This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Selling is all about relationships. We hear a lot these days about the disconnect that our increasingly digital world can create. But at Microsoft, we believe that digital tools, especially those powered by generative AI and real-time insights, can help strengthen sellers’ relationships with their customers. We’re continually investing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to enable sellers to engage with their customers more meaningfully. We are pleased to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023 report, with top scores possible in the Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap criteria for our sales force automation (SFA) platform.
Reducing complexity to drive seller success
The role of a seller has only grown more complex. A process that used to involve a couple of phone calls and face-to-face meetings now includes everything from targeted emails to impromptu online chats. Organizations rely on everything from digital sellers to field sellers to customer success champions to ensure their customers are supported end-to-end throughout the sales journey. Especially with hybrid workplaces and shrinking travel budgets, sellers need assistance from technology to build connections—between colleagues, across multiple data sources, and with customers.
The challenge is that sellers need to build these connections and foster relationships without sacrificing productivity. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, sellers spend more than 66 percent of their day managing email, leaving only about a third of their time for actual sales activities. Our answer is to provide simple solutions—focusing on collaboration, productivity, AI, and insights—to help sellers focus on closing deals. As Forrester states in its report, “Dynamics [365 Sales] showcases how SFA and office productivity solutions work together.” We believe this is what has earned our position as a Leader: we built solutions to give sellers access to real-time customer insights, subject matter experts, relevant data across different sources, and important customer and account information right in their app of choice—no context switching necessary.
Dynamics 365 Sales works natively with Microsoft Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. Additionally, copilot capabilities bring next-generation AI and customer relationship management (CRM) platform updates into collaborative apps like Outlook and Teams, unlocking productivity for sellers whether they are working in Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft 365 apps. By helping to eliminate manual data entry, meeting summarization, and other cumbersome processes, Dynamics 365 Sales ensures sellers have more time to create and nourish their customer connections, ultimately driving sales.
Providing insights that improve customer retention—and grow revenue
Referring to Microsoft, Forrester also reports that “Embedded insights are a highlight of the product”—something that Microsoft customer, DP World, knows well. DP World is the leading provider of worldwide, end-to-end supply chain and logistics. DP World implemented Dynamics 365 Sales to help the company diversify and scale after an acquisition that was driving new demand and traffic to the company. Dynamics 365 Sales provides its sellers predictive lead scoring and prioritized worklists based on AI, giving full visibility into its sales funnels and helping it effectively qualify leads and opportunities. This reduced DP World’s sales cycle, enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater customer retention.
Learn more about sales
We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.
Microsoft named a Leader
We received top scores in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023.
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.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Efficiently managing a contact center requires a fine balance between workforce engagement and customer satisfaction. The ability to create agent-specific capacity profiles in Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers administrators and supervisors to fine-tune the work allocation based on an agent’s experience and expertise, optimizing agent performance and delivering tailored customer service.
Understand capacity profiles
Capacity profiles are at the core of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, defining the type and amount of work agents can handle, ensuring equitable work distribution. Profiles are even more beneficial when agents are blended across various channels. Agent-specific capacity profiles take this a step further, enabling customized work limits for individual agents based on their proficiency. Let’s explore this capability with an example.
A real-world scenario: Casey’s challenge
Meet Casey, a Customer Service administrator at Contoso Bank who aims to maximize the efficiency of her customer service team. She wants senior agents to handle more responsibilities, giving junior agents the time to focus on training and skill development.
Casey decides to use agent-specific capacity profiles for credit card inquiries in the North America region. She sets up a “Credit Card NAM” profile with a default limit of two concurrent conversations. She assigns it to Kiana, a seasoned agent, and Henry, a junior agent who recently joined Contoso.
Customize capacity limits
Casey recognizes that Kiana’s seniority and expertise warrant a different limit. With agent-specific capacity profiles, she can easily update Kiana’s limit to handle three conversations at a time. The immediate benefit of this approach is apparent. This balance allows junior agents like Henry to invest more time in training and development while experienced agents like Kiana manage a higher workload efficiently.
Flexibility in action
In the dynamic world of customer service, circumstances can change rapidly. Contoso Bank faces an unexpected surge in insurance-related queries. Casey needs to adapt to this evolving scenario promptly and this is where agent-specific capacity profiles truly shine.
Casey has Kiana take on the additional insurance queries alongside her credit card queries. She assigns the “Insurance” profile to Kiana. She also resets Kiana’s work limit for the “Credit Card NAM” profile back to the default amount, providing her the bandwidth to handle the increased workload efficiently.
The result: Optimal efficiency
This example showcases the flexibility and real-time adaptability that agent-specific capacity profiles offer. Casey is empowered to make agile and precise work distribution decisions, ensuring that agents’ expertise and experience are utilized optimally.
Conclusion
In the world of customer service, where every interaction matters, this feature is a game-changer. It helps organizations reduce agent stress, elevate customer satisfaction, and offer a flexible solution for modern customer service management. By embracing this feature, businesses can ensure that their customer service is optimized for excellence, regardless of changing circumstances.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We recently announced the preview of our new Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile experience. This blog details the new capabilities on how technicians can benefit from this new streamlined experience, which cuts down the number of taps required to complete a booking in nearly half!
Upon launching the app with the new experience enabled, you will notice several things. Firstly, the styling and theming follows the Microsoft’s Fluent design system – bringing an experience like other modern enterprise apps like Teams and Office to your field service technicians.
There is a new bottom navigation bar with 3 main buttons:
Home – the landing page for the app, currently today’s bookings
Library – for helpful reference materials such as Guides
More – for easy access to the other areas of the app via the sitemap.
Tapping on your user avatar in the top left opens a familiar navigation menu where you can get help, provide feedback and access useful app settings, such as the ability to change your time zone and your applicable Dynamics 365 org.
Throughout the app, you will notice that touch targets are larger to eliminate mis-taps for conditions out in the field. Labels and icons, such as for booking status, are color coded for immediate visual recognition. The UX is responsive and adjusts to various screen sizes and portrait and landscape modes.
The Booking List
Every row in the booking list highlights the most important fields at a glance – such as the customer’s name, the incident type, the service address, the booking start time and the current booking status. There are one-touch filters and sorting options at the top – enabling the technician to easily filter based on booking status or sort by columns other than time.
There are also nifty timesaving shortcuts – swipe gestures to change the booking status from within the booking list and one-touch “Get Directions” button to start navigation. All of these features are designed to reduce the time required to get basic information and perform tasks. To access the booking details, simply tap on the booking from the list.
Booking details, tasks, services and products
Within the booking form, there are tabs to keep the information organized in an intuitive manner. Technicians can smoothly swipe between the tabs, instead of having to tap on them.
The General tab summarizes the key details of the booking and the associated work order. The “Edit Status” button at the bottom is both conspicuous and fixed at the bottom of the screen, making it easy to access and tap.
The one-touch “Get Directions” feature from the bookings list is available on this screen as well. Additionally, there are shortcuts to quickly start a phone call or send an email from to the onsite contact from this screen. The edit controls for the time and duration fields have also been completely redesigned using the Fluent mobile patterns. The summary field contains an expandable work description.
The tasks, products and services tabs include the list of Work Order Service Tasks, Work Order Products and Work Order Services for the current booking respectively. The tasks sub-grid has multiple UX niceties – a progress bar at the top, large tappable icons to easily check off completed tasks, a task description below each task title, links to attached Guides and Inspections (more on that in a bit) and a floating action button to quickly add tasks. The products and services lists inherit many of the same UX enhancements, with the additional features to mark an item as used and update the quantity inline.
These lists are designed to reduce the need to tap into the individual items by surfacing the relevant details and editing capabilities in the list itself.
If a user needs the unified client interface (UCI) for additional booking details, they can tap on the icon on the top right of any screen. Tapping on a record that doesn’t have the new experience also takes the user to the UCI experience – for e.g., tapping into a task will currently open the UCI form.
Step by step instructions
An exciting new feature for service technicians is the ability to access their Guides on their mobile devices with the Field Service app! If the Dynamics environment contains both Field Service and Guides solutions, users can access guides from within the library tab in the bottom navigation bar. Technicians can use guides containing instructional images and branching logic to help them when they need to follow predetermined procedures or troubleshooting maneuvers.
Each guide also has an outline to enable the user to see all the steps briefly. Also, both inspections and guides can be initiated from the task list as long as they’re attached to a particular service task – surfacing the instructions in context of the work order!
Taking notes and attaching images
Technicians will love the new timeline experience in the booking. It provides a streamlined view of text and image notes from the annotations table. It is super easy to add multiple pictures in one go by selecting them from the phone’s image gallery – or just snap away in the control itself. The image previews can also be seen inline. What’s more – rich formatted text is supported!
The new Field Service Mobile UX is packed with features simplifying the technician experience to enable them to be more productive in the field.
Try it out today by following our documentation. We are looking forward to your feedback as we bring additional enhancements, including support for our offline capabilities in the new experience as well.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The innovation continues. Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.
In business applications, we’re using generative AI to break down silos and bridge gaps between data, insights, and people so sellers, marketers, and customer experience (CX) professionals can deliver exceptional experiences across the entire customer journey, seamlessly.
With our 2023 release wave 2, we’re taking these capabilities to new heights across our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Sales Copilot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights applications.
As unveiled at yesterday’s Business Applications Launch Event, I’m thrilled to share highlights of what’s to come, including new ways that these applications—fueled by generative AI and Copilot—can help you use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration more easily than ever before. With a focus on delivering value to each line of business employee, our solutions are proven to maximize business outcomes across your organization.
Many of these capabilities are available today; all of them will be generally available or in preview before April 2024. Let’s check it out.
Use data and insights that used to be hidden
To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. But if your data is incomplete or you can’t get to it or take action on it, how valuable is that data and the insights that come out of it?
The new AI-driven capabilities releasing in this wave are set to revolutionize your customer experiences. With Copilot’s assistance, marketers, data analysts, and CX professionals can rapidly unlock data for enhanced decision-making, obtain valuable customer demographic and behavioral insights, and streamline both journey orchestration and content creation processes to fuel customer experiences.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you to harmonize disparate data sources into one complete 360-degree view of each customer; it will automatically assess incoming data and offer suggestions to improve the quality, resulting in a more complete view and better insights into each customer.
For sellers to maximize the number of qualified leads or deals closed, it’s important that they spend their time with leads and contacts with the highest likelihood of conversion. Obtaining this clarity involves looking across a growing number of customer touchpoint signals that sellers often don’t have access to (such as website visits or store visits), nor have time to analyze. That’s where the combined power of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales comes in. As sellers are working their leads, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales automatically summarizes the lead details, status, and recent activity details, including profile summaries from Customer Insights – Data. Combining sales data with important intent signals helps sellers get a full picture of their customer so they can tailor every engagement, right in their flow of work.
Unlock capabilities previously out of reach
Another one of the many beautiful things about Copilot is that it can unlock capabilities that were previously out of reach, and it applies to various roles across your organization.
For instance, thanks to dialog with data—a Copilot capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—marketers and CX professionals can get insights and define the right target audience just by asking a simple question instead of relying on data experts to do the work for them.
Creating customer journeys has also been completely transformed with Copilot. Marketers can now use everyday language to describe the customer journey they want to create, and Copilot instantly designs that journey for them, offering suggestions on segments, trigger-based actions, communication timing, branching options, and much, much more. What’s even better is that the suggested journey is now editable. So if the marketer needs to make a last-minute change to the journey’s scope, they can do so by simply asking Copilot to make the update.
When it comes to creating marketing content, bottlenecks can often arise: organizations may not have the right creative resources, enough time, or funding to produce effective content. So unfortunately, many promising campaigns never see the light of day. However, now, with the assistance of Copilot, marketers and CX professionals can easily produce highly appealing content with none of those roadblocks. Copilot capabilities like content ideas and content rewrite help these professionals write or refresh emails, forms, and more. And to make sure that collateral is on brand, they can use style assist which automatically applies colors, fonts, and styles based on a web URL and brand profiles to ensure a cohesive brand identity.
And to make it even easier to both understand your customers through data and act on insights from that data, we’ve combined Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into a single offering, with the name “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.”
Reach new levels of productivity and collaboration
With customer expectations on the rise and customer loyalty at stake, sellers and marketers need to be more on top of their game than ever, so infusing Copilot into the tools they already use—whether it’s Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, or Outlook—our solutions empower them to transform their day-to-day operations and supercharge their productivity.
Sales Copilot capabilities in Outlook deliver insights and opportunity summaries so sellers no longer have to work across multiple applications to get a comprehensive view of an opportunity or to prepare for a meeting. These summaries are accessible in various places, including collaborative deal rooms, ensuring collective visibility.
To ensure that collaboration flows smoothly across sales teams, Sales Copilot in Teams provides AI-powered planner tasks, like simplifying task assignments, setting due dates, and keeping everyone in the loop. And once it’s time for the presentation, the team is equipped with real-time tips and suggestions within the Teams meeting so they can take charge of the discussions.
Our goal is to equip sellers with the right information at the right time, in real time, so they can make every moment count when interfacing with a customer; and we’re making it all available within their flow of work.
Learn more about 2023 release wave 2 capabilities
The capabilities coming in this release wave are ushering in a new era of AI-powered efficiency and innovation, enabling you to use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.
The future of AI-driven success is here, and Copilot is leading the way. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and be ready to implement these transformative capabilities in your organization.
Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 2
Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.
This release wave introduces hundreds of new features across Microsoft Power Platform applications, including enhanced capabilities for governance, administration, and professional development. Updates for Dynamics 365 include innovation to help employees be more productive, create exceptional customer experiences and deepen relationships, and drive meaningful growth across the business. This release also features new AI capabilities in Copilot—which more than 130,000 organizations have now experienced—that help to improve insights, save time, and enhance creativity across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.
Tune in to the launch event, live or on-demand, for a concise overview of the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Nestlé, Kodak Alaris, Northern Trust, Centrica, Spark NZ, Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland, and Suffolk are adopting these capabilities to drive transformative changes in their businesses.
A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
Transforming enterprise resource planning (ERP) with AI
Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform
A new era of AI-powered customer service and field service
As a frontline for customer loyalty, service agents and field teams need access to information and insights to understand customer needs and respond appropriately. New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service will help reduce time spent on common tasks, as well as introduce enhancements to the Customer Service workspace. Updates include improved inbox functionality, a redesigned voice experience, enhanced collaboration through Microsoft Teams, and integrated diagnostics for administrators—all aimed at boosting agent productivity and operational efficiency.
During the session led by Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Customer Service, we demonstrated how Copilot assists customer service and field service processes, including customer self-service, across various channels.
We also revealed how customers like Northern Trust Corporation, a leading wealth and asset management institution, can use Copilot to assist the client services team with tasks ranging from account reviews and case investigations to post-resolution wrap-ups. Northern Trust Corporation has not only gained recognition for its innovative financial services, but also for its unwavering commitment to customer service. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service as a steadfast component of its journey, the latest capabilities in release wave 2 can help the client service teams at Northern Trust be even more efficient, effective, and customer-focused, streamlining its workflow and enhancing its ability to provide timely and accurate support to clients.
The session also delved deeper into the field service domain, where Centrica, a global energy services company, effectively manages its sizable workforce of 12,000 field operatives on site by harnessing the new capabilities of Dynamics 365 Field Service, streamlining processes from task assignments to issue resolution.
To learn more about release wave 2 capabilities for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, visit the release planner.
Transforming ERP with AI
The new release wave harnesses AI, automation, and analytics to help organizations drive greater operational efficiency across finance, supply chain, and operations—capabilities that enhance visibility, automate processes, extend coverage, and deliver a more integrated experience across departments.
Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance include the general availability of extended planning and analysis, which brings together operational and financial planning to continuously plan, act, and analyze. In addition, the general availability of business performance analytics streamlines financial reporting by centralizing data from multiple business processes and in an easy-to-use interface.
Updates to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management include improvements in demand planning, as well as procure-to-pay processes. Copilot will now suggest actions that can help purchasing agents make better decisions in response to new and updated information that affects open purchase orders.
At the launch event, Georg Glantschnig, Vice President, AI ERP, showcased how Domino’s Pizza UK and Ireland is improving its demand planning accuracy by using AI. These new features have greatly enhanced its capacity to serve more customers by precisely planning food requirements, thereby reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability through more efficient facility operations. Additionally, the process of fulfilling purchase orders has also seen a remarkable enhancement, thanks to Copilot.
We also demonstrated how New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services provider, Spark NZ, is transforming its finance and supply chain operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365. It can now automate many of its financial processes—including vendor invoice processing, automatic revaluation of foreign currency transactions, transaction reconciliation, billing, and complex tax calculations. Human resources can also streamline processes, from hiring to self-service vacation time requests and tracking.
Enhancing customer experience through AI-driven transformation
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Copilot you can use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.
The new release wave introduces a variety of solutions to help marketers and sales professionals use Copilot to deepen their understanding of their target customer base, streamline engagement processes, and push the boundaries in crafting exceptional customer experiences.
In the closing keynote session, Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Customer Experience, demonstrated how Kodak Alaris, a global technology company, effectively used Copilot within Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights. Taking advantage of the new AI capabilities, it tapped into previously hidden data to target its customer base, unlocking capabilities that were once out of reach. Using Copilot, it was able to create unique personalized content to keep customers informed about its services and effortlessly establish new levels of productivity and customer connection, attracting new businesses like never before.
Leading a new era of AI-generated low-code app development with Microsoft Power Platform
Copilot in Power Platform ushers in a new era of AI-assisted low-code development. Copilot features in release wave 2 make it even easier to quickly create solutions.
At the launch event, Sangya Singh, Vice President, Power Pages, showcased how Copilot plays a vital role in democratizing development, enabling a broader audience—both citizen and professional developers—to create innovative solutions using natural language.
Through the lens of Suffolk, one of America’s largest construction companies, we demonstrated how Microsoft Power Automate helped them streamline critical material request processes, enabling teams to use Copilot in Power Automate to build flows by describing what they need.
We also showcased how Microsoft Power Apps can help Suffolk facilitate efficient coordination of construction status updates, and how the generative answers capability in Microsoft Power Virtual Agents can search industry resources for answers, reducing manual research. We also demonstrated how Microsoft Power Pages improves collaboration with multiple partners on construction projects, and how Microsoft Power BI can help Suffolk visualize safety data at construction sites across the globe, highlighting the trends, causes, and outcomes of incidents and near misses so that preventative actions can be easily identified and implemented.
In addition to enhancing daily business operations, Copilot within Microsoft Power Platform has significantly improved the governance and administrative experience, expediting the development of these applications.
Watch the launch event on-demand for in-depth insights and demonstrations of the new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You can also delve into several deep-dive presentations on topics including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, responsible AI practices, and a fireside chat that explores the latest features in this release wave.
Don’t forget to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to stay informed about what’s new and on the horizon.
We also invite you to learn more about the latest AI innovation at Microsoft Ignite 2023, taking place in Seattle from November 14 through November 17, 2023, with online sessions available live and on-demand on November 15 and November 16. Register today.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
This post was co-authored by Caroline Dent, Senior Solutions Consultant, Velrada.
Due to fierce competition and increasing customer expectations, many organizations are looking to transform their field service operations to increase customer satisfaction, drive greater efficiency, and ensure higher service effectiveness. Digital transformation for field service operations is often focused on providing modern tools for service dispatchers who manage customer requests and create and dispatch work orders. But what about the people on the frontlines—the service technicians in the field?
Consider a utility provider with field service technicians who may work in remote areas with low network coverage or sometimes brave challenging weather conditions to support customers experiencing outages. Like any other organization, that provider needs a solution that enables it to streamline field service operations as much as possible, not only for controlling costs but also for providing the best possible experience for its customers. But when bad weather hits, it also needs a solution that ensures its field support can be productive even in extreme conditions and from the most remote locations.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, organizations with service technicians on the frontlines can help maximize productivity with AI-driven assistance and remote expert support in the flow of work. And specifically for service technicians on the frontlines, Dynamics 365 Field Service offers a comprehensive Field Service mobile app for Windows, iOS, and Android devices that provides a set of digital capabilities that extend far beyond the traditional scheduling and dispatching of work orders.
As a long-term Microsoft global partner, Velrada has emerged as a pioneering force in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to empower frontline workers. With a rich history of innovation and a strong commitment to business transformation, Velrada has consistently demonstrated its expertise in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to help its customers optimize operations.
“The field service industry is undergoing a profound transformation, and at its forefront is the demand from our customers for innovative solutions that go beyond the scheduling and dispatching of jobs,”
David Conti, Product Director, Velrada
Let’s take a closer look at how organizations are empowering field service workers with more innovative solutions by deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Empowering technicians with real-time information for better service
A primary benefit of Dynamics 365 Field Service is the Field Service mobile app, available on Windows, Android, and iOS devices. Service technicians can see their workdays at a glance in Microsoft Teams, including their latest work orders. They simply click on a work order to launch the Field Service mobile app, so they can view and update work orders, customer assets, accounts, and more, no matter where they are working—even in areas with limited connectivity. This means that even during the worst weather events, workers can get real-time dispatch updates from service agents that keep them informed about the latest outages and ready to tackle challenges regardless of the weather conditions.
Using the Field Service mobile app can also help organizations like the utility provider equip field technicians with digital workstations right on their mobile devices, so they can conduct digital inspections, manage forms, and complete service checklists—everything they were previously required to do on paper, often at the end of a long work day.
Enabling efficient on-site assessments
Using the Field Service mobile app, technicians can conduct on-site assessments with unmatched efficiency. They can capture photos, record notes, provide customers with immediate estimates, and even get their sign-off by capturing their digital signature in the app. This accelerates decision-making and facilitates faster service delivery, a crucial advantage in remote and challenging locations.
Ensuring seamless inventory management
Technicians can also easily access up-to-date inventory information on their devices. This eliminates the need for cumbersome manual inventory checks and reduces delays caused by missing parts because technicians can ensure they’re well-equipped for their service calls before they leave the service center.
Prioritizing safety and compliance
The Field Service mobile app incorporates safety checklists and real-time reporting, helping to ensure compliance with safety regulations. This not only upholds safety standards but also improves the well-being of service technicians who often work under hazardous conditions, such as near high-voltage transformers or natural gas compressors.
Revolutionizing service with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and mixed reality
For many organizations, enabling service technicians on the frontlines with digital tools that help eliminate inefficient paper-based processes and ensure workers can be productive even in the most remote locations or extreme conditions is just the beginning. Conti says, “Our customers are constantly looking at ways to innovate, and our next step is to help them give technicians access to more than just transactional information by incorporating mixed reality on top of Field Service solutions.” Organizations using Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens, HoloLens 2, Android, or iOS devices to enable technicians to collaborate more efficiently by working together from different locations. This means service technicians can find and connect with technical experts working at other locations to share what they’re seeing, receive remote assistance, and quickly resolve customer issues. This is especially critical during outages that affect a large number of customers, but it can also help substantially reduce the need for on-site visits even for routine maintenance or smaller issues, resulting in improved first-time fix rates and elevated customer satisfaction. Using mixed reality in this way helps service technicians make well-informed, real-time decisions. In addition, Remote Assist call data can be securely stored in Microsoft Dataverse and accessed for future analytics on service performance.
In addition to Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Guides to attach mixed reality guides to Field Service tasks. This makes tasks like equipment maintenance more precise as service technicians can use mixed reality to overlay digital instructions onto physical machinery, which helps them perform field inspections and review the areas that require maintenance. ensuring efficient upkeep and field inspections are enhanced through annotated issue documentation, improving accuracy and record-keeping. In addition, technicians can benefit from immersive training experiences, reducing onboarding time and accelerating skill development.
Overall, the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Guides, and tools like HoloLens helps to elevate field service operations by enabling them to optimize processes and deliver unparalleled customer experiences in today’s dynamic business environment. They can empower technicians with immersive training experiences, precise equipment maintenance guidance, and real-time remote assistance. Field inspections become more accurate, data-driven decisions become the norm, and customer interactions reach new heights.
Next steps
Learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you optimize your service operations and deliver exceptional service. And read how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you accelerate service delivery, boost technician productivity, and streamline work order management with next-generation AI.
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