Today, whilst information is everywhere, it’s often not in the hands of first-line workers when and where they need it. I’m talking about people who are working in front of customers and with products day to day.

Mixed reality allows us to blend the digital and the physical worlds, infusing the environment around them with relevant information, and empowering you to achieve more.

How do businesses use mixed reality?

Organisations across just about every industry have found valuable commercial applications for mixed reality. The applications with the clearest ROI can be grouped into a few areas:

• Remote assistance
• Training and task guidance
• Spatial planning and analytics
• Collaborative visualisation

Microsoft has responded to the clear customer demand for turnkey solutions in these areas with a range of mixed reality products under the Dynamics 365 brand.

For instance, one global energy provider uses Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to connect technicians with remote experts across the world. Together, they can troubleshoot problems in real-time to keep their operations online and incident-free.

Or take the example of an American truck manufacturer that improves its employee on-boarding and assembly line processes using Dynamics 365 Guides. First-line workers that used the technology were vocal about how mixed reality-based Guides made them feel confident and empowered to be effective in their job from day one.

Mixed reality also enables sales professionals at organisations to deliver a better customer experience, thanks to Product Visualise. It also allows far more efficient planning of spaces through Dynamics 365 Layout.

What these scenarios all have in common, is the need to bring digital information into the physical context of employees’ work.

How can mixed reality help your employees?

A good employee experience is essential for any successful business. Engaged and empowered employees are more productive, perform better, and stay with businesses longer. A core part of this is giving them the skills they need to reach their full potential.

Take the manufacturing industry, where there’s a huge gap between the number of available skilled workers and the number of jobs in many countries. In the US, 25% of workers will be eligible for retirement in the next two years. So, whilst 3.5 million jobs will be created over the next decade, only half of those jobs will get filled due to a shortage of skills.

This provides the ideal opportunity to harness mixed reality, combined with Dynamics 365 Guides, to empower your employees with the tools, expertise, and skills they need to be professionally successful.

Just imagine a set of guided instructions following you around as you perform your new job, enabling you to learn as you go, with both hands free, without distracting your new colleagues. With mixed reality, it’s possible to digitally overlay information over real-world objects, making it even easier for your team to understand a complex procedure and get it right first and every time. This shift from static 2D images, documents and classroom training into interactive, on-the-job learning means that knowledge is applied immediately and is retained.

Not only is the training and activity more effective, but you also generate valuable data that can be used to improve that training experience for the rest of your team.

How else will it transform my business?

During this year’s Future Decoded event, I had the opportunity to discuss mixed reality with Microsoft partner DXC. The firm explained how important it was to understand the current way of working and training.

This is a world of classroom-based learning, PDF instructions, and paper manuals. And it’s necessary for companies like DXC to help businesses translate these traditional methods into mixed reality – an engaging combination of text, video, images, animations, and 3D assets.

Dynamics 365 Guides must also be intuitive and user-friendly, in order to engage your employees. Holograms must be carefully selected and placed. Custom media is also sometimes necessary.

How do you follow-up your first successful project?

At the start of the journey, you’ll want to start small. A proof of concept focused on one specific use case, such as remote assistance, or a training scenario, for example. This lets you gain familiarity with the technology, how to use it, how to maximise its value. With your eye undoubtedly on the business impact, this is the ideal moment to establish the ROI.

Once this project has proved successful, you can begin to move on to broader mixed reality projects. This is when you can begin expanding the scope by adding additional use cases or scenarios. If you’re feeling bold, you may even incorporate other technologies like IoT and analytics.

With a full production rollout, it’s time to consider security and device management, too. But once you’re up and running, you can focus on the really exciting part: how to integrate the technology across your organisation.

Find out more

Watch the session from Future Decoded: Re-imagining field service operations with connected products, mixed reality and AI

Transform your field service with IoT, AI and mixed reality

About the author

Matt is currently a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft aligned to Dynamics 365, focusing on Customer Engagement. He is fascinated by the way tech can improve marketing, sales and customer service, as well as how tech providers market and sell these solutions. Prior to his experience at Microsoft he worked at a number of tech businesses, including one of the top analyst firms Gartner, honing his client development and relationship management skills. He is currently completing an MBA at Imperial College.

The post What is mixed reality and is it right for your business? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

This is where customer relationship management (CRM) comes in. It’s long been at the heart of organisations’ customer strategies, and now it’s just as critical in creating compelling and personalised customer experiences. These days, not only do you need a modern CRM system, but also complete customer engagement solution. One that empowers employees with the data and the acumen to provide the best service and experiences to your customers and nurture these important relationships.

1.      Why move your CRM to the cloud?

Customers hold the power in business relationships. Therefore, moving to a cloud business application that includes CRM is a significant step in nurturing these relationships. It unlocks your ability to consistently deliver relevant and personal experiences to every customer

“If customers don’t get the experience they expect, they’ll take their business elsewhere. This means businesses must be focused on customer expectations. And if they can deliver these differentiated experiences, it positively impacts your top-line revenue,” said Kate Leggett, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research on a recent Microsoft webinar. “Customers stay with a more engaged company longer. They will buy more from you, increasing their lifetime value, and they will serve as an advocate for your company.”

To meet your customers’ needs and expectations, you must equip your employees with the technology to access important data and insights.

“As they move to the cloud, companies can leverage cloud technologies and deliver these differentiated experiences. Cloud CRM deployments give you faster time to value.”

Kate Leggett, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research on a Microsoft webinar

A 2018 commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™study of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service found that contact centre staff are up to 15 percent more efficient, with better tools and access to rich customer data and insight. This means they can better optimise customer experiences – a value add of $5.8 million to an organisation over three years.

The study also found that employees feel more empowered to do their best work, are more likely to stay, and have higher satisfaction. Also, IT departments are more agile and able to roll out innovation faster.

2.      Gain business buy-in to ensure success

Like any other important change initiative, you’ll need a clear process in place that engages all relevant stakeholders and addresses their specific needs. You’ll need strong sponsorship and communications.

Based on experience of hundreds of projects, Microsoft has honed a best practice approach that ensures your evaluation process and subsequent migration are comprehensive yet efficient. The alignment between the business leaders and IT throughout the journey is critical, as is early buy-in.

“Shiny software and slick demonstrations alone don’t get a project signed off at the board and they don’t drive business change. It pays dividends to get the right people around the table at the outset, to agree on the key measures, steps and timings for a successful evaluation” says Mark Abery, Technical Solutions Professional for Dynamics 365 at Microsoft.

Both the Microsoft Dynamics 365 team and its cloud migration partners can work with your business to ensure that you’ve not missed any important steps and are able to reach a decision with confidence in 4-8 weeks.

3.      Remember your value

While your cloud CRM success plan is in motion, remember to keep business value at the heart of what you do.

Moving to a cloud CRM solution such as Dynamics 365 will save your business the cost of providing on-premises infrastructure and software. It will also make your organisation more competitive in a fast-moving and consumer-centric market.

Moving to the cloud offers you access to the newest functionality without the disruption or cost of upgrading on-premises applications. It also ensures your business stays up-to-date with the latest security and compliance regulations. This frees up your IT staff to focus on innovation instead of maintenance.

All of this means you can focus on the important things in your business—your customers. Plus, you get additional capabilities online that aren’t available on-premises—capabilities that make your workforce more productive and effective in sales and customer service.

“Most organisations focus on understanding the Total Cost of Ownership difference with Online. What we really need to do is ensure we expand the conversation beyond TCO and also consider the value of the additional capabilities which are online-only or online first. In addition, we should also consider the value of the increased agility online provides – delivering faster time to value. By doing this we can make a much more compelling case to move. Our business value methods help articulate this case for change,” says Robert Smith, Director, Business Value Management.

4.      Migration made simple

At Microsoft, we want to see you succeed. This is why we offer best practices, tools, and resources via our FastTrack service. The Dynamics CRM On Premises migration service is designed to make it easy for you and your business to move your Dynamics CRM 2011/13/15 on-premises solution to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Apps. You get guidance and customised support from the FastTrack team as you migrate.

Nick Latocha, Head of Data and Insights at Travel Counsellors used the FastTrack service to move his company’s CRM system to the cloud and take advantage of AI and cloud technologies.

“The process was seamless. The FastTrack team worked with us and our partner to build a custom migration plan to ensure our data moved over as easily as possible with as little downtime as possible,” he says. “We were even able to migrate earlier than planned, and with our custom migration, we didn’t hit any issues at all.”

Having the support of the FastTrack team in the migration means you can focus on driving user adoption and achieving your intended business outcomes.

5.      Futureproof your business

Our research has found that 81 percent of executives believe AI will be integral to their business in two years. 31 percent of enterprises say AI is on the agenda for the next 12 months.

Yet, only 15 percent of enterprises are currently using AI. We’re currently launching numerous Dynamics 365 AI solutions that dramatically lower the barriers for marketing, sales, and customer service organisations to apply AI and see results in the shortest possible time frame.

Best of all, whether you want to understand your customers more deeply and personalise experiences, increase sales, or optimise support operations, you will not need a data science team to get started.

For example, Dynamics 365 AI for Customer Service not only enables leaders to understand the health of their operations based on key metrics, it applies machine learning to drill down to new levels of insight. These insights enable managers to anticipate emerging issues, to understand their impact on customer satisfaction and resolution rates so they may prioritise, and to track the success of their interventions with a level of speed and granularity that they’ve never had.

Beyond better decision making, agents are liberated from the error-prone administrative burden of labelling thousands of cases, and business experts can automate operations by deploying virtual agents without relying on their IT organisation.

“Now we’re in the cloud, our focus is to improve our sales pipeline by adopting some of these technologies. The plan is to not only improve our candidate experience, but also increase our conversion rates. These new technologies are key to helping us and making it as enjoyable as possible to do.”

Nick Latocha, Head of Data and Insights, Travel Counsellors

Learn more

You can see how a better customer experience will drive real returns and you’re going to need an AI-powered solution to achieve this. Watch our webinar with our guest Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Kate Leggett, for further insight into the economic impact of moving your CRM to cloud.

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About the author

Matt is currently a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft aligned to Dynamics 365, focussing on Customer Engagement. He is fascinated by the way tech can improve marketing, sales and customer service, as well as how tech providers market and sell these solutions. Prior to his experience at Microsoft he worked at a number of tech businesses, including one of the top analyst firms Gartner, honing his client development and relationship management skills. He is currently completing an MBA at Imperial College.

The post 5 steps to move to a cloud CRM appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.