While AI is rapidly reshaping how we work, many sellers still spend too much of their day on manual tasks. Typical examples include updating CRM records, writing follow-up emails and preparing for meetings. 

That’s exactly where Microsoft sales agents come in.

By helping you focus on what matters most – building relationships and closing deals – our AI-powered assistants take care of the repetitive, time-consuming work behind the scenes.

What are sales agents?  

Sales agents are intelligent, role-based AI assistants that work across Microsoft 365 and your CRM, whether that’s Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. For example, Microsoft Sales Agent and Sales Chat can support and empower sellers in different ways, including:  

• Drafting personalised emails and meeting summaries  

• Qualifying leads and prioritising your pipeline  

• Keeping CRM records up to date automatically  

• Surfacing insights and next-best actions in real time  

What’s more, these solutions aren’t just assistive. They can work autonomously, engaging leads 24/7 and passing warm opportunities to you when it’s time to close. For lower-impact leads, they can even complete a sale. 

With Copilot, agents and human expertise working hand in hand, sales teams are empowered to unlock new opportunities for profitability and growth. 

Reimagine your sales day: watch role-based demos 

To show how AI-powered agents can transform your workflow, we’ve created five bite-size videos, including “day in the life” pieces focusing on specific sales roles.

Why not start with the demo that fits your role and see what’s possible?

🎥 Demo 1: How to Empower Your Sales Team with AI Agents

An introduction to how Sales Agent and Sales Chat work together to streamline sales operations. 

🎥 Demo 2: A Day in the Life of a Relationship Manager with AI

See how Sales Chat helps you stay informed and personalise customer engagement. 

🎥 Demo 3: A Day in the Life of a Velocity Seller with AI

Watch how Sales Agent helps you qualify leads, automate outreach, and stay focused on high-value deals. 

🎥 Demo 4: A Day in the Life of a Sales Leader with AI

Discover how Sales Research Agent helps you optimise team performance and drive revenue. 

🎥 Demo 5: Get Started with Sales Agents

Explore the benefits of enhancing sales productivity and efficiency today by integrating AI-powered platforms into your workflow.

Dive deeper into seamless, agent-supported sales journeys

To explore more, watch Microsoft Discovery Hour: The Autonomous Customer Experience on-demand, which includes highlights from our Customer Experience Reimagined UK event. You’ll hear from product and strategy experts how sales agents are already helping organisations deliver more personalised, proactive and scalable customer experiences. 

Access sales agents today 

Our agents are now generally available. To access them in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, just follow these steps:

• Open your Microsoft 365 Copilot app. 
• Navigate to Chat > Agents. 
• Use the dropdown to browse pre-installed agents or select All agents  to explore the Agent Store. 
• Select the Sales Agent, then click Add or Open.
• You can now interact with the agent using prompts in the Message Copilot box. 

Remember, these solutions work with both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. That means you can nurture and close deals without even opening your CRM. You can also fine-tune them to connect to all your business data, ensuring accurate, actionable responses.  

It’s selling, made seamless – so you can spend more time with customers, and less time with systems.

Find out more

Read Microsoft’s announcement about sales agents 

Watch Microsoft Discovery Hour: The Autonomous Customer Experience

Explore the sales agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat 

Read the e-book: AI + CX: Your guide to marketing, sales and service transformation

Watch the videos featured in this blog:

• Demo 1: How to Empower Your Sales Team with AI Agents
• Demo 2: A Day in the Life of a Relationship Manager with AI
• Demo 3: A Day in the Life of a Velocity Seller with AI
• Demo 4: A Day in the Life of a Sales Leader with AI
• Demo 5: Get Started with Sales Agents

The post Empower your sales team with AI agents: a practical guide  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In addition, a McKinsey report states that generative AI could unlock between $240 billion to $390 billion in value for retailers. When combined with non-generative AI and analytics, the total value created could reach into the trillions.

These reports suggest the retail industry is at a pivotal moment. Generative AI is no longer a future concept – it’s actively reshaping how retailers operate and compete. For software development companies, this shift isn’t just a trend to watch, it’s a transformation to build for.

From experimentation to execution

Retail-focused software development companies are no longer just exploring generative AI – they’re deploying it at scale. Microsoft partners are leading the charge, embedding AI into retail operations to deliver measurable outcomes.

Here are four standout examples:

• Blue Yonder is working with Microsoft to build next-generation supply chain solutions powered by generative AI. Their AI copilots help retailers create agile, resilient and sustainable supply chains, connecting data across ecosystems to identify issues and optimise performance in real time.
• Adobe is leveraging Microsoft Azure to deliver personalised customer experiences at scale. Through Adobe Experience Platform and Adobe Campaign, retailers can unify customer data and orchestrate AI-powered journeys across channels – turning insights into action with speed and precision.
• VusionGroup, a global leader in IoT and data solutions for physical commerce, is transforming bricks-and-mortar stores into intelligent, connected assets. By combining generative AI with Azure’s global infrastructure, they enable retailers to optimise store operations, reduce waste, and deliver seamless omnichannel experiences.
• Promo.com, supported by Microsoft partner 2bcloud, scaled its PromoAI product using Azure OpenAI Service. The platform empowers small businesses and agencies to generate branded marketing videos in minutes.

Ultimately, these examples reflect a broader industry shift in how SDCs are building for the future of retail. By co-innovating with Microsoft, partners are accelerating time to value, expanding their reach, and shaping the next wave of AI-powered retail transformation.

Implications for software development companies

For software development companies, the rise of generative AI in retail is more than a technical shift, it’s a strategic inflection point. To support this transformation, Microsoft’s perspective on AI in retail is grounded in four key transformation areas, each offering a blueprint for how SDCs can build differentiated value:

1. Enriching employee experiences
   AI can empower frontline and back-office retail employees with intelligent tools that reduce friction and boost productivity. SDCs can build copilots and task-specific agents that automate repetitive work, surface insights in real time and support decision-making, whether in stores, warehouses or HQ.
   
2. Reinventing customer engagement
   Today’s consumers expect personalised, seamless experiences across channels. Generative AI enables hyper-personalised content, conversational commerce and adaptive interfaces. SDCs can help retailers deliver these experiences by embedding AI into customer relationship management (CRM), marketing and service platforms.
   
3. Reshaping business processes
   From supply chain optimisation to fraud detection, AI is transforming core retail operations. SDCs can create modular, API-first solutions that integrate with legacy systems and modernise workflows, driving efficiency, agility and resilience.
   
4. Bending the curve on innovation
   Generative AI lowers the barrier to experimentation and accelerates time to value. SDCs that embrace co-innovation, working closely with retailers to prototype, test and iterate, can unlock new business models and revenue streams. Leveraging Microsoft’s ecosystem for co-sell, scale and technical enablement can further amplify impact.

How Microsoft partnership supports growth

We view our relationship with software development companies not just as a platform and AI provider, but as a strategic growth partner. Working side-by-side with SDCs, we help them unlock new markets, co-innovate and scale their impact globally.

Whether you’re building a new AI-powered retail solution or modernising an existing platform, Microsoft offers more than just infrastructure. We offer partnership support that includes:

• Collaborating early to shape product direction and align with market needs.
• Co-selling together through our global commercial marketplace.
• Connecting you with customers through curated industry programmes and events.
• Investing in your success with go-to-market support, technical enablement and funding opportunities.

We’re seeing the most successful SDCs treat Microsoft not just as a cloud provider, but as a business development partner – one that helps them move faster, reach further and grow stronger.

Looking ahead

If you’re a software development company building for the retail industry, now is the time to act. By harnessing generative AI, those who move early will shape the future.

As a Partner Development Manager at Microsoft, I work directly with SDCs to help them scale faster, co-innovate with confidence and unlock new commercial opportunities. Whether you’re exploring your first AI-powered solution or looking to expand into new markets, let’s connect and explore how we can grow together in this era of AI-powered retail.

Join the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Programme

You can start accelerating success today by joining the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Programme. Meanwhile, we invite you to explore two key SDC resources via our links below – an e-book explaining how to build intelligent apps that elevate user experiences, and a webinar outlining our latest ISV Success resources and incentives. 

Find out more

Download the e-book: Transform ISV Applications with Intelligent AI Personalisation 

Watch the webinar: What is New in ISV Success – AI Benefits and More 

Join the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Programme

AI-powered retail: Elevating customer experience and operational efficiency

About the author

As a Partner Development Manager at Microsoft, James specialises in strategic engagement with software development companies in the retail and consumer goods sectors. He focuses on identifying and accelerating high-potential partners, particularly those innovating with AI and disruptive technologies. James plays a key role in enabling partner growth through co-innovation, go-to-market strategy and ecosystem alignment.

The post AI in retail: the opportunity for software development companies appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We’re not just marking a product anniversary – we’re celebrating the progress businesses have made in delivering seamless, omnichannel experiences that are more personal, productive and cost-effective. 

A new era of customer engagement 

If you lead customer experience or service organisations, you’re already navigating rapid changes across industries. For example, subscription-based business models are putting customer retention under the spotlight, making every interaction an opportunity – or a risk. 

Yet, for too many organisations, disconnected channels, long wait times and customer frustration remain the norm. A recent study commissioned by Microsoft found that, while UK sectors varied in their contact-centre response times, average wait times for utilities, retail, and energy customers were over 8 minutes, 12 minutes, and 35 minutes respectively. Research cited in Forbes suggests that such poor service can cause customers to switch providers.

Customers now expect more: fast, frictionless, consistent service across every channel. In our commissioned study, 87% of call-centre workers agreed that customer service expectations had increased, while 78% agreed that service queries had become more complex in recent years.

Today’s customers want intelligent self-service, but with human help available for more challenging issues. Equally, service agents need tools that reduce manual effort and give them the context to get issues right first time. 

That’s the promise of our CCaaS platform – a connected, AI-powered contact centre where every part of the customer journey is integrated and streamlined. 

Unifying service with intelligence, end-to-end

Imagine every stage of your customer service journey – from self-serve to agent-assisted – was seamlessly supported by a suite of AI powered, always up-to-date, and highly efficient solutions. By integrating Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot, Teams Phone and Azure Communication Services, this vision becomes a reality: 

• Customers can start conversations in the channel they prefer and get quick answers through AI-powered bots. When human help is needed, AI-powered routing directs them to the right agent, based on customer sentiment, intent and complexity.  

• For agents, Copilot brings the full context  – from a customer’s interaction history to relevant knowledge articles – into a single view, enabling faster, more empathetic responses. 

Microsoft Teams Phone enhances voice quality and supports smooth, reliable conversations, while integrated tools make collaboration easy during live customer interactions. Analytics across the platform give operations teams clear insight into service performance, helping spot trends, improve efficiency and act before small issues become bigger problems. 

Delivering results in the real world 

This unified vision is already enhancing customer service outcomes at scale. Microsoft’s own Customer Service and Support (CSS) team – one of the largest globally, with over 45,000 agents in 92 contact centres across 120 countries – uses Dynamics 365 and Copilot daily.

Since adopting the platform, the team has seen faster first responses, shorter handling times and more cases resolved without escalation. 

Microsoft CSS statistics source: Microsoft Office of Chief Economist. Wave 2.5 study about the early impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service across Microsoft commercial support. The numbers reflect results from 9,900 agents from a specific five-month period (April-September 2023). Findings were evaluated at the business unit level, not across the entire CSS organization. Full results language (where necessary): 9% faster First Response rate in several areas of Azure Core and Windows Commercial Support; 12-16% decrease in Average Handle Time observed by several businesses for agents handling chat cases; 7.5% reduction in Days to Close support tickets in a portion of Windows Commercial support line of business; 13% reduction in Days to Solution of support tickets in one Developer support line of business.

Read more about how Microsoft transformed customer service and support

Organisations across the UK are seeing similar gains. VIVID, a major housing provider, has used Microsoft’s CCaaS solution to transform both customer and employee experience. Call abandonment rates have plummeted, average speed to answer has fallen from six minutes to under a minute, and digital engagement has surged. 

With simple queries handled through self-service, staff can now spend more time on complex, meaningful customer interactions. Explore how VIVID enhanced customer and staff experiences

Virgin Money has also embraced the opportunity. Their virtual assistant, Redi, built using Microsoft Copilot Studio, handles queries with a human tone – and knows when to escalate. Because it’s fully integrated with Dynamics 365, Redi stays compliant, on-brand and in sync with the rest of the service team. Read how a virtual assistant is helping reimagine Virgin Money’s customer experience

“By designing customer journeys in Microsoft Copilot, over 90% of our customers get what they want from Redi.” 

Adam Paice, Head of Digital Proposition, Virgin Money 

Experience the Microsoft difference

In today’s increasingly saturated markets, great customer experience is a powerful differentiator. Beyond resolving issues, brands that create meaningful moments inspire loyalty and trust. Moreover, when support staff are empowered with the right AI tools, they’re not only more productive but feel more satisfied at work. 

Organisations are now accessing these benefits in one connected solution. Copilot-powered tools like Dynamics 365 Customer Service are helping agents work smarter, not harder – automating repetitive tasks, surfacing insights and ensuring every interaction feels personal. 

And because it’s all built on a secure, integrated Microsoft ecosystem, you can scale confidently, backed by trusted data governance and responsible AI. 

Start your customer experience transformation

One year on, Microsoft CCaaS has already transformed the way many organisations think about customer service. But the real opportunity is still ahead. If you’re ready to connect more personally and operate more efficiently, now is the time to explore what’s possible. 

Find out more 

• Visit our website: Explore Contact Centre as a Service with Dynamics 365 

• Download the report: Modernise UK Contact Centres with the Cloud and AI 

• Watch the Microsoft Tech Brief: Transform Your Service Experience 

About the author

Ayanna is a Go-To-Market Manager for the AI Business Process team based in London, with a focus on driving pipeline growth and strategic execution for Dynamics 365 Customer Experience and Customer Service solutions. Known for her cross-functional leadership and deep understanding of customer needs, Ayanna partners closely with sales, marketing and partner teams to accelerate deal velocity and influence AI transformation across key industries.

The post Unified. Intelligent. Proven. Celebrating exceptional customer service experiences  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The emergence of AI agents is poised to further accelerate innovation. In this article, we’ll explore the impact of these agents on the insurance sector and how organisations are using them to transform business operations.   

What are AI-powered agents?  

Often referred to as “orchestrator agents”, autonomous AI agents are designed to achieve specific goals with reduced intervention from us. Extracting greater value from existing data, reducing operational costs, automating processes and improving decision-making. They can also learn from past interactions and even execute tasks autonomously.

While these improvements are promising, safety is key to rolling out agentic systems. This means prioritising security, privacy and safety throughout AI development. Drawing on decades of expertise in building AI products, Microsoft is committed to industry-leading practices and capabilities. This includes our Secure Future Initiative and Responsible AI principles, providing a solid foundation to unlock AI’s transformative potential with confidence.  

These efforts enable insurers to enhance the customer experience while maintaining outstanding standards of trust and reliability.

Using agents in the insurance industry 

Here are some significant industry use cases. 

Transforming underwriting through time-saving

AI-enabled tools in underwriting can automate data ingestion, translate unstructured data into structured data, and help underwriters access and interpret information from multiple, isolated sources.  

For example, Markerstudy Group built an app for its claims department on Azure OpenAI to summarise claims calls for handlers. With 300 claims handlers using the app, the organisation saved around four minutes per call – and a total of 7,500 working days.

AI agents can also provide real-time cross-checks, ensure compliance with new regulations, and help underwriters evaluate more policies by removing manual tasks from their workflow. For example, Zurich Insurance Group is using tools like Azure OpenAI to support more accurate, efficient risk evaluations – accelerating underwriting and boosting customer satisfaction.

Automating claims processes and data analysis

Agentic AI can automate the extraction and validation of claims data from forms, emails or portals. It can also cross-reference claim information with policies and coverage terms, and route claims for approval or escalation based on pre-defined rules.  

Insurance platform Nsure.com has created a customer copilot which draws data from Microsoft Fabric and helps customers submit payments, review renewal offers and request discounts. Along with text, the copilot offers an interactive voice response option and handles around 60% of customer questions. In scenarios like this, agents can reduce the claims process from weeks to hours.  

Improving customer services and empowering employees

With chatbots available 24/7 and capable of understanding natural language, AI agents can increase customer choice, personalisation and satisfaction. 

When a customer initiates a claim, they typically complete a form to gather general information and open the damage case. To streamline this process and improve service quality, insurance company DOMCURA has developed an AI-powered agent called Claimens, capable of handling calls, guiding customers through the claim form and outlining next steps.  

By handling simple tasks, the agent enables case workers to focus on more complex claims, which helps improve the experience for both customers and employees. 

Take the next step with trusted support 

With the UK government’s Action Plan emphasising the role of AI in driving economic growth, implementing AI-powered agents is now a key strategic priority and differentiator for businesses.  

The value of agents comes from their potential to support complex use cases across business functions, particularly for workflows that involve time-consuming tasks or require multiple sources of data. To get started with Microsoft as your partner, we invite you to co-innovate AI use cases to ensure we’re transforming priority areas.  

By leveraging proven solutions, you can streamline processes and improve customer satisfaction while maintaining the highest standards of trust and reliability. 

To learn how to build your strategic plan today and discover the five stages of AI value creation, download a free copy of our AI Strategy Roadmap.  

Find out more

Read the blog: Insurance in the era of generative AI – use cases that transform the industry

About the author

James has held leadership positions across Microsoft Consumer and Enterprise teams. With a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success, he has been at the forefront of cloud and digital transformation for over a decade, developing new revenue streams and significantly accelerating growth.

The post Transforming insurance with AI-powered autonomous agents  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Today their role hasn’t necessarily changed. However, the value organisations place on them certainly has. The focus is shifting from fitting customers around business processes to reshaping contact centres around customers’ needs.

For years, the role of contact centres was limited – often confined by traditional 9-5 working hours. It was predominantly aimed at driving down costs and improving efficiencies.

This was reflected by the way companies measured their success. They had KPIs ranging from targets for call volumes to queue times and abandonment rates. These inward-focussed efficiency metrics have, however, consistently failed to put the customer at the centre of the service.

In today’s increasingly digitalised environment, this is no longer sustainable. Nothing is more valuable than customer experience and customer outcome. Organisations are fast adapting to the idea that great customer experiences convert into customer loyalty and new customers. People increasingly sharing their positive and negative experiences online. As a result, financial institutions can no longer afford to underestimate their services.

Contact centres are transforming. From unempathetic, 9-5 services reliant on a standard agent script, to becoming a customer experience centre. They don’t just focus on a service but the total customer experience across an organisation.

This presents a new opportunity for financial services companies to become fully connected organisations driven by technology. Embrace solutions that connect and unify all their channels – from digital to physical and mobile. As a result, they can create seamless, connected customer experiences that distinguish them from their competitors.

Understanding the needs of financial services customers

To better equip contact centres to service customers, we first need to look at how the needs of these customers have changed over time.

The past few years have seen the customer landscape evolve and diversify significantly. Alongside more traditional customers, organisations are increasingly welcoming a new generation of tech-savvy, socially connected customers. They come with a fresh new range of expectations.

Empathy, passion and hyper-personal connections are key drivers behind their demands. They centre around being understood and supported throughout their customer journey. Failure to do so can have catastrophic effects for organisations. Not only will it risk customers leaving their service but also expressing their frustration online.

This means one thing:

The more you know your customer, the more you can tailor your service to them.

A customer who’s been with your organisation for decades will be likely to seek support through traditional landlines or your website. On the other hand, the younger, digitally savvy customers will want mobile and self-service options, pursuing a more digital experience.

So how can organisations make sure that all these needs and preferences are satisfied? Put simply, the more diversified the audience, the more diversified the services.

Breaking down silos in contact centres

To really drive customer satisfaction across your evolving customer base, you need to invest in omnichannel engagement. Encompassing anything from social media to instant messaging, webchats and physical customer support, customers choose their channel of preference.

But this hasn’t always been the case for organisations in the financial services industry. Organisations may have invested in technologies to support a growing number and type of customer-facing channels. However, these are often used in silos and operated by different vendors.

This leaves customer data confined. Additionally, it prevents agents from surfacing customers across multiple systems. Most importantly, it prevents organisations from leveraging customer insights and using them to better orchestrate the customer journey.

Organisations who adapt and unify these siloes will be more likely to succeed at improving the customer journey. Doing so will empower employees to be more collaborative and productive. It will also reduce time to serve customers and provide an overall higher quality of service.

But it’s not enough to change the internal ways of working. Organisations must improve the way they build relationships with their customers. Looking ahead, they need to improve their ability to capture interactions in the moments that matter. They must continuously adapt and improve using this new-found knowledge.

To do this, they need an infrastructure and technology foundation. One that can empower them to capture these moments, understand their context and orchestrate the best, most optimal route across any function. All to deliver fast, impactful and personalised services that convert prospects into long-lasting advocates.

The rise in automated self-service technology

In a world that increasingly relies on digital innovation and newly found tech capabilities, automation can play a key role in improving customer services and contact centres.

Until recently, these have had virtually no front-door filter standing between customers and operators. Self-service has only just started to become a reality, leaving agents to deal with more complex cases.

This is where automation comes in. As data-based insights and capabilities become the norm, organisations have the opportunity to identify the simpler customer queries. They can then direct them to self-service areas, virtual assistants and AI-powered services.

Conversational virtual assistants are a powerful tool. Especially when it comes to harnessing data to gain insights on the customer. This data can be used to understand customer demands, their purchase history and previous complaints and other crucial information that can help them address their query entirely autonomously.

If the customer wants to transfer to a human, all that data can be carried across. Using AI, potential knowledge articles and recommendations, agents can successfully solve a customer’s request.

AI can also assist with more complex tasks such as pre-authenticating customers before speaking to an agent. This time-saving feature benefits both the customer experience and a contact centre’s inward metrics. With the addition of voice-biometric technology, a virtual agent could also help detect and prevent fraud by comparing a customer’s voice against their customer profile. A more cost-effective solution to training agents on fraud prevention and extra reassurance to customers that their money is secure.

These kinds of innovations aren’t there to make calling a contact centre redundant. There will always be a need to speak to agents to help manage banking relationships or advise on future monetary decisions. But for simpler, everyday tasks, financial organisations can empower customers to self-service rather than waiting to speak to an adviser.

Challenger banks have been particularly good at pushing innovations in this way and raising the customer service bar. Many of them are truly revolutionising retail banking by reducing typical applications processes from a week to minutes. By promoting a digitally-native experience, more traditional banks are forced to reconsider their own customer experience.

Keeping customer data secure in the cloud

Data breaches happen far too frequently today. And as financial institutions can hold an entire customer’s wealth – from mortgages to loans to bank balances – there’s an enormous responsibility to ensure that data is kept safe and secure.

This presents an immediate challenge to spend millions innovating on an existing IT infrastructure. This may require a huge amount of capital investment and resources to maintain. We’re seeing many leading insurance companies and banks choosing to migrate their contact centre operations from on-premise servers to the cloud.

If you consider Azure for example, Microsoft has already spent billions creating a secure cloud solution and helped protect leading organisations from cyber-attacks, fraud and Denial-of-Service on an intraday basis. This reassurance makes migrating to the cloud not just a business decision for better data security, but also for greater cost efficiency by eliminating the many overheads that physical servers require.

The cloud also offers advantages when it comes to complying to financial regulations such as how organisations handle data, offer services and prevent financial crime. By working with a trusted cloud provider like Microsoft, a lot of this responsibly can be shared and evidence can be provided to show that data is being kept securely and systems are operating within regulations.

An all-in-one solution for financial services contact centres

Financial organisations are changing. Their reputation and global presence is increasingly tied to customer experience, online reviews and the quality of their services. As a result, they must reimagine their services with a new, more demanding and diversified customer base in mind.

At the same time, switching banks or insurers has never been simpler. Therefore, it crucial for organisations to innovate their contact centre and make the end-to-end experience as efficient and helpful as possible.

The key is to not consider every channel as a separate challenge. A 2021 Forrester report commissioned by Microsoft, Boost Your CX With A Better Integrated Contact Center, CRM, And Collaboration Systems, found that 74 percent of contact centre agents in organisations typically use four or more applications to service customers. This gives a disconnected experience for agents. But by implementing an all-in-one contact centre solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, financial organisations can manage their operation through a single platform. From initial customer contact to automated self-service with AI virtual assistants, to agent-guided case management and back office collaboration with Microsoft Teams.

This allows live agents to interact with customers on any channel. They have a complete overview of all previous interactions to give a frictionless and effective customer journey. It also helps to free up their time. So they can focus on the most complex and sensitive requests that virtual assistants aren’t equipped to handle.

Find out more

Envisioning the Future of Customer Experience

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service.

The post How data and AI will transform contact centres for financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Organisations that can connect and use their data are more resilient and adaptable, driving sustainable growth. But how? We’ve identified three ways your organisation can leverage data insights to turn into action.

The hybrid world of work

We all have a lived experience of hybrid working, and it’s here to stay. In our latest Work Trend Index, we found that:

_{53% of people are likely to consider transitioning to hybrid in the year ahead if they haven’t already}

_{53% of employees are more likely to prioritise health and wellbeing over work.}

This means organisations need a new digital fabric for collaboration that brings together both digital and physical spaces. One that connects people and empowers them to balance their career and their wellbeing.  Organisations won’t be able to scale to this transition without a strong understanding of data.

Unilever provides their people – including individuals, managers, and leaders – with data-driven, privacy-protected visibility with Microsoft Viva. These data insights help Unilever improve the employee experience and promote greater work-life balance.

The hyper-connected business

We need that next level of real-time hyper-connectivity between businesses, and between consumers and businesses, where data and intelligence flow freely to tackle the challenges of supply and demand.​

According to our research, 80 percent of companies suffer with significant data silos. This prevents them from gaining meaningful insight to make business decisions. But by ensuring your data strategy combines the right capabilities and the right culture, you can identify opportunities, better serve customers, transform your products, empower employees, drive sustainable results and optimise operations. 

Access and unify your data

The more siloed your data, the harder it is to accomplish data governance. When you harness the streams of data being created on a secure platform, enabling better decision making and transformative processes.

Analyse, predict and orchestrate

Once you have unified your data you can leverage AI and Machine Learning. Run big data analytics to predict customer intent to purchase and identify segments that are at risk of churning. This can help identify new, or even protect revenue streams, improve operational efficiencies, create sustainable supply chains and drive a better overall quality of service.

Activate and measure

Take these insights and democratise access through your organisation. The people who will best put the data to use are the ones who deal with it day-to-day. By allowing both front and back-end employees access to that data, they can create low/no code apps that streamline operations and deliver better customer experiences.

Heineken gives their frontline employees customer data insights directly on a unified platform with Azure Synapses and Dynamics 365. This enables their sellers to gain much richer insights about their customer’s preferences to deliver the best possible purchase recommendations and provide a much more tailored buying experience.

Omnichannel customer experience

Technology has shaped both the online and offline experience for customers. And the more data silos organisations have, the more frustrated the customer becomes.

A hyper-connected business can link all the customer touchpoints together to create a 360-degree view. Employees can access this, meaning they can provide the best experience to the customer, no matter the point of they journey they are in, or how they’re getting in touch. AI and Machine Learning can then help drive richer data insights that can be used to delight and build trust.

Alpha XR Boots Alliance balances data and privacy to deliver more engaging and personalised experiences, to their patients and customers. By dramatically enhancing their customer personalisation, they can deliver the best tailored offers and content to the right customer, in the right context, at the right time and through the right channels across the entire journey.

Build sustainable growth with data insights

The events over the past several years have shown us that organisations that are able to connect and use their data are more robust and able to adapt to changing environments, harness potential and drive competitive advantage.​

Through empowering employees with the right culture, unifying and optimising your data, and building the omnichannel customer experience, you can turn data insights into action.

Find out more

Imagine business powered by data

Put your most important asset to work

The post How to turn data insights into action appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Data can help an organisation identify new opportunities and uncover hidden efficiencies. The business world is no stranger to disruptions and changes, and when you extract as much value from data as possible, your organisation will be able to move with speed and gain competitive advantage.

Data maturity helps empower employees to collaborate, gain new insights and take action to deliver operational efficiencies. It can help teams be more innovative with their product development. Ultimately, this leads to delivering a better customer experience.

95% _{of surveyed organisations have deployed big data initiatives on a department or enterprise level}

To drive tangible outcomes, leaders should build a solid data foundation to start maximising opportunities. By fusing the power of Azure data and AI with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, organisations can start to unlock new insights and more critically – take action.

But what stage are you on in your journey? And how do you leverage the right tools to stay agile and deliver the results you need and drive innovation?

_{Data-driven organisations are growing at an average of} 30% _{or more annually}

What stage is your organisation in your data journey?

1. Good
   • Better understand your customers, employees and use data to drive collaboration.
2. Better
   • Identify needs and trends, and adapt quickly to new business models, drive efficiencies and reduce costs.
3. Best
   • Empower employees with insights and drive meaningful change.

Step 1: Good

Customers have high expectations of brands. They want to be heard, understood and have personal, meaningful experiences.

73% _{of customers will consider switching to a competitive brand after one bad experience.}

How can leaders meet these goals in an ever-changing world?

• Make customer experience an organisation-wide priority.
• Be agile enough to respond to customer needs quickly.
• Respond honestly and authentically.
• Meet customers in the channels they expect.

When you unify and centralise your customer experience technology, you’ll gain insights to build deeper customer relationships.

Royal Enfield offers a frictionless experience to both its potential and existing customers at different touchpoints, ensuring they can access their data on the spot instead of starting anew each time.

75% _{of organisations have proved that customer satisfaction leads to revenue growth through increased retention or lifetime value.}

These insights will help employees deliver a more personalised experiences to customers. They will also be able to make decisions faster and with greater confidence, to deliver insights to the right stakeholders and the right time.

Rolls-Royce provides targeted and actionable insights at the point of need to inform business decisions, such as which factors will have the most impact on fuel performance.

How?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Helps you better listen to, understand and satisfy your customers. When combined with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, it will help collect customer feedback across channels and form more authentic customer relationships.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Get a 360-degree view of customers and identify new unfound segments to support customer retention or create new revenue stream. Optimise and orchestrate real time personalised journeys to create fans improve loyalty.

Power BI

Gives every employee within the business the ability to respond in real-time with data-empowered insights on a secure platform.

Step 2: Better

To make sure your organisation continues to meet changing expectations, leaders must collaborate across business functions to align data goals and initiatives. At the same time, continued disruption, and budgeting means cost saving measures are critical.

64% _{of IT leaders say they’re using two or more analytics solutions}

When you consolidate your data, you’re creating a single source of truth for the enterprise. And by combining it onto one tool like Power BI, you’ll reduce costs.

PwC provides their clients with the data they need to on one platform. They use Azure to process the data and push it to Power BI, before shutting down (to save costs). From there, clients can view their data across customisable dashboards from anywhere.

48% _{of business goals driving data initiative investments is to improve decision making}

Power BI

Align your data across organisational silos. Employees can easily self-serve to get the data they need when they need it. Take advantage of cloud tech such as AI and automation to create cross-team reports that gain more insight. Plus, industry-leading data security capabilities help keep your insights protected.

_{The average time-to-insights is} 27% _{faster with Power BI}

Step 3: Best

Now you’ve laid the groundwork for a data-driven culture, you can use these insights to drive meaningful change and adapt at speed.

45% _{of users want real-time data aggregation and analysis}

To fully take advantage of your data, leverage automation and AI tools to process, aggregate and analyse data in one place in real-time. This, combined with user-friendly tools allows any employee to pull insights that are relevant for their role, right when they need it.

82% _{of users agree that self-service analytics is a top priority at their organisations}

This gives rise to the citizen analyst. Employees can get the answers they need while reducing the burden on IT staff. This better places your organisation to make decisions at speed.

66% _{of users say these capabilities are critical when evaluating new tools and solutions}

Data and AI can also enable predictive analytics, helping you respond quicker to upcoming changes, uncover new opportunities and better support customers. Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Commerce or Dynamics 365 Marketing can help you find new segments to market to, or drive customer retention with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

_{Preemptive digital transformations have a} 50% _{higher ROI than reactive ones}

Identify operational inefficiencies with analytics to streamline and optimise back-end tasks, for example, monitor equipment health in manufacturing or healthcare or reduce manual tasks. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain can maximise your supply chains operations.

Analytics can also be used to amplify your organisation’s work. Take, for example, healthcare. AI is being used to analyse medical imagery, leading to quicker diagnosis and helping doctors focus on patient care.

Move forward with confidence

Making data-driven decisions with the right technology will help you make bold business moves with confidence. As a result, you’ll empower your employees, deliver better customer outcomes and stay agile in a fast-paced environment.

Find out more

Discover how to build a data strategy:

Imagine business powered by data

Learn how to put your data to work

Get data-driven insights

Get fresh perspectives on business modernisation:

Watch Microsoft Envision UK on demand

Explore data management solutions:

Power BI

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post KPIs and ROI: Quantifying the impact of data management in your business appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

But despite being so vital to a brand’s success, frontline employees are often the last to be reached by the technology that retailers invests in. Typically, we see C-Suite and head office getting all the latest tech, while it takes time to trickle down to the shop floor. This has two major impacts.

Firstly, the majority of frontline workers feel underappreciated by their employers. According to a recent Retail Trust survey, The Health of Retail report 2021, many feel insecure, undervalued and uncertain in relation to their careers. In fact, 84 percent say their mental health has deteriorated since early 2020. And while this is undoubtedly connected to the impact of the last few years on the high street, there is work to be done to bridge the gap between the different levels of retail organisations, from C-Suite to the shop floor.

The other major impact is on the customer experience. Without the right tools in place, the in-store experience can feel impersonal and disconnected. Especially when comparing it to the increasingly personalised online shopping space. Here, consumers have become accustomed to being served highly personalised recommendations.

For me, empowering employees means giving them the right tools to do their best work. And in retail, that means the people on the shop floor having the right technology at their fingertips to allow them to access every type of information that customers need and expect.

Here I want to talk about some of the ways that retailers can start to empower their employees with technology. And as a result, create better customer experiences and a happier, more productive workforce.

Meeting customer expectations in-store

Like every industry, retail is still navigating the new ways of the world. Within that context, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what the future of the industry looks like and where we all fit in that jigsaw puzzle.

But one thing that has been shown clearly is that consumers are itching to get back into shops. The question is: what do those shops now look like?

Up until now, in-person retail has retained quite a consistent format. You go into the shop, you pick the product you want, you go to the checkout, and you leave. And that’s been okay until the last few years, when suddenly consumers started wanting more personal experiences.

That’s the impact of online shopping. Consumers go to the website of their retailer of choice. They get recommendations based on the data the company collects over time. Or they’ll get it personally by email. The challenge is to match this kind of personalisation in-store. And there are great benefits for retailers who manage achieve it.

Research suggests that customers will purchase more from a retailer if they shop both on their digital and in-store spaces. It underscores the importance of omni-channel retail. It also outlines a clear agenda for retailers moving forward: Striving to achieve intelligent retail. One where you connect to customers, your employees, and then your data as well, so that you can have that personalised experience in the store.

We’re already seeing many established retailers making their high street stores more like experience centres. So if you wanted to buy a Surface, for example, there’s the Microsoft Experience Centre in London. Here, you can come in and see the different devices, learn how you can interact with them, and try out accessories in-person. You may not buy the device there; you’re actually more likely to go home and order it online. But we’re definitely starting to see a blend of those online and physical channels.

It’s going to take time for everyone to catch up, especially if you’re a retailer with hundreds of stores nationwide. But devices are a great place to start with the transformation to a more blended, omni-channel shopping experience.

The importance of devices to omni-channel retail

As a society, we’ve become more used to having things instantly available at the tips of our fingers. Whether that’s a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop, devices are what have driven the expectation. This is now being translated into retail.

With this rising expectation, retailers who don’t empower their employees to respond quicky and accurately to customers in-store are going to suffer.

Frontline retail employees need to be able to do on-the-spot inventory checks, so they don’t have to go and rummage around in the store room or warehouse, looking physically on the shelves to try and find something that could have been checked in seconds on a handheld device on the shop floor. Without those devices, they often find themselves less well-informed than the customers coming into their stores.

Devices have benefits for retail employees beyond their interactions with customers too. Retail spaces are often large. Having a designated device for communication between team members who could be scattered across the building space, or even on different sites, will make the operation more integrated and seamless from an operational point of view too. They will enhance the connection between the different levels of an organisation, helping to bridge the gap between the C-Suite and shopfloor.

This will empower employees to feel more integral to the business. At the same time, leadership teams can make better decisions based on a more accurate understanding of stores, because they’re able to get feedback from them directly.

And then of course there are the sustainability benefits of devices. M&S is a great example of a UK retailer that has embraced devices, allowing it to achieve its goal of going paperless. This is just one of many benefits the company is now reaping from its push to integrate new technologies across its operations.

Devices designed for the hybrid retail space

The ultimate role of devices in the retail space is to help create a great experience for customers. Whether that’s ordering something in for a customer online, checking inventory levels, or even checking what shifts people on a team are working so managers can make sure that the shop floor is filled with the right people at the right time. All of it comes back to enhancing the in-store experience.

But there’s an increasing understanding that within every retail space, there are different types of workers, and they have different needs. Frontline workers don’t want to walk around the shop floor with a laptop, because it’s heavy and there’s a security risk in putting it down in a busy retail space. Similarly, an information worker in the back office isn’t going to want to use a foldable in-your-palm device.  

At Microsoft, we’ve packaged this understanding into a cohesive offering for retailers. We’ve got lightweight, on-the-go devices like the Surface Go that are designed specifically for frontline workers who don’t want to be tethered to a PC. We’ve got other Surface devices designed for information processing, as well as Surface Hubs that can help improve in-office and hybrid collaboration – meaning everyone feels included.

And because our devices are specifically made to complement the Microsoft software stack, it means that retailers get the best experience from things like Microsoft Teams and Power BI when using them on their Surface. It helps to keep our employees connected with each other, and empowers them serve customers quickly and efficiently.

I am confident that this empowerment will translate into the evolution of the role of frontline workers, who can be there to genuinely support people with disabilities or accessibility needs, becoming much more of a helping hand to customers in-store. There always will be a need for that kind of support, as we adapt to the new world we find ourselves in.

Find out more

Learn how to harness digital for the future of retail

Personalise your organisation’s customer experience strategy

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Device Decisions – The future is hybrid – considerations for IT leaders in the changing workplace

Technology can help unlock a new future for frontline workers

About the author

Joseph runs the Product and Marketing Strategy of our Surface Devices and Accessories for our Small Medium & Corporate (SMC) customers in Microsoft UK.

The post Empowering retail employees: How to transform the frontline appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Demand for this bespoke treatment has increased. Today’s expectations are for hyper personalisation across all channels of engagement between the customer and organisation. This move towards an omnichannel model has increased the scope in which companies can reach customers in new ways. 

Where should a business start in this vast landscape of customer touchpoints to craft a personalisation strategy that leads to customer delight and long-term loyalty? Let’s examine this now.

1.    Understand your customers

The goal is to make every customer feel that the service they are receiving is 100 percent customised to them. However, this isn’t always achievable due to time and budget constraints.

Instead, a crucial step is to analyse your own data estate. From your customer relationship management (CRM) system, to social channels and customer engagement (CE) platforms. Integrating this data for analysis with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help to surface rich insight by creating a single customer view that generates individualised personas. 

Predicting customer behaviours using these data-driven personas can allow businesses to segment their customers more effectively in order to better align customer treatment strategies. 

2.    Embrace omnichannel experiences

The ways that customers engage with your business continues to expand. This offers a huge opportunity to benefit from the increased customer data flowing into your business.

Unifying this data into a consolidated customer profile that can carry across any customer touchpoint is fundamental to a business’ personalisation efforts. As a result, conversations are more targeted and relevant. Additionally, customer service agents gain a greater understanding of the events leading up to a customer interaction if this unified omnichannel profile is accessible and properly collated.

3.    Make the most of innovation to personalise

AI adoption for customer service has been widespread. However, its full potential to drive personalisation lies beyond the simple Q&A functionality that has become a popular standard.

Conversational AI’s ability to learn about customer interests and preferences, and then re-engage with personalised product recommendations at key stages of the buying process has become a key personalisation capability for companies to adopt.

The more simplistic virtual assistant functionality also has its place. For example, where customers need to action more simple tasks, such as getting an update on an order status. These systems complement the more complex analytical use cases. AI should be thought of as augmenting existing processes that extend the consistency of your company identity. 

4.    Personalise – but don’t overdo it

It can be a fine line to tread between providing a customer with bespoke service and appearing to be compromising their privacy.

Location-based personalisation techniques such as offers/greetings sent to apps on consumers’ phones when they pass by a store can come off as invasive.

At the same time, be as transparent as possible when it comes to informing consumers how and why their data is used. Regulations like GDPR have helped created industry standards for this. However, companies can always look to bolster trust with their own in-house messaging and policy statements.

5.    Don’t lose the human touch

The capabilities of AI and data analytics are crucial to develop the insights necessary for understanding customers, building profiles and offering bespoke offers and interactions.

However, businesses should not over rely on these automated capabilities. The moments that matter are often those of one-on-one human connection. Take time to establish a comprehensive culture of communication that is agile to change. This is essential to empower your customer service agents with the empathetic skills they need to help find resolutions for customer that are personal and valued.

Personalise your customer’s experiences

The ways that personalisation will be felt across customer service will continue to evolve. Either from ongoing trends of increasing digital touchpoints or unexpected factors. Being agile to change is key.

At Microsoft, we work with customers across industries to implement modular solutions that fit in to existing customer service ecosystems to unlock new personalisation capabilities.

Find out more

Download our e-guide: Create outstanding experiences in moments that matter

Watch our webinar: Envisioning the future of customer experience with guest speaker and Senior Forrester Analyst Vasupradha Srinivasan

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service

About the author

Chris leads the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio for Microsoft UK within the Dynamics 365 Business Group. Chris is responsible for developing and orchestrating the go-to-market strategy across this portfolio for the UK geography to generate awareness, create excitement and drive business development. The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portfolio is a suite of intelligent front office business applications designed to accelerate digital transformation across sales, marketing and customer service

The post The top five ways to personalise your customer service appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We’ve always had accessibility standards ensuring we use closed captions and subtitles but we needed to think beyond that. Like many organisations, our accessibility journey is ongoing. It adapts as we learn and get feedback from our employees, partners, and customers. As Storytelling & Digital Destinations Lead, I continually challenge myself and my team to reimagine our websites, pushing to create great experiences that everyone can access.

Through our AI for Good cohort, we were made aware that for over 70 million Deaf people globally, their first and preferred language is sign language. Sign languages are structured differently from spoken and written language. As a result, some Deaf people have difficulties understanding content in written form. Many rely on friends and family to access the information they need. For example, getting a COVID vaccination is not a simple task when booking and follow-up information is in written text and healthcare staff are wearing facemasks (reducing the ability to lipread).

Despite our focus on accessibility and ensuring all content has subtitles and closed captions, this identified that our content was still inaccessible to a broad group of people.

“BSL is not the same as spoken English or written English, says Tim Scannell, Signly ambassador. “A lot of companies say English is good enough, because they think that Deaf people can understand English like a first language. We’re trying to show that the Deaf grassroots BSL community don’t necessarily understand English well.”

As part of the Deaf BSL community, Tim and Signly have been researching into the impact of the lack of BSL services. “They [BSL users] would always talk about having to bother somebody who is hearing that they knew.” Tim says. For some, this may be the children of Deaf adults, which then changes their relationships and increases stress and anxiety for both. “It also took Deaf people sometimes long time to understand.” For example, if a hearing customer had an issue with their bank, they could go into the branch, or call and get it sorted quickly. “A Deaf customer, however, will go into the branch and the bank would give them written information to read, or they [the bank] wouldn’t know about booking an interpreter or very rarely that would happen. But most don’t know how. They just apologise and say they couldn’t. A Deaf person just wants better communication.”

Learning about Signly

Technology has the power to help everyone. Therefore, it’s clear that we need to make sure that no one gets left behind. That’s why at Microsoft, we’re always looking at ways we can improve accessibility.

We were introduced to Signly when they became part of our AI for Good programme. Instantly, I knew they’d be a key partner to help us further our inclusion goals.

What do Signly do? Their technology translates written text to sign language. It removes this barrier, making content more accessible and is all run on Azure.

“A lot of firms think about just providing the typical accessibility features and think it’s okay, and it’s always because of the wrong perception that Deaf people are okay with English,” says Tim. “If people only think about the options they’ve set up. That’s not going to work. They need to think sometimes outside of the box.”

And Signly thinks innovatively. Signly allows users to self-serve, view or request sign language translations on webpages. The AI for Good programme helped Signly scale their app. Lloyds Bank became the first UK organisation to offer a translation website in British Sign Language.

“Signly covers the fixed information you have on a website so that you make less calls to need an interpreter,” says Tim.

With only around 1000 interpreters in the UK, it’s important we use technology to assist them in their roles while empowering BSL users. Both the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD) and the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters (WASLI) express how machine learning or AI signing avatars should not be used when the information being delivered is live, complex or of significant importance to the lives of Deaf citizens. Signly helps free up BSL interpreters to focus on those moments, while giving BSL users equal access to the information when they need it.

Improving access for everyone with sign language

The Microsoft Apprenticeship Network was built to help connect apprentices and organisations together. To bridge a digital skills gap, the UK needs over three million people in tech careers by 2025. Apprentices are key to this.

At the same time, we need to ensure that our new talent is diverse and inclusive. According to the NHS, people who are Deaf or experience hearing loss are more likely to be unemployed. And in employment, 74 percent surveyed felt that their employment opportunities were limited because of their hearing loss. This means we’re missing out on diverse perspectives, building new talent and driving inclusive innovation. We’re also missing out on the potential economic output. If we don’t address these employment rates by 2031 the UK economy will lose £38.6 billion per year.

The low code tech behind the solution

The beauty behind Signly is its simplicity. As a low code solution, it can be easily added to any website. You can translate the pages like we did. So, when you launch you are automatically accessible for everyone. The service also works on demand. Users can request websites to be translated when they need it.

“We use Azure to create a ‘Signing Studio,’” explains Mark Applin, Signly CEO. “It grabs the English straight from the website and fires it straight into the teleprompter for the Deaf translator working from a home studio.”

From there, the video goes back to Azure, and straight onto the web page. And when you update your website, a notification is automatically sent to Signly to update that section. This means all your users are getting the right information at the right time.

The BSL user experience

When Tim showed the website to other BSL users, he said they were amazed and relieved. As one Signly user said: “Wow. That’s wonderful, that’s really beautiful. I’ve had a problem with all kinds of things, whether it’s doctors or banking and nobody will help me with the English. And I don’t know any of that in English… I have to go to Citizen’s Advice. There’s just barriers everywhere. All the companies just won’t help you.”

“People were getting emotional just to see something in their language.”

– Tim Scannell, Signly ambassador

The future of our accessibility journey with sign language

Working with Signly has shown me the massive opportunity it has in democratising access to everyone. Our values are right there on our website. We aim to help everyone achieve more. And we want to not just talk the talk but to walk the walk. Signly helps us achieve this goal. This is the start of a journey. This pilot is a good first step to see how we can scale the technology across other websites. In the future we can even perhaps scale it to our partners and customers.

“I think with Microsoft being such a massive leader, it could have a huge impact on so many other firms and organisations and what can be done. Every website should have sign language content. It makes deaf people feel accepted,” says Tim.

Another Signly user agrees with Tim. “It [BSL on websites] would be a massive benefit. Less stressed, I’d know how to communicate. I wouldn’t constantly have to ask what does this mean, what does that mean. It would give us equality. I can learn at the same time.”

How Signly could transform other industries

It’s also a great opportunity for the public sector to deliver important information to BSL users. For example, the NHS could use it to provide fixed information around vaccinations, as suggested by a Signly user: “They [The NHS] send me a leaflet about the vaccine, and I said, ‘I just can’t read it’. I’ve not had any information about the vaccine. I keep saying ‘where is the interpreter?’ They’re all wearing masks and I can’t lip read them. If I had a bad reaction, I don’t know what to look out for.”

Media companies can also leverage the technology, to provide more equitable access to news and content. “You miss things on the news…The BBC website should have sign language on the news [page]. And the NHS,” adds a BSL user.

Your accessibility journey will be constantly evolving as you learn. It’s important to remember that implementing inclusive designs in your services and products is not a ‘one and done’ job. It’s a continuous process that you must update and approach in new ways. And working with companies like Signly, you can easily scale out these innovations. This endeavour is a stepping stone for us at Microsoft. It’s one we are proud of and hope to expand on.

Find out more

Learn more about Signly

Our accessibility commitment

Help Signly and take part in their social impact research

Resources to empower your development teams

Accessibility fundamentals

Learn the basics of web accessibility

About the author

Great stories demand heroes, emotions, and insight. As Storytelling & Digital Destinations Lead at Microsoft UK, Victoria Oakes places these principles at the heart of Microsoft UK’s content output. In this role, she drives to unify messaging and content across Microsoft using insights at the heart. Through her passion for engaging copy, visual storytelling, and data-driven insights, she truly cares about content being useful, interesting and easy to digest. As a philanthropy advocate, Victoria strongly believes in using technology for social impact, strengthening empowerment and inclusion for all and environmental sustainability.

The post How to empower even more people by challenging accessibility standards appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.