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In the fast-paced world of customer service, efficient outbound calling communication is the cornerstone of success. Dynamics 365 Customer Service has long been a trusted platform for managing customer interactions. With the upcoming October release, we’ve listened to your feedback and delivered a significant enhancement that is set to transform outbound dialing.
Currently, modifying the dialed number proves to be cumbersome given the inability to edit a digit. Additionally, the absence of number validation increases the risk of agents dialing incorrect numbers. This is especially true in the event of missing country codes.
In the October release, you will find a more intuitive, streamlined, and efficient outbound dialing experience.
Editing flexibility
In the new outbound dialing experience, agents can continue to initiate calls from customer records. What’s changed? Now, modifying the dialed number is a breeze. The enhanced interface empowers agents to effortlessly edit the number before placing the call. This new experience also introduces auto-formatting, automatically structuring the number as agents type it. This functionality not only reduces errors but also highlights incomplete or invalid numbers. This newfound flexibility ensures accurate and effective outbound calling experiences.
Smart use of screen real estate
The improved interface is designed to optimize the available screen space. By default, the keypad is hidden, given most agents prefer to use the keyboard, which also allows for a clearer view of essential information. However, should agents need to utilize the keypad, it’s just a click away.
Recall recent numbers
Agents now have the power to swiftly call back recent numbers. With the ability to access the last 20 numbers dialed or received calls, agents can easily reconnect with customers. This feature is a time-saver and helps maintain a seamless communication flow.
Country and region support for outbound dialing
A significant advancement for administrators and agents alike is the support for specific countries and regions. Administrators can customize outbound profiles to allow calls only to selected countries or regions. This prevents accidental calls to unintended destinations, reinforcing precision in customer communication.
Intuitive profile selection and profile matching
Agents with multiple outbound profiles will appreciate the intuitive profile selection process. The dropdown menu displays the collective list of supported countries and regions from all profiles. Simplifying the process even further, agents need only enter the number they wish to dial. The system intelligently identifies the outbound profile supporting the dialed number’s country or region. This feature is coming as a fast follow in October.
The October release of Dynamics 365 Customer Service brings an outbound dialing experience with enhanced editing capabilities, smarter interface design, call history, number auto-formatting and validation, and refined country and region support. Agents can confidently and efficiently connect with customers, bolstering the delivery of exceptional customer service.
To preview this feature, administrators should update the Settings definition for Enhanced outbound dialer experience to set the environment value to Yes. To learn more, see Call a customer in the voice channel | Microsoft Learn.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are re-imagining the way employees come together with Microsoft Mesh, a new three-dimensional (3D) immersive experience and, we are excited to announce Mesh public preview availability in October.
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Note:As announced at Microsoft Inspire 2023, as of September 1, 2023, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights have been brought together into one offering. We are retaining the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights name to encompass this new offer of both applications. Customers can start with one or both applications and then further invest in the application they want to scale by buying the capacity they need.
In today’s turbulent economic times, companies are facing critical business challenges such as customer acquisition, increasing customer loyalty, and maximizing lifetime value. Often, to save time, they follow a one-size-fits-all approach—resulting in impersonal marketing strategies with low customer engagement. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 89 percent of marketers say they struggle with having time to do their jobs.
To meet these complex challenges, it is crucial for companies to shift their approach from traditional mass communication to personalized engagement based on a deep understanding of each customer’s preferences and actions while ensuring their marketers have more time to leverage their creative and strategic skills to engage their customers. With this very goal in mind, Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2018.
We are pleased and honored to share that in a short span of five years in market, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms* for the second consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.
Figure 1: Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms**
For Microsoft, this placement recognizes our commitment to help companies better connect with their customers at scale, across all departments, to make this simple and easy for any company with a broad range of skillsets to employ.
Accelerating the journey to more personalized customer engagement
We started our Dynamics 365 Marketing journey in April 2018. Since then, we’ve gathered feedback and continued to learn at a rapid pace to help our customers on their journey to drive meaningful customer engagement, ensure long-term loyalty, and accelerate business success. To be competitive in today’s market, organizations must harness the power of data to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft one-on-one personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions. Generative AI makes these capabilities within reach for every company. That’s why we’ve brought together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI-led solution to revolutionize customer experience. The new Customer Insights enables our customers to be more flexible by giving them access to both a modern, AI-driven customer data platform (Customer Insights data application) and real-time marketing with customer journey orchestration (Customer Insights journeys application). Customers can start with one or both applications and invest in the areas where they most want to scale.
To drive the necessary customer experience (CX) transformation, companies cannot rely on piecemeal integration of sales, service, and marketing products. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 50 percent of replacement customer relationship management (CRM) sales technology decisions will involve solutions including non-sales software comprising other modules from a CRM or a CX suite.[1] However, the reality is that only a few companies are currently delivering on these expectations. Customer experiences often remain fragmented across channels and departments, leading to inconsistencies. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help customers overcome these challenges, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was built exactly for this purpose—to support customers throughout their end-to-end CX journeys.
Like all Dynamics 365 offerings, Customer Insights relies on Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM software data, which enables our customers to securely store and manage their data and harness the true power of that data by removing silos across sales, service, and marketing via a unified platform approach. Customer Insights helps marketers and customer engagement professionals gain a holistic view of their customers, anticipate their needs, and discover growth opportunities. Marketers can also deliver more relevant, contextual, customer-triggered engagements through the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Some of our most recent Copilot capabilities in Customer Insights enable marketers to:
Discover new customer insights by using natural language to ask questions and gather information and suggestions for forming additional, deeper questions.
Get help developing content for emails, social posts, and other text with a tone of voice that matches their brand and campaign.
Enabling our customers to increase their reach
Zurich Insurance Group, a global insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries, wanted to optimize marketing processes to help create more personalized customer experiences. Its Switzerland business unit connects to its customers through hosting online and in-person events—but to drive the highest impact, it must be sure it invites the right customers to the right events. It wanted to improve its ability to track if customers opened event invitations—or even received them, as well as the connection to registration and attendance. It also wanted a formalized way to collect feedback or easily use engagement data to continue to optimize the sales process after the event. Zurich selected Dynamics 365 Marketing to give it the flexibility to reach customers in new ways and drive more effective follow-ups to help shape their journeys. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, Zurich increased its lead quality by over 40 percent.
Over the past decade, Natuzzi, a globally hailed creator of exceptional luxury furniture that delivers a harmonious combination of design, function, aesthetics, and ethics, has seen a rapid global expansion of its heralded luxury brand. Natuzzi lacked a customer engagement platform capable of unifying data from its retail point of sale (POS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and CRM systems. The company also wanted a way to bring together its business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) related data sets to drive greater insight between audiences. Adopting Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Natuzzi implemented an extensive customer experience platform to transform how its luxury brand discovers and sustains its customers. It uses customer data and insights to nurture customers and prospects through personalized campaigns, delivering emails, SMS texts, promotions, events, sales appointment reminders, and other relationship-building messages.
Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner
Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.
We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping our customers unify and enrich their customer data to deliver personalized, connected, end-to-end customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service. We truly believe that bringing together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables us to continue investing in capabilities that will enable stronger, insights-based marketing that helps marketers and data analysts glean insights from customer data.
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offer.
Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Antin, 20 September 2023.
*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today at an event in New York, we announced our vision for Microsoft Copilot—a digital companion for your whole life—that will create a single Copilot user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows.
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This is a continuation of an earlier blog post on unified environment management options in Power Platform admin center.
Customers of finance and operations apps have historically had two choices for deploying their development workloads: self-hosted as a virtual machine on-premises or hosted on a customer-provided Azure subscription. Both of these models have been available through the Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) admin center and have been heavily used by more than 99% of customers. This speaks to the extensibility requirements that enterprise customers have to enrich the products, creating competitive advantage and tackling unique circumstances.
Over the last couple of years, customers have been increasingly seeking faster and low-code extensibility options to complement their core Dynamics 365 business software. To that end, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of unified, developer environments that IT administrators can deploy directly from Power Platform admin center.
New environment templates in Power Platform
Customers who have purchased Dynamics 365 customer engagement have been able to enjoy a concept in Power Platform known as environment templates, which allow for faster creation of new sandbox environments that include Microsoft Dataverse, their Dynamics 365 application of choice, and several other related apps in a single deployment workflow. Now, finance and operations apps customers will find new templates available to them in Power Platform admin center for Finance (Preview), Supply Chain Management (Preview), and Project Operations for ERP (Preview). This will include Dataverse, the finance and operations core enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, and related apps for dual-write, virtual tables, and business events pre-installed and configured so that they are ready for immediate use.
How to deploy these new templates
If you want to simply try the deployment process for free, you can read about signing up for a no-cost, subscription-based, trial offer. After which, you will see templates such as these when you deploy a new trial environment via Power Platform:
Trial subscriptions are limited to 30 days, and you can only deploy up to 3 trial environments at the same time. During preview, we will not support converting the trial to a sandbox environment. However, this restriction will eventually be removed.
For the unified developer environments, during the preview these are limited to deployment via Power Platform for administrators PowerShell. For more information, see the step-by-step tutorial.
Storage-based provisioning model
As part of this preview, the new unified, developer environments will utilize the storage-based provisioning model that other Dynamics 365 applications rely upon today. For finance and operations apps customers, they will have two main categories of storage to manage: Dataverse database and Finance and operations database:
Every new environment requires at least 1 gigabyte (GB) of available storage for both Dataverse and Operations database capacity to deploy. Capacity is granted from finance and operations apps user licenses, sandbox add-on purchases, as well as add-on capacity packs. For more information on storage, as it relates to finance and operations apps, see the documentation.
Customers, partners, and ISVs can leverage this storage-based capacity model, and it will not bill to your Azure subscription.
More capabilities for admins and developers
Historically administrators for finance and operations apps have needed to manage time-consuming and complex tasks on behalf of the development teams they support. Such examples include backing up and restoring copies of production data over to the developer VMs hosted on-premises or in Azure, manually deploying new environments and assigning remote desktop credentials to a developer, and managing virtual machine uptime schedules to reduce cost.
Now administrators can:
Deploy environments at scale using admin tools like PowerShell or the Power Platform API.
Copy Lifecycle Services-based production or sandbox environments directly to the new, unified, developer environments both via the new admin center or via admin tools.
Add developers in Dataverse to give them permissions to deploy X++ to the new environment.
Add microservice add-ins to the developer environments such as Planning Optimization, and Export to Data Lake.
Enable customer-managed keys (CMK) for Dataverse and finance and operations apps together.
And more capabilities are coming! For developers, they can enjoy a simpler way of writing and deploying X++ alongside Dataverse solutions. For more information, see the related Unified Developer blog post.
Call to action
Ready to get started? Check out the Unified admin experience for finance and operations apps article to learn about this new way of provisioning developer and trial workloads. If you have any questions or feedback, please join our community in Viva Engage. We look forward to hearing from you!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
In the fast-paced realm of modern business, companies often find themselves in need of agile warehousing solutions that can quickly adapt to changing customer demands. This evolution frequently involves a departure from their central ERP(enterprise resource planning) system, enabling the rapid establishment of a new warehousing entity. This shift requires the separation of warehouse management functionality from the broader ERP functions. In certain cases, the inexorable shift towards cloud-based operations drives the adoption of cloud-based warehouse systems.
The swift adoption of advanced warehouse management systems in a two-tier environment, working in harmony with any ERP system, represents a significant leap forward in operational efficiency. This dynamic solution provides robust core Warehouse Management System (WMS) capabilities, supports shared warehousing, seamlessly facilitates extended warehousing scenarios beyond advanced core WMS capabilities through pre-configured integrations with Microsoft’s suite of cloud solutions, including Sustainability Cloud, Intelligent Order Management, PowerBi, and a wide array of others. At the same time, it offers the flexibility to effortlessly integrate with numerous third-party Material Handling Equipment (MHE) systems, cloud-based printing solutions, and carrier hub cloud platforms.
Depending on specific operational requirements, businesses may choose to implement a Warehouse Management Only solution to address temporary or growing warehousing needs. These solutions offer customizable deployment options finely tuned to align with the enterprise’s unique demands. Operating in Warehouse management only mode enhances warehouse capabilities, ensuring a trifecta of flexibility, efficiency, and scalability—all achieved without necessitating a comprehensive overhaul of the existing system.
The embrace of Warehouse Management Only mode optimizes warehouse operations in an exceptionally effective manner, unlocking transformative potential that should not be underestimated. Take the plunge into these possibilities today by exploring the preview release and immersing yourself in the profound impact it can have on your business.
You can use lightweight source documents that are dedicated to inbound and outbound shipment orders to communicate between the systems. These documents focus exclusively on warehouse management, so they can replace multiple types of general-purpose documents (such as sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders) from a pure warehouse management perspective.
Warehouse management only mode also provides several deployment options to support your business needs. You can use Supply Chain Management to handle only warehouse operations, or you can use it to handle warehousing plus a wider range of processes (such as sales, purchase, and production orders). You can also set up a dedicated legal entity in Supply Chain Management that handles only the warehouse management processes for external systems.
Warehouse management only mode is a great way to enhance your warehouse management capabilities without having to overhaul your existing systems. It offers flexibility, efficiency, and scalability for your warehouse operations. Don’t miss this opportunity to try out this feature and see how it can transform your business. Try out the preview release today and get ready to experience the power of Warehouse management only mode.
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