This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Microsoft Viva with new apps and services that help companies address the three business imperatives from our latest Work Trend Index Pulse Report, to empower and energize employees to do meaningful work in an uncertain economic environment.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales on October 3, the first Viva application designed to improve the employee experience for a specific role: sellers. Viva Sales brings together a seller’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams seamlessly in their workflow, enabling them to save time and return to what they loveconnecting with customers and closing deals.
Designed for seller productivity, Viva Sales:
Delivers real-time business context from a seller’s CRM system in Microsoft Outlook and Teams to reduce time spent searching for relevant information.
Keeps sales teams easily connected and deals moving forward by facilitating knowledge sharing and efficient collaboration.
Augments a seller’s actions and decisions with AI-powered insights to improve customer engagements.
Viva Sales does all this while eliminating the burden of manual CRM updates, thus boosting sales team productivity.
Partner solutions enhance the Viva Sales experience
We’re looking to grow an ecosystem of complementary solutions to enhance the Viva Sales experience starting with a partnership with Seismic, the leading enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to ignite revenue growth. Through this partnership, our joint customers can streamline the meeting and buyer engagement experience for sales teams and improve productivity through preparation, automation, and intelligence in their daily flow of work. As the first step in this journey, Seismic Enablement Cloud uses AI-powered insights from Viva Sales to recommend content, training lessons, and a prebuilt digital sales room as post-meeting follow-up actions in Viva Sales. This delivers value to sellers right in their flow of work. As a customer of Seismic, Microsoft’s global sales team will take advantage of this partnership and looks forward to seeing the results.
“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft to reimagine the future of selling with Viva Sales, streamline the fragmented seller workflow and give salespeople precious time back to do what they do best: sell. Now with Seismic’s leading enablement solutions used by some of the largest enterprise companies, sellers can not only show up to a customer meeting better prepared, but also be equipped with personalized, automated,and intelligent sales tools to help them delight customers and grow revenue.”Hayden Stafford, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Seismic.
Viva Sales supports customer choice in CRM
The next era of selling must embrace a hybrid worldnot only where and how people work, but their technology stack, too. That’s why Viva Sales includes out-of-the-box functionality for both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM. We’re excited to announce our launch customersAdobe, Crayon, and PwC. Here’s what they have to say:
“As our sales teams are spending more time out meeting with customers and balancing the world of hybrid work, the need to navigate multiple systems and tools quickly and easily is vital to their success. Adobe is evaluating Viva Sales to determine how it can improve our team’s productivity and effectiveness, and give them more time to spend building strong relationships with our customers,” said Stephen Frieder, Head of Global GTM and Sales, Adobe.
“With Viva Sales, we can empower our sales team to spend more time with customers by automating tasks such as entering data into CRM, and the platform provides relevant insights, content, and coaching that helps push a deal forward. As a customer-first company, Viva Sales enables us to spend more time focusing on what’s most important and that’s providing business value to our customers,”said Melissa Mulholland, CEO, Crayon.
“When we speak with our clients, we consistently hear about how sellers need a more unified and frictionless experience. With Viva Sales, we see a significant opportunity to offer our clients a chance to cut down on day-to-day repetitive tasks and benefit from insights gleaned to improve customer engagements and stay focused on big picture goals,” said George Korizis, Customer Transformation Practice Leader, PwC.
Reimagine the selling experience with Viva Sales
Sellers are critical to an organization’s bottom line. Yet, according to a survey we commissioned with Futurum, nearly 7 in 10 salespeople (68 percent) shared they would be more productive at work if they didn’t have to enter data into their CRM manually. And 81 percent said faulty data has led to an embarrassing mistake with a customer.1 Viva Sales enriches the user experience with AI-driven insights and actions to help sellers maximize their time with customers. With more than 270 million monthly active Teams users, Viva Sales acts as a bridge connecting the data and insights sellers need to sell effectively and close deals faster with the productivity and collaboration tools, they use every day. Viva Sales enables a seller to:
Eliminate manual data entry by interacting with CRM from Outlook and Teams, and syncing customer engagement data to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM: Viva Sales eliminates the duplicative work of updating CRM systems by allowing sellers to update their CRM data from Teams and Outlook. Sellers can capture new contacts from emails and meetings right into their CRM and see key customer insights such as previous activitiesincluding emails and meetings. Furthermore, sellers can save emails directly from Outlook into CRM so organizations maintain customer connection and relationship history.
Figure 1: Update CRM contact from Outlook.
Easily collaborate with colleagues on customer records within Teams and Outlook: With Viva Sales CRM, sales records are first-class citizens in the digital experiences sellers use most. With contacts, opportunities, and accounts at their fingertips, sellers can move deals forward, make better decisions, and collaborate with others in Outlook and Teams. Sellers can track, search, share, and inline edit CRM entities across Outlook and Teams, leveraging Context IQ, using rich contextual cards, keeping sales teams in their flow of work, reducing unnecessary application and context switching, and boosting satisfaction.
Figure 2: Share business data easily within Teams and Outlook.
Augment customer engagements with AI-powered insights: Professionalism with customers and follow-through are important attributes of any good seller. When communicating with customers on Teams, Sales Conversation Intelligence (SCI) can generate meeting summaries, track customer sentiment, and suggest action items for customer follow-ups post meeting. SCI eliminates the need to take notes during calls by recording, transcribing, and providing valuable insights. Sentiment analysis within SCI helps a seller to better track caller sentiment about a specific topic, helping to guide the conversation and plan the best approach for future conversations.
Figure 3: Sellers can view a meeting summary along with helpful insights that they can copy and share with their team.
Improve business results by improving team productivity and enabling strategic insights on deal wins and losses
Today, businesses cannot track and utilize insights from customer engagement data along with CRM data uniformly and consistently across sales teams. Therefore, they miss opportunities to learn and use insights from deal wins and losses for the next customer proposal. By tracking customer engagement data effortlessly and consistently in CRM systems, Viva Sales allows sales leaders to have a unified view of activities, deals, and revenues while removing the friction of sellers keeping their CRM systems up to date. These views can enable relevant insights for better sales engagement within and across customer accounts. With improved data tracking, businesses can also run timely and more accurate sales reports.
Switching Viva Sales on is an easy decision! Viva Sales respects company security and privacy policies in sharing customer contact information, including CRM access controls and user permissions. Viva Sales is free for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers, and otherwise available at $40 per user, per license at general availability on October 3, 2022. Viva Sales is available separately and not part of the Viva suite.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Some of the main goals for adopting DevOps culture in our organization are the reduction of failures in new deployments, be able to update our solutions frequently, improving deployments time, among others.
Implementing DevOps processes into your Team requires trust and responsibility, because as Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s very common to have elevated access to perform almost or sometimes all actions in an environment. With an Elevated Account or Service Principal, there are some important aspects that we need to consider in order to prevent a disaster.
In this case, I focus on Azure Data Factory (ADF) because it has a special treatment when integrating automatization deployments in Azure DevOps.
As described, to deploy changes that were built into our ADF we have to use “ARM Template Deployment” task which is used to deploy all kind of ARM templates into our environment, but this task has an important and very powerful option, which is “Deployment mode”.
Deployment mode can be “Incremental”, “Complete” and “Validation only”. To see information about what these modes do, you can click the little “i” symbol. Incremental mode will deploy, and update resources described in the ARM template. Validation only will make sure there is access and that the template and parameters are well formed. The option most people don’t need, that is dangerous is “Complete mode”. Complete mode says to make an environment (Management Group, Subscription, or Resource Group) look EXACTLY like the provided ARM template. That means that any resource not defined will be deleted. In ADF deployments, if you have other resources in the same resource group that aren’t in the ADF ARM template, they will be deleted.
There are ways to help mitigate this in case that happened.
Lock or add a policy in the Resource Group to avoid deletion
Fully define your environments and components in Infrastructure as Code so that you can quickly recreate environments either for testing or for Disaster Recovery
Security is a priority. In all aspects of a solution. Have a plan for (BC/DR) Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery from the beginning. That includes testing deployments in environments and having ways to recreate your environment. Make sure that you understand how ARM templates are deployed if using them for deployments. Thank you and please consider these recommendations.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In the customer experience (CX) game, the last best experience sets the bar for the next. Businesses that are successful at meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations are hearing glowing testimonials like:
“This brand makes valuable information directly available.” “The salesperson recommended the perfect solution.” “How did the brand know exactly what I was looking for!” “This brand perfectly understands our business goals.” “I received a discount exactly when I needed it.” “Rep x is my trusted advisor.” “This was an amazing service from A to Z.” “This is my favorite brand.”
Excellent CX encourages your customers to purchase your products, be repeat customers, and recommend your brand. It keeps your brand prominent, helps maintain ongoing relationships, and fuels emotional connections, which is especially important in between purchases. So how do we live up to these customers’ expectations? Let’s start by understanding the customer and learning how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can help.
Understanding today’s customer
Triggered by the boom of connectivity and the accelerated shift to digital during COVID-19, customers’ expectations have changedand they are rightfully asking for more. This also applies to business-to-business (B2B) customers, who have adopted the same purchasing behaviors as they have in their personal lives. They want modern, consumer-like experiences that allow them to engage on their own terms.
Customers are seeking more autonomy as they engage with brands. They call for digital first, immediate, self-service solutions. According to Trust Radius, virtually 100 percent of buyers want self-service options for at least part of the buying process, up 13 percent from 2021.1 Once customers make the decision to engage with a salesperson, they expect the person to know their intentions.
To add to this, buying journeys are no longer linear. Customers no longer follow a sequential top-down path across marketing and sales. They go back and forth between content and online and offline channels. However, expectations remain the same for seamless, friction-free interactions that are personalized regardless of the touchpoint.
They tune out one-size-fits-all interactions that make them feel like they’re just another number, especially when businesses could make use of the data collected from their past interactions to anticipate their needs and ultimately deliver better-personalized experiences.
Customer experience and the sales landscape
The sales process has become even more complex. As buyers are faced with economic pressures, customer experience is even more important than ever. This is causing brands to interpret more signals, due to the variety of stakeholders and their indecisiveness in the purchasing process.
And buyers are allowing themselves to be inconsistent as they reconcile decision-making with practical realities. As they engage with a myriad of business stakeholders, their decisions can seem contradictory. This is causing businesses to miss opportunities to simplify the process and deliver relevant experiences across shifting influences.
Customers feel the disconnect and ask questions, such as: “Why do I still see ads for a product I already bought?”, “How could the seller not know about my past order?”, “Why are the promotional messages I’ve seen differ from the vendors’ pitch?”.
Though a small number of businesses can deliver congruous experiences, the truth is that most are failing to connect the dots. Technology, people, and data siloed within different departments are preventing businesses from working as one. Creating a holistic continuum of engagement from customer insights to identifying intent and actioning that information with the right buyer at the right time is a challenge.
Finally, departments such as sales and marketing are misaligned. The businesses’ organizational structures are preventing effective collaboration, and they share different goals, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs), too often not oriented toward achieving revenue optimization. In the long run, those inconsistencies in the experiences affect the overall perception of the brand and, most importantly, customers’ satisfaction.
What the research is telling us
Yet CX is where businesses are and will increasingly compete. Most professionals who engage in or lead CX for their businesses or department expect to compete on the basis of CX.
LinkedIn found that for 85 percent of sales and marketing leaders, alignment is the largest opportunity for improving business performance today.2 Marketing needs to orchestrate engagement whenever it’s appropriateincluding prompting sales with intent signals and digital buyer behaviors that indicate that sales engagement would be valuable or welcomed. Sales must consistently use marketing-provided content and technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency. This allows sellers to engage with buyers further down the funnel, increasing the effectiveness of sellers through higher qualified leads.
This is driving the transformation of CX where businesses streamline and automate processes to enhance customers’ interactions with their brand. The goal is to continuously refine CX at every touchpoint to grow and foster an ongoing relationship. “This brand perfectly understands our expectations.”
As an example, Northrup & Johnson, a luxury yacht broker and charter service provider, has seen a shift in the expectations of its buyers, who are increasingly self-exploring digitally throughout their buying processcomparing different models, taking virtual tours, and comparing with competitors. They expect a highly personalized experience both digitally and with the sales team. They want to lead their sales process and not have it dictated to them. Northrup & Johnson engages its customers on all channels with content specific to the yacht models they’ve expressed interest in or the tours they’ve taken. As its customer’s propensity to buy increases, it routes them to a seller at the right moments, such as reaching out after they had a great boat charter experience. Leveraging a unified customer understanding creates self-service experiences that then empower sellers with knowledge of affinities, intent, and lifetime value.
Our approach
So how do you prepare your organization to transform CX and deliver frictionless, outstanding experiences to maintain a competitive edge? One thing is clear: doing things the “old way” is no longer an option.
Companies that require a customer to fill out a web form or start with a phone call will rapidly become irrelevant. Instead, they need to provide consumer-like experiences and be comfortable with unknown visitors to their digital properties. With control ceded to the buyer, they are no longer being forced through a one size fits all funnel and may enter in the middle of the funnel with a preference, then pop up the funnel to assess their options. They could start by buying and then seek knowledge about their purchase, or anything in between. The customer journey needs to flow seamlessly between sales and marketing as a result.
Enabling these experiences starts with data. Instead of customer understanding being limited to that which a seller is willing to manually enter into their customer relationship management (CRM) system, all the interactions, purchases, and multitudes of different data sources can come together to shine a light on the buyer journey. By unifying data, organizations can gain a full understanding of their customers.
Combined with AI capabilities, they can curate a timeline of individual customer interactions, identify relevant behavioral signals in the buying process, and through automated predictive analytics, understand key factors influencing actions and KPIs, such as churn, customer lifetime value (CLTV), net promoter score (NPS), and customer sentiment. Based on those insights, marketing and sales teams can craft real-time single or multi-step personalized journeys that automate the best experiences for each buyer. They can be orchestrated to quickly advance the buyer to the next step of the journey and accelerate the pipeline through marketing-led lead identification that seamlessly notifies sales to contact the buyer at exactly the right time, in the right channel, and with the right offer. “I received a discount exactly when I needed it.”
Through automated lead scoring and AI-powered next-best-action recommendations, these once tedious tasks no longer prohibit sellers from focusing on building relationships and delivering value in every interaction. Based on similar account interactions, sellers can also recommend relevant products to customers (“the salesperson recommended the perfect solution”) and in the long run through repeated on-point exchanges transform relationships (“rep x is my trusted advisor“).
Sellers and marketers can create self-service consumer-like experiences and provide content that contributes to lead generation to meet buyers where they are. “This brand makes valuable information directly available.” They can empower customers to engage on their terms, the conversations are no longer seller-led but guided by the customers’ choice and timing. Customers experiencing self-driven paths are likely to buy more than initially planned.
A key to this is analyzing the effectiveness and pipeline through a common lens and using data to optimize journeys, and personalized content to accelerate the pipeline, improve close rates and increase customer retention.
Bringing these capabilities to the forefront illustrates how CX is driving the need to build sales and marketing alignment. It allows companies to automate empathy and relationship building beyond the sales cycle based not just on who the buyer is, but on the moments that matter to keep the company top of mind, relevant, and the buyer happy. “This was an amazing service from A to Z.”
Transforming customer experience with Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
To guide each B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) business in their CX transformation and accelerate their growth, we provide unrivaled connected sales and marketing capabilities through Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights applications.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights respects privacy when unifying fragmented data, sometimes from hundreds of data sources across the organizationincluding data from Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Marketingto create a unified profile that can be enriched with first- and third-party data sources and used to generate AI-powered insights that identify churn risk and drops in customer sentiment and suggest the next best action to satisfy customers.
These insights about the customer can be activated in real time within Dynamics 365 Marketing to identify segments and preferred channels, trigger flawless journeys, create self-service content, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences not just based on who the customer is, but also in real time based on what they are doing. For example, Biologische Heilmittel Heel, one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers of homeopathic remedies worldwide, is using Dynamics 365 to provide its buyersdoctors, pharmacists, and veterinarianswith self-service curated content. Due to the nature of this industry and its complexity across buyers, the message and approach have to be personalized from one customer to the next. This also makes it difficult to support customers throughout their journey with the company. Dynamics 365 has enabled seamless data sharing across the organization, enabling it to understand the customer and orchestrate real-time consumer-like experiences that span sales and marketing while putting the buyer in control.
Through Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can continue to build seamlessly on marketing efforts. Marketers orchestrate handoffs by identifying prospects showing purchase intent across their buying journey and automatically pass marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) at exactly the right time to optimize sales engagement. With AI-driving sales force automation, sales teams can jumpstart digital selling and meet buyers where they are using sales accelerator sequencing and predictive scoring. Through personalized work lists and AI-optimized next-best-action recommendations, they know exactly what customer and activity to focus on to accelerate sales and increase wins. All these capabilities, along with embedded collaboration and real-time conversation intelligence, boost seller productivity and enable them to read customer signals to know if their engagements and the buyer experience are effective.
Connected, these applications unlock unique opportunities to create individualized experiences that meet customers’ expectations whether they are one-time empathetic interactions or lifetime emotional connections.
Microsoft’s solutions empower your teams to transform CX so that your customer base refers to your organization as “my favorite brand.”
Recent Comments