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: 

1. 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. 
2. 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. 
3. 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

• 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. 

Next steps

• Learn how to integrate third-party dialers with Dynamics 365 conversation intelligence. 
• See an example of an integration project between Twilio Flex and Dynamics 365 Sales conversation intelligence. 
• Not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer? Take a tour and start your free trial today.

The post Conversation intelligence unleashes the potential of your sales organization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Only months after announcing Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, employees at more than 63,000 organizations—including brands like 3M, Prada Group, Campari, and Kraft Heinz—have had the opportunity to experience some of the AI-assisted features firsthand—and the reviews are pouring in.

A common theme in the feedback we’ve received is a boost in efficiency and productivity, with employees able to reduce the time and effort spent completing common tasks. Organizations also report higher quality work, helped by AI-assisted insights and guidance, from suggested actions and content ideas to faster access to valuable business data.

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Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF), a 103-year-old football club in eastern Spain, has used Copilot to help create opportunities for more meaningful and personalized fan engagement. “From creating content or journeys, to segmentation to gaining insights—Copilot enables our teams to deliver fan experiences and business impact faster and easier,” shared Franco Segarra, Innovation Director at Valencia CF. “It’s going to be amazing to uplevel our work with Copilot.”

Northrop & Johnson, the world’s leading superyacht brokerage, shared the team’s early experiences with Copilot. “We’ve tried some machine learning-based AI point solutions before—they were expensive and not as efficient as what we are seeing now with generative AI,” explains Keith Perfect, Director of Tech & Intelligence. “It’s amazing to have Copilot built right into Dynamics 365 as it is in the flow of work, has the business context, adheres to our existing security model, and also doesn’t come with the extra cost.”

Like Valencia CF and Northrop & Johnson, we’re hearing from a range of organizations that expect Copilot to boost results across teams, from customer-facing departments like sales, marketing, and service to operations, finance, and supply chain roles.

Copilot helps sales professionals focus on closing deals

One of the first sales organizations to try Copilot in Viva Sales, launched in March, is Microsoft’s own business-to-business sales team. Nearly 4,000 sales professionals have used its capabilities, and the impact has been significant, with approximately 37,500 draft emails generated through the power of generative AI. Viva Sales was rolled out with a “customer zero” mindset, designed to create the best experience for employees to accelerate innovation and improvements for customers. According to Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience platform, feedback from the team has influenced new capabilities added to Microsoft Sales Copilot. “Sellers can get real-time suggestions and guidance as they craft emails, pulling insights from automated email summaries. It’s like having a virtual assistant right at their side, helping them to generate compelling content and ensuring that no opportunity is missed. Our sellers have embraced these features with enthusiasm, recognizing how it significantly boosts their productivity and enables them to focus on building strong customer relationships.”

Using Copilot to gain better insights faster from the data in Dynamics 365 is a strategic priority area for Sandvik Coromant, one of the world’s leading suppliers of tools, tooling solutions, and know-how for the metalworking industry. “We are very excited about Sales Copilot helping us accelerate here with opportunity summary,” shared Per Hoffner, Product Owner, Dynamics CRM at Sandvik Coromant, referring to the ability to get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes; all from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. “The feedback from our pilot groups has been very positive.”

For insight into day-to-day selling assisted by Copilot, read the guide “How Sellers Can Use AI to Better Engage with Customers” at Microsoft WorkLab.

Copilot helps marketers improve customer experiences

We previously announced Copilot capabilities for marketers, including AI assistance to help brainstorm marketing copy for email campaigns, create targeted marketing segments, and use natural language to infer key insights from customer data. These and newly announced Copilot capabilities are available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights which, as reported last month, will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution.

NC Fusion, a professional soccer team and sports organization serving the Triad region of North Carolina, is an early adopter of Copilot. Marketing director Chris Barnhart shared the team’s experience. “Normal engagement runs about 20 to 30 percent and there’s a lot of factors that go into the email itself, but with the email written with content ideas the engagement was about 70 percent.” The content ideas feature helped them save time, too. “[It] helps us tremendously to efficiently produce emails,” said Barnhart. “In fact, I can tell you it was normally at least an hour, and I did it in 15 minutes, it takes me ~25 percent of the time it took before to create email content!” Learn more about how NC Fusion is using Copilot to inspire young soccer players.

Campari Group, a worldwide leader in the spirits industry, is also benefiting from the ability to prompt Copilot to generate content ideas. “Setting the tone allows Campari Group, a global company, to tailor the tone of voice for each brand and region’s communication style saving us hours of copywriting,” said Liam Barnes, Global IT Director – Marketing Technologies at Campari Group. 

“It’s pretty impressive,” said Keith Perfect, Director of Technology and Intelligence from Northrop & Johnson. “Our team has been very happy using the feature. it’s making delivering great content faster and easier.”

Institutions for higher learning can also benefit from Copilot by equipping departments and colleges with Copilot capabilities to better engage a variety of audiences. “Once we share this with our teams, it has the potential to be quite transformational,” shared Sidney Fernandes, Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Technology at the University of South Florida. “Students and staff won’t need to be educated on the nuances of student data or copywriting to engage the right audiences impactfully.”

Coffee + Dunn, a leading technology and customer engagement consulting firm, shared its experience using query assist to use conversational, everyday language to quickly build targeted segments. They can simply describe the attributes of the target segment—such as demographics, psychographics, behaviors, or preferences—and query assist will automatically generate the list of contacts. “Using query assist was quick and easy,” said Tyler McClain, Senior Solution Consultant. “I just typed ‘anniversary within the past five years,’ and it gave me exactly what I was looking for. This feature can further empower our clients to engage their customers with ease, and I’m excited to share it with them.”

To learn more about AI-assisted marketing tasks, read the guide “How Marketers Can Use AI to Unlock Breakthrough Creativity” at Microsoft WorkLab.

Using AI for breakthrough customer service experiences

Customer and field service teams are on the frontline for customer satisfaction and retention. Based on early reviews, Copilot promises to help service agents and field teams to improve service delivery and customer experiences.

Firesafe, a market-leading provider of fire protection components and systems in Nordic countries, will deploy Copilot as part of an extensive customer engagement transformation. “We are excited about the Copilot capabilities for customer service and omnichannel and are looking forward to see the anticipated productivity gains for the customer service agent in real action,” explained Petter Aamot Vangstein, CDO.

Delivering more strategic value across operations, supply chain, and finance roles with AI

With Copilot, you can further unlock the potential of enterprise resource planning (ERP) by bringing together data and AI to accelerate the speed of execution and business outcomes. Bartek is the world’s largest producer of malic and fumaric acid—two key ingredients for many foods, beverages, and industrial applications. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, it now has perpetual inventory sales that gives the company visibility to see inventory and customer orders all in one system. “Business Central and the Power Platform really lets us leverage a small team, and create very big outcomes,” explained Steven Chambers, Chief Financial Officer, Bartek. “As we move into more automated planning and bringing in AI-assisted demand planning, I know Microsoft and Business Central are there.”

Explore what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot—and share your review

We are dedicated to helping your employees be more effective and provide customers with amazing experiences. With Copilot, your teams can do more with less and focus on higher-impact work. Best of all, teams across your organization can start experiencing Copilot. Many Copilot capabilities are available now, with more coming over the following months. Explore more about what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot and get started on your journey today.

The post The early reviews are in: Dynamics 365 Copilot helps to reclaim time, drive innovation, and engage customers    appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are excited to announce the preview of SharePoint integration with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Dynamics 365 customers can now sign up to preview this capability in their test environments and provide early feedback. 

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service already works with your internal knowledge base to guide agents and improve their productivity. It can generate suggestions for chat and draft email content. Agents can also use the multi-turn conversational experience to discover high quality information and serve customers with confidence.  

However, our customers currently previewing Copilot capabilities also indicated the need for Copilot to use substantial knowledge across external sources like SharePoint. Acting on this feedback, we are now inviting customers to participate in the preview to help us understand their use cases for this feature. 

Administrators can easily configure Copilot settings within the Customer Service admin center app to include underlying knowledge sources, which could be either an internal knowledge base or SharePoint. If they choose SharePoint, they must configure and link active SharePoint portals with Copilot as shown below: 

After configuration, Copilot will use the federated search framework within Dynamics 365 with graph search APIs to search for SharePoint content in real time. Copilot will then process it further with Azure Open AI service to generate a relevant response parsed across thousands of lengthy files (Word, PDF, text formats) making the content easy for agents to read and act upon quickly. 

Plan for future Copilot updates

Currently, customers previewing Copilot can use either their internal knowledge base or SharePoint as their primary knowledge source, but not both. Based on feedback and collective assessment, we would like to bring SharePoint and internal knowledge bases together for Copilot to generate unified responses across both sources. The following features are already on our roadmap:   

• Unified Copilot response: We will be enhancing the ability for Copilot to search and index both internal and SharePoint content together to generate unified response. 
• Improved quality of response: Use Azure Open AI to improve overall quality and relevance of responses with SharePoint content. 
• Support for SharePoint site page contents (*.aspx): Enhance Copilot to include site page content in its responses while answering queries. 

AI solutions built responsibly 

Enterprise grade data privacy at its core. Azure OpenAI offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Copilot is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection. 

Responsible AI by design. We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. 

Try Copilot with SharePoint

Customers interested in trying this feature can share their org IDs by filling out a short survey form: Copilot Integration with SharePoint as a Knowledge Source

To try other Copilot features in Customer Service, read the documentation: Enable Copilot features in Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

The post Use Copilot with SharePoint knowledge to serve your customers  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.