they can now easily test and measure to ensure their investments are resulting in the most efficient and optimal outcomes. As a result, personalization becomes their crucial strategy. Businesses can now deliver tailored recommendations, content, offers, and experiences, across all channels and devices, along the entire customer journey.
Chief Executive Officers (CEO) also benefit from the solution, knowing that it is helping their teams align on growth and opportunities. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform can aide in progress by helping to instill a digital mindset for internal processes and, as a result, create a positive, productive culture. Teams looking for new revenue streams can accelerate progress when they have a left-to-right view across the business.
Organizations like Campari Group and Leatherman rely on this end-to-end platform to successfully deliver great brand experiences and build quality customer relationships in an era of heightened customer expectations. Customers attending NRF will have the opportunity to see, first-hand, the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in fueling next-generation customer experience.
With the power of Microsoft Business Applications, organizations can transform customer experience, driving topline sales and improving operational efficiencies that lead to sustained profitability and meaningful growth. With the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, retailers can optimize marketing ROI by unlocking customer data with AI-driven insights to deliver connected, personalized experiences at scale.
Customer experience is the most effective avenue for sustainable competitive advantage and often the most important barometer of success. The most successful retailers are taking control of their customer data in this time of uncertainty and changing shopper expectations, engaging in new ways across every touchpoint, creating raving fans.
Microsoft’s growing ecosystem of partners helps customers extend the robust capabilities of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. Our partners are dedicated to serving retailers’ unique needs by helping provide integrated retail industry-specific solutions that extend the core capabilities of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. They are trusted allies, helping customers to identify new opportunities for benefiting from innovations, and to accelerate the time-to-value for investments. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform with additional solutions to address the most urgent challenges the retail industry is facing today.
To find out how you can unlock the value of your customer data to fuel your customer experience transformation, we invite you to join us at NRF. For more information about Microsoft announcements at NRF, be sure to read How Microsoft Teams empowers your retail workers to do more with less and the Microsoft Cloud for Retail blog. Not traveling for the show? Learn more with our Microsoft Learn collection of resources and contact your account manager today to find out how you can harness insights to inform and deliver more relevant, connected customer experiences.
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The retail industry has changed dramatically over the past few years due to supply chain disruptions, economic fluctuations, and changing customer demands. Discover the latest Microsoft 365 and Teams innovations that we’ll be showcasing at NRF here.
The post How Microsoft Teams empowers your retail workers to do more with less appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
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Jamie is an IT admin working on managing Contoso’s IT services. Because his work is mission critical, he has a premier support account with the IT infrastructure provider. This includes direct technical support access to a specific support agent with deep knowledge of Jamie’s setup and requirements.
Jamie is working on enabling a new service in production. He knows there is some risk that he may run into an issue in the process. It gives Jamie peace of mind that he is only one call away from contacting a domain expert with knowledge of his setup if needed.
Many customer contact centers have scenarios where the ability to contact a specific agent via phone is critical. Handling such setups via workstreams is very cumbersome and not recommended.
The voice channel in Dynamics 365 Customer Service now provides the ability to configure direct callbacks with just a few clicks. Organizations can set up callbacks using either a default inbound profile as a configuration that can apply to all enabled agents, or specific inbound profiles for select agents. These configurations can account for special behavior settings requirements that differ from the default, e.g., agents that handle sensitive account data vs. technical customer support. Inbound profiles are modeled after existing outbound profiles, which make it intuitive to configure and manage both within the same admin UI.
Here are some important concepts to know when you are configuring direct inbound calling:
Back at Contoso, Jamie is running into a service deployment issue. Normally, this would make him very nervous as he is on the clock to finish the deployment over the weekend. What makes the difference for him is that he can simply contact support agent Ana via a direct phone call. Ana knows about the Contoso deployment and is available to take the direct call and help Jamie. She decides to stay on the call with Jamie during the rest of the deployment. Jamie loves that personalized service and is super happy that he went with this IT infrastructure provider.
For more information, read the documentation: Set up inbound calling for the voice channel | Microsoft Learn
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