This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have tremendous vision and passion, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 can help turn dreams into reality. With Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can use the power of AI to reduce the daily grind of running your business—giving you additional time to reach more customers, create new products, and continue to grow your business.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The reuse of DNS names is a common requirement for cloud customers, as applications and services may need to be upgraded or migrated while still having the ability to deploy using the same DNS name as a pointer. The danger of this practice is that it can leave you vulnerable to a security threat known as a subdomain takeover. This can happen when a DNS name record does not point to a provisioned Azure resource, which means any domain associated with the DNS entry is now considered “dangling”. A malicious actor could take control of the dangling domain by creating a new resource with the same DNS name that points to different resources as shown below:
In the past, Azure has recommended multiple ways to remediate this type of threat by using products like Microsoft Defender for App service or Azure DNS alias records, along with practicing “good DNS hygiene”. Today, we are excited to announce a new capability for Azure public IP address that can prevent this type of subdomain takeover while still allowing for re-use of DNS names. We have introduced a new parameter called Domain Name Label Scope will have an additional, hashed string in between the domainnamelabel and location fields.
The value of the Domain Name Label Scope can be set to four different values:
Value
Behavior
TenantReuse
Object with the same name in the same tenant will receive the same Domain Label
SubscriptionReuse
Object with the same name in the same subscription will receive the same Domain Label
ResourceGroupReuse
Object with the same name in the same Resource Group will receive the same Domain Label
NoReuse
Object with the same name will receive a new Domain Label for each new instance
Let’s say you have a single Azure subscription and want to create a website for your Contoso Coffee business while preventing others from reusing your DNS name records. You would:
Select SubscriptionReuse as the option when deploying a public IP address with DNS, generating a domain name label of contoso.fjdng2acavhkevd8.westus.cloudapp.Azure.com
Create a DNS zone for your domain name in Azure DNS for contoso.com and then assign a CNAME (canonical name) record in your DNS zone with the subdomain contosocofee.contoso.com that points to your domain name
Delegate your domain name to the Azure DNS name servers at your domain name registrar Note the second and third steps could be done at any DNS provider, inclusive of Azure DNS.
If you delete and redeploy a public IP address using the same template as before, the domain name label will remain the same. However, if another customer deploys a public IP address using this same template under a different subscription, the provided domain name label will change (e.g. contoso.c9ghbqhhbxevhzg9.westus.cloudapp.Azure.com), even if the public IP resource with the domain name above was removed. This would prevent any other subscription from being able to takeover the subdomain.
The feature to secure your domain name label records using Domain Name Label Scope is available in all regions. For more information on Azure DNS or Azure Public IP Services, you can review the documentation below.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Great customer service is absolutely critical to any organization’s success. Today, organizations require modern solutions that can help them support customers on the channels and touchpoints of their choice, by providing customers with self-service options and arming customer support agents with access to information and experts to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. We are pleased to share the results of a March 2024 Forrester Consulting Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) Study commissioned by Microsoft. Forrester calculates Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered benefits of $14.70 million over three years to a composite organization. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315% with a payback period of less than six months.
Methodology and purpose
Forrester’s TEI study is a methodology developed specifically to assist companies with the complexities of procuring technology solutions. The TEI study also aids technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value proposition. To these ends, the TEI study discussed here provides a framework for business-decision-makers to assess the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
dynamics 365 customer service drives roi and enhances operations
Ultimately, the financial impact of the 2023 study is a projection for a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses that currently use Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These businesses’ experiences and the interview results are aggregated to create a composite organization to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks. For this study, the composite organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic organization that operates at multiple locations around the world. It has 5,000 employees total, and 500 of those are customer support agents who support a growing customer base. Each agent works an average of six hours a day and spends 75% of that time on support interactions.
Continue reading to learn what key challenges the composite organization faces and the study’s critical findings.
Key challenges
In the interviews conducted for this TEI study, the organizations shared the following common challenges:
A disparate stack of aging customer support and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
Siloed customer data, which led to suboptimal support.
Increasing support capacity requirements.
An inconsistent and one-sized customer experience.
With these challenges top of mind, the organizations wanted to find and invest in a customer service solution that could:
Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams.
Deliver automation and AI-driven insights to the customer support function to enable agents to deliver a better support experience while limiting the requirements for additional support agents.
Help establish and curate a knowledgebase to help agents further support the customer experience.
Key findings
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides service organizations’ agents the tools they need to deliver faster, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service simplifies and automates support agent processes with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service while delivering faster support experiences to organizations’ customers, which can improve customer satisfaction and lead to additional revenue and profit.
Forrester’s study revealed four quantifiable impact areas: improved handling times leading to greater agent productivity, improvements to first-call resolution and misrouted calls, improvement to sales pipeline generation leading to revenue increases, and cost savings after retiring other customer service solutions.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas below to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value for customer support organizations.
Reduced call handling time by 40%
Interviewees noted several inefficiencies across their organizations’ previous customer service solutions that increased agents’ interaction time with customers:
Multiple solutions for different support functions, leading to siloed customer data and relevant support information.
Lack of visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and resolution.
A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing.
No automation for common support tasks.
Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled their organizations to automate manual aspects of their agents’ daily responsibilities, which helped to reduce the time they spent searching for customer information and best practices. Because agents were able to have shorter, more efficient interactions with customers, the composite organization saved an average of 468 hours per agent each year.
Improved first-call resolution by 20%—and decreased misroutes by 15%
With their legacy customer support tools, agents at the study’s participant organizations had no easily accessible customer knowledge base with records of common support issues. They also had no easy way to locate specialists who could help resolve issues, so calls were frequently misrouted to the wrong specialists.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they found they could automatically route support cases to the best specialists depending on the nature of the case. This helped them to both increase first-call resolution rates by 20% and shorten the overall time of interactions. They also decreased the times agents misrouted calls to the wrong specialists by 15%. Overall, the composite organization’s agents saved up to 292 hours per year.
Increased sales pipeline generation to drive additional profitability
Some interviewees shared revenue impact to their organizations’ revenue based on the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. A CRM product manager at a travel and hospitality organization explained that because Dynamics 365 Customer service automates the majority of searches performed by agents, they can spend more time on revenue-linked interactions. Another interviewee at a manufacturing organization said that customer information and leads are shared between support agents using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling salespeople to see customer interactions and identify opportunities for new revenue.
Saved up to $978,000 in costs on retired customer service solution(s)
By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, participant organizations were able to retire their previous customer service solutions, saving costs on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. Interviewees from one manufacturing organization said their company reclaimed nearly $100,000 annually by decommissioning two third-party customer service solutions made redundant by Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Other benefits
Forrester Consulting Total Impact Study
See the total economic impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Study participants mentioned additional benefits to their organizations that were not quantified for this report, including:
Integration with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Power BI for discovering and predicting common support issues and Teams for easy collaboration between support agents and specialists to help resolve issues.
An improved customer support experience with reductions in key support metrics such as handle time, hold time, and resolution rates—and the ability to deliver faster, more personalized, and more nuanced support experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Next steps
Forrester’s TEI study of Dynamics 365 Customer Service found four primary quantifiable impact areas and several soft benefits. Taken together, the study found that Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered a total economic impact of $14.7 million in financial savings over three years. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315%.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Great customer service is absolutely critical to any organization’s success. Today, organizations require modern solutions that can help them support customers on the channels and touchpoints of their choice, by providing customers with self-service options and arming customer support agents with access to information and experts to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. We are pleased to share the results of a March 2024 Forrester Consulting Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) Study commissioned by Microsoft. Forrester calculates Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered benefits of $14.70 million over three years to a composite organization. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315% with a payback period of less than six months.
Methodology and purpose
Forrester’s TEI study is a methodology developed specifically to assist companies with the complexities of procuring technology solutions. The TEI study also aids technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value proposition. To these ends, the TEI study discussed here provides a framework for business-decision-makers to assess the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
dynamics 365 customer service drives roi and enhances operations
Ultimately, the financial impact of the 2023 study is a projection for a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses that currently use Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These businesses’ experiences and the interview results are aggregated to create a composite organization to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks. For this study, the composite organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic organization that operates at multiple locations around the world. It has 5,000 employees total, and 500 of those are customer support agents who support a growing customer base. Each agent works an average of six hours a day and spends 75% of that time on support interactions.
Continue reading to learn what key challenges the composite organization faces and the study’s critical findings.
Key challenges
In the interviews conducted for this TEI study, the organizations shared the following common challenges:
A disparate stack of aging customer support and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
Siloed customer data, which led to suboptimal support.
Increasing support capacity requirements.
An inconsistent and one-sized customer experience.
With these challenges top of mind, the organizations wanted to find and invest in a customer service solution that could:
Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams.
Deliver automation and AI-driven insights to the customer support function to enable agents to deliver a better support experience while limiting the requirements for additional support agents.
Help establish and curate a knowledgebase to help agents further support the customer experience.
Key findings
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides service organizations’ agents the tools they need to deliver faster, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service simplifies and automates support agent processes with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service while delivering faster support experiences to organizations’ customers, which can improve customer satisfaction and lead to additional revenue and profit.
Forrester’s study revealed four quantifiable impact areas: improved handling times leading to greater agent productivity, improvements to first-call resolution and misrouted calls, improvement to sales pipeline generation leading to revenue increases, and cost savings after retiring other customer service solutions.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas below to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value for customer support organizations.
Reduced call handling time by 40%
Interviewees noted several inefficiencies across their organizations’ previous customer service solutions that increased agents’ interaction time with customers:
Multiple solutions for different support functions, leading to siloed customer data and relevant support information.
Lack of visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and resolution.
A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing.
No automation for common support tasks.
Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled their organizations to automate manual aspects of their agents’ daily responsibilities, which helped to reduce the time they spent searching for customer information and best practices. Because agents were able to have shorter, more efficient interactions with customers, the composite organization saved an average of 468 hours per agent each year.
Improved first-call resolution by 20%—and decreased misroutes by 15%
With their legacy customer support tools, agents at the study’s participant organizations had no easily accessible customer knowledge base with records of common support issues. They also had no easy way to locate specialists who could help resolve issues, so calls were frequently misrouted to the wrong specialists.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they found they could automatically route support cases to the best specialists depending on the nature of the case. This helped them to both increase first-call resolution rates by 20% and shorten the overall time of interactions. They also decreased the times agents misrouted calls to the wrong specialists by 15%. Overall, the composite organization’s agents saved up to 292 hours per year.
Increased sales pipeline generation to drive additional profitability
Some interviewees shared revenue impact to their organizations’ revenue based on the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. A CRM product manager at a travel and hospitality organization explained that because Dynamics 365 Customer service automates the majority of searches performed by agents, they can spend more time on revenue-linked interactions. Another interviewee at a manufacturing organization said that customer information and leads are shared between support agents using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling salespeople to see customer interactions and identify opportunities for new revenue.
Saved up to $978,000 in costs on retired customer service solution(s)
By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, participant organizations were able to retire their previous customer service solutions, saving costs on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. Interviewees from one manufacturing organization said their company reclaimed nearly $100,000 annually by decommissioning two third-party customer service solutions made redundant by Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Other benefits
Forrester Consulting Total Impact Study
See the total economic impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Study participants mentioned additional benefits to their organizations that were not quantified for this report, including:
Integration with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Power BI for discovering and predicting common support issues and Teams for easy collaboration between support agents and specialists to help resolve issues.
An improved customer support experience with reductions in key support metrics such as handle time, hold time, and resolution rates—and the ability to deliver faster, more personalized, and more nuanced support experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Next steps
Forrester’s TEI study of Dynamics 365 Customer Service found four primary quantifiable impact areas and several soft benefits. Taken together, the study found that Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered a total economic impact of $14.7 million in financial savings over three years. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315%.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Welcome to our March 2024 update.
This month, export to CSV and show details in PivotTables are now available in Excel for the web. Also, creating Power BI-connected tables is available in Excel for Windows users, and Office Scripts for Office 365 E1 and F3 licenses.
Excel for Web:
Export to CSV
Show Details in PivotTables #FIA
Excel for Windows:
Create Power BI Connected Tables in Excel
Office Scripts for Office 365 E1 and F3 Licenses
Excel for Web
1. Export to CSV
The ability to export to CSV is now available to all Web users. This experience was already supported for Windows, and Mac users and we’ve now expanded this service to all Web users. Take advantage of this lightweight file format in Excel for the Web to exchange and use data between apps and across platforms. Read more here > Export to CSV
#FIA
2. Show Details in PivotTables We’ve added a new button on the ribbon under the ‘PivotTable Analyze’ tab called Show Details, this button allows you to drill into your PivotTables. Previously, you were able to double-click a value cell in the PivotTable and create a new table to further analyze the details for that value. This button makes this existing capability easier to find and use. This functionality was already available for Web users.
Excel for Windows
1. Create Power BI Connected Tables in Excel A new Insert Table option is now available for the Power BI Datasets pane in Excel. It enables users to create a connected table directly in Excel. This streamlines the workflow of adding data and is friendlier to more Excel users. This is now available for all Windows and Web users. Read more here >
Power BI Connected Tables
2. Office Scripts for Office 365 E1 and F3 Licenses Starting today you can find the Office Scripts feature set in the Automate tab on the Excel ribbon. Office Scripts is an automation platform in Excel that allows users with all levels of programming experience to automate their repetitive workflows. To get started, use the Action Recorder to record the actions you take in Excel. These actions are then translated into a script that you can run at any time. No programming experience required! Read more here > Office Scripts
Check if a specific feature is in your version of Excel
Your feedback helps shape the future of Excel. Please let us know how you like a particular feature and what we can improve upon—“Give a compliment” or “Make a suggestion”.. You can also submit new ideas or vote for other ideas via Microsoft Feedback.
Special thanks to our Excel MVPs David Benaim andBill Jelenfor their contribution to this month’s What’s New in Excel article. David publishes weeklyYouTube videosand regularLinkedIn postsabout the latest innovations in Excel and more. Bill is the founder and host ofMrExcel.comand the author of several books about Excel.
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