Navigating a new development model

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solutions once frustrated both callers and developers with repeated “sorry, I didn’t understand” messages. In traditional software development, you wrote code to send an API request, parse a defined response and handle known errors in predictable ways. Testing was clear-cut.

Today, with LLM-based agents, development works differently. Developers guide models to say “I don’t know” when appropriate – an essential part of building trustworthy experiences. This requires prompting the model to reason probabilistically, rather than following fixed rules.

The shift means guiding the model to associate customer intent with the correct API call and the necessary parameters to execute the API call successfully – a more flexible, less deterministic approach.

Designing for consistency and clarity

Even small changes in phrasing or context can lead to variations in the model’s interpretation. As a result, evaluating performance is no longer about binary success. Instead, it’s about assessing how reliably the model maps natural language to structured API calls across a wide variety of inputs, edge cases and unseen user behaviour.

With new metrics and processes required, bridging the gap from proof-of-concept to production-grade application becomes a significant business challenge. Indeed, Gartner predicts that at least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof-of-concept by the end of 2025. As AI technology advances, aligning enterprise expectations, workflows and development methods will be critical to delivering long-term value.

Voice AI’s transformative promise

Even with these new dynamics, the opportunity for voice AI agents is vast. Contact centres – complex, high-volume environments – may be transformed by agentic solutions that can scale, support human agents or enable autonomous customer experiences.

For the first time, voice becomes a truly intelligent interface. AI agents can interact conversationally, adapt in real time, and generate new insights into customer preferences and the overall customer journey at a previously unimaginable scale.

This isn’t just a new channel – it’s a smarter way to support one of the enterprise’s most personal customer touchpoints.

Building for production: PolyAI’s approach

PolyAI has worked with LLMs since 2017, partnering with leading enterprises like Pacific Gas & Electric, Caesars Entertainment and Unicredit to deploy voice agents that manage millions of conversations with fluency and enterprise-grade reliability.

That experience shaped PolyAI Agent Studio – our enterprise platform designed to help teams build, manage and continuously improve production-grade voice agents.

Powering our platform is a tightly integrated suite of proprietary models: Owl for speech recognition and Raven for reasoning. These models give us something off-the-shelf systems can’t – fine-grained control, deep observability and continuous learning from real-world conversations.

With reinforcement fine-tuning, our agents become more reliable over time, improving how they respond, manage uncertainty and support seamless customer conversations.

Our context-orchestration framework lets developers connect from CRMs, telephony, APIs or user history with precision, allowing personalised, brand-consistent interactions at scale while limiting the risk of hallucinations.

At the heart of our platform is fluency: enabling AI agents to respond with relevance, continuity and clarity.

Deploying with Microsoft Azure

By extending Agent Studio to Microsoft Azure, enterprises gain more control over how they deploy PolyAI agents, whether for compliance, data residency or closer integration with their Microsoft ecosystem.

We’re also building integrations with Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Microsoft Teams, enabling faster deployment of voice AI agents into high-value customer service workflows.

Find out more

Visit the Microsoft Azure Marketplace for more about PolyAI’s solution

Read MIT’s Technology Review Insights Report on Customizing Generative AI

About the author

Michael Chen is the VP of Strategic Alliances and Corporate Development at PolyAI. He leads a team focused on expanding PolyAI’s collaborative relationships with cloud providers, technology partners and global systems integrators. Michael has been on the frontier of the LLM and generative AI revolution since 2020, bringing expertise and perspectives across corporate strategy, customer experience, product marketing and business transformation.

The post How PolyAI helps enterprises deploy production-grade voice AI agents faster 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.

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.

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.

I think this is true. There are always going to be more patients. But as recent times have shown, there’s hardly ever going to be enough of everything else.

The last two years has certainly exacerbated this situation. Backlogs of patients requiring care have multiplied dramatically. We’ve essentially lost two years’ worth of elective treatment. And waiting lists are worse than ever.

Despite this, I’m actually optimistic. We’ve known that we would have to face up to these challenges eventually. The pandemic has significantly brought them forward, but we’ve also learnt a lot about ourselves over the last few years.

It is a fact of life that demand for healthcare will grow faster than our supply of doctors and nurses. As a result, we must be open to how technology can help.

What’s interesting, however, is that a lot of the challenges that we didn’t know how to answer have already been by necessity. We didn’t know if people would use their phones and various technology to interact with healthcare. But they have and it’s not been anywhere near as problematic as we thought.

In other words, it turns out that technology is much further along than we thought it would be for our sector.

More importantly, we can now much more confidently use it to deal with more current and future issues. We can tackle key problems such as clearing waiting lists, improving time management and more.

The importance of looking at the bigger picture

I may be Chief Clinical Information Officer at Microsoft, but I’m also a paediatrician. Spending my Fridays at the children’s hospital is still my favourite part of the week. This is where I get to really see life on the shop floor. As a result, I can help find the digital solutions to help improve it.

And the inspiration can really come from anywhere. For example, at the hospital we use an orange, lever arch folder where we store all the relevant information about a patient; tests we’ve run, follow-ups and more.

One time the orange folder broke. There was panic, because we didn’t have another ‘orange’ folder to replace it (we only had black ones). We ended up having to order a new one online.

Now, the beauty of my job is not just finding a solution to this particular – and relatively small – issue. But to solve them on a much broader scale. Replacing the orange folder shouldn’t be the end goal. There are so many other parts of that system that we cannot just improve but transform for the better.

Using the cloud to stay agile in healthcare

One of the big issues we’ve always had in healthcare is that there’s always another revolution coming, another update or digital initiative that needs to be actioned.

To prevent the inevitable fatigue that comes from lots of change, we need to ensure everything we are doing is scalable and fit for the future. I believe that the answer to this is the cloud. We’re never going to be able to implement all of this if we do it as a small step. The last two years have shown us that we need to take some big steps. Cloud technology gives us just that. Combine that with Microsoft’s suite of CRM apps, like Dynamics 365, and we will be able to deliver patients with specific information, send them personalised advice and engage with them more.

Just look at the work we’re doing with Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. They have moved their entire electronic record to the cloud. This has given them functionalities and scale that will serve them well into the future.

Leeds covers one and a half million patients. They’ve got about 20,000 staff and the sheer number of electronic forms that they must process has grown by 300,000 since 2015. That’s hundreds of thousands more forms that patients and caregivers are filling in. Additionally, they then need to be processed. It would be a nearly impossible task if they hadn’t just moved it all to the Azure cloud.

Beyond making them far more scalable this has also helped them to use their extra computing elsewhere. And therefore, to do things such as keeping track of data, analyse it and review it for any future needs.

Simplifying processes and consultations via Teams

Another technology that’s proving key in solving backlogs is Microsoft Teams.

The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust caregivers lead the way in this respect. They carry out virtual consultations that allow patients to utilise teams for clinical interactions.

This has double benefits. On one hand, it allows caregivers to visit their patients without having them come to the clinic. On the other, it gives patients greater visibility of their appointments. Additionally, they can reschedule without having to go through back-and-forth calls.

I have learned the pains of contacting patients through regular phones the hard way. For privacy reasons, the NHS forbids us to leave voicemails to patients, unless that person has a message that states who they are. Whilst understandable, this is a rather outdated policy as now no one picks up a private callers’ phone and too few people check their voicemail.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to start saying to our patients directly during the consultation: I’m going to send you a link for you to have the next appointment. However, even better than that they can choose a time that works best and it will automatically go into both our calendars.

And if you need to change it, you can do that online without wasting time with inefficient telephone calls.

Managing resources though Power Apps

Another brilliant way to use technology to clear backlogs and waiting times is using data and data-centric low and no code solutions.

We all obsess about this ability to try and find the right data and then be able to use it meaningfully to achieve better patient outcomes. With the help of cloud technology, organisations are increasingly shifting towards huge data centres. Here, they can analyse data in real time and use it to make decisions and forecast, identify patterns and much more.

Just look at the extraordinary work by the Northern Care Alliance. They use Microsoft Power Apps to get continuous, real-time updates on the state of beds and bays at their facilities.

In operation since before the pandemic, this solution turned out to be a game changer during the tough months of lockdowns, when the status of wards and beds would evolve constantly. Thanks to the solution, staff at the Northern Care Alliance were able to check availability on real-time dashboards and allocate available beds in a much more efficient way.

Driving digital modernisation in healthcare

The most amazing thing about the NHS is that it’s simply the world’s biggest team. Every person working within it is there to look after patients and is committed to doing things better.

If we can use technology to let this huge team be more efficient and work better together, we’ll really be able to help clear the backlog and relieve staff of all the simple repetitive tasks that frustrate them and get in the way of treating patients.

Organisations often ask me how they can start this much-needed digital modernisation in the most effective way.

My advice is to simply start off by looking around you. See what other organisations are doing, and then pick up the phone and find out how they got started and what is going well. Also keep an open mind. In my experience, there is always a group of people that will remain negative. But don’t be discouraged by that – once you get started, you’ll be surprised at how quickly momentum can build and what seemed implausible becomes routine.

Lastly, make sure that you set and over-communicate your goals. Embracing new technologies will help empower all caregivers to achieve more – freeing them to spend more time caring for patients and leading to better outcomes. Plus, you’ll be making sure the foundations are strong for continued innovation, ensuring healthcare is fit for the future.

Microsoft Envision UK

London, May 19 2022
Join us at our first in-person UK conference in over two years where we will explore the road ahead in 2022 and beyond.

Reserve your FREE space now

Find out more

 Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The transformation imperative in healthcare

The Digital Healthcare Playbook

Healthcare Delivery Cloud Solutions

About the author

Umang is a Chief Clinical Information Officer at Microsoft with a passion for ensuring that technology delivers its full potential and value in healthcare. He is also a practising NHS paediatrician and has a background working across multiple sectors covering both payors and providers. Umang was a foundational member of start-up Babylon Health which had a successful IPO in 2021 on the New York Stock Exchange. With Microsoft, Umang is helping shape the digital transformation in health across the UK which is aiming for better outcomes through seamless integration and innovation. 

The post Using technology to manage the healthcare backlog appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Turning great customer wins into bottom-line results and satisfied customers takes coordination, collaboration, and insight across every aspect of the end-to-end business. Organisations must rely on faultless management of both operational and project management processes.

So how can construction businesses get ahead, and stay ahead, in an industry that has traditionally been slow to optimise? How can they mobilise their IT landscapes to break down operational boundaries and remove information silos?

Project management complexities

It’s hard to imagine a project that is more complex and fragile than a large construction job. The path from initial estimate and quote to final approval and delivery is long. It is littered with potential pitfalls and bottlenecks. The critical components of the project itself – including resources, skill sets, physical materials and costs – need to be orchestrated across the foundational operational processes of the business. It draws in cross-department expertise such as finance, HR, sales, procurement, supply chain, logistics, project management, quality assurance and legal.

Typically, the interface between daily project management and business operations extends across multiple, disparate IT systems. Often, the consolidation of information across these systems is only possible with a lot of repetitive, manual work and some rather hefty Excel spreadsheets.

At best, this manual process is time-intensive and error-prone. At worst, the lack of real-time insight can mean that the process can go off the rails before the project team is even aware that there is an issue. The result can be missed deadlines, reduced profitability and dissatisfied customers. Not to mention stressed and frustrated employees.

Connecting operations and project management

Connecting the entire business in one cloud-based solution enables a free flow of business and project information across departments and functions. It also promotes a new level of collaboration and knowledge sharing across extended project teams.

Once implemented, the positive effect of truly joined-up solution like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Project Operations will be seen and experienced across every area of the business.

Joined-up systems align daily activities and processes with operational practices and corporate goals. This, in turn, gives each employee a shared baseline from which to collaborate, share knowledge and leverage skill sets.

With IT and collaboration barriers removed, construction organisations can enable significant improvements. They can see this in the way they handle the daily task of monitoring, managing and delivering on project expectations. Improvements that can be seen and felt in the business every day in the complex and large-scale orchestration that is at the heart of modern construction.

As Paul Fryer, Construction Industry Account Executive at DXC*, a Microsoft partner states: “Project operations comes in multiple ‘flavours’. DXC helps customers decide how best to take advantage of project ops and get the most business value from it.”

Four real-world benefits of removing organisational silos

1. 1. More flexible and intuitive project management: Base your planning on accurate and actionable project information from across the organisation. Additionally, document and surface planning with familiar Microsoft Project capabilities and visualisations. Project managers can then spend less time building plans and more time on ensuring that projects are running smoothly. And the whole business can easily stay in the loop.
   2. More effective and satisfied employees: Scheduling the right people with the right skills at the right time will help you to avoid classic workload issues. You will also get the most from your project teams. Add in simplified processes for time tracking and expense management and reimbursement and you have a great baseline for optimising resource usage. It will also help find and keep the best talent in the industry.
   3. A more predictable and healthier bottom line: Discover more accurate, experience-based estimating, quoting and forecasting, more effective use of materials and resources, and more informed and compliant project accounting.  Your project profitability will reflect every cost you have saved and deadline you have nailed.
   4. Improved collaboration and insight: Make data-driven decisions in real-time and collaborate easier with an organisation-wide collaboration platform – such as Microsoft Teams. Each new decision is based on experience from previous engagements. This can be aligned to support business goals and changing market demands.

Build agility and resilience in project management

In the ultra-competitive and dynamic world of construction, success is dependent on the ability to react quickly to changing industry, economic, legislative and cultural factors. Retaining and building on this success relies on the ability to consistently make business decisions. These decisions must not only be sound. They must also more insightful than your competitors.

Construction is an industry where fortunes can be made and lost based on the success of a few key projects. Therefore, it is essential that the IT systems deployed by construction companies are more like the final brick and mortar solutions they deliver for their customers. Practical, accessible and built to last.

*Note: DXC is one of the Dynamics partners we have at Microsoft to help us deliver on this proposal. DXC has many years’ experience of rolling out multi-country professional services deployments, supported by close alignment with the Microsoft Product Team for PSA and now Project Operations, enabling us to stay ahead with product developments and ensuring deployments with security and best practice baked in.

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About the author

Toby is a Technical Specialist for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, focussing on Professional Services and the Construction industries. Critically, since the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Toby has been the UK Field Lead for Project Operations working on global projects across a multitude of different industries. Toby has been working in the technology and ERP space for several years. He is passionate about driving and providing business and digital transformation by realising the business value through transformational systems. He enjoys empowering organisations to get that ‘competitive edge’ over their competitors.

Toby has been working with the Project Operations Core Engineering and Marketing teams to develop the GTM strategy for the new products and drive new revenue from customers adopting the new platform.

The post How digital modernisation can help innovate the construction industry appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

I recently joined in a panel discussion with business leaders in the telcom and tech industries who spoke about how organisations can start planning thier own customer experience transformations.

“In an industry where you have a lot of competition and very low switching costs; products and services are becoming increasingly commoditised. Telcos need to differentiate in customer experience to grow,” says a telecom industry lead.

The future state of customer experiences

Customer expectations have outpaced their present experiences. This makes ensuring positive experiences vital for a brand’s reputation and profitability.

A 2018 PwC report into customer experiences found that 43 percent of customers surveyed would pay a premium for greater convenience, while 42 percent would pay for a more friendly experience.

Pair with this the importance of telecoms updating their infrastructure and moving to 5G – now has never been a better time for organisations to reduce silos and create unified data streams. An organisation needs to ensure all their employees have access to and can understand data to provide these pivotal customer experiences.

However, what we are seeing is a lag between business strategy and the technological upgrade needed to support it.

“You can spot all the exciting opportunities in the horizon, but it’s difficult to execute those given the current tech and infrastructure that telcos are operating on,” says an industry expert. “There is a real job to be done around modernisation within IT and within architecture.”

So how do telecoms modernise and develop better customer experiences?

A truly integrated customer journey

“Designing and delivering innovative new products and services that create demand, reasons to stay beyond switching costs, and then reasons to recommend means not just meeting – but exceeding – every single interaction,” says a telecom industry lead.

They add that omnichannel has gone further, into opti-channel – where each touchpoint has a thoughtful role to play in the customer experience. However, the challenge is the handovers – where critical information gets lost between agents or touchpoints and the customer gets frustrated.

Take advantage of a solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 that integrates data from across all silos – sales, marketing, supply chains, and more into the customer journey. When the customer is at a certain touchpoint, all the information needed to help that customer is there. It can even provide predictive insights, so you can help the customer before they realise they need assistance. This means your employees can focus on providing quick, reliable and personalised service.

Engaging customer experiences that generate trust

Telecom firms handle a lot of unique data around customer identities. And security is highly important to customers and your reputation. “When we look at identity across any industry right now, it’s about the security and privacy of the end consumer and the trust that you have. That is part of the experience,” says an industry expert.

There’s still a stereotype that privacy and security hinder employee productivity. But with solutions that have built-in intelligent security, you can actually enable productivity. AI and automation take over low-level monitoring, so IT teams can focus on more important tasks. Integrated security that authenticates users and endpoints works in the background. This means employees can get on with their work, while data stays protected.

Empower customer experiences with AI and analytics

“The focus has morphed from [analytics] being an afterthought to ‘I need to do this because it’s important for my business,’” says an industry partnership leader.

AI and analytics are helping telecom firms build new data-driven operation models within their organisation. It can help augment customer touchpoints and create stronger brand experiences. A chatbot powered by AI, for example can answer frequently asked questions. An app can help a customer onboard and activate new products and services instantly. Putting this data into your employees’ hands means they can provide better and more personalised experiences. It also can be used to streamline operations. This gives employees more time to spend with customers or more time creating innovative services.

“If you can reduce the call handling time, if you can give more specific and relevant service more rapidly, that is a huge improvement on your customer satisfaction score or NPS score. That translates directly into revenue,” says an industry expert. “Giving sales associates access to those kinds of data points is absolutely critical. There is a significant area here of augmenting the physical experience.”

From there, you can use the data collected to start turning insight into value and discovering where business opportunities lay.

A 360-degree customer view

For employees to provide the best customer experiences, they need to have a full view of customer data. Reducing silos and unifying data is the best way to do this.

“The single customer view and the customer data platform project are absolutely critical,” says an expert. “Effectively building the single customer view and then having a way to have systems and data visualisations to be able to democratise that across the business.”

Our industry partnership leader agrees. “I think the most important point is democratising data,” they say. “Standardising data and making it simple to use in the form of APIs.”

Solutions that present data in easily digestible ways, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Power BI ensure your employees are confident interacting with and understanding it. Power Apps empowers your people to be able to build low and no code apps and solutions.

Part of democratising data is to ensure that your employees have the skills to do this. Make a digital literacy programme available, leveraging a mix of self-service, on-demand and online training to ensure everyone gets re- and up-skilled.

Effective customer experiences are the new premium services

“The limiting factor to innovation and the customer experience used to be our own imagination. But we can literally design and build anything we come up with today,” says a telcom business leader.

Reduce silos, unify business data and integrate secure solutions that provide 360-degree customer views. You can then easily create experiences that delight and engage customers throughout their lifecycle. This data can be used to drive real value, turning telecom firms into real drivers of business and create new partnerships, innovative products, and build sustainable growth.

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Empower your employees to thrive

Discover how to build a data-driven organisation

About the author

Passionate about the transformation technology can bring, Stuart is an Industry Lead for Media and Telecommunications within Microsoft, where he relishes any opportunity to offer his entrepreneurial spirit and natural storytelling ability to challenge organisations to ‘refocus the lens’ in order to create a successful impact through the adoption of innovation.

He is a lead spokesperson for innovation within the media industry and has played both sides of the fence. Stuart started his career as a BBC Journalist before moving into a number of roles in media production. From here, the pull of technology innovation took him into development and R&D, then corporate strategic management and change consultancy for some of the biggest media brands around the globe.

Over the last 20+ years, Stuart has helped deliver major business transformation having held significant change roles at companies ranging from the BBC, Endemol Shine Group, to Sony.

The post How to make customer experience the key differentiator in telecoms appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.