Fast, efficient service, it’s what everybody wants. And today’s field service organizations are answering the call by adopting next-generation AI technologies that can help them be more flexible and responsive to customers while also driving revenue, reducing overtime, and ensuring more predictable arrival and completion times. Service managers, field technicians, and customers all benefit.

Streamlining work order and resource management to improve service metrics is always top of mind for field service managers. Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service brings the power of next-generation AI to field service managers, enabling them to automate work order management and optimize scheduling with data-driven recommendations based on travel time, resource availability, and skill sets. Recently, we announced new capabilities in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service web app that enable field managers to interact with Copilot using natural language to find pertinent information about work orders. Copilot can assist in retrieving work order details, summarizing them, and presenting them in an easily digestible format. Copilot can also go beyond searching work orders to searching other Microsoft Dataverse records including accounts, contacts, opportunities, and more. In addition, field service managers can now configure data that Copilot uses to generate work order summaries in Dynamics 365 Field Service for more advanced reviews before closing work orders to ensure they’re meeting customer needs.

Resource Scheduling Optimization (RSO) is an add-in to Dynamics 365 Field Service that automatically suggests the technicians, equipment, and facilities (such as warehouses) best equipped to handle a given job. Ghazanfar Riaz, Head of Digital Consulting at Visionet, a Microsoft Managed Partner, believes that having the ability to extend Field Service in conjunction with Resource Scheduling Optimization and Microsoft Copilot Studio can help service organizations be more customer-centric, flexible, and efficient.

“Dynamics 365 Field Service has catalyzed a shift towards smarter, more efficient field services management. With the integration of Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365 Field Service, service organizations are now more equipped to consistently exceed customer expectations and build long-lasting relationships at every point of interaction.”

Ghazanfar Riaz, Head of Digital Consulting, Visionet

Microsoft’s latest update to Dynamics 365 Field Service introduces enhanced Copilot capabilities, designed to serve as a field service manager’s AI assistant. Using natural language, managers can now converse with Copilot to swiftly extract essential details and summaries from work orders and transform complex data into clear, actionable insights. Field service managers can also use Copilot to adeptly navigate Dataverse records, including accounts, contacts, and opportunities, for a more holistic view of the customer landscape.

Additionally, field service managers can tailor how Copilot generates work order summaries to help ensure the best possible schedules for field technicians and the best possible outcomes for customers. By using Copilot in Dynamics 365, field service management becomes a more intuitive and intelligent experience, ensuring customer needs are not just understood but anticipated and met.

Let’s take a closer look at how Visionet extended Dynamics 365 Field Service and RSO capabilities to achieve a more customized, adaptable system and greater efficiency in resource scheduling scenarios.

Optimizing schedules for field service technicians

With rising customer expectations, many service organizations have opted to supplement their operations by using contractors or other third-party services to address any gaps in service. In these cases where contractors or third parties are involved, knowing what resources to use—especially when automating resource scheduling for efficiency—can be tricky and time consuming. In addition, contractors and third-party resources are often more expensive than in-house technicians, so many service organizations want to ensure they’re using those resources strategically.

Service managers often find themselves manually reallocating contractors or other third-party resources, consuming valuable time. Visionet identified an opportunity to enhance Field Service RSO, which facilitates automated schedule creation, by extending its capabilities to offer improved scheduling insights and enable automation on a larger scale.  Service managers can efficiently assign bookings by setting preferences for factors such as cost (weighing the use of in-house technicians against contractors), skill set, territory, and availability. With these preferences established, service managers and dispatchers can use this enhanced RSO feature to optimize daily or weekly schedules more effectively and generate precise recommendations.

Visionet is collaborating with service organizations to further augment Field Service RSO by integrating Copilot automation capabilities. Using natural language interactions, field service managers can quickly pinpoint specific resources or assets needed for jobs. This helps ensure that work orders are evenly distributed, skill sets are appropriately matched to tasks, and more costly resources are employed judiciously to maintain cost efficiency.

Managing downtime for field service technicians

Downtime for field technicians, particularly when it’s unexpected, can disrupt service and revenue. Service managers often find themselves needing to reorganize schedules due to unforeseen circumstances such as illness, emergency calls, mandatory training, or meetings that prevent technicians from being in the field. Recognizing this challenge, Visionet enhanced the Field Service RSO by incorporating customizations that improve scheduling flexibility.

Now, service managers can specify planned, non-productive events like mandatory training sessions, weekly team meetings, work breaks, and other time off directly within the system and specify whether they are one-time or recurring. The RSO uses this information to automatically adjust schedules accordingly and ensure no service interruptions occur.

Responding in real time to daily schedule changes

For many service organizations, things can change from minute to minute. Customers can experience outages due to weather, utility maintenance, road construction—the possibilities are endless. In addition, field technicians can get held up by traffic or an accident on the freeway, or even by a customer issue that was more complicated than what was initially scoped. And sometimes, customers need to cancel or reschedule service—even when a technician is already on the way. To help with this, Visionet enhanced Field Service RSO so service managers can use the Intra Day feature to help optimize work order schedules on the fly. With this feature, service managers can dynamically adjust a day’s schedule in response to various situations such as cancellations or rescheduling, incoming high-priority trouble tickets, unexpected gaps in technicians’ schedules, delays in ongoing assignments, or fluctuations in resource availability. This level of agility in scheduling ensures that service disruptions are handled with maximum efficiency.

Take, for instance, a scenario where a customer faces an unexpected broadband outage during the day, and the problem can’t be fixed remotely. In that case, a service manager may dispatch a field technician to the location to resolve the issue quickly and limit service interruption. Reviewing the Field Service RSO board, the manager can find an available technician with the expertise that’s best suited to address the customer’s issue promptly. The manager then assigns the new work order and reorganizes the day’s schedule to accommodate this change.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

Interact with Copilot using new capabilities in the Field Service web app.

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Stepping up field service with next-generation AI

We’re excited to be sharing all the ways you can use Copilot Studio with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service to extend AI capabilities that can help make your field service organization more efficient, productive, and responsive to customers.

We invite you to visit the Microsoft booth (216), along with our partners, at Field Service Palm Springs to discover how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service works alongside frontline teams to streamline work order management and increase technician productivity. Learn more about AI-powered experiences for your frontline on Monday, May 6, by attending:

• Chair Opening Remarks by Héctor Garcia Tellado, General Manager, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Frontline Applications
• The Customer Journey Panel: Revaluating and Remapping Service Workflows to Optimize Automation Tool Adoption and Enhance CX

The post Enabling fast, flexible, cost-effective service with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Both winning and retaining customers requires a unified customer understanding and ability to orchestrate experiences across sales, marketing, and service. To deliver exceptional experiences, businesses need a solution that breaks down data silos between applications and departments so sellers, marketers, and service agents can get the right information in the right interface at the right time.

Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1

Release wave 1 brings new innovations and capabilities to transform your business. 

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Imagine if your sellers could effortlessly collaborate with contributing stakeholders and had the exact right information at the exact right time to make a persuasive sales pitch that speaks to the needs and wants of each individual customer to cement the sale.

Imagine if your marketing team could create the perfect end-to-end campaign, one that aligns input across departments, that pulls in the perfect target audiences, that includes campaign assets aligned with your brand identity. And instead of doing so in months, being able to create a good draft…in minutes.

Imagine if each time customers interacted with your company, no matter what department or touchpoint they engage with, they felt known, and each interaction built on the last.

With generative AI and our Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience solutions, these “imagine ifs” are reality.

The innovative capabilities that are coming to you in Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation, optimize the buying journey with the power of data, and personalize every customer interaction.

Elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation

A recent study of sales professionals showed that up to 70% of their time is used for administrative and non-selling tasks that reduce the quality of their interactions with customers.

With Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365 Sales, we enable innovative AI-enriched experiences to support sellers as they move through the sales process. We help transform sales teams from just following leads and opportunities into being trusted advisors who can predict and support customer needs.

Copilot for Sales is designed to be an invaluable assistant helping drive productivity and improve sales efficiency. It combines all the unique role-based sales capabilities with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to deliver a unified and highly relevant seller experience right within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, keeping the seller in their flow of work. Sellers can use chat to identify answers to top sales questions, whether it’s to find out more about an account or opportunity, or to view the sales pipeline. We deliver relevant sales context using natural language and prompt-based actions.

Let’s look at some of the newest features within Copilot for Sales, an application for sellers who use either Dynamic 365 Sales or Salesforce but prefer to work within their Microsoft 365 productivity apps to manage their day:

• Enhance email summaries and replies to minimize app switching and provide a response that’s aware of the customer context. Insight related to sales such as buying intent is emphasized, and suggested changes such as updates to sales stages, opportunity budgets, or estimated close dates appear in the side panel allowing instant updates.
• Easily create meeting preparation reports that give you the information you need to engage your customers confidently. You can share the meeting prep with your team members so everyone can be on the same page with knowledge about the customer and the account. Using the power of Copilot in Word combined with Sales insight from your customer relationship management (CRM) application.
• Get immediate AI-generated tips, suggestions, and advice in Microsoft Teams meetings to help sellers concentrate on the meeting dialogue and ensure they can respond quickly to requests and possible challenges, such as competitor references, by surfacing relevant information when and where they need it.
• Generate post-meeting follow-up quickly and easily allowing sellers to follow-up with tasks and notifications that are generated from the Teams intelligent recap screens and review the key questions that need to be answered. Follow-up work with their team members can be managed using deal rooms and planner activities to review task suggestions and assignments ensuring no follow-up is missed.
• Keep systems up to date without the pain of manual effort. Copilot for Sales allows for quick creation of records, such as leads and opportunities, right in the Microsoft 365 surface area. In the Copilot side panel, create new records and update fields using pre-filled suggestions without leaving the screen.

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to be our market-leading CRM solution designed to streamline sales processes, cultivate customer relationships, and expedite deal closures for businesses of all sizes. We bring the power of generative AI right inside this surface area and help sellers transform their CRM interactions to support customer conversations and land deals. With the latest release we’re helping sellers to:

• Transform the CRM sales experience by using the immersive full-screen Copilot view right in Dynamics 365 Sales. Get all key information in one place including pipeline, suggested actions, deals in progress, and real-time insights on key accounts. Sellers can query that information to get further details and insights using natural language and suggested prompts. Use it to get started every day as a homepage for all sellers using Dynamics 365.
• Make the best use of prospecting time with intelligent lead management to make sure that sales development teams are using their time wisely and focusing on leads that have a higher chance of closing quickly. In this release, we’re adding qualification criteria that incorporate signals to help show how interested the customer is. The distribution of those leads is then improved based on seller capacity and our new notification alerts make sure that sellers don’t lose the opportunity to interact when the timing is right.

Optimize the buying journey with the power of data

It all starts with data. Generative AI takes what used to be specialized and trained roles and democratizes them so customer experience (CX) professionals can use and take advantage of the data, insights, and workflows from their CRM system. Generative AI will autonomously assist customers and sellers in their day-to-day experiences to:

• Elevate customer experiences in real time: With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, CX professionals can now ensure customer profiles and associated insights are updated in real time based on data signals, allowing them to provide the most targeted and personalized experience as they engage with your website or mobile app, which will foster loyalty, increase engagement, enhance satisfaction, and drive higher conversion rates.
• Know your account better with AI-generated account summaries in Dynamics 365 Sales: With integrated data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, sellers can now quickly access a comprehensive overview of each account, enabling them to prioritize their work effectively and engage with customers in a more personalized and targeted manner.
• Maximize sales success with AI-suggested past successful deals: In Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers now have the ability to use the collective intelligence from past successful deals to identify and pursue similar opportunities effectively. This AI-driven feature simplifies the decision-making process and increases the likelihood of closing deals quickly. By analyzing personal success stories and industry-specific data, sellers can make well-informed decisions that enhance sales effectiveness. The strategic use of AI suggestions not only improves efficiency but also significantly raises the chances of winning deals, thereby boosting overall sales performance.

Personalize every customer interaction

Marketers and CX professionals are being empowered to go beyond automated spam to creating cross-channel cohesive, conversational experiences that drive loyalty and retention. The innovative capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that are releasing in this wave enable CX professionals to:

• Take campaigns from concept to launch in minutes using Copilot in Customer Insights Journeys: With Copilot, instead of breaking down a series of fragmented work items, the team begins by telling Copilot the outcome they want to achieve. In minutes, they’re presented with the new project board, curating ideas for every component central to the campaign: such as segments, content, and journeys, all ready for review. It’s fueled by unified data from all sources of customer data, brand guidelines, past campaigns, and creative briefs.
• Generate unique on-brand creative assets in minutes: No more scouring media libraries or resorting to use of stock images. You can ensure images are on brand and personalized for each audience, generated by Copilot using the new Typeface integration. Copilot allows you to generate variations that then can be used for personalization—no special photo editing abilities required.
• Personalize omnichannel experiences with no code using Optimizely: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely now unlock omnichannel personalization and experimentation capabilities, enabling marketers and citizen developers to personalize every customer touchpoint with no code or prior expertise required. By combining insights and segments from Customer Insights with Optimizely audiences, you can create experiences that are tailored to your customer’s browsing activity, their loyalty, past engagement history, and other real-time signals. Moreover, you can continue the conversation or re-target your visitors by delivering the same consistent experience through customer journeys, based on which Optimizely treatment cohort the customer was part of.

With generative AI and Copilot, we’re revolutionizing the workflow for sellers and CX professionals. First, sending personalized content at every stage of the marketing campaign, improving the quality of sales leads, and next, optimizing the productivity of sellers and enhancing every single engagement with their customers, helping them to close deals faster, all thanks to Copilot. There has never been a more exciting and productive time to be a seller or marketer. We can’t wait for you to experience it.

Learn more about 2024 release wave 1 capabilities

The future of customer experience is here, and it’s driven by cutting-edge AI technology that empowers businesses to better connect with their customers, drive sales, and improve overall satisfaction for both customers and employees. This release wave is truly driving transformative change for customer-facing roles, so get your organization set up today.

To see how all of this comes to life, watch the CX overview segment of the Business Applications Launch Event and check out the 2024 release wave 1 plans to read more about these game-changing capabilities.

The post 2024 release wave 1: Transforming experiences with Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations improve every aspect of contact center operations. We’re continuing to invest in generative AI to help contact centers create seamless self-service options for common questions. Plus, it helps every agent become a super-agent when it comes to more complex, high-touch issues.

Copilot and AI innovation in Customer Service

Since we announced Copilot capabilities a year ago, organizations have been realizing the benefits of generative AI in the contact center. Copilot answers agents’ questions, drafts email, provides case and conversation summaries, and automates time-consuming tasks. We’ve enhanced the email drafting capability further by including a contextual inline email editor, making it even easier for agents to deliver personalized service.

Also in this release, we’re enabling agents to generate AI-powered timeline highlights to get an overview of key activities like emails, notes, appointments, tasks, phone calls, and conversations. This minimizes the amount of clicking and scrolling an agent must do to get caught up on case and customer details.

Organizations can extend Copilot capabilities with prompt plug-ins in public preview this month. With plug-ins, agents can generate a summary of their customers, products, cases, or any other entities in Microsoft Dataverse without having to switch tabs or log in to a separate app.

Generative AI in external apps with Microsoft Copilot for Service

In February, we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Service, which enables organizations to use Copilot capabilities with their existing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as Salesforce, and other productivity apps like Microsoft Teams and Outlook. It helps organizations by making their knowledge more accessible. This speeds up training and problem-solving, making work easier for agents.

In Teams, agents can save time by accessing a customer’s CRM records during a meeting. Agents can update the case and contact details, and link to open CRM records from Teams.

In Outlook, Copilot for Service can draft personalized, contextual customer service emails based on predefined intents, or agents can provide their own custom intents. Copilot can also help agents catch up on email quickly by generating summaries of long email conversations and display summaries of all the activities and information of a case. They can then save the summary to the CRM system and access it later.

Preparing for meetings is easier for agents because Copilot for Service provides the case summary associated with the meeting, along with access to view and edit CRM records. Furthermore, Copilot for Service can recommend CRM updates to agents based on information it finds in Outlook, such as contacts, emails, meetings, and summaries.

Voice channel enhancements in Customer Service

The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service help organizations provide support to customers across multiple channels, including email, voice, text message, chat, and social media. This release brings several voice channel enhancements and certifications.

With enhancements to outbound dialing, agents can easily search for a customer in the outbound dialer and open the customer record right from the call history. They can now test the microphone and speakers before and during calls. Agents can also rate the call quality using a five-star rating system with the ability to describe issues with lower quality calls. We’re also enhancing customer trust, compliance, and security with sensitive data masking in data storage, during interactive voice response (IVR) sessions, and agent sessions.

IVR enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Omnichannel add-on help customers self-serve before they must speak with an agent. In addition to improved speech recognition accuracy, these new voice features enable organizations to set prompts on silence, control timeouts, enable barge-in at any step, and suppress noise. The result is a smooth, contextual experience for customers.

Customers in Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) Moderate can now access features from the voice channel. In addition, we’re submitting Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certifications for the components of the omnichannel stack in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This high-level certification for government clouds will ensure the security of newly integrated features.

Workforce management

Intelligent forecasting with Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces an AI-powered forecasting feature designed to predict service volumes and agent demands effectively. By analyzing historical data and trends, this intelligent model provides accurate predictions for up to six months into the future. Organizations can use this capability to optimize resource allocation, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction, thanks to daily and intraday forecasts for cases and conversations.

Forecasting is tailored to the unique needs of front-office and back-office operations. It distinguishes between direct customer interactions (conversations) and internal processing (cases), offering flexibility in forecasting for different service channels. This allows organizations to plan resources efficiently, ensuring optimal service levels and agent availability for both immediate and future service demands.

Operational metrics such as service level, shrinkage, and concurrency are considered in forecasting agent demand, aligning capacity with operational constraints. The model’s auto-detection of seasonality and holidays further refines accuracy, enabling businesses to adapt to service demand variations. User-friendly charts and the ability to slice forecast data by channels and queues provide valuable insights, while the export functionality enhances usability and integration with other tools.

Email enhancements

An intuitive agent experience is key to connecting with customers. Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a robust agent desktop with generative AI, collaboration tools, and productivity features in a customizable workspace.

Agents now have a more efficient way to search for customers. They can use any part of the customer’s name to quickly find the right recipient. Email addresses are displayed alongside recipient names, making it easier for agents to identify and select the correct contact. Additionally, agents can see if recipients have set an out-of-office status, so they can adjust their communication accordingly.

The enhanced email attachment experience allows agents to quickly drag and drop attachments in emails. It also includes a reminder system that prompts agents if they mention an attachment in the email but forget to include it. These capabilities help agents save time and increase productivity when handling email communications.

To benefit the support organization, we’re also introducing the ability to create multiple cases from emails. The feature allows for automatic case creation for all mailboxes that receive an email, ensuring full visibility into customer issues. It enables teams to respond independently to customer issues, without case transfers, leading to quicker first responses and improved handling times. By avoiding case transfer delays, teams can more quickly meet service level agreements.

Next-generation AI that’s ready for enterprises

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We’re putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Empower agents to resolve issues quickly using generative AI and automation.

Try it for free

Learn more and try Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Learn more about how to elevate your service with AI and enable Copilot features for your support agents.

The post AI-powered innovations enhance customer service with 2024 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

This morning’s Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, available to view on-demand, includes highlights and demonstrations of features from the release wave, as well as a firsthand look at how organizations like Lenovo, Sonepar, Ford, Omnicom Group, and G&J Pepsi are using these capabilities in transformative ways.  

Extend Microsoft 365 with role-specific Copilot capabilities

The central theme across this release wave is how, across the business and productivity applications organizations depend on, Copilot is helping to better empower employees, improve business processes, and engage customers. In fact, 68% of surveyed Copilot users told us that it helps them jumpstart their creative process, and 70% said Copilot made them more productive so that they could do their job faster and easier.¹

Since each role is unique, we have extended Copilot for Microsoft 365 even further to tailor Copilot experiences for specific business functions. This includes Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Service and the recently announced Microsoft Copilot for Finance—all integrated with the apps and data you use every day so that you can spend less time searching for data and more time engaging with customers and driving a strategic agenda for your organization.

Underpinning these Copilot extensions is Microsoft Copilot Studio, which makes it easy to customize and build your own customer and internal-facing copilots using your data and workflows. We are excited to dive deeper into Copilot this release wave and help you use it to transform your business.  

Business Applications Launch Event

Tune into demos of new capabilities, on demand.

Watch here

Transforming customer and field service with generative AI 

Release wave 1 introduces new Copilot capabilities to help customer service agents and frontline workers boost efficiency, reduce training costs, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

New Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Copilot for Service—which infuses generative AI into your existing contact center and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—include Copilot-drafted knowledge articles to streamline the knowledge creation process, as well as proactive Copilot responses for conversations with customers. 

At the launch event, we shared how Lenovo is integrating Dynamics 365 Customer Service, third-party solutions, and custom bots to scale its innovative service delivery solution, Premier Support Suite for PC devices. Thousands of agents can now provide omnichannel support to customers in 200 regions and in more than 40 languages globally.   

We also spotlight how G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned and operated Pepsi franchise bottler in the U.S., has reduced operating costs by 6.6% and increased revenue by 8% with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Power Platform. They expect Copilot to further streamline work order management and enhance their best-in-class service by giving the field service teams access to a complete picture of their accounts in real time.   

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Copilot for Service, and Dynamics 365 Field Service.  

The future of enterprise resource planning (ERP)

ERP is going through a once-in-a-generation transformation. For decades, employees across the globe have manually completed a significant amount of ERP processes daily to keep their companies running. Microsoft is pioneering a new vision for ERP—a world where ERP solutions powered by AI operate more independently, continually adjusting to evolving circumstances, involving users when necessary, and opening new possibilities for businesses.  

At the launch event, we spotlighted how Omnicom Group, a global leader in marketing communications, envisions leveraging Dynamics 365 for a new, autonomous ERP model that will help it to accelerate growth, become more efficient, and power its ability to innovate. They can use the new Copilot to optimize their strategic decision-making and transform their operational processes, such as prompting Copilot to identify opportunities for growth expansion and gauge the performance of initiatives.  

We also introduced new Copilot capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that help small and medium businesses to automate processes and complete tasks faster. A new Copilot chat pane allows users to quickly find and go to data, reveal insights, and get help with tasks. Users can prompt Copilot to create sales lines, match e-invoices with purchase orders, answer questions about data analyses, help with repetitive tasks, and more.  

Other updates include sustainability tracking, the ability to connect Business Central with Shopify B2B (business-to-business), and developer tools for Copilot.  

Explore the release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Microsoft Copilot for Finance, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Dynamics 365 Business Central.  

Accelerate development with Microsoft Power Platform 

Microsoft Power Platform is the rapid modernization platform of choice of hundreds of thousands of organizations, providing AI-first, low-code tools to build enterprise-wide solutions and automations. Copilot is seamlessly integrated across Microsoft Power Platform, empowering you to create applications, automations, and analytics through simple, natural language and conversational interactions.  

At the launch event, we demonstrate how Ford is leveraging Copilot to produce connected services to enhance the driving experience. Like Ford, organizations can take advantage of new Copilot capabilities in this release wave to transform workflows. Microsoft Power Automate introduces new ways to create cloud flows, desktop flows and process mining using natural language prompts. Microsoft Power Apps accelerates app development with enhanced user reasoning and data insights in custom apps. Microsoft Copilot Studio enables organizations to build custom copilots, with new ways to build custom prompts and generative actions, along with access to OpenAI’s custom GPTs and AI Builder models for extended scenarios.   

Explore the release plans for Power Apps, Microsoft Power Pages, Power Automate, Microsoft Power BI, and Copilot Studio.  

Deliver more personalized customer experiences  

Buyers expect businesses to cater to their unique set of needs. To do so, marketing and sales teams need a unified understanding of the customer and the ability to orchestrate experiences across marketing, sales, and service.  

Sonepar is leveraging Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to become the first global B2B electrical distributor to provide a fully digitized and synchronized omnichannel experience to every customer. With Copilot alongside sellers, Sonepar can personalize marketing content, improve the quality of leads, and enhance every engagement with customers.  

New Copilot capabilities in release wave 1 provide recommendations, summarize data, retrieve information, and perform actions in context and within the flow of work—so they can stay productive and focus time on engaging customers.  

Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event  

We invite you to tune into the launch event on-demand for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.  

Be sure to read the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan in the release planner.  

Sources:

¹ Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report: What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com) 

The post 2024 release wave 1 kicks off with hundreds of AI-powered capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Innovations announced include:

• New AI demand planning capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium, a new product offering that’s now available.
• New AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations to improve operational processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences, from sales to service.
• Updates to Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service, extending Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions that integrate with your existing contact center, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and productivity apps.

New AI capabilities with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium

In October 2023, we announced the public preview of new demand planning capabilities for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. These capabilities are available today in a new product offering, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium. The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. By combining insights with streamlined collaboration, planners can have an increased level of trust for a more reliable forecast. Customers like Poloplast, an Austrian pipe manufacturer, is using Dynamics 365 to enhance its demand planning and forecasting.      

“The storage space allocation of our goods has improved because it is now based on statistical methods surfaced in Dynamics 365 … . We have seen a measurable reduction in external storage costs as a result, significantly less than what we used to require.”

Holger Kreisel: Head of Enterprise Resource Planning, Poloplast

With general availability, we are also adding several new capabilities that significantly enhance demand planning. Users can engage with Copilot-provided data insights that bring a new level of intelligence and automation to demand forecasting, and allowing for more accurate and data-driven decision-making. The new product phase-in-phase-out process helps support smoother transitions in product life cycles, minimizing disruptions and optimizing inventory levels. The introduction of row-level security enhances data protection, allowing for granular access control and safeguarding of sensitive information. Moreover, the new cell-level commenting feature complements the existing plan-level commenting, providing users with the flexibility to annotate specific data points. This fosters a more detailed and collaborative planning process, where insights and context can be shared directly within the demand planning workspace.

New AI capabilities help boost seller productivity and close deals faster

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to bring new capabilities that extend customer insights and boost sales through intelligence, collaborative selling, and Copilot-enhanced sales processes. A new proposal summary feature recaps important details within lengthy customer proposals associated with a specific contact, opportunity, lead, or account. The summary briefs sellers on the budget, authority (decision maker), need and timeline gleaned from the proposal or agreement documents, and recommends next best steps.

Additionally, sellers can access enhanced AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations in the flow of work, including in the immersive Copilot homepage, helping them stay on top of active customer email conversations and post-meeting actions to move deals forward faster.

New lead qualification enhancements enable sellers to assign opportunities to the right seller, view an AI-generated lead qualification summary, and create multiple opportunities from a single lead. These features will be available in public preview in mid-May 2024.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales introduces new generative AI capabilities that enable sellers to access sales-specific skills, data, and actions from within Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook and Microsoft Teams. With the new conversation intelligence platform, managers can measure and guide their sellers’ activities without physically shadowing them. Sales managers can use this dashboard to coach sellers to improve their sales interactions, understand customers and analyze market trends, and get insights which will help you build a sales strategy. You can download the public preview here, available since March 15.

Activity orchestration across various accounts and activities is one of the biggest challenges for sellers. When sellers work in a collaboration space in Teams, Copilot will monitor conversations and suggest tasks based on the selling team’s activities. Once accepted, the tasks are automatically generated with assigned owners. Sellers can add a tab in the collaboration space to access and view the status of tasks assigned to team members. This capability will be generally available in mid-April 2024.

New AI innovations continue to boost agent productivity and deliver personalized experiences

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to deliver innovations that empower agents to accelerate case resolution and provide exceptional customer experiences. Agents can now get a succinct overview of the most recent and significant updates related to any record in the Dynamics 365 timeline, and swiftly catch up in just a single click. Copilot generates the streamlined timeline highlights, summarizing key developments from various activities, such as those in emails, notes, and conversations, enhancing agent productivity by minimizing unnecessary clicks and lengthy scrolling. This helps agents to have faster and clearer interactions with customers to meet their expectations.

Agents can also conveniently use Copilot inline right within the email editor, in addition to the side panel, to generate contextual draft email responses. They can refine their existing drafts with follow-up custom prompts and single-clicks, using Copilot without requiring any knowledge articles. Together, these enhancements make navigation in the workspace more flexible and deliver an easier email authoring experience. The capabilities will be generally available in North America this month with a subsequent planned rollout for other regions.

In addition to currently supported knowledge sources such as Microsoft SharePoint, Copilot can now be extended to access customer, product or case data in Microsoft Dataverse, with prompt plug-in support. Agents can get a unified experience using these plug-ins, as they no longer need to switch to other tabs and tools to connect to information residing in Microsoft Dataverse. Agents save time as well, as Copilot can automatically identify the right prompt plug-in needed, based on the question being asked and through a deep understanding of the intent implied by the question. Available in public preview later this month, support for prompt plug-ins created in Microsoft Copilot Studio helps agents deliver faster resolution and increased customer satisfaction.

AI innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel capabilities also significantly uplevel self-service automation, redirecting more cases that would be typically escalated to an agent. Customers can engage with a robust conversational AI driven experience, with IVR enhancements that now include fine-tuning speech for optimized authoring, improved speech recognition accuracy, and an overall better customer experience when dealing with interrupts, latencies, and information collection.

Additionally, Copilot for Service features previously available in preview status will reach general availability later this month. These include the ability to use Copilot in Outlook and Teams to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and more. Download the Copilot for Service app to experience Copilot for Service in Teams and Outlook.

In May, we will introduce in preview the ability for agents to ask Copilot for answers to questions about CRM data—such as case, contact, or knowledge details, as well as use Copilot to summarize case details.  

Be sure to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan, in the release planner.

Business Applications Launch Event

Learn about new features and capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

Register today

Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in to the Business Applications Launch Event this Wednesday, April 10, at 9 AM Pacific Time for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.

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After shipping 13 publicly available Microsoft Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that enable marketing teams to ask Copilot questions about their data, receive ideas for content from key points they want to make, define audiences and journeys in everyday words, understand their data quality, or get a summarized answer from multiple sources on how to use a feature within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (to name a few), we realized that Copilot can help our marketing teams not just with tasks, but can completely change their workflow.  

This workflow in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will enable marketers to deliver unparalleled customer experiences (CXs). This could encompass a myriad of scenarios, from a marketing campaign for a new product or promotion, to managing how companies interact with their customers in key moments at scale.

The new Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

The new Copilot in Customer Insights in now available in preview.

Register and try it

Take for example a theme park—as customers scan their tickets to ride attractions, they can receive personalized messages and notifications across their preferred channels be it: in-app, web, text message, or email. This not only enhances customer experience by making the most out of their visit but also enables the company to maximize customer spending.

Companies often spend a tremendous amount of time building these campaigns and experiences. With the growing demand for digital and mobile experiences, coupled with the need to use customer data from an expanding array of disconnected systems to personalize and trigger the experiences, the time and cost to deliver continues to rise.

Our conversations with numerous companies illuminated a common pain point—the process to deliver a CX project or campaign can extend from 12 to 15 weeks (about three and a half months). There are no signs this will decrease in length.

It’s not surprising why. The current marketing workflow resembles a complex team sport, requiring multiple contributors focused on different aspects—audience, journey, content, and the delivery channel.

Most teams create campaigns starting with a blank canvas; assembling, testing, and going live; then tracking the analytics to ensure everything is going well and any drop-off points are addressed. The complexity and coordination across people affect more than the time to market, it affects the quality and level of personalization delivered to the end customer.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will completely change the game.

“At Campari Group, we’re excited by the opportunities these new Copilot capabilities will bring us to streamline our digital marketing processes—driving collaboration and enhancing our ability to deliver a truly engaging consumer experience, whilst staying one step ahead of the competition!”

David Hand – Global IT Manager, CRM, Campari

Companies have data that ground Copilot in brand styles, tone, language, and imagery. Briefs contain a lot of key information about the intent, success, branding, and key points. Over time, data from prior projects or campaigns will drive the continuous improvement of business results.

Armed with this data, what if you could describe the outcomes you want,
and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights could take the lead?

Our vision has four key areas of innovation:

1. We’re removing complex UIs that are difficult to navigate and use, instead Copilot will provide dynamic user experiences (UX) that come to you based on what you are trying to achieve. Examples of this are the dynamic project board and analytics.
2. Instead of marketers having to start from a word or pixel for every element of the project or campaign, Copilot provides data-driven suggestions that allows you to curate your project instead of having to create every piece. Everything starts connected and Copilot keeps it connected and in sync making any downstream changes saving the marketer time and eliminating a class of errors due to partial changes. Choose from suggested images, emails, audiences, journeys, and more instead of having to create each element from scratch. We don’t believe any of the suggestions will be 100% of what the marketing team needs, what we do know is that even if it’s only 60% the way there, it will save 60% of the time needed to launch the project.
3. We’re removing the constraint of resources limiting the quality of experience and depth of personalization. Instead of personalizing to four cohorts, Copilot will personalize to 64 cohorts or more. But then, you need confidence in what you’re delivering to customers. We are innovating in new UX and Copilot capabilities that will allow marketing teams to review and approve at Copilot scale where instead of having to review 100 variations across the journey, Copilot will tell you the key variations to review and tweak and make corrections on your behalf.
4. Today, after a project or campaign goes live, you need to assign a person to track the analytics and find where customers are dropping off. That person then needs to work with the right people to improve the results. Now, Copilot can track the analytics on behalf of the marketing team and proactively notify of optimizations with suggested options that allow the team to curate rather than create and deliver business success.

We’re partnering with Typeface to deliver this vision, and it plays a key role in enabling scaling on-brand multimodal content personalization in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Typeface understands your brand in depth and utilizes that understanding to deliver text and images that align to companies’ brand guidelines enabling one-on-one personalization with on-brand images at a scale that wasn’t viable in terms of time and cost before.

“Copilot holds the potential to be a real game-changer. Its ability to seamlessly align our business goals with community values has the potential to save us valuable time on internal processes. This efficiency translates to quicker iterations and more frequent connections with our audience. It’s not just shaping up to be a tool but a strategic advantage.”

Martin Nicholson – Digital Engagement Manager,  Rare Ltd.,
Xbox – Sea of Thieves

This innovation is not years away, not months, not even weeks. Today, we’re happy to announce that our first public preview focusing on curation rather than creation is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in English, in all regions. Sign up to be one of the first to preview and experience the new capabilities.

We invite you to explore this transformative journey as Copilot takes the reins, opening a new era in marketing workflows. Join us in redefining how work gets done.

Learn more:

• Register and access Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Watch our latest webinar on Streamlining Marketing with AI in Microsoft Copilot!
• Watch the New Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Read the release note on Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Check the release W1 2024 video for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Discover more about Typeface.
• Read Microsoft’s commitment to responsible AI.

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Methodology and purpose

Forrester’s TEI study is a methodology developed specifically to assist companies with the complexities of procuring technology solutions. The TEI study also aids technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value proposition. To these ends, the TEI study discussed here provides a framework for business-decision-makers to assess the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Ultimately, the financial impact of the 2023 study is a projection for a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses that currently use Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These businesses’ experiences and the interview results are aggregated to create a composite organization to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks. For this study, the composite organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic organization that operates at multiple locations around the world. It has 5,000 employees total, and 500 of those are customer support agents who support a growing customer base. Each agent works an average of six hours a day and spends 75% of that time on support interactions.

Continue reading to learn what key challenges the composite organization faces and the study’s critical findings.

Key challenges

In the interviews conducted for this TEI study, the organizations shared the following common challenges:

• A disparate stack of aging customer support and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
• Siloed customer data, which led to suboptimal support.
• Increasing support capacity requirements.
• An inconsistent and one-sized customer experience.

With these challenges top of mind, the organizations wanted to find and invest in a customer service solution that could:

• Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams.
• Deliver automation and AI-driven insights to the customer support function to enable agents to deliver a better support experience while limiting the requirements for additional support agents.
• Help establish and curate a knowledgebase to help agents further support the customer experience.

Key findings

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides service organizations’ agents the tools they need to deliver faster, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service simplifies and automates support agent processes with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service while delivering faster support experiences to organizations’ customers, which can improve customer satisfaction and lead to additional revenue and profit.

Forrester’s study revealed four quantifiable impact areas: improved handling times leading to greater agent productivity, improvements to first-call resolution and misrouted calls, improvement to sales pipeline generation leading to revenue increases, and cost savings after retiring other customer service solutions.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas below to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value for customer support organizations.

Reduced call handling time by 40%

Interviewees noted several inefficiencies across their organizations’ previous customer service solutions that increased agents’ interaction time with customers:

• Multiple solutions for different support functions, leading to siloed customer data and relevant support information.
• Lack of visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and resolution.
• A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing.
• No automation for common support tasks.

Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled their organizations to automate manual aspects of their agents’ daily responsibilities, which helped to reduce the time they spent searching for customer information and best practices. Because agents were able to have shorter, more efficient interactions with customers, the composite organization saved an average of 468 hours per agent each year.

Improved first-call resolution by 20%—and decreased misroutes by 15%

With their legacy customer support tools, agents at the study’s participant organizations had no easily accessible customer knowledge base with records of common support issues. They also had no easy way to locate specialists who could help resolve issues, so calls were frequently misrouted to the wrong specialists.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they found they could automatically route support cases to the best specialists depending on the nature of the case. This helped them to both increase first-call resolution rates by 20% and shorten the overall time of interactions. They also decreased the times agents misrouted calls to the wrong specialists by 15%. Overall, the composite organization’s agents saved up to 292 hours per year.

Increased sales pipeline generation to drive additional profitability

Some interviewees shared revenue impact to their organizations’ revenue based on the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. A CRM product manager at a travel and hospitality organization explained that because Dynamics 365 Customer service automates the majority of searches performed by agents, they can spend more time on revenue-linked interactions. Another interviewee at a manufacturing organization said that customer information and leads are shared between support agents using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling salespeople to see customer interactions and identify opportunities for new revenue.

Saved up to $978,000 in costs on retired customer service solution(s)

By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, participant organizations were able to retire their previous customer service solutions, saving costs on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. Interviewees from one manufacturing organization said their company reclaimed nearly $100,000 annually by decommissioning two third-party customer service solutions made redundant by Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Other benefits

Forrester Consulting Total Impact Study

See the total economic impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Read here

Study participants mentioned additional benefits to their organizations that were not quantified for this report, including:

• Integration with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Power BI for discovering and predicting common support issues and Teams for easy collaboration between support agents and specialists to help resolve issues.
• An improved customer support experience with reductions in key support metrics such as handle time, hold time, and resolution rates—and the ability to deliver faster, more personalized, and more nuanced support experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Next steps

Forrester’s TEI study of Dynamics 365 Customer Service found four primary quantifiable impact areas and several soft benefits. Taken together, the study found that Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered a total economic impact of $14.7 million in financial savings over three years. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315%.

To get a closer look at the study’s results and a better understanding of how Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help your organization, download and read the full study: The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

The post Forrester TEI study shows 315% ROI when modernizing customer service with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Join us on Wednesday, April 10, 2024

See what’s new at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Register now

Redefine what’s possible with AI 

Join Microsoft product leaders and engineers on April 10, 2024, for an in-depth look at the latest AI features and capabilities in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. You’ll learn how advances in AI and Microsoft Copilot can help you connect teams, processes, and data, and respond to changing business needs with greater agility—and see how organizations across several industries already take advantage of the newest AI features to streamline business processes and accelerate low-code development.  

Register now to see key presentations from Microsoft leaders, including:  

• Business Applications Launch Event—2024 release wave 1. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, will provide opening remarks and shed light on the strategy and vision behind new Copilot and core platform capabilities in 2024 release wave 1. 

• Amplifying contact centers and field service operations with AI. Jeff Comstock, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, will share how Copilot is transforming the customer service landscape, boosting efficiency, reducing training costs, and ultimately delivering exceptional experiences for agents, frontline workers, and customers.  

• Streamline sales and marketing with Copilot. Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing, will discuss how sellers can close more deals by optimizing sales and marketing strategies and increasing productivity. 

That’s just a small sample of what we’ve got planned. You’ll also hear directly from other Microsoft leaders about their vision for AI, customer service, and operations, and get timely tips on how to use these new technologies to take on your business’ toughest challenges. If you have questions about new AI features, how Copilot experiences work, or what’s new in low-code tools, take advantage of the live Q&A chat with Microsoft experts throughout the event. 

Explore new AI features and capabilities for Dynamics 365 

We’re excited to share the latest AI features for Dynamics 365 spanning across end-to-end customer experiences, sales, finance, supply chain, commerce, and other areas. Here are just a few of the new features in 2024 release wave 1: 

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales features include recommended content for documents, insights from past successful deals, and summaries of account details—including customer buying behavior, recent activity, and more.   
• Microsoft Copilot for Sales helps teams deliver more seamless experiences within Microsoft Teams and Outlook. New features include suggested updates to customer relationship management (CRMs) systems as sellers work and suggested responses based on customer questions across platforms. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights empowers every organization to unify and enhance customer data, using it for insightful analysis and intelligent actions. New features now make it easier and faster to ingest and manage data, while AI enables quick insights and easier access to analytics. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance includes more autonomous finance features, building intelligence, automation, and analytics around every business process. This release adds AI-powered experiences to ease setup of financial dimension defaulting. 

See what AI can do for you  

Microsoft customers are already doing amazing things with the new AI features in Dynamics 365, and we can’t wait to inspire you with their stories. Register now and join us to see what’s new in the 2024 release wave 1.   

Microsoft Business Applications launch event  

Wednesday, April 10, 2024  

9:00–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

The post Explore the next wave of AI innovation at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

Investing in AI and a unified platform for modernizing customer service 

More and more, service agents feel increased pressure to provide smart, fast, and customized answers when presented with customer issues. But finding information and experts to quickly resolve an issue can present its own challenges. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 62% of people spend too much time scouring for information during their workday. For service organizations, agents who must scramble to find information can mean both slower time to resolution for individual cases and a lower number of cases addressed per day overall. The agent experience is the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The key to improving satisfaction in service delivery is enabling agents to take customer requests from any channel, handle multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools. Our answer is to provide a solution that helps service organizations harness the power of data, AI, automation, and collaboration to help agents focus on resolving customer issues quickly. Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps service organizations unlock trusted knowledge to accelerate onboarding and case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work.  

More recently, we’ve brought Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Without costly development time, organizations can simply point to their data and, in a few minutes, unlock generative AI-powered conversations across their knowledge bases and other sources. Agents can use Copilot to respond to incoming email, factoring in other relevant customer data to produce a personalized, accurate, and editable reply. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. In addition, service agents are empowered with additional AI experiences and automation to help fuel collaboration and productivity for delivering world-class customer service at scale. We recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for our own Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high-volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22% reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.  

At Microsoft, we strive to enable our customers to empower their customers to engage on their terms, at their optimal times, and on their channels of choice. We believe we have earned our position as a Leader by developing a customer service solution that enables agents to focus on delivering more cutting-edge service experiences by harnessing available data and using the power of generative AI to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences; maximize their productivity; and optimize service operations. And with our comprehensive service platform that includes automation, knowledge management, collaboration, and more, service organizations can streamline case management, enable more personalized service, and get a clear, 360-degree view into how their service organization is performing. As Forrester points out in its report, “Microsoft’s vision is broader than just customer service, and it’s firmly grounded in three principles: Engagement must be personalized via AI; customer service must be highly collaborative; and outcomes must drive improvements. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service actualizes this vision.” 

Building on next-generation AI that’s enterprise ready 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, so our customers can rest assured that it offers data privacy and protection. Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage, enabling organizations to control access to their data, and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities.  

Creating responsible AI solutions 

Most importantly, we are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. 

The Forrester Wave™

Microsoft is a Leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024.

Read the report

Learn more about customer service 

We’re excited to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative customer service platform capabilities to help our customers continuously improve their own customer service offerings. 

Learn more about: 

• Dynamics 365 
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service 
• Microsoft Copilot for Service 

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investment, and consider trying Dynamics 365 Customer Service for free by visiting. 

The post Microsoft is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024  appeared first on Microsoft AI Blogs.

As we begin a new year, large companies and corporations need practical solutions that rapidly drive value. Modern customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems fit perfectly into this category. These solutions build generative AI, automation, and other advanced AI capabilities into the tools that people use every day. Employees can experience new, more effective ways of working and customers can enjoy unprecedented levels of personalized service.  

Upgrade your customer experience

Harness the power of AI and boost your sales

Learn more

If you’re a business leader who has already embraced—or plans to embrace—AI-powered CRM and ERP systems in 2024, you’ll help your organization drive business transformation, innovation, and efficiency in three key ways: 

• Streamline operations: Transform CRM and ERP systems from siloed applications into a unified, automated ecosystem, enhancing team collaboration and data sharing. 
• Empower insightful decisions: Provide all employees with AI-powered natural language analysis, allowing them to quickly generate insights needed to inform decisions and identify new market opportunities. 
• Elevate customer and employee experiences: Personalize customer engagements using 360-degree customer profiles. Also, boost productivity with AI-powered chatbots and automated workflows that free employees to focus on more strategic, high-value work. 

The time has come to think about AI as something much more than a technological tool. It’s a strategic imperative for 2024 and beyond. In this new year, adopting CRM AI for marketing, sales, and service and ERP AI for finance, supply chain, and operations is crucial to competing and getting ahead. 

2023: A transformative year for AI in CRM and ERP systems 

Looking back, 2023 was a breakthrough year for CRM AI and ERP AI. Microsoft rolled out new AI-powered tools and features in its CRM and ERP applications, and other solution providers soon followed. Among other accomplishments, Microsoft launched—and continues to enhance—Microsoft Copilot for Dynamics 365, the world’s first copilot natively built for CRM and ERP systems. 

Evolving AI technologies to this point was years, even decades, in the making. However, as leaders watched AI in business gradually gain momentum, many took steps to prepare. Some applied new, innovative AI tools and features in isolated pilot projects to better understand the business case for AI, including return on investment (ROI) and time to value. Others forged ahead and broadly adopted it. All wrestled with the challenges associated with AI adoption, such as issues around security, privacy, and compliance.   

In one example, Avanade, a Microsoft solutions provider with more than 5,000 clients, accelerated sales productivity by empowering its consultants with Microsoft Copilot for Sales. Consultants used to manually update client records in their Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system and search across disconnected productivity apps for insights needed to qualify leads and better understand accounts. Now, with AI assistance at their fingertips, they can quickly update Dynamics 365 records, summarize emails and meetings, and prepare sales information for client outreach. 

In another example, Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland Ltd. helped ensure exceptional customer experiences—and optimized inventory and deliveries—with AI-powered predictive analytics in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Previously, planners at Domino’s relied on time-consuming, error-prone spreadsheets to forecast demand at more than 1,300 stores. By using intelligent demand-planning capabilities, they improved their forecasting accuracy by 72%. They can also now quickly generate the insights needed to ensure each store receives the right resources at the right times to fill customer orders.  

Trends and insights for CRM AI and ERP AI in 2024 

All signs indicate that in the years to come organizations will continue to find new, innovative ways to use CRM AI and ERP AI—and that their employees will embrace the shift. 

In recent research that looks at how AI is transforming work, Microsoft surveyed hundreds of early users of generative AI. Key findings showed that 70% of users said generative AI helped them to be more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work. Also, 64% of salespeople surveyed said generative AI helped them to better personalize customer engagements and 67% said it freed them to spend more time with customers.¹ 

Looking forward, the momentum that AI in business built in 2023 is expected to only grow in 2024. In fact, IDC predicts that global spending on AI solutions will reach more than USD500 billion by 2027.²  

Some of the specific AI trends to watch for in 2024 include: 

• Expansion of data-driven strategies and tactics. User-friendly interfaces with copilot capabilities and customizable dashboards with data visualizations will allow employees in every department to access AI-generated insights and put them in context. With the information they need right at their fingertips, employees will make faster, smarter decisions.  
• Prioritization of personalization and user experiences. Predictive sales and marketing strategies will mature with assistance from AI in forecasting customer behaviors and preferences and mapping customer journeys, helping marketers be more creative and sellers better engage with customers. Also, AI-powered CRM platforms will be increasingly enriched with social media and other data, providing deeper insights into brand perception and customer behavior.  

• Greater efficiencies using AI and cloud technologies. Combining the capabilities of AI-powered CRM and ERP tools with scalable, flexible cloud platforms that can store huge amounts of data will drive new efficiencies. Organizations will also increasingly identify new use cases for automation, then quickly build and deploy them in a cloud environment. This will further boost workforce productivity and process accuracy. 

• Increased scrutiny of AI ethics. Responsible innovation requires organizations to adhere to ethical AI principles, which may require adjustments to business operations and growth strategies. To guide ethical AI development and use, Microsoft has defined responsible AI principles. It also helps advance AI policy, research, and engineering. 

AI innovations on the horizon for CRM and ERP systems

Keep an eye on technological and other innovations in the works across the larger AI ecosystem. For example, watch for continued advancements in low-code/no-code development platforms. With low-code/no-code tools, nontechnical and technical users alike can create AI-enhanced processes and apps that allow them to work with each other and engage with customers in fresh, new ways. 

Innovations in AI will also give rise to new professions, such as AI ethicists, AI integrators, AI trainers, and AI compliance managers. These emerging roles—and ongoing AI skills development—will become increasingly important as you transform your workforce and cultivate AI maturity.  

To learn more about the innovations that will drive—and be driven—by generative AI, read the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Artificial Intelligence, 2023.³  

Best practices for AI adoption in 2024 

To drive transformation with AI in CRM and ERP systems, you should carefully plan and implement an approach that works best for your organization. The following best practices for AI adoption, which continue to evolve, can help guide you: 

• Strategic implementation: Formulate a long-term AI implementation strategy to empower employees and optimize business processes, emphasizing data-driven culture, relevant skills development, and scalable, user-friendly AI tools in CRM and ERP systems. 
• Ethical adoption: Adhere to evolving ethical guidelines, starting with AI-enhanced process automation and progressing toward innovative value creation, while ensuring your organization is hyperconnected. 
• Data quality and security: Maintain high data integrity and security standards, regularly auditing AI training data to avoid biases and ensure trustworthiness. 
• Alignment with business goals: Align AI initiatives with strategic objectives, measuring their impact on business outcomes, and proactively managing any potential negative effects on stakeholders. 

As you and your organization learn more about AI and discover what you can do with it, don’t lose sight of the importance of human and AI collaboration. Strongly advocate for using AI to augment—rather than replace—human expertise and decision-making across your organization. Remember, although employees will appreciate automated workflows and AI-generated insights and recommendations, AI is not infallible. Successful business still depends on people making intelligent, strategic decisions.  

The importance of embracing AI in business 

Immense opportunities exist for organizations across industries to use AI-powered CRM and ERP systems to accelerate business transformation, innovation, and efficiency. According to Forrester Research, businesses that invest in enterprise AI initiatives will boost productivity and creative problem solving by 50% in 2024.⁴  Yet, without leaders who are fully engaged in AI planning and implementation, many organizations will struggle to realize AI’s full potential.  

Be a leader who prioritizes and champions AI in your business strategies for 2024. Your leadership must be visionary, calling for changes that span across roles and functions and even your entire industry. It must be practical, grounded in purposeful investments and actions. It must be adaptable, remaining open and flexible to shifting organizational strategies and tactics as AI technologies evolve.  

Team up with a leader in AI innovation 

Wherever your organization is in its AI adoption journey, take the next step by learning more about how AI works with Microsoft Dynamics 365, a comprehensive and customizable suite of intelligent CRM and ERP applications. 

With copilot and other AI-powered capabilities in Dynamics 365, your organization can create unified ecosystems, accelerate growth, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. It can also continually improve operational agility while realizing greater productivity and efficiency. Get started today to make 2024 a transformative year for your organization. 

End notes 

¹ What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? 

² IDC Blog, Top 10 Worldwide IT Industry 2024 Predictions: Mastering AI Everywhere, 1 November 2023. 

³ Gartner, Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2023, Afraz Jaffri, 19 July 2023.  

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark, and Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

⁴ Forrester 2024 Predictions: Exploration Generates Progress, Forrester Research, Inc., October 2023. 

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