In today’s fast-paced sales landscape, staying ahead of the game is more crucial than ever. Sales teams aiming to close deals swiftly understand the importance of real-time opportunity information. But let’s be honest, obtaining a straightforward Opportunity summary can be quite the challenge. Vital details are often scattered across various applications and documents, making it a time-consuming endeavor to compile a concise and up-to-date opportunity snapshot. However, there’s a game-changer now available within Microsoft Sales Copilot, and it comes in the form of AI-powered Opportunity summaries. In this blog, we’ll dive into how deal teams can revolutionize collaboration and keep the focus on valued customers. Say goodbye to information overload and hello to seamless teamwork!

Stay informed: AI-generated Opportunity summaries

Sales Copilot makes it easy for sales team members to stay up to date on opportunities by providing AI generated summaries of the latest opportunity information. Sellers see this information in a Deal room Collaboration space in Microsoft Teams, which is set up to collaborate and stay connected on opportunity-related activities. The Opportunity summary includes details such as sales stage, budget, closing date, and latest activity saved in opportunity notes. These summaries not only provide time saving benefits, but also help the sales team gain a shared understanding of the opportunity status. This shared perspective enhances their ability to collaborate effectively, particularly when addressing customer needs and managing deals efficiently.

Enhancing team collaboration: comprehensive access to opportunity details

For Dynamics or Salesforce organizations that have created a Deal room in Microsoft Teams, the Opportunity summary is instantly displayed after setup. Members of the deal team will find a complete summary that shows information from relevant CRM opportunity fields like sales stage, budget amount, estimated close date, parent account name, primary contact name, and more. Any important notes added to the opportunity are also included in the latest activity summary.

This AI-generated summary offers the sales team a clear overview of the opportunity and helps them save a lot of time and work better together, focusing on the most important things with the latest information available.

Whether new team members join the deal room or existing ones seek real-time updates, accessing this summary is effortless. By issuing the command “@Sales Copilot show Opportunity summary” within Deal rooms, or alternatively, by generating the Opportunity summary through the “@Sales Copilot Help” options, individuals can promptly tap into the most pertinent details of an opportunity.

Activate AI summaries via Sales Copilot admin settings

Dynamics and Salesforce administrators can enable AI-generated Opportunity summaries in Deal rooms by accessing the Sales Copilot admin settings in Sales Copilot app in Microsoft Teams. Within the admin settings, simply toggle on the Copilot option in the ‘Set up Copilot AI features’ page.

Once the Copilot toggle is enabled, the Opportunity summary is generated using the following CRM fields from the opportunity record: 

• Opportunity name 
• Opportunity ID  
• Created On  
• Estimated close date  
• Sales stage  
• Budget amount  
• Description  
• Parent Account name  
• Primary contact name 

Content under the Latest activity section is generated from the summary of the last three notes added to the opportunity record. 

Next Steps

New to Sales Copilot? Sign up here: Microsoft Sales Copilot

Learn more about Opportunity summaries in Deal rooms: View opportunity summary | Microsoft Learn

Learn more about Collaboration spaces and Deal rooms: Introducing Collaboration spaces for sales teams

The post Streamline your sales workflow: How AI-powered Opportunity summaries transform collaboration appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Six months ago, we introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first AI Copilot natively built for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Since then, more than 63,000 organizations have experienced Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform first-hand, empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways to improve experiences across the customer journey.

Copilot is designed to help people do their very best work—and we’re seeing real value to support this vision. Today, I’m excited to share the most widely used scenarios and performance metrics from employees at Microsoft and leading organizations using Copilot capabilities across the customer journey. These stories and insights showcase what’s possible when employees are assisted by AI in the flow of work—helping them to boost productivity, perform tasks more efficiently, and focus on what matters most.

Transforming customer experience in the age of AI

Sellers, service agents, and marketers share a common goal: developing exceptional customer experiences that ultimately impact the bottom line. In July, we introduced the next wave of Copilot and AI capabilities to deliver connected customer experiences—from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, all the way through to the customer interactions in Outlook and Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Sales Copilot. With Dynamics 365 Copilot and Microsoft Sales Copilot, marketers can use everyday language to create relevant and targeted campaigns and brainstorm creative copy; sellers can move from one customer call and email to the next with relevant context on the opportunity at their fingertips; and service agents can become super agents with the help of AI to serve up relevant information to close customer cases more quickly.

Assisted by Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft Support team resolves more cases faster, with less effort

At Microsoft, we’re also leading our own AI-first transformation and, since April, have been using Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service within our Customer Service and Support (CSS) team—one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Today, we can share how Copilot has impacted the way agents work to resolve support cases, and the impact on their efficiency and productivity.

Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Economist, in partnership with the Dynamics 365 product group, evaluated how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service has impacted agent productivity since April. The initial results shared here reflect those of 11.5K agents, with 6.5K agents who used Copilot and the control group of 5K agents who did not use Copilot.

The findings demonstrate how Copilot can support agents of all experience levels in their workflows to increase efficiency and quality of customer engagements. Key results included:

• Expedited agent onboarding. High turnover rates are common for service teams across industries, placing a burden on organizations to onboard new agents to be productive quickly. Copilot has been particularly effective in helping newer agents who don’t have years of experience or institutional experience get up to speed and find relevant information more quickly, the study found. Specifically, for low-severity chat cases in one area of our commercial support business, we observed a 12 percent reduction in average handle time—the time actively spent on resolving a customer case.
• More cases resolved faster—without peer assistance. In the most productive scenario, the study found that in one support business, 10 percent of cases that normally require collaboration with peers were resolved independently. This means fewer customers had to experience being put on hold.

Direct feedback from Microsoft Support agents reveals how Copilot improves interactions with customers:

• “Just wanted to share my gratitude to Copilot as a person who always struggles to wrap up wording before sharing with the customer—amazing time and pain saver for me!”
• “[A] customer switched language mid-chat from English to Spanish. Copilot enabled me to continue to solve the problem regardless of the language shift.”
• “I used Copilot to help a customer and got CSAT [customer satisfaction score] 5 out of 5. Their feedback was, ‘Very informative and to the point.’”

While the study captures just the first few months of AI-assisted service within the Microsoft Support organization, the results should encourage other organizations looking to optimize service operations with AI. The findings offer a glimpse of efficiencies and productivity gains that other organizations might experience when using Copilot. Read more details about the Microsoft Support team’s experience with Copilot on Microsoft Source. For the full story and video testimonial about the team’s transformation journey, check out the case study.  

In addition to performance metrics, Microsoft employees provide feedback to the development team, helping to ensure every new capability provides the best possible benefit for users. This step is crucial as we roll out new features across Dynamics 365 Copilot—including a feature available today. Copilot summarization, now generally available, helps agents to quickly review the details of a case without sifting through notes, chat transcripts, and emails. This feature generates automatic conversation summaries, helping service agents to quickly understand highlights of a case—such as key customer problems and steps that agents took to resolve the case.

The Copilot summarization feature joins a host of upcoming Copilot capabilities for service teams, from the call center to field service professionals. View the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service for details. 

Service organizations expect Copilot to help deliver new levels of agent productivity and customer experiences

In addition to the early results from the Microsoft Support team, we’re hearing directly from leading organizations getting an early start with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Prada Group, a global leader in luxury brands, is using Copilot to improve experiences for its discerning customers. “We’re excited to be one of the early adopters of the new Dynamics 365 Copilot AI tool,” shared Francesco De Giampaulis, Global Client Service & e-Commerce Payment Gateways and Anti-Fraud Manager, Prada Group. “By integrating it with our Knowledge Base and other internal sources, Copilot will assist our Client Service Advisors speeding up the onboarding process, offering a fast and smooth assistance to our customers, saving time searching for answers and focusing on providing a great experience, including suggestions for the right product or look.”

One of the leading investment management and advisory services, Vanguard Group, shared its initial experiences with Copilot. “Vanguard is utilizing Dynamics 365 Customer Service to support its agents in client service and knowledge management scenarios, as well as a custom bot to manage customer inquiries via its website,” explained Grant Pharez, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Specialist at Vanguard. “We are seeing promising results in testing the generative AI capabilities in these applications to help our customer care teams and self-service customer applications deliver exceptional service.”

Sellers reach new levels of productivity with Microsoft Sales Copilot

Concurrent to the Microsoft Support team’s experience, Microsoft deployed Microsoft Sales Copilot (previously Viva Sales) to 10,000 sellers within its sales organization. Early results show that 85 percent of surveyed sellers report completing one or more tasks faster, and 70 percent claim that Microsoft Sales Copilot helps them improve productivity.

Organizations like Securitas, a leading provider of custom security and guarding solutions, are noting the ability for sellers to focus time on what matters most. “Opportunity summary in Microsoft Sales Copilot is a huge and important leap in our direction to save more time for our sales personnel,” said Philip Eklund, Vice President, Client Engagement Services, Securitas. “With this capability in the hands of our sellers, they can spend more time equipping organizations with best-in-class security solutions to help make our world a safer place.”

Sellers using Microsoft Sales Copilot benefit from AI capabilities that help streamline the workday. Features slated for general availability in September and October include AI-generated preparation notes for customer conversations and opportunity and lead summaries. In addition, Microsoft Sales Copilot improves teamwork and knowledge sharing, providing sellers with collaboration spaces in Teams that integrate with CRM data and contact cards that surface CRM records directly in Microsoft 365 apps. View the release notes for Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot for details. Get the e-book, “The AI Advantage: Driving Sales Performance with Next-Generation Tools”, which details how AI supports sales teams throughout the day. 

Marketers surface deeper insights, optimize customer journeys with Copilot

Like sales and service professionals, marketing teams using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights report tangible business benefits. TTEC Digital, a global customer experience (CX) technology and services company and Microsoft Gold Partner, shared how Copilot democratizes marketing tasks. According to Karl Phenix, VP at TTEC Digital, “Copilot in Customer Insights makes marketing employees more comfortable in doing complex tasks such as segmentation, which previously required specialists such as data scientists.” Karl added that “Copilot frees up time by generating emails in minutes, so marketing employees can do more to drive sales activities and accelerate the pipeline.”

Copilot features now generally available help marketers to deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience. Marketers can craft email content by prompting Copilot to curate content, change the tone and voice, or adjust the length of the copy. Available in preview, marketers can also create customer journeys simply by describing actions at each step, such as: “When a contact registers for an event, send a thank you email.” In fact, 59 percent of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers* have used Copilot when creating segments and 36 percent of customers used Copilot to ask questions to uncover customer and business insights. View the release notes for more details.

Start transforming customer experiences with Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is a complete suite of CRM and ERP applications that helps you manage your businesses across sales, marketing, service, finance, and supply chain.

Dynamics 365 Copilot is the world’s first AI copilot integrated into CRM and ERP applications in the cloud. Unlike other solutions, generative AI features are included in Dynamics 365 subscriptions for enterprise customers at no additional charge.

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 applications and get started today with a free 30-day trial.

View the Dynamics 365 licensing guide to choose options that suit your business, and contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

If you are a Dynamics 365 customer, use Copilot capabilities today. Visit the Dynamics 365 release planner to view features coming soon and available to try now.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.

Read how

*Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers that have access to copilot capabilities, US only, based on telemetry data.

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Global retailers, manufacturers, and distributors continue to face the new normal of doing business today: economic volatility, unpredictable customer spending, and operational complexities. As we gear up for the holiday season, businesses that are agile and responsive will be poised to capture market demand and deliver an exceptional end-to-end customer experience. Adopting modern technology solutions can introduce agility to key processes overnight, and leaders should look across their supply chain functions to identify levers for maximum impact.

Supply chain technology leaders recognize that competitiveness—and in some cases, an organization’s survival—demands digital parity, if not leadership, so they now openly embrace exploratory IT investments.¹

One of those levers is warehouse management, a market that IDC reports grew at a compound annual rate of 14 percent in 2023.² By embracing modern, robotic, and AI-enhanced warehouse management solutions (WMS), organizations can drive meaningful results across the business in a relatively quick time-to-value.

In this post, we’ll explore why warehouse management solutions are needed and how Microsoft and Dynamics 365 enable customers to navigate ongoing disruptions, optimize inventory levels, and deliver on time with ease.

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

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Navigate supply chain uncertainties with technology

While the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic are behind us, retailers and operators are still navigating the new normal, which includes:

• Growing labor constraints.
• Demand volatility.
• Multichannel distribution.
• Storage capacity challenges.
• Permeation of AI into core processes.

In the face of these challenges, there is an opportunity for businesses to embrace uncertainties with technology and maximize levers like distribution capacity, improved employee and warehouse productivity, and consistent operations during volatile times. Legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are often disjointed and lead to a delay in real-time insights and optimization.

What is a modern WMS?

A modern warehouse management system helps businesses manage and optimize key warehouse operations like inventory tracking and shipping coordination through an open and composable framework. It can integrate with multiple systems and platforms and helps support end-to-end business processes, from ERP to customer relationship management. For businesses that want to stay competitive in an ever-expanding fulfillment economy, a modern WMS meets those challenges with an agile, digitally connected solution that reduces costs through maximizing resources like employees, machinery and storage.²

Modern warehouse management solutions can help improve real-time visibility into inventory levels, provide the ability to automate and streamline operations, and drive greater efficiency across the organization.

Adopting a modern WMS can contribute to these outputs:

• Reduced costs through improved inventory turns and optimized storage space.
• Improved customer satisfaction via on-time and in-full delivery and improved fill rates.
• Business growth and agility to meet unexpected customer demand and product development.
• Automation and enhanced productivity to free up your employees’ time to focus on what’s next.

The benefits of a modern WMS

1. Reduced costs

Golden State Foods (GSF) is an industry leader that produces liquid products like sauces, dressings, and condiments for customers like McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. With a 25 year-old legacy ERP system, GSF chose Dynamics 365 ERP solution’s Supply Chain Management and Finance to help create a modern, common platform with centralized reporting and more standardized processes to facilitate opening a new plant.

“We chose Dynamics 365 because we need modern technology that will evolve with us.”

–Carol Fawcett: Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, GSF

With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, GSF’s warehouse management processes were completely modernized. Dynamics 365 is being used to receive, put away, and consume inventory for production; report inventory as finished; store it in finished goods warehouses; and select it for shipment for customer orders. It prints standard barcode labels that are used at customers’ distribution centers for fast and accurate traceability—a considerable improvement from previous processes. This end-to-end visibility helps GSF operations managers improve inventory turns and make better decisions about production restraints and forecasting. With improved forecasting, GSF can reduce waste, optimize inventory, and increase its efficiency across its plants.

2. Improved customer satisfaction

Bedrosians Tile & Stone is one of the largest porcelain tile and stone importers and distributors in the United States, with 40 retail locations worldwide. It’s 30 year-old legacy ERP system impacted demand planning and forecasting, which was critical for Bedrosians’ massive 10,000-item inventory. Without accurate demand planning and forecasting, Bedrosians was reactive and vulnerable to market whims.

Like many retailers, Bedrosians saw customer demand skyrocket during the COVID-19 pandemic. Annual spending on home improvements grew, but without accurate demand forecasting, Bedrosians struggled to find that “just right” inventory on hand formula, often finding itself understocked or overstocked. With lead times as long as six months or more, the need to have accurate inventory levels—and visibility into them—couldn’t be more important.

Bedrosians’ legacy ERP impacted its ability to optimize inventory placement and as such, the company was at risk of promising products they couldn’t deliver or losing sales opportunities while inventory was in transit. Bedrosians chose Dynamics 365 ERP solutions to help optimize financial, inventory, purchasing, and planning capabilities to better streamline the movement of their globally sourced inventory. What used to be a manual guessing game has turned into an automated, scientific forecast based on historical data and industry trends. This ensures Bedrosians can capitalize on sales opportunities, despite months-long lead times, and deliver an on-time and in-full customer experience.

“Implementing Dynamics 365 has been a game-changer for our business. It has improved our operation and financial management. Real-time visibility, optimized procurement, and streamlined order processing has resulted in increased sales, improved margins, and a more efficient supply chain and positioned us for sustained growth in a competitive market.”

–Nirbhay Gupta: CIO, Bedrosians Tile & Stone

3. Business growth and agility

Barnas Hus is Norway’s leading children and baby products retailer, with both e-commerce and 28 physical stores. Working with a Microsoft partner, KPMG, Barnas Hus set out to face its supply chain challenges that were hindering its business growth, such as lack of visibility and inconsistent accuracy in its legacy ERP system. Barnas Hus embraced a modern, cloud-powered platform enabled by Dynamics 365. This technology-focused improvement helped the company transform its warehouse management, inventory control, production planning, and more—setting Barnas Hus up to meet growing customer demand.

Once they had made the shift, Barnas Hus opened a new state-of-the-art warehouse that utilizes autonomous robotics to accurately pick, sustainably pack, and trace every product. The modern warehouse management system improved inventory visibility and freed up employees to spend time with customers. The best part? The ease of implementation led to a quick time to demonstrate value and Barnas Hus saw its biggest month ever in revenue.

See how Barnas Hus embraced robotics with KPMG and Dynamics 365.

4. Automation and enhanced productivity

Michael Hill is a leading jeweler based in Australia with operations in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. When the pandemic hit, its 300 stores were facing temporary closures and the company confronted logistic complications that forced expensive, indirect, and inefficient shipments to its customers worldwide. Michael Hill’s legacy ERP system was inflexible and lacked visibility and accuracy.

The international jeweler moved quickly to avoid harm to its business and its brand. It rapidly deployed Dynamics 365 and almost immediately began providing increased visibility into inventory availability across its supply chain. This gave Michael Hill the ability to treat each of its stores as a warehouse location, which seamlessly allowed customers to order items online with the option to pick up at the site of their choice or ship direct from that location. It also vastly reduced the manual labor previously required from Michael Hill employees to ensure fulfillment.

“We use the ship-from-store capability in Dynamics 365 to fulfill demand from many locations, rather than requiring human intervention whenever stock is transferred. That helps us reduce how many hops it takes to put a piece into the hands of the customers, and that’s our end game—a better experience.”

–Matt Keays: Chief Information Officer, Michael Hill

By implementing Dynamics 365 as its warehouse management system, Michael Hill was able to deliver agile flow solutions that freed up its employees to focus on more strategic initiatives such as loyalty programs and trialing new fulfillment models.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 solutions

To compete and thrive in market conditions today, organizations should look to adopt modern warehouse management solutions to better prepare for uncertainty, increased demand, and disruptive conditions. While legacy ERP systems are complex, Microsoft partners and Dynamics 365 solutions provide quick time-to-value and provide the agility and automation required for growth.

Explore a free guided tour of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Footnotes

¹Gartner SC 2023 Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Execution Technologies, 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

²Source: IDC TechBrief, Warehouse Execution Systems, Document number:# US51050623, August 2023.

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