OVERVIEW
In a blog published on the Microsoft website, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President, Muhammad Alam made a special announcement introducing new functions and capabilities. The goal of these series of changes is to further help businesses with relevant digital solutions that facilitate quick adaptation, build resilient and sustainable operations that dwarf today’s challenges.
Most of the additional capabilities are slated in for previewing beginning April 2021 and can be categorized as follows:
1.Real-time customer-led journey orchestration capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing (April preview available in North America & Europe)
- More insights from ecosystem-wide data in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
- Real-time survey capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to help organizations drive personalized interactions with customers
2. The new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management which ushers in an era where organizations can now intelligently automate order capture and fulfillment using AI and machine learning (preview available in April)
3. A powerful and seamless integration of Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 that includes embedded Teams collaboration experiences in;
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service
DEEP DIVE INTO THE NEW CAPABILITIES
- Enabling more personal customer interactions and experiences.
Customer expectations have changed significantly. Marketing needs to expand from segment-based campaigns to moment-based marketing, from megaphone messaging to personalizing a holistic customer journey for each individual.
Muhammad Alam, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President
This will be achieved through the following changes;
a) Dynamics 365 Marketing Updates
Teams can now win new customers and earn loyalty much faster by engaging with customers in real-time across marketing, sales, commerce and service channels. Furthermore, with AI and machine learning, more personalized customer experiences can be curated across digital and physical touchpoints.
b) Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Updates
These will help organizations to gather even greater insights from ecosystem-wide data and direct activation on new destinations, including Microsoft Advertising and third-party services. In addition, deep integration with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics will facilitate the construction of custom AI models geared to improve relevancy with advanced segmentation and targeting.
c) Dynamics 365 Customer Voice Updates
The key here is improving business’ agility in collecting, analyzing and implementing direct feedback. It becomes particularly important in the age where both customer and internal feedback has become central to growth. Mr. Alam went on to explain the efficiency and use of this new capability as follows:
Within Dynamics 365 Marketing, people can now use customer journeys to create automated campaigns with workflows triggered by survey responses. For example, if a customer is displeased with a specific product feature or service, the response can notify an account manager for follow-up or send a coupon by email.
Muhammad Alam, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President
2. Driving more resilient supply chains through intelligent order management
Highlighting the need for intelligent order management, Mr. Muhammad Alam explained why static rule hard-coded systems have become obsolete;
All customers expect seamless omnichannel buying and after-purchase experiences with multiple fast delivery options. Companies need to centrally and intelligently manage the entire lifecycle of an order from intake to fulfillment so that they respond fast to constraints and disruptions and still deliver on the order promise.
Muhammad Alam, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President
This user-friendly, easily configurable rule-based system which uses real time omnichannel inventory data, AI and machine learning will have the following operations and more;
- Organizations can easily scale to support new order intake, fulfillment, and delivery partners with pre-built connectors.
- Companies can get up and running quickly as it integrates seamlessly with any enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), warehouse management, fulfillment, and delivery systems
3. Going big on collaboration and engagement
Through their experience working with large organizations, Microsoft has infused and extended the characteristics of best performing companies to all users of Dynamics 365 through this update.
It’s no coincidence that businesses with a culture built around teamwork and collaboration are often highly agile, innovative, and in tune with customers. Time and again, we spot this trait at organizations that use both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams together to access, share, and collaborate on information.
Muhammad Alam, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President
Mr. Muhammad Alam went on to further highlight the exact operations that the integration of Teams and Dynamics 365 will facilitate;
A more connected and engaging experience with Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 makes it simple to meet, chat, call and collaborate right from within your Dynamics 365 workspace. Similarly, while working in Teams, you can seamlessly access and share records, and information from Dynamics 365—so everything you need to stay focused and productive is in context of the task at hand.
Muhammad Alam, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President
The list of other capabilities include but is not limited to;
- Collaborative digital selling and engagement in Dynamics 365 Sales. An embedded Teams dialer experience for Dynamics 365 and an extensible Teams meeting experience—video or audio—that seamlessly ties back to Dynamics 365 Sales has also been added
- Turning event attendees into loyal customers by setting up, promoting, and reporting on events hosted on Microsoft Teams from within Dynamics 365
- With Teams capabilities embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, customer service agents can now easily find and collaborate with the right, available subject matter expert directly from the flow of their work to rapidly resolve customer issues.
- New customer engagement capabilities for Dynamics 365 Field Service (generally available on April 1, 2021) that enable end customers to find their technician and rate their visit. Customers can also schedule on their own time directly from their devices and automated service visit reminders will ensure customers are ready and available when the technician arrives. Real-time location tracking and a function that enables customer to send feedback have also been added on Dynamics 365 Field Service.
The Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President, Mr. Muhammad Alam, finished by expressing their undying commitment to continuously improve work processes;
We will continue our investment in innovation to turn work the way it was, into work the way we want it to be: More efficient, more collaborative, more insightful—and ultimately, more productive. The Microsoft Cloud is built from the ground up to enable just this, and we can’t wait to see what you will do with it.
Muhammad Alam, Dynamics 365 Corporate Vice President
All of the above solutions join hundreds of additional capabilities that will be released between April 2021 and September 2021.
This announcement first appeared on the Microsoft Cloud blog, visit it to learn more.