This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s competitive business landscape, maximizing the value sellers derive from sales tools is paramount. One key aspect of achieving this is the ability for customers to customize Viva Sales forms, enabling them to have the right business information at the right time. This blog post explores how the latest Viva Sales update empowers administrators to add relevant out-of-the-box or custom entities to enhance the Viva Sales experience, so sellers can reduce context switching across applications and instead focus on building stronger relationships with their customers to close deals faster.
We have integrated Viva Sales settings with the underlying CRM app, offering a more cohesive admin experience. When adding a new entity to Viva Sales, administrators now have the option to select an existing view from the CRM app to retrieve metadata information. This CRM view determines the fields to be shown, their order, filtering, and sorting definitions for Viva Sales forms and list views.
Customize Viva Sales: Add new entities to Viva Sales from the Forms menu entry in the admin settings
Adding new entities to Viva Sales
Viva Sales administrators can easily add entities from the Viva Sales settings. It’s important to note that only entities directly related to existing Viva Sales entities are available for selection. Additionally, administrators can control how the new entity is related to relevant existing Viva Sales entities. This influences its visibility in the Outlook side pane. For example, when admins add the Case entity, defining its relation to Contact and Accounts will determine how it displays in the main view and the detailed entities view within the Outlook side pane. Entities related to other entities will appear in the detailed view of their corresponding entities. For instance, adding the “Opportunity Product” entity will show the product list for a specific opportunity in the detailed view of opportunity records.
Adding new entities through customization extends their availability across various Viva Sales experiences, including the Outlook side pane and the Teams message extension. This ensures that sellers can access and interact with the relevant information seamlessly within their preferred Viva Sales flow of work.
Add new entity: Admin selects a CRM view to use as a reference for the entity form and views.
Sellers have additional entities in the Viva Sales side pane and can click to see entity details and related entities. Sellers can also share any entity with their colleagues in Teams using an adaptive card.
Seller views: side panel available entities, side panel detail view and Microsoft Teams adaptive card
Keeping Viva Sales customization up to date
When changes are made to the CRM entities exposed in Viva Sales it is important to refresh the Viva Sales settings area to reflect the update. These changes are not automatically refreshed and require action to keep a consistent experience across the applications.
Removing entities
Administrators have the flexibility to remove entities from Viva Sales. If an entity has related entities within Viva Sales, these related entities will be removed together with the main entity. This will happen unless they are still associated with other entities. Contact remains an exception and can’t be removed from Viva Sales. Removing entities doesn’t remove any data from Viva Sales or your CRM app. It only impacts the visibility of CRM data in the Viva Sales app.
Saving Outlook emails and meetings to custom entities
Empowering sellers with greater flexibility, the latest customize Viva Sales update enables saving Outlook emails and meeting activities to any Viva Sales out-of-the-box or custom entity. Sellers can now save activities to any entity that has been added to Viva Sales. Please note that today saving to custom entities is currently available exclusively for Dynamics 365 customers.
Save email activity to a lead record.
The ability to customize Viva Sales forms plays a pivotal role in ensuring the information is highly relevant and impactful for the seller while keeping them working within the applications they prefer. The latest update allows Viva Sales administrators to:
Effortlessly add new relevant custom and out-of-the-box entities.
Leverage CRM views.
Provide sellers with a tailored experience across various interfaces.
By keeping Viva Sales customization up to date and allowing for expanded options when saving Outlook activities, this update equips sellers with the tools they need to excel in their sales endeavors. Embrace the power of customization in Viva Sales and unlock a more efficient and personalized sales workflow.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With a growing alignment between customer service and brand loyalty, companies recognize the increasing complexity and consequence of the service relationship. Those looking to evolve service delivery have sought new tools and technologies to improve the experience for both the customer and the employee. This includes everything from omnichannel engagement to self-service, automation, and AI-enabled technologies that can assist agents in faster resolution and increase customer satisfaction.
But where should they start? To answer that question, Microsoft developed a service sophistication model that helps organizations assess their current service level and get guidance on evolving to the next level or beyond. Based on the aggregated responses from the assessment since its launch, we now have a white paper that highlights the key findings: Global State of Customer Service Sophistication: Leveling Up to Deliver a Modern Customer Service Experience.
Leveling up service is of interest across geography, industry, and size of organizations
Businesses across the board chose to participate in the assessment. About 65 percent of participants hailed from North America and Western Europe, followed by 26 percent from the Asia Pacific region. Financial services led the pack at 15 percent of respondents, followed by retail, healthcare, and the public sector at about 11 percent each. Businesses of various sizes expressed an interest in customer service needs, including about 20 percent from small businesses (less than 100 employees) and from 25 percent large enterprises (5,000 or more employees).
This illustrates that the interest in creating more robust customer experiences isn’t limited to a particular geography, organizational size, or industry.
A glimpse at how service organizations are looking to evolve
Modern customers expect ease and speed at every touch point; they want to interact with trained, knowledgeable staff who are empathetic to their needs. They want a seamless journey, a personalized approach that anticipates their needs, and they want to feel empowered through self-service options that give them control.
The white paper dives into how many of today’s organizations are looking to evolve their customer service and experience to satisfy these customer needs, with the assessment and guidance providing a solid foundation to start. Some of the key findings are as follows:
While voice still dominates as the primary channel for customer service, omnichannel engagement is making strides.
Manual routing for agent assistance is still the approach for a high percentage of companies; however, automated and AI-powered routing appears to be gaining ground.
While many organizations are working with only basic information, there appears to be a growing interest and trend toward more knowledge-based, holistic, and AI-assisted agent support. Many respondents are still manually generating insights from historic support data, illustrating an opportunity to move toward more automated AI-driven data analysis.
This is just an overview of the assessment findings, with the white paper providing additional details, as well as the implications of the results on customer service today and in the future. Overall, the assessment illustrates not only where the customer service level currently stands for many organizations, but also their commitment to and interest in evolving to take it to the next level and improving customer satisfaction—and in the digital tools that can help organizations reach those goals.
What organizations can do now to improve customer service operations in the future
The assessment responses noted above and further detailed in the white paper provide valuable insights on where organizations are excelling in customer service and where there is room to level up to a more sophisticated offering. That leveling up typically comes through the help of technology, with AI and automation poised to revolutionize the customer service experience.
Fortunately, this evolution doesn’t have to happen at one time. It’s more about embracing the need to create value for every interaction along the customer journey and finding the tools that can offer the connectivity and accessibility to help provide maximum engagement for customers. That digital transformation can begin by implementing small changes and applications with the potential to evolve into a cutting-edge service solution. It’s all about customizing capabilities to each individual business’ needs and making the right changes at the right times.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help organizations with this evolution by optimizing service operations, personalizing customer experiences, and increasing overall productivity. A holistic agent experience is the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which is designed for flexibility based on the organization’s unique business needs. It uses the latest technology, including AI and analytics, knowledge management, collaboration, and more, to streamline case management, enable personalized service with a 360-degree customer view, and provide visibility into how the service is performing.
Microsoft’s service sophistication model
Assess your organization’s current service level and get guidance on evolving to the next level.
Together with the open and flexible Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, service organizations can evolve at their pace and create the best experience for their customers.
Assess and evolve your organization’s customer service level
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction:
In this blogpost we are going to dive into the exciting features and capabilities of 2023 release wave 1 for the Warehouse Management module. Get ready for a sneak preview of the cutting-edge features that will revolutionize the implementation experience and streamline your warehouse operations.
In this release, we’re thrilled to showcase several major themes that will take your warehouse management to new heights. From label printing enhancements to a modernized user experience for setting up your warehouse, and even innovative methods for importing data while maintaining configuration, this release is packed with game-changing improvements.
Let’s dive in and uncover the possibilities that lie ahead in the world of warehouse management.
Warehouse groups
Warehouse groups are used to manage warehouses that all need the same configuration, such as wave templates, location directives and so on. Instead of adding configurations to individual warehouses, you create a warehouse group that applies the defined configuration to every warehouse of that group.
The setup is really easy: you create a group, include the warehouses that share the common configuration and then in the corresponding configuration you determine whether you would like to apply the settings for the specific warehouse, group or all warehouses.
One warehouse group can have an unlimited number of warehouses. The same warehouse can be included in different groups.
Benefits of this feature include:
Easier warehouses setup that share the same configuration
Adding new warehouses with an identical process in 1 click by adding new warehouse to existing group
Quick access and review of the configuration: no need to create multiple identical configurations
Simpler maintenance: less configuration records – easier maintenance
The following table lists the pages that support the warehouse group concept. It also shows the minimum version of Supply Chain Management that is required to apply warehouse groups.
In 10.0.32, a new set of data entities related to warehousing has been introduced. These data entities include an additional field that represents queries in the JSON format. This exciting feature allows you to conveniently review and edit queries through the data entities.
Here are some valuable use cases where this functionality can be particularly beneficial:
Copying location directives across different work order types: Export the location directives with the queries to Excel, make necessary changes such as adjusting names, work order types, action names, and queries, and then import them back into the system.
Replicating a complete warehouse setup with minor modifications: Export specific data entities, update names and warehouse information as needed, and then reimport them into a new warehouse configuration.
Utilizing your own template for demos, pre-sales, and testing: Import your customized templates, including the queries, giving you the ability to seamlessly import them into the system.
Accelerating the configuration process: If you prefer working in Excel, you can now speed up the configuration process by making changes in Excel and then importing the data back into the system.
Exporting configuration for review with business users: Easily export the configuration for review and collaboration with your team, streamlining the review and approval process during implementations.
Creating a test setup in a separate environment: Test and ensure that the configuration functions as desired in a test environment, and once confirmed, easily export it to create a Golden template. This simplifies the process of transferring configurations from a test system to a production-ready template.
Benefits of this feature include:
Improved review and approval process for configurations during implementations.
Efficient identification of configuration issues, saving time and reducing costs.
Accelerated adjustment of configurations, allowing for quicker iterations and updates.
With the new Queries Import/Export feature in JSON format, managing and manipulating warehouse-related data has never been easier. Unlock the potential of streamlined configuration processes and optimize your warehouse operations.
Label printing enhancements
This is the summary of all label printing enhancements:
10.0.32. License plate label layout. This feature let you build more advanced license plate label layouts. Now LP layouts can have repeating structures and include header, body, and footer elements. You can print information from the related tables and define custom date, time, and number formats. To learn more about this feature, follow this link: License plate label layouts and printing – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn
10.0.33 Custom label layouts. This feature introduces a new Custom label layout type that allows you to build layouts for any data sources. New Print button will be displayed automatically when layout exists for corresponding source. Users can print labels for any data including but not limited to Product labels, Location labels, Customer labels. To learn more about this feature, follow this link:
10.0.34 Label printing using external label service solutions. This feature provides an effective solution for printing labels using any external labeling solutions. This feature allows direct interaction between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and 3rd party solutions by providing framework for communication using HTTP APIs, without the need for a the Document Routing Agent. To learn more about this feature, follow this link:
The 10.0.32 release supports additional events including wave processing, load posting and work creation.
The 10.0.33 release supports additional events including wave creation and wave status change. Work creation history can be replaced by AppInsights for troubleshooting. No need to enable Work creation history to find out the root cause, the similar information can be found in the AppInsights.
Monitoring the performance of a system to generate actionable insights that can improve productivity and optimize users’ experience.
Location directive and actions name editing
10.0.32 introduces a new ability to edit location directives and action names after saving. This highly anticipated feature empowers our customers to make changes to their configuration without the need to recreate entire location directives and actions. We understand the value of flexibility and efficiency, and this enhancement ensures that managing your location directives configuration becomes even more convenient and user-friendly.
This feature allows customers to adapt and fine-tune their configuration by simply editing names, without the burden of recreating complex directives and actions. By providing greater flexibility and ease of use, we strive to enhance your overall experience and enable you to optimize your warehouse operations more efficiently. Stay tuned for further updates as we continue to evolve our solutions to meet your evolving needs.
Self-healing rules
Additional validations and a new set of self-healing rules in the optimization advisor have been released in 10.0.33, making it easier to identify and correct the most common configuration errors. It includes:
Location stocking limits and volumetrics optimization advisor rules
Dead configuration optimization advisor rules
Wave template optimization advisor rules
We strongly recommend running the optimization advisor after you configure the Warehouse management module to detect any missing or incorrect configurations.
Preview query results for the mobile device menu items
A new feature released in 10.0.33 allows you to confirm the desired outcome of your queries, and helps you quickly identify issues with your query configurations for mobile device menu items.
By providing a streamlined and user-friendly preview capability, we aim to enhance your query management experience and ensure the smooth operation of your mobile device menu functionalities.
We are committed to providing intuitive and effective tools to enhance your troubleshooting experience, and this feature is another step towards achieving that goal.
Guided setup of the Warehouse management
Warehouse initiation wizard has been split into 2 separate wizard, to make the user experience even simpler:
Inbound configuration wizard
Outbound configuration wizard
Inbound configuration wizard adds a new option to create mobile device menu as part of the wizard.
Outbound configuration wizard adds a new capability to set up packing functionality as part of the wizard.
Location directive – Filter by Warehouse
10.0.33 This feature introduces new filter by warehouse option to the location directive.
This new capability allows users to easily detect and filter location directives that are applicable to a selected warehouse. Whether it’s a location directive for all warehouses, a warehouse group, or a specific warehouse, this feature ensures that you can quickly identify the relevant directives specific to your warehouse operations. We understand the importance of efficient warehouse management, and this enhancement aims to streamline your processes and optimize your overall productivity.
Acceptance tests enhancements
This feature in 10.0.33 introduces new options for When/Then conditions. It enables more flexible and advance validation of the configuration. It also includes considering replenishment configuration for the location directive.
To learn more about this feature, follow this link:
In 10.0.34 businesses that extend the functionality now have the ability to achieve test coverage and easily validate for any potential regressions. This groundbreaking feature ensures that businesses can proactively avoid issues and data corruptions while significantly speeding up the implementation process and improving the accuracy of their extensions. It is important to have robust and reliable solutions, and this enhancement empowers businesses to ensure the seamless integration and operation of their extended functionality.
Spot cycle counting: Process Guide
With this improvement, customers can extend existing mobile Spot cycle counting process in X++ in a more efficient way. WhsWorkExecuteDisplaySpotCycleCounting has now been converted to Process Guide which make the extension easier, since this process is broken into small steps that can be easily extended
Conclusion
The 2023 release wave 1 for Warehouse Management introduces exciting features: warehouse groups for simplified configuration, JSON import/export for queries, enhanced label printing, telemetry for performance monitoring, self-healing rules, improved location directive editing, guided setup, acceptance tests, X++ warehouse tests, and a Process Guide for spot cycle counting. These updates revolutionize warehouse operations.
Do you want to know more about Supply Chain at Microsoft ?
We’re excited to launch Free Trial | Microsoft Supply Chain Center Preview , which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Thanks to a recent upgrade of Microsoft Learn, you can now get an up-to-the-minute PDF version of release plans for Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry anytime you like, in any language we publish. Previously, you had to wait for us to create PDF files to share the release plans with your team, clients, or partners. And since we created PDFs just once a month, they were often out of sync with the published release plans. Our localized PDFs were even more tardy.
Custom PDFs will be retired
In the next two weeks, we’ll retire the custom PDF files we’ve been creating every month. After that, any links to PDFs on the release wave landing pages will redirect to the automated PDF option so that you have the most up-to-date information available.
How to get live PDF release plans on demand
How do you get the new experience? At the bottom of the table of contents on any release plan page, select Download PDF. A PDF version of the entire release plan opens in a new browser tab. Select the Contents icon to expand the table of contents and easily navigate to sections that interest you.
Legend:
Contents icon
Annotation tools (highlighter, pen, eraser, text)
View tools (zoom out, zoom in, fit to width, go to page, rotate page, switch between viewing one or two pages)
You can use the same technique to get a PDF of any documentation section of the Learn site.
Tell us what you think
We’re excited about this upgrade, but we want to know what you think! We’re always working to make the release plans more useful for you. Give it a try and let us know. And feel free to suggest features you’d like to see in the PDF version.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
AI-powered experiences are changing the game of what’s possible for sellers, and generative AI with Copilot is here to assist sellers do their best work. Copilot in Viva Sales is quickly evolving and adding new features and experiences to make sellers’ lives better. The tools are there to help offload and automate those mundane sales activities, allowing a seller to spend more time with prospects and engaging customers at the right moment in the sales cycle.
With email remaining a key channel in day-to-day interactions the recently announced General Availability of email features have received great feedback from salespeople helping them save time when connecting with customers. Let’s look at 5 ways Copilot in Viva Sales takes seller productivity to the next level:
Use Copilot in Viva Sales to generate email content suggestions
Responding to emails can take time and is often the activity sellers leave until the end of the day or week. It can be overwhelming and might even cause sellers to miss important deals. With AI-generated email content suggestions, we’re here to help your sellers balance their time and effort!
Sellers can use this feature to
Generate email replies. These replies will be in context of the e-mail thread and surface data from the relevant CRM opportunity.
Generate new emails based on a user defined prompt.
In our suggested replies, users can choose between several pre-defined categories or suggest their own prompt. The AI-generated replies intelligently create drafts that directly address the email thread users are replying to. In addition, the suggestions use CRM data to enrich the text and make it relevant to the specific situation. The response includes opportunity data based upon a contact match and allows the individual to adjust and switch opportunities with a simple click. It can even include the seller’s Outlook calendar availability to suggest meeting times.
AI-generated email content
With AI generated new emails and replies, users can refine the suggested text to add more content or context. For example, if a seller prefers to adjust the auto-suggested meeting day, they could simply add a free-text prompt asking Copilot to offer a time next week. The generated text will then update with the new timeslot.
Making sure the data is correct is critical to adoption. If the seller wants to understand the source of information in the generated reply, simply click the blue highlighted data point to see a window into the data source. Not only does this help build trust that the data is accurate, it also ensures they can validate without having to context-switch across multiple applications saving time and focus.
Forget “Admin Day” – quickly catch up on emails and update the CRM in the moment
With Copilot in Viva Sales, we are looking to reduce those admin days and instead help sellers get up to speed on customer communications quickly. Help them make those critical updates that improve data quality back into CRM and generate responses faster, so sellers can execute them in the moment rather than save up for an end of week activity.
AI-generated email thread summary
Viva Sales uses Copilot to summarize email conversation threads and provide your sellers with options to:
Copy the summary.
Save the summary to the CRM system as a note on the record’s timeline.
Provide feedback on the quality and relevancy of the summary output.
When logging into your inbox it can be daunting to work through all the unread mail. As a typical pattern long emails are often reviewed briefly by skim reading the first few paragraphs. This can provide a huge risk to sellers missing key points that could be placed later in the thread. This is where the summarization capability with Copilot can help.
Email summaries are generated for emails or email threads with more than 1000 characters, which is about 180 words.
The email summary contains the key insight broken down into digestible bullet points so sellers can quickly catch up in seconds.
After adding the summary to the CRM system, sellers can edit it as needed in the timeline of the record.
The summary generated is designed to help sellers see key insights immediately and assist in the decision making on whether they need to take a deeper look. Copilot capabilities are never a replacement for a human review, but we designed them to help sellers decide to jump in faster with better context.
Effectively prepare for sales meetings
Copilot in Viva Sales helps sellers prepare for meetings in advance. It saves precious time by offering relevant customer information within Outlook, without making the seller switch screens to their CRM.
When opening a customer meeting in Outlook, in the Viva Sales pane, sellers get a view to help them get ramped up on the situation with the customer. The view includes:
CRM information on the opportunity that is the discussion topic of in the meeting.
Summary of recent notes that were captured on the opportunity level.
Any issues or concerns addressed within the notes.
Summary of previous opportunity activities (like emails and meetings).
Sellers can drill into the data source to get more context if necessary and be readier to engage knowing the top items that need to be addressed.
AI-generated opportunity summary
Boost seller productivity with AI-generated meeting summaries
Delivering a professional engagement with a customer can be the difference between winning and losing a deal. This applies to seller communications. When finishing an important meeting with a client a common task is to send a follow-up recap. Not only does this show that the seller has listened throughout the call but also ensures that there is a clear understanding of the next steps. Sellers capture their notes in a variety of places, but if they use the conversation intelligence capability in Viva Sales – creating the recap is easy.
With Copilot in Viva Sales, we’re here to help sellers cross this task off their list quickly and easily. We’re combining our conversation intelligence technology with the magic of Viva Sales and GPT, to boost seller productivity and help sellers focus on their customer relationships.
With just a few easy steps, Viva Sales flags that a new meeting summary is available for the previous communication. The seller can select and use the generated recap as a solid starting point for the response. Simple!
Compose a new email and launch Viva Sales to see the highlights tab.
Select “summarize a meeting”.
Select the relevant meeting to summarize.
Add the generated summary to the email then review, edit, and send.
AI-generated meeting summaries
The generated meeting summary will cover topics that sellers discussed in their calls and action items that were mentioned, all captured by our conversation intelligence. The GPT technology will format the information into an email, and leverage CRM data to enrich the content.
Immediately engage with Viva Sales Copilot experiences, then sign in to connect with your CRM
Users who are not initially connected to CRM are still able to get instant value with Copilot in Viva Sales. We’ve made some capabilities available immediately upon opening the Viva Sales pane to showcase the productivity experience. Sellers who would like to take further advantage can then connect to CRM for access to the full capabilities.
When opening the Viva Sales pane without being connected to CRM, users can:
Provide a prompt to draft AI-generated email content.
Catch up on emails with email summaries at a glance.
Users can easily sign into their CRM to save those thread summaries or get additional Copilot in Viva Sales value.
Copilot in Viva Sales without CRM
Next steps
As organizations embark on their AI defined vision and strategy, Copilot in Viva Sales is a great way to see immediate value for sellers. The solution is designed to help sellers see real tangible results from the moment they switch it on without lengthy consultancy effort or technical training. If you are a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and above customer Copilot in Viva Sales is included within your license plan and it is easily available for Salesforce customers to purchase.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today we’re announcing new updates to the free version of Microsoft Teams that will allow you to create communities from scratch, share and invite members, create and host events, moderate content with critical trust and safety features, and get notified about all important activities.
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