In today’s data-driven world, businesses rely on customer data to fuel their marketing strategies. They need to access, analyze, and act on this data to power personalized experiences that drive return on marketing investments. However, this comes with the challenges of (1) configuring systems like a Customer Data Platform correctly and (2) ensuring high data quality within these systems.

A Gartner research study¹ reported that high quality data provides “better leads, better understanding of customers, and better customer relationships” and that “every year, poor quality data costs organizations an average of $12.9 million.” This is why it is crucial to understand the current configuration state of your Customer Insights – Data environment and the quality of your data; addressing these challenges is the key to unlocking the most relevant and impactful insights about your customers. 

We recently shipped generative-AI powered features in D365 Customer Insights – Data to help organizations improve data quality and configuration with Copilot so they can empower business users with the best insights to deliver highly personalized customer experiences.

This blog post will share more information on how you can improve data quality and configuration with Copilot. With these features you can:

• Review the current status of your Customer Insights – Data environment,
• Understand the overall health of your data,
• Consult which insights can be generated successfully from your data,
• Act on recommendations to unlock more insights.  

To illustrate how these features work, let’s see how they can be used to improve the speed and quality of an email marketing campaign to target high lifetime value customers with a ‘thank you’ discount on their next purchase.  

Quickly know if your jobs have run successfully, and where to go if not with Copilot  

Contoso Coffee recently implemented Customer Insights – Data, which involved integrating source data from various systems and creating unified customer profiles. To ensure that everything was running smoothly, they checked the system settings. Environment Status Summary, a Copilot feature not only highlighted a recent issue, but also used AI to identify where the issue occurred and provided a direct link to investigate. Thanks to this feature, Contoso’s IT Team was able to quickly fix a skipped customer profile job that would have otherwise blocked them from generating insights for an upcoming email marketing campaign. With the problem resolved in minutes, they could focus on re-engaging high lifetime value customers in a timely manner. 

Understand your overall data quality with Copilot

Now that Contoso’s environment is running smoothly, they want to quickly understand the general health of their data estate.

They review a summary of their data quality on the Home Page by the Data Prep Report, a Copilot feature. This summary includes a data quality grade, which insights are available, the most critical data quality issues, and a link to a detailed data prep report to learn more. Using this summary, Contoso can see that their data quality is medium with a 75% score. They are able to generate some insights, but not the customer lifetime value prediction they want for their email marketing campaign.

If not for this summary, Contoso would have attempted to configure, train, score, and run a customer lifetime value prediction that would have failed completely or had low-grade results. The summary show where their data stands. Thus they don’t have to go through the frustration of trying to generate insights based on unusable data.  

See which insights can be generated successfully from your data 

Next, Contoso wants to deep dive the report to understand the next steps to build their email campaign. They click into the full Data Prep Report, which informs them that they can generate churn predictions, segments, or measures based on their current data. However, they want to pursue a customer lifetime value prediction to support their campaign. They filter the report to review the detailed issues and recommendations specific to customer lifetime value and see the issues listed in priority order from highest to lowest severity. The report gives them the targeted, easy-to-digest information they need to know how to proceed. 

Act on recommendations to unlock more insights 

Finally, Contoso engages their IT Team to act on the detailed issues and recommendations. The IT Team follows the recommendations by taking the suggested actions such as adding more data incorporating products with a sufficient number of purchases. With minimal time, effort, and ambiguity they are able to improve their data and light up the customer lifetime value prediction they want for their marketing campaign. 

Create and use high-impact insights in marketing campaigns 

With the help of Environment Status Summary and Data Prep Report, Contoso Coffee is able to get their Customer Data Platform environment set up correctly and resolve their top data quality issues effectively.  By improving data quality and configuration with Copilot they are able to instantly get rich insights, such as customer lifetime value predictions, which are conveniently available out-of-the box in Customer Insights – Data. This lets their marketing team focus on launching an effective email campaign that provides relevant and in-the-moment offers to their highest value customers to drive business results. Consult our product documentation and start using these AI-powered features today to achieve similar results!

What are some ways to engage further with Customer Insights – Data? 

• If you’re a new user, or want to test with demo data: Start a trial of Customer Insights 
• For more information, reach out via the Customer and Partner Voice channels or in the Dynamics 365 Application Ideas page.  
• The Customer Insights forums are also another great way to ask questions and connect with other partners and users.
• Discover Dynamics 365 Customer Insights W2 2023 capabilities.

The post Deliver higher-impact experiences with better data quality and configuration with Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As businesses around the world increasingly recognize the value of generative AI in driving growth through better customer experiences, Microsoft has taken the lead in developing advanced AI features within its journey orchestration and customer data platform product—Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. 

Our AI journey began more than two years ago. Since then, we’ve already implemented 10 groundbreaking AI features, with more coming each month. Our AI features already assist data analysts and marketers in their daily tasks—improving data quality, unlocking data to understand customers, identifying audiences, and building journeys and content to engage customers. This demonstrates our commitment to promptly deliver announced product innovations offering cutting-edge solutions that boost productivity, unlock capabilities, and leverage data, effectively addressing the needs of organizations worldwide.

As we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, we’re delighted to give you a sneak preview of the new features releasing as part of 2023 release wave 2.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Leverage data to personalize your customer experiences

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Unleash the power of AI and real-time insights to fuel customer experiences

To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. Dialog with data offers an intuitive way to explore your data across all your data sources and uncover new opportunities to grow your business. Chat with your data and ask questions using everyday words to receive answers as well as additional insights within seconds. Dialog with data is available in all geographies in 23 languages.

As customers engage with your business, they constantly provide signals about their interests, such as adding a product to a cart or signing up for a trial. It’s crucial to build on these signals as they happen so you can deliver the right experience at the right time. With this release, we are introducing in public preview real-time capabilities to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, enabling you to now personalize your customer’s experience on web and mobile in real-time, whether they’re anonymous or known. You can deliver the most relevant offer, content, or experience by combining their latest interactions and activities with your brand together with their profile data, the segments they belong to, and insights about them, such as their lifetime value.

As customers engage across digital and human-assisted channels, it’s essential for sellers also to have access to comprehensive data and insights to ensure a seamless cross-channel experience. By unifying, enriching, and transforming customer data and interactions into actionable insights using data from multiple sources, Customer Insights equips sellers with unparalleled knowledge. We’ve made these insights readily available to sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot. Sellers can consult customer profile summaries, an at-a-glance view of essential customer engagement, predictions, and insights to help the follow-up conversation. Metrics such as lifetime value, churn risk, and buying propensity, displayed right on the page where sellers are working, assist them in identifying high-value opportunities and enable them to have hyper-personalized conversations.

Orchestrate personalized journeys using Copilot

In the past, the idea of completing complex tasks by simply describing them seemed like something out of a sci-fi movie. But with AI and natural language models, this is becoming a reality. Journey creator, a Copilot feature, streamlines the process of designing customer journeys. Just describe your journey in English, and let Copilot build it for you. Get suggestions to create the journey on segments, triggers, communication timing, branching options, and easily make journey edits. Journey creator is now available in North America and coming to all geographies in December.

Query assist, our AI powered segment builder, is now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys, so both marketers and data analysts can build complex segments just by describing them. Thanks to intelligent segment summaries, teams can easily collaborate. Sharing segments, understanding the intent of the segment, and ensuring the logic matches the intended outcome has never been easier. Marketers also receive recommendations to optimize their segments.

In addition, with this release, you will receive a variety of features aimed at enhancing customer engagement and streamlining communication. These include setting up quiet times, preventing duplicate emails to the same address, choosing the most effective email address for reaching customers, and allowing the use of your brand as an SMS sender.

Boost content impact, streamlining creativity and efficiency with Copilot

Designing content that resonates with your audience requires a combination of creativity and time, and with the assistance of Copilot, this process becomes more efficient and impactful. Content ideas, your solution for generating captivating emails in minutes, is now accessible worldwide in English, and in seven additional languages. Continuous enhancements, such as sample key points for typical email types or choosing a tone of voice best suited to your brand, have made content generation even more efficient.

While content ideas is perfect to kickstart new emails, you can now use Content rewrite to rapidly iterate and perfect your existing messages. Whether you are creating emails, text messages, push notifications, or forms, you can easily rephrase your messages, adjust the tone of voice, shorten or lengthen your copy, and uplevel your campaigns.

To complement your content, Copilot automatically recommends a selection of images from your library matching your copy, so you can easily add images in your emails, forms, and push notifications without spending hours searching.

Finalizing your campaigns often required dedicated time from you or a designer to achieve just the right look. Using Copilot, you can effortlessly style your emails, event registration pages, and forms to interpret your website and instantly apply a similar design. Maintain a consistent brand identity by saving those themes in your brand profiles and easily apply them to your future campaigns. This streamlines the process, reducing the time spent fine-tuning styles and allowing you to focus on other core activities.

Generate higher quality leads to maximize your opportunity pipeline and increase win rates

Organizations that prioritize sales and marketing alignment are typically more likely to achieve their organization’s growth goals. Sellers want marketers to deliver good quality leads. Marketers want sellers to follow-up on the leads they generate and convert these into revenue. To boost conversions, it’s crucial for marketers to identify prospects that are most likely to make a purchase and send them to sellers when they are ready to engage. Our enhanced lead scoring model, with its granular qualification criteria and signals, helps your team in assessing a prospect’s likelihood to purchase. Once you’ve identified qualified leads, you can automatically handoff in Dynamics 365 Sales at exactly the right time for the seller to reach out.

Thanks to the analytics dashboard, you can see the impact of your marketing efforts. It enables you to drive better conversion rates and optimize your activities to deliver higher return on investment (ROI). Marketers can better align with Sales by sharing a comprehensive view of the pipeline, from prospects to won opportunities.

Recognizing that each business has unique needs and requirements for aggregating data from various sources, we will now provide additional custom reporting capabilities. In Customer Insights – Journeys, you can leverage Microsoft Fabric, an all-in-one analytics and business intelligence reporting solution, to create custom Power BI reports. You can unlock more insights using data science and machine learning, without the need to move your data or conduct any data transformation activities.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

These innovations are just a small part of what is coming in this wave release. With real-time capabilities, generative AI, and by unifying sales and marketing efforts, your teams can do more with less and focus on customer experiences that win you customers for life.

Don’t wait to get started, the era of AI is now.

• Explore Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Leverage all our new AI innovations for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys by transitioning to real-time marketing.
• Get a full view of what is coming in 2023 release wave 2 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data and Journeys.
• Check the 2023 release wave 2 video.
• Discover Microsoft Fabric.

The post AI-infused personalized customer journeys with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 2023 release wave 2 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

AI is ready to support work—the question is: What will your business do with it?

Join us at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event on October 25 and explore how to create an AI-powered business that helps people and teams be more productive, solve problems quickly, and focus more energy on building revenue.

This will mark our tenth Business Applications Launch Event—a milestone in our commitment to business app innovation, our customers, and our partners. But we’re just getting started. To see what’s next—and what it means for your organization—you’ll hear directly from Microsoft leaders about their vision for AI, customer service, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and low-code solutions.

Register for a glimpse at the future of business AI, with thought leaders and Dynamics 365 experts guiding you. Be first to see the latest AI advancements in action, including:

• The latest AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales that provides relevant recommendations, summarizes data, retrieves information, and performs actions within the flow of work.
• Advanced Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service that streamline agents’ workspaces, let them see transcripts of live chats and voice calls in their inboxes, and allow them to respond to customers quickly with the right information.
• New Microsoft Sales Copilot features that help compose emails, update customer relationship management (CRM) records, recap meetings, and offer real-time tips to help sales teams close more deals.
• Enhanced automation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance to help handle accounts payable and bank statements, complex tax scenarios, and e-invoicing requirements in more markets.
• New Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to help marketers quickly create memorable customer experiences using whole new levels of personalization for emails, images, and layouts.

Plus, learn about updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources—all ready to help your employees be more productive, build customer loyalty, and drive meaningful growth. You’ll also hear from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Business Applications and Platforms, about what’s driving innovation today. Then catch some of the newest AI capabilities in action, with demos led by the people behind the 2023 release wave 2, offering expert guidance on how these updates will help you:

• Improve insights, save time, and fuel creativity with the latest AI-powered solutions.
• Empower your employees to focus on revenue-generating work and avoid repetitive tasks with automation.
• Connect people, data, and processes across your organization using modern, AI-enhanced collaboration tools.

Insights on putting AI to work for you

The Business Applications Launch Event is more than our chance to showcase hundreds of new features and updates. It’s also a great opportunity for you to learn expert tips on how to apply these new technologies to some of your business’ biggest challenges. And if you have questions about new features, the role of AI at work, the evolution of copilots, or what’s ahead for business apps, get them answered by experts—we’ll be hosting a live Q&A chat at the end of the event, so be sure to stick around.

It’s been inspiring to see all the new features that the Dynamics 365 team has been working on, and we’re looking forward to celebrating 10 events’ worth of advancing business applications ahead.

Business Applications Launch Event

Explore how to create an AI-powered business.

Register now

We hope you’ll join us.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

 9:00 AM–10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7)

The post Discover new AI for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at our tenth Business Applications Launch Event appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Note: As announced at Microsoft Inspire 2023, as of September 1, 2023, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights have been brought together into one offering. We are retaining the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights name to encompass this new offer of both applications. Customers can start with one or both applications and then further invest in the application they want to scale by buying the capacity they need.

In today’s turbulent economic times, companies are facing critical business challenges such as customer acquisition, increasing customer loyalty, and maximizing lifetime value. Often, to save time, they follow a one-size-fits-all approach—resulting in impersonal marketing strategies with low customer engagement. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 89 percent of marketers say they struggle with having time to do their jobs.

To meet these complex challenges, it is crucial for companies to shift their approach from traditional mass communication to personalized engagement based on a deep understanding of each customer’s preferences and actions while ensuring their marketers have more time to leverage their creative and strategic skills to engage their customers. With this very goal in mind, Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2018.

We are pleased and honored to share that in a short span of five years in market, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms* for the second consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

For Microsoft, this placement recognizes our commitment to help companies better connect with their customers at scale, across all departments, to make this simple and easy for any company with a broad range of skillsets to employ.

Accelerating the journey to more personalized customer engagement

We started our Dynamics 365 Marketing journey in April 2018. Since then, we’ve gathered feedback and continued to learn at a rapid pace to help our customers on their journey to drive meaningful customer engagement, ensure long-term loyalty, and accelerate business success. To be competitive in today’s market, organizations must harness the power of data to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft one-on-one personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions. Generative AI makes these capabilities within reach for every company. That’s why we’ve brought together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI-led solution to revolutionize customer experience. The new Customer Insights enables our customers to be more flexible by giving them access to both a modern, AI-driven customer data platform (Customer Insights data application) and real-time marketing with customer journey orchestration (Customer Insights journeys application). Customers can start with one or both applications and invest in the areas where they most want to scale.

To drive the necessary customer experience (CX) transformation, companies cannot rely on piecemeal integration of sales, service, and marketing products. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 50 percent of replacement customer relationship management (CRM) sales technology decisions will involve solutions including non-sales software comprising other modules from a CRM or a CX suite.^[1] However, the reality is that only a few companies are currently delivering on these expectations. Customer experiences often remain fragmented across channels and departments, leading to inconsistencies. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help customers overcome these challenges, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was built exactly for this purpose—to support customers throughout their end-to-end CX journeys.

Like all Dynamics 365 offerings, Customer Insights relies on Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM software data, which enables our customers to securely store and manage their data and harness the true power of that data by removing silos across sales, service, and marketing via a unified platform approach. Customer Insights helps marketers and customer engagement professionals gain a holistic view of their customers, anticipate their needs, and discover growth opportunities. Marketers can also deliver more relevant, contextual, customer-triggered engagements through the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Some of our most recent Copilot capabilities in Customer Insights enable marketers to:

• Deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience with emails, forms, and event registration pages that align to their organization’s branding guidelines.
• Easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, to respond to customers quickly, generate sales leads, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Quickly build, summarize, and simplify targeted segments using conversational, everyday language, enabling more time for building customer relationships and reducing time to build complex segments from scratch.
• Discover new customer insights by using natural language to ask questions and gather information and suggestions for forming additional, deeper questions.
• Get help developing content for emails, social posts, and other text with a tone of voice that matches their brand and campaign.

Enabling our customers to increase their reach

Zurich Insurance Group, a global insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries, wanted to optimize marketing processes to help create more personalized customer experiences. Its Switzerland business unit connects to its customers through hosting online and in-person events—but to drive the highest impact, it must be sure it invites the right customers to the right events. It wanted to improve its ability to track if customers opened event invitations—or even received them, as well as the connection to registration and attendance. It also wanted a formalized way to collect feedback or easily use engagement data to continue to optimize the sales process after the event. Zurich selected Dynamics 365 Marketing to give it the flexibility to reach customers in new ways and drive more effective follow-ups to help shape their journeys. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, Zurich increased its lead quality by over 40 percent.

Over the past decade, Natuzzi, a globally hailed creator of exceptional luxury furniture that delivers a harmonious combination of design, function, aesthetics, and ethics, has seen a rapid global expansion of its heralded luxury brand. Natuzzi lacked a customer engagement platform capable of unifying data from its retail point of sale (POS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and CRM systems. The company also wanted a way to bring together its business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) related data sets to drive greater insight between audiences. Adopting Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Natuzzi implemented an extensive customer experience platform to transform how its luxury brand discovers and sustains its customers. It uses customer data and insights to nurture customers and prospects through personalized campaigns, delivering emails, SMS texts, promotions, events, sales appointment reminders, and other relationship-building messages.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping our customers unify and enrich their customer data to deliver personalized, connected, end-to-end customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service. We truly believe that bringing together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables us to continue investing in capabilities that will enable stronger, insights-based marketing that helps marketers and data analysts glean insights from customer data.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offer.

1. Gartner Forecast Analysis: CRM Sales Software, Worldwide, Roland Johnson, Amarendra, Julian Poulter, 12 December 2022.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Antin, 20 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant 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. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Six months ago, we introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first AI Copilot natively built for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Since then, more than 63,000 organizations have experienced Copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform first-hand, empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways to improve experiences across the customer journey.

Copilot is designed to help people do their very best work—and we’re seeing real value to support this vision. Today, I’m excited to share the most widely used scenarios and performance metrics from employees at Microsoft and leading organizations using Copilot capabilities across the customer journey. These stories and insights showcase what’s possible when employees are assisted by AI in the flow of work—helping them to boost productivity, perform tasks more efficiently, and focus on what matters most.

Transforming customer experience in the age of AI

Sellers, service agents, and marketers share a common goal: developing exceptional customer experiences that ultimately impact the bottom line. In July, we introduced the next wave of Copilot and AI capabilities to deliver connected customer experiences—from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, all the way through to the customer interactions in Outlook and Microsoft Teams powered by Microsoft Sales Copilot. With Dynamics 365 Copilot and Microsoft Sales Copilot, marketers can use everyday language to create relevant and targeted campaigns and brainstorm creative copy; sellers can move from one customer call and email to the next with relevant context on the opportunity at their fingertips; and service agents can become super agents with the help of AI to serve up relevant information to close customer cases more quickly.

Assisted by Dynamics 365 Copilot, Microsoft Support team resolves more cases faster, with less effort

At Microsoft, we’re also leading our own AI-first transformation and, since April, have been using Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service within our Customer Service and Support (CSS) team—one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Today, we can share how Copilot has impacted the way agents work to resolve support cases, and the impact on their efficiency and productivity.

Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Economist, in partnership with the Dynamics 365 product group, evaluated how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service has impacted agent productivity since April. The initial results shared here reflect those of 11.5K agents, with 6.5K agents who used Copilot and the control group of 5K agents who did not use Copilot.

The findings demonstrate how Copilot can support agents of all experience levels in their workflows to increase efficiency and quality of customer engagements. Key results included:

• Expedited agent onboarding. High turnover rates are common for service teams across industries, placing a burden on organizations to onboard new agents to be productive quickly. Copilot has been particularly effective in helping newer agents who don’t have years of experience or institutional experience get up to speed and find relevant information more quickly, the study found. Specifically, for low-severity chat cases in one area of our commercial support business, we observed a 12 percent reduction in average handle time—the time actively spent on resolving a customer case.
• More cases resolved faster—without peer assistance. In the most productive scenario, the study found that in one support business, 10 percent of cases that normally require collaboration with peers were resolved independently. This means fewer customers had to experience being put on hold.

Direct feedback from Microsoft Support agents reveals how Copilot improves interactions with customers:

• “Just wanted to share my gratitude to Copilot as a person who always struggles to wrap up wording before sharing with the customer—amazing time and pain saver for me!”
• “[A] customer switched language mid-chat from English to Spanish. Copilot enabled me to continue to solve the problem regardless of the language shift.”
• “I used Copilot to help a customer and got CSAT [customer satisfaction score] 5 out of 5. Their feedback was, ‘Very informative and to the point.’”

While the study captures just the first few months of AI-assisted service within the Microsoft Support organization, the results should encourage other organizations looking to optimize service operations with AI. The findings offer a glimpse of efficiencies and productivity gains that other organizations might experience when using Copilot. Read more details about the Microsoft Support team’s experience with Copilot on Microsoft Source. For the full story and video testimonial about the team’s transformation journey, check out the case study.  

In addition to performance metrics, Microsoft employees provide feedback to the development team, helping to ensure every new capability provides the best possible benefit for users. This step is crucial as we roll out new features across Dynamics 365 Copilot—including a feature available today. Copilot summarization, now generally available, helps agents to quickly review the details of a case without sifting through notes, chat transcripts, and emails. This feature generates automatic conversation summaries, helping service agents to quickly understand highlights of a case—such as key customer problems and steps that agents took to resolve the case.

The Copilot summarization feature joins a host of upcoming Copilot capabilities for service teams, from the call center to field service professionals. View the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service for details. 

Service organizations expect Copilot to help deliver new levels of agent productivity and customer experiences

In addition to the early results from the Microsoft Support team, we’re hearing directly from leading organizations getting an early start with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Prada Group, a global leader in luxury brands, is using Copilot to improve experiences for its discerning customers. “We’re excited to be one of the early adopters of the new Dynamics 365 Copilot AI tool,” shared Francesco De Giampaulis, Global Client Service & e-Commerce Payment Gateways and Anti-Fraud Manager, Prada Group. “By integrating it with our Knowledge Base and other internal sources, Copilot will assist our Client Service Advisors speeding up the onboarding process, offering a fast and smooth assistance to our customers, saving time searching for answers and focusing on providing a great experience, including suggestions for the right product or look.”

One of the leading investment management and advisory services, Vanguard Group, shared its initial experiences with Copilot. “Vanguard is utilizing Dynamics 365 Customer Service to support its agents in client service and knowledge management scenarios, as well as a custom bot to manage customer inquiries via its website,” explained Grant Pharez, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Specialist at Vanguard. “We are seeing promising results in testing the generative AI capabilities in these applications to help our customer care teams and self-service customer applications deliver exceptional service.”

Sellers reach new levels of productivity with Microsoft Sales Copilot

Concurrent to the Microsoft Support team’s experience, Microsoft deployed Microsoft Sales Copilot (previously Viva Sales) to 10,000 sellers within its sales organization. Early results show that 85 percent of surveyed sellers report completing one or more tasks faster, and 70 percent claim that Microsoft Sales Copilot helps them improve productivity.

Organizations like Securitas, a leading provider of custom security and guarding solutions, are noting the ability for sellers to focus time on what matters most. “Opportunity summary in Microsoft Sales Copilot is a huge and important leap in our direction to save more time for our sales personnel,” said Philip Eklund, Vice President, Client Engagement Services, Securitas. “With this capability in the hands of our sellers, they can spend more time equipping organizations with best-in-class security solutions to help make our world a safer place.”

Sellers using Microsoft Sales Copilot benefit from AI capabilities that help streamline the workday. Features slated for general availability in September and October include AI-generated preparation notes for customer conversations and opportunity and lead summaries. In addition, Microsoft Sales Copilot improves teamwork and knowledge sharing, providing sellers with collaboration spaces in Teams that integrate with CRM data and contact cards that surface CRM records directly in Microsoft 365 apps. View the release notes for Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot for details. Get the e-book, “The AI Advantage: Driving Sales Performance with Next-Generation Tools”, which details how AI supports sales teams throughout the day. 

Marketers surface deeper insights, optimize customer journeys with Copilot

Like sales and service professionals, marketing teams using Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights report tangible business benefits. TTEC Digital, a global customer experience (CX) technology and services company and Microsoft Gold Partner, shared how Copilot democratizes marketing tasks. According to Karl Phenix, VP at TTEC Digital, “Copilot in Customer Insights makes marketing employees more comfortable in doing complex tasks such as segmentation, which previously required specialists such as data scientists.” Karl added that “Copilot frees up time by generating emails in minutes, so marketing employees can do more to drive sales activities and accelerate the pipeline.”

Copilot features now generally available help marketers to deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience. Marketers can craft email content by prompting Copilot to curate content, change the tone and voice, or adjust the length of the copy. Available in preview, marketers can also create customer journeys simply by describing actions at each step, such as: “When a contact registers for an event, send a thank you email.” In fact, 59 percent of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers* have used Copilot when creating segments and 36 percent of customers used Copilot to ask questions to uncover customer and business insights. View the release notes for more details.

Start transforming customer experiences with Dynamics 365

Dynamics 365 is a complete suite of CRM and ERP applications that helps you manage your businesses across sales, marketing, service, finance, and supply chain.

Dynamics 365 Copilot is the world’s first AI copilot integrated into CRM and ERP applications in the cloud. Unlike other solutions, generative AI features are included in Dynamics 365 subscriptions for enterprise customers at no additional charge.

Take a guided tour of Dynamics 365 applications and get started today with a free 30-day trial.

View the Dynamics 365 licensing guide to choose options that suit your business, and contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

If you are a Dynamics 365 customer, use Copilot capabilities today. Visit the Dynamics 365 release planner to view features coming soon and available to try now.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.

Read how

*Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers that have access to copilot capabilities, US only, based on telemetry data.

The post From Microsoft to global brands, Dynamics 365 Copilot is helping transform customer experiences across service, sales, and marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This post is authored by Gerry Murray, Marketing and Sales Technology Research Director, IDC; and coauthored by Carlena Neely, Product Marketing Manager, Business Applications, Microsoft.

Dynamics 365 AI

Learn about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Sales Copilot.

Read more here

Delving into the realm of customer-centric strategies, IDC analyst Gerry Murray casts a visionary light on the transformative influence of generative AI (Gen AI) on sales and service. Murray’s perspective resonates powerfully with the groundbreaking nature of Gen AI, which is reshaping customer interactions into a new era of efficiency and effectiveness.

Gen AI isn’t just another technology; it’s a strategic leap that orchestrates seamless data and workflows across marketing, sales, and service touchpoints. Gerry Murray emphasizes its potential to eliminate mundane tasks, such as drafting emails and preparing for meetings, while providing real-time support during crucial interactions. It is also extremely exciting to have covered the addition of Microsoft Sales Copilot, providing a more streamlined and AI-powered selling experience.

The true potential of Gen AI infused in tools such as Microsoft Sales Copilot unfolds when it seamlessly integrates with other applications such as CRM systems, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams, presenting a harmony that minimizes risks while maximizing benefits. This strategic synergy aligns with industry best practices and fosters an environment of innovation.

Gen AI transcends the realm of ordinary tools; it’s an enabler propelling business toward an era of seamless experiences and unparalleled efficiency.

AI-powered customer and seller experiences

Customers have extremely high expectations for a vendor’s ability to personalize everything about their experiences pre- and post-sale. Consumers expect each touchpoint in their journey to be informed and enhanced by all the previous touchpoints. Business buyers have the same expectations, but they take much more work on the part of sellers to fulfill as everything about the B2B sales process is far more complex than B2C. In both cases, the days of relying on customers to continually explain the context of their situation to the next point of contact are over.

To achieve today’s new level of continuity, the data from every touchpoint needs to be available to every other system within brand and regulatory policy. Giving all customer-facing functions equal insights into behaviors such as social sentiment, sales engagement, purchase histories, late payments, product returns, and support consumption can greatly improve business performance across the board. That improvement requires the underlying infrastructure supporting front-office applications to enable the customer’s data to be available to service them wherever they go next, which is a daunting challenge for large enterprises with fragmented data silos.

Generative AI (Gen AI) for front office applications can manage the data and workflow triggers between customer interactions across marketing, sales, and service enabling these employees to be more helpful faster, which in turn raises customer satisfaction, advocacy, and lifetime value.

Generative AI for sales

AI-powered role-based assistants can help sales reps increase productivity and personalize every customer interaction so they can close more deals. Gen AI can be present in the tools sellers use daily such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems. AI alleviates the tedium and time sinks of endless click loops through menus, drop downs, pick lists, and check boxes. The impact on employee experience will be significant as AI will enable sellers to:

• Get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes.
• Create contextual emails that utilize customer CRM data to pull in product, customer, and opportunity information.
• Prepare for customer meetings with a summary view including account information, recent notes, highlights of any issues or concerns, customer news, and more.
• Get real-time tips and suggested answers during video meetings prompted by competitor or brand mentions by the customers to stay ready to handle objections.

Augmenting the front office with insight

But AI in and of itself is not enough, as it requires a great deal of data. To help organizations increase the speed of acting on customer insights and orchestrating personalized customer journeys, data infrastructure must offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution and continue investments into real-time marketing.

The most effective way to optimize the benefits of AI and minimize the risks at the same time is to put AI in the context of other applications. This approach makes AI effective at completing repetitive tasks for customer-facing employees in marketing, sales, commerce, merchandising, point of sale, customer service and support, call center, loyalty, and so forth, all functions in which decision quality and cycle time are essential to customer satisfaction. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot can eliminate repetitive tasks such as:

• Drafting messages and project plans.
• Scheduling and summarizing sales calls.
• Creating, testing, and fine-tuning audience segments.
• Matching brand guidelines for emails, forms, and event registration pages using natural language to deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience.
• Orchestrating customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, so customer actions can be responded to appropriately and quickly, generating sales leads or increasing customer satisfaction.

AI significantly impacts customer-facing employees, improving their experience and enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks. It accelerates decision-making, improves productivity, and enhances the coordination of interactions with customers across various touchpoints.

Enhancing business efficiency

Gen AI is new and evolving at warp speed. IDC expects there to be a great deal of innovation in terms of future capabilities and a wide range of use cases across multiple front-office functions. Examples of how Gen AI can enhance work processes for sales and marketing include:

• Additional sales use cases for Gen AI could include request for proposal (RFP) creation and response, upselling recommendations, price optimization, contract generation and review, account planning, territory optimization, and more.
• In marketing, Gen AI can describe their customer segment in their own words to create a target segment with the query assist feature. Marketers can also use Gen AI to get inspiration for email campaign content based on a simple request. Gen AI can make suggestions based on key topics entered by the marketer and the organization’s existing marketing emails, as well as from a range of internet sources to increase the relevance of generated ideas. Additional use cases could include fine-tuned segmentation, send time optimization, content generation, testing and optimization, attribution, media mix modeling, and more.

IDC conclusion

Gen AI is one of the most significant technological advances of the last decade, it is as much of a quantum leap as the graphical user interface, the Internet, and smartphones. Gen AI is a major advancement for line-of-business people who can now explain what they want to do to an AI assistant instead of having to learn how to do it in a graphical user interface (GUI) that might involve hundreds of mouse clicks on menu calls, dialog boxes, drop downs, radio buttons, application switching, and so forth.

Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Sales Copilot on the Dynamics 365 AI webpage.

The post IDC shares how generative AI transforms business processes within marketing, sales, and service  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

At Microsoft Inspire 2023, we announced that we are bringing together Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into one offer, enabling organizations to unify and enrich their customer data to deliver personalized, connected, end-to-end customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service. We are retaining the existing “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights” name to encompass this new offer of both applications. Today, we’re excited to share that the new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is now generally available for purchase.

For our existing Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights customers, this change signals an acceleration into our “better together” story, where we’ll continue to invest in new capabilities that will enable stronger, insights-based marketing, making it easier for marketers and data analysts to glean insights from customer data. Beginning September 1, 2023, customers who had the previous license for Marketing and/or Customer Insights will only see a product name change in the product; there will be no changes to the core product functionality due to the consolidation of the two products.

The new Customer Insights offers your organization flexibility to meet your business needs, with access to both the customer data platform (Customer Insights—Data) and real-time marketing with customer journey orchestration (Customer Insights—Journeys). The new pricing enables customers to unlock access to both applications and then buy the capacity they need. This gives you, our customers, the power of choice—where you can start with one or both applications and further invest in the capabilities that you’d like to scale. If you’re an existing customer of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, you can use Customer Insights as the foundation of your customer experience (CX) stack by achieving greater customer understanding and orchestrating contextual customer journeys across every touchpoint of the business.

Achieve greater personalization with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

With the Customer Insights customer data platform, you can gain a holistic view of your customers, anticipate needs, and discover growth opportunities. And with real-time marketing and journey orchestration, you can deliver personalized, in-the-moment customer-triggered engagements that are relevant and contextual. With Copilot in Customer Insights, you can save time by using natural language to create or enhance target segments. You can also nurture creativity by turning topics into suggested copy, helping marketers move from concept to completion faster.

With the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, included at no additional cost, your data analysts and marketers can be more productive and increase their focus on personalizing the customer journey.

Our latest investments in copilot capabilities include the ability to:

• Style your emails, forms, and event registration pages to match your organization’s brand guidelines using natural language, so you can deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience. You can get started by simply using an existing website.
• Use natural language to easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, so customer actions can be responded to appropriately and quickly, generating sales leads and increasing customer satisfaction.
• Use conversational, everyday language to quickly build, summarize, and simplify targeted segments. Generate accurate rules with less effort, allowing you to spend more time building customer relationships and less time constructing complex segments from scratch.
• Ask questions about customers in natural language and see an answer within seconds. Review extensive information related to your original question that provides further insights and suggested questions to continue discovering new insights about your customers.
• Get help with content development by providing a short list of key points, and tailor with a tone of voice that matches your brand and campaign. Utilize the generated content suggestions as-is or build upon them in email, social posts, and more.

Customer success with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights: Lynk & Co

Let’s take a look at an organization that is using Dynamics 365 Customer Insights today.

Lynk & Co is a Sweden-based company that is transforming the way people use cars by offering a simple and flexible experience where customers can choose to buy, borrow, or subscribe to a vehicle. With ambitions to disrupt the automobile industry and launch its business in seven markets in less than two years, Lynk & Co needed to quickly build an infrastructure that could support multi-channel customer engagement and drive highly personalized experiences. The company chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 for its out-of-the-box and customizable tools and the ability it provided to build in modules to create unique processes and prioritize specific customer experiences. Within 18 months, Lynk & Co was able to ramp up a significant digital presence in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, as well as open social clubs designed to bring the company’s online brand to life through community-focused events.

The company uses Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to capture actionable customer data and link it with operational data within its cars. This is helping the company create seamless, highly personalized experiences for every customer from their first engagement to every time they use the app, drive a car, have service, or visit a club. It also makes it easy to support customers if they want to move from simply borrowing a car, to a monthly subscription, or to a car purchase. 

With the customer journey orchestration features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, customers get personalized messaging and image content. Beyond that, the system sends right-timed information on specific-to-the-customer club event invitations. These events vary from country to country but have included everything from unplugged live music nights and art openings to meet-ups for running and cycling groups, community talks on social issues, or workshops on how to upcycle old sneakers.

Engagement data from these events feeds back into the platform to further personalize member experiences across all lines of business, across all communication channels—and helps Lynk & Co learn and iterate.

Learn more and get started today with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

To learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, take the guided tour or start a free 30-day trial. If you have questions about the merging of Dynamics 365 Marketing and the previous Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, including pricing, please reference the FAQ on Microsoft Learn. If you missed Inspire 2023, you can watch the session by Emily He (Corporate Vice President, Business Applications Marketing), on demand, to see the announcements for Business Applications, including the latest innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

The new Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

We're bringing together Marketing and Customer Insights into one offer.

Generally available now

The post Now generally available: The new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Discover how Dynamics 365 helps customer experience leaders do more with less

Leaders of organizations in every region and industry are cautiously navigating business decisions of 2023. The recent economic turbulence has forced companies to evaluate their internal processes, tools, and enterprise software to optimize for efficiency. Conversely, customer experience (CX) leaders see 2023 as the year of opportunity. By strengthening their customer experience strategy with technology, CX leaders can retain their most valuable customers, acquire new customers, and look to surpass their competitors. The good news is that you don’t need more to do this. You can do more with less, utilizing the power of AI to optimize experiences for your sellers, marketers, and data analysts so they can deliver better experiences for your customers.

Dynamics 365

Drive demand and close deals faster

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Understand your customer

CX leaders know that the first step to any great customer experience is understanding your customer. They need a customer data platform that can do more for them, making sense of their data, offering recommendations, and serving up valuable insights. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unifies and enriches first-party and third-party data to truly understand your customer and predict their intent. It does this while maintaining privacy and compliance with customer consent. Out-of-the-box AI guides data wranglers with the next best action and also can provide predictions for customer lifetime value, so you can determine how to best invest in your customers.

Business Finland utilized Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to gain greater data insights, resulting in the ability to support thousands of Finnish companies through the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing its export sales by 20 percent, and allowing the Finnish government to fund topics and initiatives that align with its strategic goals.

With the latest Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, data analysts and marketers can engage directly with customer data using simple, natural language. This saves time for data analysts, allowing them to type the query in their own words instead of identifying the query in SQL. This capability democratizes access to insights, allowing marketers to use their customer data platform (CDP) to ask questions using everyday language and receive answers fast, without needing to know SQL programming. With simple prompts, marketers can explore, understand, and predict customer preferences and needs in near real time, reducing the reliance on the analytics team to provide them with the customer insights they need.

Engage your customer

Customers today expect personalized experiences, but your marketers don’t have the time or resources to tailor every interaction with every customer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can do more with less by using AI to orchestrate personalized journeys across every customer touchpoint. In addition to customer journeys, Dynamics 365 offers email marketing, lead scoring, marketing pages, and social posting, allowing you to seamlessly connect your marketing and sales processes. Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics, an aviation parts supplier, is using Dynamics 365 Marketing to automate the follow-up process for completed repairs, tying this activity into product campaigns, and communicating more effectively with customers.

With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can eliminate the time-consuming process of manually building customer segments for email campaigns, utilizing the query assist feature that allows them to describe their targeted segment in natural language. When they are ready to craft their email content, marketers can harness the Copilot feature, content ideas, to generate content by providing a few prompts. They can also tailor the tone to meet the needs of their audience. With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can spend less time on copywriting and audience segmentation, and more time on strategic marketing efforts.

Deliver for your customer

You’ve moved your customer down the funnel, understanding and predicting their intent, personalizing experiences with communications and offers, and now they’re ready to purchase. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with your customers, take actions based on insights, and close deals faster. You can use Dynamics 365 Sales to keep track of your accounts and contacts, nurture your sales from lead to order, and create sales collateral. Sales managers can use AI to make their sales teams stronger by monitoring conversations with customers using conversation intelligence and providing coaching and feedback to sellers, or by creating step-by-step guidance for next best steps with sequences.

DP World shortened sales cycles enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater retention with Dynamics 365 Sales.

With Copilot in Microsoft Viva Sales, part of Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can save time with generated email content suggestions, which includes data that is relevant to the customer, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. In addition, they can generate an email response that proposes a meeting date and time based on availability of their Outlook calendar. These new capabilities help sellers automate and expedite administrative work so they can focus on what matters most—making meaningful connections and building trust with their customers and prospects.

Learn how to do more with less

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Marketing, and Sales, you can connect your teams across all business processes to ensure your customer is always at the center. This ensures they have a personalized, seamless experience, from consideration to purchase. To learn more or take a guided tour, please visit our connected sales and marketing solution page or take a guided tour. To learn more about Dynamics 365 Copilot, read the announcement blog from Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications, Emily He.

The post Optimize experiences for sellers and marketers with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s unpredictable market conditions, companies are looking to do more with less, and delivering exceptional customer experiences is necessary to both acquire new customers and retain and increase the lifetime value of existing customers. Faced with a larger set of choices, customers expect the companies they do business with to know them, anticipate their needs, and deliver personalized interactions. To earn their loyalty, it’s critical that every interaction, digital or in person, exceeds their expectations. 

To win against their competitors, companies need to deeply understand their customers, personalize every interaction pre-sale and post-sale, and use data and AI to deliver proactive and continuous value to win the hearts and minds of their customers. Marketers and sellers must work closely together as a single unit to deliver experiences where every interaction builds upon the last. Marketers and customer experience (CX) professionals are being tasked with orchestrating these experiences seamlessly across every department, for both new and existing customers, and are being asked to do this with even fewer resources.

At Microsoft, we aspire to empower every company to create amazing experiences for their customers that translate into business success. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, companies can orchestrate real-time, end-to-end journeys designed by business users. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can use all its data as an enterprise asset and get insights that can be actioned across the customer’s lifecycle. AI assists every step of the way, so employees can be more efficient and have more time to focus on the things they really want to do. Companies can:

• Gain deep insights into their customers to deliver relevant interactions.
• Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences.
• Unify sales and marketing teams to accelerate the pipeline.

Discover how 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you delight your customers while increasing your team’s efficiency. Let’s look at some of the features in this wave that I am most excited about.

Gain insights into your customers to deliver relevant interactions

Understanding your customers is key to delivering relevant interactions that drive engagement and loyalty. The use of generative AI empowers companies to understand customers like never before. While analyzing vast amount of data previously required deep knowledge of the data and took time to prepare, thanks to Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can now get insights faster and more easily by using natural language. Marketers, sellers, and data analysts can ask questions in simple everyday words to explore, analyze, and instantly understand their customers—segment sizes, preferences, and new insights to uplevel every interaction.

While Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables the speed of getting to insights, these insights are only as good as the quality of the underlying data. That is why users can now better understand data quality with an overall data quality grade to unlock better insights. AI analyzes the imported data and makes suggestions on which out-of-the-box predictions the data can support, giving companies the opportunity to remediate data issues and increase the value they can get out of the data.

To get value from insights, these must be available where they can be actioned. With the latest customer interactions compiled into a unified timeline and made available directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing, each team can be guided by a complete understanding of their customers and their recent activities. Armed with relevant customer information accessible directly within the flow of their work, sellers and marketers can orchestrate next best experiences that exceed their customers’ expectations.

Use generative AI to orchestrate impactful experiences

To run successful campaigns, marketers must target the right customers. Often this means finding that one person who understands the underlying data set and can create the right segment to target. Now, using query assist, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can build segments in minutes by simply describing audiences’ characteristics in natural language, for example, create a segment from contacts living in Seattle.

Creating compelling emails can be hard and often getting started is the hardest part. Copilot can assist marketers in finding inspiration and generating engaging emails within minutes. With Content ideas, a Copilot feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can easily craft engaging emails—it’s like brainstorming with their team. After marketers specify the type of email they want to send and select the tone of voice that is the right fit with their brand, Copilot generates high-quality content that marketers can easily adjust. With the assistance of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can significantly reduce the amount of time spent copywriting, and shipping engaging emails is faster, more efficient, and fun.

In order to maximize marketing ROI, it is important to know what activities are having a positive impact. Out-of-the-box AI-powered dashboards help marketers understand how their activities contribute to defined milestones, for example, number of webinar registrations, qualified leads, or opportunities created. Thanks to AI-powered milestones and rules-based attribution models, marketers can easily identify their best performing activities and journeys, drop ineffective tasks, and optimize their marketing spend.

Unify sales and marketing to accelerate your funnel

It is no longer enough for sales and marketing teams to just be “aligned,” they must now be unified so together they can effectively nurture leads, close pipelines, and build a loyal customer base. With the new lead scoring model and qualification model in real time marketing, marketers can define criteria and identify leads to prioritize so every single qualified lead gets attention at the right time from the sales teams.

Furthermore, to make sure leads are actioned immediately, marketers can automatically assign leads to the seller in Dynamics 365 Sales. Leads are identified, prioritized, and while they are still hot, they are seamlessly passed to the relevant or available expert on the sales team to increase the chances of closing the deal.

To ensure the seller is enabled to deliver value in every interaction, sellers can access valuable insights directly within their Dynamics 365 Sales workflow. They can for instance use average transaction amount, total sales, loyalty reward points, and customer lifetime value for each contact, account, or lead and use these insights to hyper-personalize the interaction. This kind of interaction builds relationships, exceeds expectations, and leads to loyal customers.

Start using Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights wave 1 2023 features

We aim to help you capitalize on your data to better understand your customers. We aim to democratize the use of generative AI so you can deliver experiences that build customer loyalty while improving employee productivity. We aim to facilitate seamless collaboration across departments so your organization can operate as one seamless unit. And we are excited to bring solutions in this wave designed to do just this, while making your work easier and enabling you to transform customer experiences so you can grow your business.

Business Applications Launch Event

Discover new capabilities for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

Register to watch

Read the release notes to discover all Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights new capabilities.

The capabilities highlighted above are planned to be released from April 2023 through September 2023 either as previews or generally available.

Visit the website to sign up for a free trial for Dynamics 365 Marketing and for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Note: The product visuals are only for illustrative purposes and might not reflect the general availability feature.

The post Use generative AI to drive customer engagement with 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Generative AI has left its mark on computing, and it’s only the beginning. The world of business applications will never be the same. For several years now, we have been iterating on and shipping copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365, and I’m pleased to announce our next wave of value.

And it’s coming out just in time. Today’s customers demand tailored experiences that cater to their individual needs. They expect businesses to be responsive on all communication channels and to treat each individual with knowledge of their overall relationship and journey. For example, recent research from LinkedIn found that over two-thirds of customers say they’re less likely to engage with sellers whose initial outreach isn’t tailored to them and their role.¹

On the heels of our Business Applications Launch Event (BALE), I’m thrilled to introduce some of the latest features being released over the next few months for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights.

Our new technologies and tools enable you to provide engaging customer experiences, standing out from the competition and building loyalty and trust. It makes your employees more productive and your customers feel more connected. Our latest wave builds on our most recent public releases, such as natural language AI generation through Copilot, and sets up Dynamics 365 business applications to become the game-changing opportunity for you to do more with less.

Business Applications Launch Event Resources

Access resources to learn all about the 2023 release wave 1 updates.

Sign up for access today

A unified approach to Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights

A recent survey from Microsoft found that nearly 9 in 10 business users want to apply AI solutions to more tasks, so that they can focus on the work that really matters.² Our upcoming investments deliver this across the customer experience landscape. We bring together sales, service, and marketing through Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marry that with Microsoft 365 data, and apply Copilot generative AI. The result is cohesive end-to-end customer engagements that empower and connect your sellers.

Here are a few highlights coming with the 2023 wave 1 release and recently released capabilities to keep on your radar that were showcased at BALE:

• With Dynamics 365 Sales, navigating records in a database is no longer the norm, and now you can look at opportunities, accounts, and contacts and view both a list and a detailed view of the record. We call this focus mode. It’s a part of our overall vision to move from tracking tools to tools that help sellers get their job done. With focus mode, sellers can prioritize engagement and optimize their workspace, reducing overall clicks to get work done. We introduced text message embedded within Dynamics 365 so you can engage customers through text in Dynamics 365 on customers’ preferred channels. When working opportunities, the new pipeline view experience is the default experience to quickly view and manage the sales pipeline. Deals will also see an updated smart organization chart to view and manage stakeholders. Finally, release wave 1 will showcase the power of Dynamics 365 Copilot generative AI to assist sellers in meeting preparation, meeting follow-up, and proposals. See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales.
• With Microsoft Viva Sales, included at no additional cost in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium, a monthly cadence of improvements to Copilot capabilities are reimagining the way salespeople work starting with AI-generated email replies, proactive insights, summarization, and search. With the latest Outlook calendar integration generative email replies can propose meeting times. Beyond Copilot, an exciting new Microsoft Teams collaboration experience will help connect sales teams and customers in a shared Teams workspace. Salespeople can become trusted advisors to customers, and information can flow through shared files and chat, all linked back to the sales opportunity record for instant updates. Full support for out-of-the-box and custom customer relationship management (CRM) entities will enable organizations to configure the entire experience, and Teams meeting enhancements include CRM integration as well as real-time tips and suggestions. See the release plans for Microsoft Viva Sales.
• In Dynamics 365 Marketing, users can use new copilot features to create engaging emails and define segments using natural language. To generate higher quality leads, users can build modern forms using an intuitive form experience, prioritize leads with the new lead scoring builder, and engage sellers at the right time. The out-of-the-box dashboards make it easy to track pipeline developments and analyze the impact and contribution of journeys, marketing messages, and content. When a marketing campaign hits your customer’s inbox, your sellers can immediately reference a copy of the email and start connecting for more opportunities. Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Marketing.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights accelerates customer understanding to know your customers deeply and accurately. Users can understand their data quality more deeply with a data quality score, automatically see which out-of-the-box predictions apply to their data, and seamlessly connect custom models from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, users can use natural language to have a dialog with their data to quickly get deep insights without the need for experts. Additionally, sellers can access relevant insights from within their flow of work to further personalize their conversations and close deals faster. AI-driven seller productivity gives your sellers an edge on every opportunity, all within the flow of their work, whether they’re talking to customers in Outlook or Teams or analyzing data in Dynamics 365. Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Real impact, real customers

Look at these inspiring case studies that demonstrate how our upcoming features can transform businesses:

• Greenreb AG, the exclusive Topgolf licensee for Europe aims to deliver an engaging golf and technology-infused leisure experience across Europe and in the United States. As a golfer, I certainly need to try them out! With Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing, Greenreb can use its existing game data to create personally tailored marketing campaigns for each customer. With automated lead generation and no silos between sales and marketing, no customers fall between the cracks. The benefits of the scalability of Dynamics 365 is clear according to Phillip Fu, the CTO of Greenreb who explained that “[b]ecause we synchronize all our data in a Dataverse and have it on one platform, all departments get the same access to all the data in every system. We’ve bundled many functions in one product and can integrate further modules quickly.” To hear more from Phillip, you can read the full customer story.
• Lynk & Co, an automotive company that aims to disrupt the industry by putting the customer at the center of the experience. Embracing the latest capabilities from across Dynamics 365 has enabled it to scale its customer engagement quickly to half-dozen countries across Europe with a small team. Sign up here for access to a video from BALE that highlights how the latest Dynamics 365 release can help the Lynk & Co team prepare for an upcoming event—Planet First Eco-Drive, with a simplified data-informed campaign that uses natural language to query customer data and identify the best audience for upcoming events. To hear more about Lynk & Co and their experience with our business applications, you can access the fireside chat here.
• OBOS is a Nordic leader in housing and financial services—not only in the development and sale of homes and properties, but banking and financial solutions, property management, and real estate brokerage. As a co-op, with its clients also being owners, breaking down silos to deliver a cohesive experience across projects and businesses is critical to both customer retention and employee effectiveness. You can read more about how it was able to transform its business using Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights in the customer story.

Join the Dynamics 365 community on this journey

These innovations are just a small part of what is coming in this wave release. Our goal is to help your employees be more effective and provide your customers with amazing experiences. With generative AI capabilities through Copilot, your teams can do more with less and focus on higher-impact work. Don’t wait to get started—the world is changing now. Many AI capabilities are available now, and we’re seeing many companies shortcut standard CRM rollouts and we have more coming over the following months.

I value your feedback and look forward to hearing how these tools have improved your customers’ and employees’ lives. Connect with me on LinkedIn for more updates and insights, and be sure to share your stories of success with generative AI on our Dynamics 365 Communities platforms. Let’s create better solutions together!

Learn more about generative AI and Dynamics 365

To learn more about all the innovations coming with generative AI, or to see some of the other announcements from BALE, check out these other articles:

• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights
• New Sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 1
• New Marketing capabilities in 2023 release wave 1
• Release wave 1 expands agility, automation, and innovation across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
• Access all BALE event recordings here

¹LinkedIn State of Sales Report 2022.

²Four Ways Leaders Can Empower People for How Work Gets Done, Microsoft WorkLab.

The post Release wave 1: Transforming customer experiences with generative AI and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.