This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce several new features that will help service organizations work more efficiently than ever before. The new not-to-exceed (NTE) feature ensures that work orders stay within budget, the trade and trade coverages features enable you to stay organized and efficient when providing groups of services to customers. In addition, significant performance improvements to the asset and functional location trees let you manage larger facilities and more complex assets. These features will streamline your workflow and save time, especially when working with vendors or subcontractors to fulfill jobs. Read on to learn more about how they work and why you should try them out today!
Not-to-Exceed functionality
Phenomenal service starts with understanding customers’ needs and expectations. The new not-to-exceed feature allows you to capture your customer’s price expectations before work begins. When new information changes work estimates, your frontline workers will be warned about going over the customer’s expected cost. This provides an opportunity to seek approval for additional charges before any work is performed.
Not to exceeds can be captured manually on work orders or be automatically applied when onboarding customers onto your service network. Customers often automatically approve work that is recurring, preventative, or low cost. By capturing expectations when onboarding a customer, they will be automatically applied to work orders, cutting out back-and-forth communications about pricing and expediting job completion.
In addition, cost expectations can be set via not-to-exceed values or based on a margin of the price expectations. For example, when your organization contracts maintenance of a location to a vendor, and you expect to make a 30% margin on these maintenance work orders. The system can automatically apply the appropriate price not-to-exceed to the work order for the customer and apply a cost not-to-exceed 30% less than the price, ensuring the vendor contacts you if costs are higher. This ensures your margin expectations are met by coordinating all stakeholders directly on the work order.
Trade and Trade Coverage
Set up trades to organize the services you offer and expedite work order setup. Instead of combing through hundreds of incident types when creating a work order, start with the trade. By applying a trade, the work order gains context about the job, letting it filter to only relevant incidents, and apply more appropriate not-to-exceeds. In addition, you can describe the services each customer should and should not receive as trade coverages. For example, you might provide roofing, pest control, and appliance services to the owner of a property, but only appliance services to the tenant. If a customer requests work that they are not covered for, the system will provide a warning for a chance to contact the customer or apply special pricing before moving forward. By setting up trades and trade coverages, the work order experience is streamlined to be more relevant to the customer’s problem.
Manage larger facilities and more complex assets
Significant performance improvements to the asset and functional location trees allow you to manage locations and assets at scale. Customers with 5000 assets will see load times go from 15 seconds down to 0.5s. In addition, asset systems that span across multiple locations are easier to manage with the updated user experience. Child assets at a different location than their parent will show both under their location and the parent asset in the tree with icons and tooltip explanations. For example, a CCTV security system at a campus spans two buildings: 83 and 86. The CCTV monitoring system at building 83 will show the child camera asset beneath it with an info icon. The CCTV camera will also show under building 86 with an info icon. Hovering over the icons will show a tooltip calling out the related asset, making for an easy search to pull up its details.
Track work order cost totals
Organizations can now track work order costs with enhanced total cards. Work order totals include the sum of all products and services with taxes. No more digging through product and service line items or creating custom fields to calculate the total cost of products and services on work orders!
Turn on new features
Go to Field Service Settings > Work Order / Booking tab, turn on these new features, and try them out today!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
For more than two decades, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software have been defined by manual entry and high-touch data processes. Since then, businesses have made strides in automating many manual transactions through various means but have largely reached a plateau. Our 2023 survey on business trends found that 9 out of 10 workers hope to use AI to reduce these kinds of repetitive tasks from their jobs.1
Supply chains have been a prime area for the application of AI, due to the vast amounts of critical business data and processes involved. Supply chains have evolved over the years, with emerging technologies and innovations that enable businesses to optimize their operations, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. Yet, while statistical models have been used in processes such as inventory management, forecasting, production planning, and scheduling, there hasn’t been a significant shift in the industry beyond improving algorithms. Learning hasn’t been applied to make supply chain processes intelligent and self-regulating. The next generation of AI will transform the industry by making it more agile, efficient, and responsive to changes.
In March, Microsoft announced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, introducing the world’s first AI copilot for ERP and CRM applications. With the next generation of AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Copilot, those high-touch, laborious processes can be transformed with interactive AI-powered assistance.
With Copilot, you can further unlock the potential of ERP by bringing together data and AI to reduce time spent on unfulfilling tasks and accelerate the speed of execution and business outcomes.
We are excited about bringing next-generation AI to virtually every business function, and especially so about the opportunities AI has within the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform. In this post, we look at AI in supply chain management (SCM), both its development and current state, and we share our view of next-generation AI in SCM.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution opens doors that further transform how we work and what we focus on during the workday. We have come a long way from the industrial plant floor automation of the 1960s to the intelligent era of supply chain digital twins of the 2020s. We now have significant technological advances that can transform traditional supply chains into next-generation cognitive supply chains. These cognitive supply chains can proactively predict and self-correct disruptions, trigger replanning, and provide intelligent recommendations. Thus, enabling humans and AI to work together to quickly respond, in real time, to changing environments.
In the age of AI, tools like artificial neural networks and machine learning provide the means to automate personal workflows and processes. Still, low-code applications, natural language processing, and generative AI will not replace human innovation. It will, on the other hand, increase and expand our expertise and ability. This is why at Microsoft, we believe that AI is going to define new ways for humans to amplify their impact, their capability, and their unique potential.
The brief history of AI in supply chain management processes
The first application of AI in SCM is a so-called expert system known as the inventory management assistant (IMA). IMA was designed in 1986 to improve the replenishment of spare parts and reduce safety stock for the US Air Force.2 From there, the 1990s saw a broad resurgence of interest in the decades-old concept of AI. As a result, AI became commercially available in SCM applications on a limited basis during this time.
In the 2000s, computing power continued to increase as hardware costs declined rapidly, making the investment in AI affordable. However, AI’s widespread adoption in SCM really took off in the 2010s with the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the associated acceleration in digital transformation. Together, these factors led to an explosion in the amount of data generated by supply chain processes, marking the beginning of big data in the supply chain.
Outside the supply chain, machine learning algorithms matured and refined into efficient and almost standard-like features, such as the Netflix recommendation engine. At the same time, SCM use cases were taking shape and beginning to deliver value. The first applications of machine learning came in the areas of demand forecasting using regression models to achieve high forecast accuracy, short-term demand sensing using pattern recognitions, anomaly detections in assets, and inventory optimization, to name a few.
Today, AI is used in a wide range of applications, including image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and autonomous vehicles. More recent breakthroughs, such as Dall-E2 and ChatGPT from OpenAI, are rapidly opening new doors, as evidenced by our recent launch of Dynamics 365 Copilot. However, most companies are still focused on analytics and promotion use cases, such as forecasting demand or planning production.
As such, organizations have yet to fully explore the potential of AI, which involves self-learning supply chains, more sophisticated supply chain algorithms, and recognizing patterns in big data that are beyond human perception. AI can automate many of the recurring decisions in SCM and interact with supply chain systems in human context, but this requires a platform to connect legacy and modern solutions to unify the vast, growing amounts of supply chain data.3
Microsoft Supply Chain Platform and next-generation AI
As supply chain complexity grows, companies are using next-generation AI to gain a competitive edge and remain profitable. AI is proving to be a game-changer for businesses, whether they’ve already embarked on a digital transformation journey or are considering doing so. Let’s explore some of the cutting-edge AI use cases in supply chain management that can deliver immediate value without undertaking costly transformation initiatives.
AI-powered risk mitigation
By unifying data sources and business applications and combining them with next-generation AI, companies can better predict and act on disruptions across channels, suppliers, and geographies. For example, the AI-powered Microsoft Supply Chain Center news module proactively flags external issues such as weather, financial, and geopolitical news that may impact key supply chain processes. Plus, predictive insights surface affected orders across materials, inventory, carriers, distribution networks, and more.
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With Dynamics 365 Copilot capabilities, users can quickly turn these insights into action with contextual email outreach. With a custom and contextual reply, supply chain users can save time and collaborate with impacted suppliers to quickly identify new ETAs and reroute a purchase order (PO) based on a weather disruption or fulfill a high-priority customer order via an alternate distribution center due to geopolitical tension.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management (IOM) enables organizations to intelligently orchestrate fulfillment and automate it with a rule-based system using real-time omnichannel inventory data, AI, and machine learning. IOM can improve order fulfillment models by using AI to automate the identification and selection of optimized fulfillment decisions. Including the ability to enhance AI models when recommendations are not ideal, using the train, feedback, and improve methodology.
Elevate forecast accuracy with AI-driven collaborative demand planning
Demand forecasting is an area that has already seen pervasive use of AI. Organizations already use machine learning-powered forecasting algorithms to improve their forecast accuracy. However, trust in the system-generated forecast is still not as high as was hoped. Recent supply chain disruptions have only exacerbated the role of the importance of manual oversight during creation and careful review. As a result, demand planners and other stakeholders continue to spend a significant portion of their time manually analyzing trends and anomalies, and fine-tuning demand plans. The next-generation of foundation models have the potential to disrupt these very use cases. Ability to get answers through AI forecast explainability and natural language querying will help demand planners breeze through their demand plan analysis, reducing the time needed for fine-tuning and adjusting demand plan from days to minutes. Furthermore, AI can help in demand review meetings by using natural language for data-driven decision making, surfacing risks and opportunities, summarizing assumptions behind a plan, providing real-time what-if analysis, and generating transcripts and summaries of the meeting along with action items. The next generation of AI in demand planning promises to make the entire process more efficient, accurate, and collaborative.
Mitigate order delivery risks with data Q&A
Procurement teams often conduct monthly supplier reviews for top vendors by volume and vendors struggling to meet delivery requirements, but which have been painful to stop trading with for some reason. A significant amount of time for two to three team members is usually dedicated to gathering and analyzing monthly performance data in preparation for these reviews. Conversational AI can unlock productivity.
With conversational AI, we can imagine a future scenario where any analyst is prompting Dynamics 365 Copilot to: “Show me all orders which were not delivered on-time and in-full (OTIF) in the last 30 days. Estimate how much of our order backlog is impacted by these late deliveries. Suggest three questions that will help the supplier dig into the root cause of the issue. Write a short recommendation requesting the supplier participate in our monthly supplier review until OTIF is above 97 percent.” This example is only the tip of the iceberg for scenarios where generative AI can be used to democratize access and retrieval of a company’s data through conversation-styled interaction with AI chatbots.
Additionally, AI could significantly accelerate the onboarding of new suppliers by bypassing or speeding up internal legal review. We can envision purchasing managers, supply chain directors, and more benefitting from AI contract review by assisting in tasks like reviewing master supplier agreements.
Autonomous self-regulated supply chains
One of the biggest challenges in managing a complex supply chain is that it is “high touch” with disparate data sources, different cross-functional units, and processes ranging from strategy to execution. Companies struggle to harmonize these disparate data and processes, leaving planners to make intuition-based decisions rather than data-driven ones. AI can address the complexities of mapping a multi-tier network model from several disconnected systems across the value chain, including external business partners. Further, with advances in AI such as reinforcement learning, the networks can be adaptive, and self-regulated with different sub-network agents operating toward a common goal of increasing resilience, profitability, and customer service. Such an adaptive network considers the historical trends, and supply chain internal and external events, along with signals. The system evaluates multiple scenarios and performs business impact analysis to determine the best course of action using techniques such as simulation, optimization, and machine learning. For example, the system may recommend a make-and-buy option, versus solely buying, and provide a balanced scorecard of supply chain metrics and costs, along with a ranking for the recommendation. This type of supply chain offers automation to eliminate manual processes, and intervenes based on exceptions, generating alerts, and providing suggested actions. It also has the ability to self-learn from user actions and automatically execute corrective measures.
Intelligent process automation
As next-generation AI innovation emerges, it will increasingly deliver on the promise of automating many of the recurring decision touchpoints in supply chain management, freeing up valuable human resources to focus on higher-level productive tasks that require creativity, judgment, and complex problem-solving skills. AI bots can carry out tasks like reading email for new procurement requests, logging into multiple systems for data entry, solving supply chain alerts, and triggering workflows. Another example is increasing planners’ productivity by using generative AI to create the artifacts (plans, performance, assumptions, risks, and mitigations) required to run monthly business review (MBR) meetings such as sales and operations planning (S&OP).
Intelligent inventory visibility and optimization
Another example of AI in supply chain management is inventory intelligence where AI can balance inventory more accurately to reduce stockouts, and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Consider a scenario where the global inventory position analysis shows a projected inventory depletion in the upcoming quarter, with levels falling below safety stock requirements. With AI, the supply chain analyst can gain insights into the root causelow supply relative to demand for a particular region and time. The scheduled maintenance of a factory in that quarter would lead to no additional production, exacerbating the situation. As a result, the demand must be met from existing inventory. With the help of AI-powered insights, the analyst can now delve deeper into the impacted products and locations and take corrective measures, using AI-powered recommendations to rebalance inventory from other locations or employing a cost-effective contract manufacturer.
Intelligent inventory visibility is also revolutionizing the way businesses search and view their stocks and products, empowering users with unparalleled accessibility and efficiency. The power of AI enables users to swiftly ascertain stock levels and product availability by merely typing their inquiries in natural language, similar to chatting with a friend. Whether it’s a query about products nearing expiration or the availability of limited-edition items across various regions, the AI assistant promptly delivers the desired results. Gone are the days of navigating through cumbersome menus, remembering product IDs or location details; simply use natural language to acquire essential information within seconds. In addition, AI can streamline today’s labor-intensive data-mining and table-joining. AI technology can now streamline the entire process, and even summarize inventory status in dashboard and text reports. Consequently, businesses can liberate their analysts from mundane tasks such as data cleansing and report writing, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive success.
Shorten warehouse inventory cycle times
Another area of supply chain management to which AI can be applied is to shorten cycle times in warehouse fulfillment. Today, as demand for different items ebbs and flows, it’s difficult to predict which items should consume forward picking locations in the warehouse. Warehouses typically deal with the situation in two ways: they can pay for more space than they need at the current volume (unlikely) or have workers re-slot bins to bring items from a bulk area to a pick location. The latter is an ongoing, labor-intensive, and time-consuming process that is reactive by default.
In the future, AI could be applied to analyze incoming orders (or look further upstream in the supply chain) to forecast demand better. Based on this analysis, combined with data like physical product dimensions and the storage capacity of bin locations, recommendations for re-slotting can be offered to warehouse managersallowing plans to be proactively set in motion to ensure that on-hand inventory is available at the time of picking.
Revolutionizing the supply chain industry
The above are just a few examples of how we imagine this next wave of AI innovation can improve supply chain processes and the overall employee experience. And it’s certainly just the starting point. AI has the potential to revolutionize supply chains, offering new possibilities for improved efficiency, cost savings, and customer satisfaction. To fully harness the benefits of AI, businesses must invest in the right technology and infrastructure to unify their supply chain processes and datawhile considering critical aspects like security, accessibility, and company values. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to deliver AI in supply chain, by integrating built-in capabilities across our solutions and delivering a secure, composable, extendable, and interoperable platform. With low-code/no-code automation, collaborative actions, process orchestration, and rich supply chain functional capabilities in a single experience, customers can compose a tailored ecosystem and confidently apply AI to deliver new value.
Next steps for AI in supply chain management
Dynamics 365 Copilot in Microsoft Supply Chain Center is already unlocking a new world of opportunity and redefining what’s possible when teams harness the power of AI. By embracing AI, organizations can gain a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing business landscape. And as we explored through the possible supply chain scenarios covered in the last section, we are just getting started. Sign up for a free trial to get started.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we’re excited to announce Copilot in Microsoft Viva, along with the introduction of Microsoft Viva Glint, to help organizations create a more engaged and productive workforce.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s unpredictable market conditions, companies are looking to do more with less, and delivering exceptional customer experiences is necessary to both acquire new customers and retain and increase the lifetime value of existing customers. Faced with a larger set of choices, customers expect the companies they do business with to know them, anticipate their needs, and deliver personalized interactions. To earn their loyalty, it’s critical that every interaction, digital or in person, exceeds their expectations.
To win against their competitors, companies need to deeply understand their customers, personalize every interaction pre-sale and post-sale, and use data and AI to deliver proactive and continuous value to win the hearts and minds of their customers. Marketers and sellers must work closely together as a single unit to deliver experiences where every interaction builds upon the last. Marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals are being tasked with orchestrating these experiences seamlessly across every department, for both new and existing customers, and are being asked to do this with even fewer resources.
At Microsoft, we aspire to empower every company to create amazing experiences for their customers that translate into business success. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, companies can orchestrate real-time, end-to-end journeys designed by business users. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can use all its data as an enterprise asset and get insights that can be actioned across the customer’s lifecycle. AI assists every step of the way, so employees can be more efficient and have more time to focus on the things they really want to do. Companies can:
Gain deep insights into their customers to deliver relevant interactions.
Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences.
Unify sales and marketing teams to accelerate the pipeline.
Discover how 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you delight your customers while increasing your team’s efficiency. Let’s look at some of the features in this wave that I am most excited about.
Gain insights into your customers to deliver relevant interactions
Understanding your customers is key to delivering relevant interactions that drive engagement and loyalty. The use of generative AI empowers companies to understand customers like never before. While analyzing vast amount of data previously required deep knowledge of the data and took time to prepare, thanks to Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can now get insights faster and more easily by using natural language. Marketers, sellers, and data analysts can ask questions in simple everyday words to explore, analyze, and instantly understand their customerssegment sizes, preferences, and new insights to uplevel every interaction.
To get value from insights, these must be available where they can be actioned. With the latest customer interactions compiled into a unified timeline and made available directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing, each team can be guided by a complete understanding of their customers and their recent activities. Armed with relevant customer information accessible directly within the flow of their work, sellers and marketers can orchestrate next best experiences that exceed their customers’ expectations.
Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences
To run successful campaigns, marketers must target the right customers. Often this means finding that one person who understands the underlying data set and can create the right segment to target. Now, using query assist, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can build segments in minutes by simply describing audiences’ characteristics in natural language,for example, create a segment from contacts living in Seattle.
Creating compelling emails can be hard and often getting started is the hardest part. Copilot can assist marketers in finding inspiration and generating engaging emails within minutes. With Content ideas, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can easily craft engaging emailsit’s like brainstorming with their team. After marketers specify the type of email they want to send and select the tone of voice that is the right fit with their brand, Copilot generates high-quality content that marketers can easily adjust. With the assistance of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can significantly reduce the amount of time spent copywriting, and shipping engaging emails is faster, more efficient, and fun.
In order to maximize marketing ROI, it is important to know what activities are having a positive impact. Out-of-the-box AI-powered dashboards help marketers understand how their activities contribute to defined milestones, for example, number of webinar registrations, qualified leads, or opportunities created. Thanks to AI-powered milestones and rules-based attribution models, marketers can easily identify their best performing activities and journeys, drop ineffective tasks, and optimize their marketing spend.
Unify sales and marketing to accelerate your funnel
It is no longer enough for sales and marketing teams to just be “aligned,” they must now be unified so together they can effectively nurture leads, close pipelines, and build a loyal customer base. With the new lead scoring model and qualification model in real time marketing, marketers can define criteria and identify leads to prioritize so every single qualified lead gets attention at the right time from the sales teams.
Furthermore, to make sure leads are actioned immediately, marketers can automatically assign leads to the seller in Dynamics 365 Sales. Leads are identified, prioritized, and while they are still hot, they are seamlessly passed to the relevant or available expert on the sales team to increase the chances of closing the deal.
To ensure the seller is enabled to deliver value in every interaction, sellers can access valuable insights directly within their Dynamics 365 Sales workflow. They can for instance use average transaction amount, total sales, loyalty reward points, and customer lifetime value for each contact, account, or lead and use these insights to hyper-personalize the interaction. This kind of interaction builds relationships, exceeds expectations, and leads to loyal customers.
Start using Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights wave 1 2023 features
We aim to help you capitalize on your data to better understand your customers. We aim to democratize the use of generative AI so you can deliver experiences that build customer loyalty while improving employee productivity. We aim to facilitate seamless collaboration across departments so your organization can operate as one seamless unit. And we are excited to bring solutions in this wave designed to do just this, while making your work easier and enabling you to transform customer experiences so you can grow your business.
Business Applications Launch Event
Discover new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The role of the seller is evolving. Buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. To achieve this, sellers must be efficient and effectiveprioritizing who to engage, identifying how and when to connect, and spending more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers. Sellers can’t be overwhelmed trying to make sense of too much data and information; rather, they need the data to work for them by providing value in every customer interaction.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can improve their sales by prioritizing their best bets, collaborating with their sales team in the moment with Microsoft Teams built-in, knowing when they should engage with prospective customers, and then seeing how it went after ending the call. Sellers are given the gift of time, plus intelligence, so they can close more deals faster than before.
For years, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have asked sellers to enter data so sales managers could forecast revenue and assess seller performance. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Viva Sales, we have put the applications to work for youusing AI to simplify data capture and recommend in-the-moment interactions whether selling from Dynamics 365 Sales or in Microsoft 365 productivity tools. Starting today, we will begin to roll out new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales that use the power of AI to help sellers:
Prioritize your work to land more deals faster.
Stay productive and collaborate in the flow of work with Viva Sales.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s in store for sellers in the weeks and months ahead.
2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales
Learn about the new sales capabilities helping sellers with the power of AI.
The sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers to sell with intent by building a prioritized worklist and surfacing automated activity recommendations to speed the sales process. Sequences enable sales organizations to automate these processes, tailoring them to their unique sales approach and best practices. Sequences are powered by our common customer journey orchestration engine shared across Dynamics 365 applications. We are enhancing the sequence capabilities to support account-centric selling with multiple sequences to a record, improve effectiveness with actionable AI-powered suggestions, and analyze performance using sequence insights.
Time with customers is precious, so every sales interaction matters. Conversation intelligence helps sellers make the most of their sales calls by transcribing the dialog and using AI to detect sentiment, questions, and actions to ensure no follow-up is missed. In this release, we have enabled text message as an additional channel for sellers to engage with customers and added additional AI capabilities to redact sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) data from phone calls and provide in-the-moment suggestions to guide sales conversations.
Sellers are routinely managing many deals at the same time. As sales engagements progress and sellers learn more about their customers, they need to regularly adjust and review this data while, at the same time, keeping an eye on how they are performing. Sellers can easily maintain the various stakeholders for an account with the new org chart capability, identify and analyze the activity of key decision makers, and ensure they stay on top of their performance and update their pipeline with the new opportunity management experience. The new opportunity experience eliminates many processes that sellers would normally need to do and streamlines everything into a single workspace.
Stay productive and collaborate in the flow of work
Not all sellers spend all their time in a CRM system. Many spend much of their time in productivity tools, emailing, calling, and collaborating with colleagues and customers. In October 2022, we launched Microsoft Viva Sales. We are empowering salespeople with AI-driven insights and data automation right in the flow of workin the productivity and collaboration tools millions are already using every day: Microsoft 365 and Teams.
Selling is a team sport. Enabling sales team members to collaborate with each other effectively with the right tools is key to their success. Collaboration spaces bring together the right users, contextual insights, and productivity apps to boost seller collaboration in Teams. Collaboration spaces makes internal and external collaboration take center stage. Sellers can use sales templates to create a collaboration space. Sales templates speed up structured team/channel creation with predefined channels, pre-pinned apps, and integrated access to CRM data.
For sales teams, the adage “time is money” is more relevant than ever before. Sellers are busy people who find it challenging to balance the time and effort required to respond to customer emails with their other responsibilities. Pain points include:
Pulling data from a CRM system is time-consuming with complicated navigation and menus.
Keeping track of customer opportunities and the history is difficult and increases for sellers managing many accounts.
Responding to a high volume of emails can be overwhelming and might cause the seller to miss important details.
With the help of Copilot in Viva Sales, alongside the context of the email or meeting and CRM data, we will now generate suggested email content for a variety of scenariossuch as replying to an inquiry, creating a proposal, or summarizing the action items from meetings. Viva Sales brings together Microsoft 365 data and CRM data to help sellers quickly generate responses using the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
Organizations have taken pride in the customization of their CRM systems, considering it to be critical to their business success. These customized experiences allow sellers to engage and capture customer data effectively within their CRM system. In October, we introduced Viva Sales, which lets sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data into any CRM system, eliminating manual data entry and giving more time to focus on selling.
In February, we released the ability for CRM administrators to customize CRM forms, fields, and behavior in Viva Sales for accounts, contacts, and opportunities. With this release, we will add the ability to configure additional out-of-the-box entities as well as custom entities using queries defined in the CRM system. CRM administrators will be able to add or remove relevant custom and out-of-the-box entities to Viva Sales forms and control filtering and sorting behavior of lists using CRM-defined queries. Sellers will be able to see custom and out-of-the-box entities in the Outlook side pane in Viva Sales, share custom entities with colleagues in Teams, search for custom entities in the Teams messaging extension, and connect Outlook email and meeting activities to custom or out-of-the-box entities.
Learn more about 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales
These are just a few of the new capabilities that we are rolling out for sellers in 2023 release wave 1. To learn more about these new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales, click on the links below.
If you are not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft aims to make mixed reality accessible and intuitive for frontline workers everywhere. With Dynamics 365 Guides, deskless workers use step-by-step holographic instructions to ensure process compliance, improve efficiency, and learn on the job. In 2022, new Microsoft Teams capabilities in Guides combined anyone, anywhere, seamless collaboration with the “see what I see” magic of HoloLens 2. In real-time, participants on a call could see what the HoloLens user saw, annotate their colleague’s three-dimensional space, and share files easily. We’ve just released another set of features in Guides to make this new experience even more intuitive and reliable.
Draw anywhere with digital 3Dannotations
Imagine being able to draw on any object, any surface, or in thin air. With our recent annotation improvements, you can. Previously, a HoloLens user could only draw on a flat or semi-flat surface some way off in the distance. Now HoloLens users can draw 3D images anywhere using digital inkand in Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist, an expert working on a PC or mobile device on the other side of the world can draw in your world in 3D.
These drawings stick where they’re placed in the space and remain still. Users can walk around them and view them from different angles. On surfaces, the digital ink stays where intended, regardless of whether the user changes location or position. With HoloLens, the entire world is inkable, allowing you to annotate and share in real time.
Join mixed reality Teams calls more securely
In Dynamics 365 Guides, HoloLens users now have more options when joining a Teams call. Before entering the call, you can turn video on or off and join muted or not. As before, you can also change these settings once you’re in the meeting. In spaces where confidentiality is core, this allows frontline workers to use HoloLens as their main calling devicewithout compromising on security.
Further driving our efforts to help you keep your company and your information secure, we also recently added restricted mode features that enable your admin to restrict who can log on to the device and make calls.
Link to Guides from inside a Guide
Navigating through the steps of a guide is as intuitive as paging through a document or scrolling through a file. What about jumping from one file to another? You can do that now, too. We’ve added the ability to navigate directly from one guide to another by linking the second guide in an action step. Navigating between different sets of training materials or guides is as easy as jumping to a new web page from a hyperlink.
What’s next?
Learn the details of all our recent additions in the Dynamics 365 Guides release notes.
Stay tuned for more updates coming soon as we continue to build on the intuitive and frontline worker-focused features in Dynamics 365 Guides!
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