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.

At National Retail Federation (NRF) 2023: Retail’s Big Show, thousands of people joined together in New York City to collectively envision what’s next for the future of retail. The lessons and best practices shared have important implications for other industries as well. Retailers, operating in a highly competitive environment, are often the first to blaze the trail of innovation in customer experience.

Elevating the consumer shopping experience requires companies to deliver more relevant, streamlined experiences throughout the retail value chain. That delivery starts with unifying disparate data from sources across the end-to-end shopper journey. Driving customer acquisition, retention, and business growth requires a connection between your customers, your people, and your data.

Marketers today are rethinking their data strategies, looking for ways to take ownership of their customer data and to use that resource to create valued customer relationships in a time of tightening privacy legislation. Microsoft continues to make significant investments in helping organizations across industries fulfill customer demands for privacy and personalization while optimizing marketing return on investment (ROI). To that end, we are excited to showcase the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform—an opportunity for organizations to jump-start their customer experience transformations—at NRF 2023.

Microsoft Customer Experience Platform

A platform that puts you in control of your customer data

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Deliver more relevant customer engagements with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform is an end-to-end customer experience platform that brings together industry-leading applications spanning Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft PromoteIQ, Microsoft Clarity, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Purview.

With full ownership of their data, organizations can engage buyers the way they expect. With a deep understanding of customers and rich, out-of-the-box insights, organizations can now maximize the value of their customer data. By determining and predicting intent, they can deliver the right content on the right channel and in the right moment. And, with AI-orchestrated journeys, organizations can engage customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpoint—all the way from awareness, to purchase, to service.

For Chief Data Officers (CDO) and their data wranglers, the solution delivers on their need to balance technology investments and business productivity demands with the scalability to support ever-changing business complexities. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform integrates seamlessly with your existing Azure Data Lake to remove the complexities of duplicating the ingestion and storage of data, while making it faster to combine data with other sources and deliver unmatched time to insight.

Teams responsible for enterprise-wide data and information strategies, including privacy, governance, and data quality, can feel secure knowing that the solution fulfils their needs while, at the same time, it is helping them create business value. As consumers increasingly adopt digital technology, the data they generate creates both an opportunity for enterprises to improve their consumer engagement and a responsibility to keep consumer data safe. At the same time, consumers are increasingly exercising their rights to privacy, given the growing awareness of data misuse and breaches. The solution safeguards customer privacy and honors customer consent with built-in and configurable tools that automatically store and manage consent.

Turn insights into understanding to deliver tailored customer experiences

For Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and their marketing teams, the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform serves as a secure, single source of truth. For marketing leaders who want to elevate customer experiences, the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform is the solution that enables your organization to build deep customer connections while maintaining full control of your data. The consolidated, real-time data powers operational excellence while AI and machine learning capabilities pave a path to competitive advantage. Having the ability to predict customers’ needs and wants means marketers can turn insights into true understanding of their prospects and customers. By leaning on their data with the magic of AI, they can now easily test and measure to ensure their investments are resulting in the most efficient and optimal outcomes. As a result, personalization becomes their crucial strategy. Businesses can now deliver tailored recommendations, content, offers, and experiences, across all channels and devices, along the entire customer journey.

Chief Executive Officers (CEO) also benefit from the solution, knowing that it is helping their teams align on growth and opportunities. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform can aide in progress by helping to instill a digital mindset for internal processes and, as a result, create a positive, productive culture. Teams looking for new revenue streams can accelerate progress when they have a left-to-right view across the business.

Organizations like Campari Group and Leatherman rely on this end-to-end platform to successfully deliver great brand experiences and build quality customer relationships in an era of heightened customer expectations. Customers attending NRF will have the opportunity to see, first-hand, the power of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in fueling next-generation customer experience.

Extend capabilities to meet retailers’ unique needs

With the power of Microsoft Business Applications, organizations can transform customer experience, driving topline sales and improving operational efficiencies that lead to sustained profitability and meaningful growth. With the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, retailers can optimize marketing ROI by unlocking customer data with AI-driven insights to deliver connected, personalized experiences at scale.

Customer experience is the most effective avenue for sustainable competitive advantage and often the most important barometer of success. The most successful retailers are taking control of their customer data in this time of uncertainty and changing shopper expectations, engaging in new ways across every touchpoint, creating raving fans.

Microsoft’s growing ecosystem of partners helps customers extend the robust capabilities of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. Our partners are dedicated to serving retailers’ unique needs by helping provide integrated retail industry-specific solutions that extend the core capabilities of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. They are trusted allies, helping customers to identify new opportunities for benefiting from innovations, and to accelerate the time-to-value for investments. A robust partner ecosystem extends the value of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform with additional solutions to address the most urgent challenges the retail industry is facing today.

Join Microsoft at NRF 2023

Missed us at the show? Find out how you can unlock the value of your customer data to fuel your customer experience transformation with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform. To see our Microsoft announcements at NRF, be sure to read How Microsoft Teams empowers your retail workers to do more with less and the Microsoft Cloud for Retail blog. See our Microsoft Learn collection of resources and contact your account manager today to find out how you can harness insights to inform and deliver more relevant, connected customer experiences.

The post Transform retail customer experiences with the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As technology advances, so do customer expectations. Whether a consumer or a buyer, it no longer matters as the respective lines between customer expectations have blurred, and, at the end of the day, the business-to-business (B2B) buyer is a consumer too. Hyper-personalized, self-driven, seamless interaction across any channel at any time is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have as customers want to engage on their own terms and expect businesses to deliver even better experiences. At the same time, exacerbated by a turbulent economy, businesses need to reduce cost and complexity to innovate quickly and stay resilient so they can meet current customers’ expectations and find new ways to engage them. Businesses that take the opportunity to optimize their processes to do more with less will stand out against the competition and be better positioned to drive loyalty, retain customers, and emerge stronger from these uncertain times.

We’re excited to share the new capabilities coming in the 2022 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and, more importantly, how these new capabilities will help you deliver greater efficiency, empower marketers to be more productive, and provide value to customers in moments that matter. Ready? Let’s get started!

1. Maximize the value of your data to understand your customers

The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and intent of each customer.

If you are a new Customer Insights user, you will be delighted by the first-run experience feature that helps you accelerate understanding your customers. To fuel your journeys, valuable insights are generated in a matter of minutes simply from a customer list, saving you time and avoiding advanced configurations.   

2. Engage your customers in moments that matter with real-time marketing

To deliver unforgettable experiences, marketers need to send the right message on the right channel at the right time. To allow you to do just this, we have further developed our real-time engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.  

Whether it’s to catch your customer’s attention to collect relevant details, or capture leads to nurture and strengthen the sales funnel, we’ve enhanced our capabilities so that marketers can effortlessly design customized forms with a few clicks. Through the modern drag-and-drop editor, marketers are guided step-by-step from creation to preview, test, and publish. Within seconds they can deliver compelling branded forms, on websites or landing pages, while directly tracking conversions.

To engage customers through their preferred channel, marketers can now easily build custom channels in real-time marketing. We’ve improved upon the model in outbound marketing by providing the ability to create a channel with all the power and flexibility that the box channels have. It enables marketers to extend their reach across bespoke text message providers, Viber, or direct mail, and activate these new channels in customer journeys using out-of-the-box modern templates, text message editor, and consent collection. In addition, marketers can natively track deliverability analytics to monitor the success of the custom channel activation.

Customers often qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. The frequency cap feature prevents message fatigue by setting limits on the number of messages that can be sent per channel per day, week, or month. At the same time, marketers can bypass the limit for the most important journeys, ensuring customers never miss an important message.

3. Personalize content to grow your audience engagement

Each customer is unique and driven by different incentives. To get noticed, businesses need to easily create personalized content that stands out and resonates to keep their brand top of mind.

Finding inspiration to create enthralling emails has never been so easy. Thanks to AI, marketers receive engaging content ideas, based on the key messaging points they want to convey. Marketers can also use feature-rich text links and QR codes for events and coupons within email campaigns to get more customers to engage, click, and convert.

Managing multi-brand content is often demanding as marketers spend time customizing each email to comply with specific brand guidelines. The new brand profile functionality helps them to gain time and consistency, and reduce content-related errors by defining default senders for emails and social links, as well as custom values such as URLs or compliance messages, and easily switch these settings for the brand they are working on.

To ensure compliance and privacy of customer interactions across multiple brands or business units, marketers now have the ability to fully customize out-of-the-box preference centers to match their business needs, from tracking or isolating consent data to adhering to brand guidelines for logos, styles, and colors. Furthermore, marketers can create and manage topics that align with your brands and business for customers to opt-in to marketing subscriptions, for example: “Get cooking tips and tricks”. Last but not least, consent is becoming entity agnostic and will work with customer profiles, contacts, leads, and custom entities.

Maximizing the impact of personalized content requires effectively targeting the right audiences. As part of our effort to improve marketers’ efficiency, we have redesigned our segment builder. The workflow and UX have been enhanced, and we’ve set the foundation for supporting contacts, leads, and any entity, including custom, in the future. Segments can be created instantly using an intuitive and powerful logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures. Marketers are empowered by AI-assisted natural language capabilities, the ability to create a static snapshot of segment membership, as well as previewing segment members and size. This not only scales reach but improves marketing productivity.

4. Connect your sales and marketing to provide seamless experiences

By placing customer needs at the center of the organization, deep collaboration within and across departments unlocks significant business growth opportunities.

For instance, as marketers nurture leads with real-time journeys, signals from the lead might indicate an urgency to engage with the sales team. Marketers can directly trigger a sales sequence or assign a follow-up call from the journey to the sales team to ensure the lead gets individualized attention at the right time when they are most likely to engage. Marketers identify potential leads, and sales teams receive smart assistance to optimize their time and prioritize opportunities in the lead nurturing process.

Businesses can capitalize on B2B contact unification in Customer Insights to create a complete view of accounts and contacts within the same environment. Typically, businesses engage with contacts, however, the context for engagement is based on the attributes of the organization in which the contact resides. Unified contacts provide the ability for marketers to now generate segments of contacts based on account attributes.

5. Use data and AI to optimize your campaigns and scale up your business

Harnessing the power of data and AI is key to marketing at scale and achieving higher levels of marketing maturity.

As businesses create a vast number of assets, they need to organize them according to their organizational structure to remain compliant and productive. They can now effortlessly organize their digital assets, content and journeys according to their business structure. Whether it’s business data or customer data, it can be isolated by departments, regions, brands, business units, and product lines, reducing your compliance risk.

In the upcoming months, you will be able to increase your throughput to send up to 300 million messages per month. This added capacity empowers your team to deliver personalized experiences at scale and will help you grow your business, whether you are increasing your customer base in new markets, expanding geographies, promoting new products, or building your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.

Use new features for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights with the 2022 release wave 2

Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights

Stay up-to-date on the latest functionalities.

Read the release notes for details

From leveraging AI to capitalize on your data, optimizing real-time interactions and personalization capabilities, to customizing tools to meet your unique business needs, or facilitating deeper collaboration between departments, we are thrilled to deliver solutions that are designed to make your job easier, more productive, and ultimately enable you to transform customer experiences.

The Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights functionalities highlighted above are planned to be released from October 2022 through March 2023 either as previews or generally available.

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

The post 5 steps for transforming customer experience with Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights updates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Expectations for executives leading their companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts seem to grow every day. From driving sustainable growth, to aligning your teams and integrating your technology, to empowering employees to do their best work, there’s more on your plate than ever. Meanwhile, customer expectations can feel like a moving target that only goes up. Buyers today are digital first, becoming more informed, more comfortable switching between channels, more likely to ignore anything that doesn’t feel authentic, and they expect businesses to follow their lead.

To stay relevant to customers, many leaders are rethinking their approach to CX at every touchpoint. Relying on customer relationship management (CRM) to drive sales simply won’t cut it anymore. You need to connect customer insights and data across your organization—sales, marketing, and service—to meet customers where they are and capitalize on every opportunity.

That’s why I’m excited to invite you to Customer Experience Reimagined, a digital event on October 26. Learn about the latest trends shaping CX today—and tomorrow—with Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. He’ll share his perspective about what CX leaders are facing, how they energize employees by simplifying fragmented and complicated systems, and what it means to be a digitally connected enterprise with unified, enriched data.

Hear insights straight from the experts

Customer Experience Reimagined will give you a window into what other CX leaders are thinking, with strategies to help your business adapt to a changing landscape. Learn about the evolution of CRM, along with critical technologies and skills from leaders who are shaping their customer experience strategy:

• Constellation Research Founder and CEO Ray Wang—author of Everybody Wants To Rule The World: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giants—will join Constellation Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Liz Miller to discuss the importance of AI, analytics, and automation for shifting from real time to “right time” personalized experiences.
• Accenture Senior Managing Director John Bolze will share insights from a new report by Accenture, The Human Paradox, including how 95 percent of C-suite executives say customers are changing faster than businesses are able to adapt. John will talk about why overcoming this crisis of relevancy requires shifting from a customer-centric strategy to a life-centric strategy.
• Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF) Director of Innovation in charge of Digital, Business Intelligence/Analytics, and Fan Experience Franco Segarra will discuss how to create more meaningful fan experiences, increase attendance, and improve game day experiences with a data-centric approach.
• Eika Director of Business Applications Atle Riksfjord, Northrop & Johnson Director of Technology and Intelligence Keith Perfect, and Accenture Song Global Lead Social & Emerging Channels and author of Human-Driven Experience: The Battle for Trust in the Digital Age Robert Harles will lead a roundtable discussion on how to kick-start your CX transformation and guide your company to deliver more personalized, intentional, and relevant experiences.

Learn key lessons from Microsoft’s modern marketing transformation

Get the inside story of our own CX transformation from Stephanie Ferguson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Global Demand Center, as she shares the vision for our Commercial Customer Platform to meet the changing expectations of customers in the business-to-business (B2B) space. Stephanie will show how we help our marketers and sellers around the globe engage our customers with greater relevancy, clarity, and purpose.

You’ll also hear our technology vision from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, along with Lori Lamkin, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing. They’ll talk about how we’re helping companies connect data from hundreds of business applications and deliver AI-enabled insights to sellers and service agents with automated tools that give them more time to spend with customers. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform combined with the new seller experience application Microsoft Viva Sales helps companies unify and automate, so they can scale their customer experience investments to get customers to “yes” faster.

See what’s shaping CX today—and tomorrow

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear strategies for elevating your customer experience and uncover new ways to sustain business growth, no matter what the future brings. Register for Customer Experience Reimagined today to join us on Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 9:00-10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7).   

Customer Experience Reimagined

Evolve your CRM to personalize and connect customer journeys

Register here

The post Evolve your CRM at Customer Experience Reimagined appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We all know one, the person whose weekend is consumed by a singular passion for their favorite sports team. Their weekdays are dedicated to deconstructing the recent drama while contemplating the narrative awaiting the Saturday or Sunday afternoon ahead. The rain-soaked terraces are home to them. The booming music of the arena is their hymn book, and the legendary names hanging from the rafters are their heroes. A peek into their closet will reveal a sea of matching colors printed on scarves and t-shirts. Their social media will be awash with images of heroes present and past, opinions of games told in terms worthy of epic conquests, and, of course, the barbed insult to anyone who dares question the validity of their narrative.

Read how Microsoft helped Valencia CF unlock the value of their customer data to create super fans.

Engage super fans through actionable insights

This is the world of the sports “super fan”—they are the backbone of the world’s greatest sports franchises. Along with their passion, the super fan is the mainstay of a team’s economy, accounting for a disproportionate number of ticket sales, merchandise, media impressions, and revenue. Teams all over the world love their super fans. In some countries and sports, they have seats in the boardroom and strong voices in ownership decisions. And while it is tempting to view the super fan as a dynastic, generational phenomenon passed on through time and culture, the truth is that today, the super fan is a function of data as much as history. Big, multidimensional data gleaned from the numerous touch points between fans and sports franchises is woven into insights that are specific and actionable at an individual level. Data is how casual fans ascend the ladder of engagement to become super fans and how super fans are rewarded and celebrated.

Row 15 seat 164 in Valencia’s vast Mestalla Stadium is a hallowed place. It is occupied by a statue honoring Señor Vicente Navarro Aparicio, a lifelong Valencia CF fan who sat in that seat for 25 years, never missing a game, even when his eyesight failed him in his later years. Señor Aparicio is the very definition of “super fan.” Valencia CF is more than 100 years old with a proud history of Spanish and international success, and a worldwide fan base of more than 50 million supporters. Although fan engagement has always been a top priority, the club didn’t always know its fans or what they needed in the intimate detail they do today. When Franco Segarra joined Valencia CF as Innovation Director, he immediately recognized the need for a new game plan to enhance fan engagement.

“Super fans aren’t like ordinary customers. They are passionate—experiencing euphoria and shedding tears or losing sleep with the inevitable ups and downs. The sport is steeped in tradition, where fans have special rituals, passed down from parents and grandparents. Therefore, each fan is unique. Fragmented data makes it impossible to understand, let alone deliver, deeply personal experiences that speak to each fan as an individual.”—Franco Segarra, Innovation Director, Valencia CF.

Innovate personalized customer experiences

As an innovative and forward-thinking organization, Valencia CF is continuously improving the global fan experience and building new connections with their fans. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, the club gained new and actionable insights and a deeper understanding of its fans. With an integrated data architecture, Valencia can run personal campaigns with its season ticket holders. From deploying an app to speed food orders in the stadium to checking in with 1,500 season ticket holders who missed in-person games during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Valencia has used the insights from its customer data to create delightful, rewarding, and engaging fan experiences. By applying custom Al on top of the unified data, the club was able to predict which season ticket holders were most likely to attend games. For those who missed two consecutive games, Valencia CF reached out with a tailored email. And for a subsegment of the fans, football legends Ricardo Arias and Miguel Angel Bossio, who played for Valencia CF in the 80s and 90s, made personal calls.

“Imagine the older fans’ reactions when their all-time favorite idol calls to say hi and see how things are going—it’s an unforgettable experience. It also gave us the opportunity to sincerely thank our fans and hear firsthand what’s on their mind. Customer insights helped us engage at the right moment with a meaningful personal touch that deepened the relationship and strengthened loyalty.”—Franco Segarra, Innovation Director, Valencia CF.

Take a look at how Valencia CF leveraged customer data and technology to create amazing fan experiences.

Valencia CF demonstrates that transforming a casual fan into a super fan is about delighting and engaging that fan on a one-to-one basis.

Super fans are increasingly important in the world of sports brands. Building the commitment of the super fan is not just about tradition and generational influence. It’s about data, and more specifically, drawing all the diverse data sources into one platform driving innovation. But we are only at the beginning of this data journey, and Microsoft is the partner enabling sports teams all over the world to discover the exciting possibilities when the power of integrated data is unleashed.

Next steps

• Read how Microsoft helped Valencia CF unlock the value of their customer data to create super fans.
• Learn more about the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

The post Data empowers Valencia CF to create personalized fan experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The role of the chief financial officer (CFO) has been evolving for some time, from hindsight report generation to forward-looking advisor, business innovator, and change agent. During the pandemic, many finance leaders took ownership of large-scale digital transformation efforts––a trend that is only accelerating. Indeed, a central lesson learned through the challenges of the past two years is the advantage of being able to rapidly adapt an organization to minimize the impact, or avoid altogether, the effects of disruption. Even as we move into a post-pandemic world, disruptive events are here to stay––increasing in both severity and frequency. At the same time, new business models are emerging, such as the subscription economy and service-based experiences like platform-as-a-service (PaaS), that require significant changes to financial and operational models.

Taken together, the need to adapt and overcome disruption and the opportunity presented by emerging business models offer a clear justification of why organizations––and in particular the futurist, change-making CFO––must develop flexibility and adaptability to achieve resilience. This point has not gone unnoticed. According to McKinsey, only 11 percent of companies believe their current business models will be economically viable through 2023, while another 64 percent say their companies need to build new digital businesses to help them get there.¹ Despite having so much at stake, many finance leaders face roadblocks on the journey to become more agile. Therefore, this blog looks at 3 forces driving adaptability for CFOs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

1. Modernize enterprise resource planning solutions

The first force driving adaptability is the modernization of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Recent technological advances, such as the shift from the rigid structures of monolithic ERP to highly adaptable, composable business applications, are a primary benefit driver of ERP modernization. This is perhaps one reason that, according to Gartner®, by 2023, organizations that have successfully renovated their ERP platforms will achieve at least a 40 percent improvement in IT agility to deliver business outcomes.² This will not surprise companies that had completed ERP modernization before or during the pandemic. These businesses grew US corporate equity, assets, and profit ten times faster than corporate debt during the 21 months of the pandemic³––proving that savvy companies, boosted by digital transformation, can rapidly pivot to new sales and services models.

Dynamics 365 Finance offers businesses standardized capabilities on a composable ERP platform. Plus, it can function as both a stand-alone solution, allowing organizations to avoid costly rip-and-replace of legacy technology or as a tightly integrated and extensible system. As CFOs look to modernize existing ERP solutions as a path to unlocking adaptability, Dynamics 365 is enabling the transformation and improving IT agility to embrace new business models.

Learn more in our recent blog: Dynamics 365 breathes composability into enterprise resource planning modernization.

2. Enable a real-time, single source of truth

Though expensive to maintain and resource-intense to customize, legacy ERP often becomes highly customized and fragmented as businesses grow and add new solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM) or warehouse management systems (WMS). These additions are disparate and disconnected from a central ERP, leaving data silos that are difficult to integrate and reconcile. Without unified data available in real-time across the organization, finance leaders can remain stuck in the function of economic guardians and unable to rise to the role of business innovators.

Dynamics 365 Finance is built on a modern, open platform that can be easily connected to both legacy internal solutions and modern, cloud-based systems via RESTful APIs. This flexibility and extensibility serve to unlock adaptability, automate data harmonization, and create a single source of truth. Ultimately, this allows finance teams and the broader organization to confidently make quicker, data-first decisions.

3. Deliver AI-driven insights

As we have discussed previously, AI is poised to transform the finance function. The core set of financial management processes that support the work of every organization are often highly manual, making them slow to innovate and challenging to transform. While progress has been made through automation, specific tasks, like predicting when a customer will pay an invoice or creating an intelligent cash flow forecast, require more person-hours than are available in a month, let alone on demand. This is because these tasks require comprehensive knowledge of large, complex data sets––a job ideally suited to the application of AI and machine learning.

Dynamics 365 Finance recently announced the general availability of finance insights, a set of AI-powered capabilities that help companies improve the efficiency and quality of financial processes by leveraging intelligent automation. Finance insights provide three new financial management tools: customer payment insights, cash flow forecasting, and budget proposals. When combined with Dynamics 365 Finance, these tools improve business decision-making by delivering AI-driven business insights that are clearer and faster while also improving operational efficiency by utilizing intelligent automation.

Take a deeper look in our webinar with special guest R “Ray” Wang from Constellation Research, Inc., to learn how analytics, automation, and AI can help you achieve financial dexterity.

Maximize financial visibility and profitability

As we have seen here, businesses and the finance leaders who support them need the right technology solutions to drive adaptability if they are to thrive in an era of disruption and to capitalize on emerging trends, such as PaaS, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and the subscription economy. To this end, we walked through three forces that are driving adaptability for CFOs with Dynamics 365 Finance: modernizing ERP systems, enabling a real-time, single version of truth, and delivering AI-driven insights.

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 Finance can help your organization maximize financial visibility and profitability in our new normal, check out our webinar with special guests from The Adecco Group. You can also see Dynamics 365 for yourself with a Manage Financial Risk Guided Tour today.

Sources:

1- McKinsey Digital, 2021. The new digital edge: Rethinking strategy for the postpandemic era.

2- 2021 Gartner, Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.

3- McKinsey & Company, 2022. The CEO agenda in 2022: Harnessing the potential of growth jolts.

GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post 3 ways Dynamics 365 powers adaptability for chief financial officers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Organizations across industries and around the world are seeking new ways to unlock their customer data to provide high-quality, connected customer experiences. Microsoft’s work to help enterprises, especially those in the retail, consumer brands, healthcare, manufacturing, and media and advertising industries to meet their customers’ expectations by delivering privacy-aware, consent enabled personalization has gained some recognition.

Microsoft is thrilled to be named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Data Platforms Focused on Front-Office Users 2021-2022 Vendor Assessment (doc # US47524621, December 2021). The IDC MarketScape is the first research by a major analyst firm evaluating customer data platform (CDP) vendors.

Source: “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Customer Data Platforms Focused on Front-Office Users 2021–2022 Vendor Assessment”, By: Gerry Murray, David Wallace & Michelle Morgan, December 2021, IDC # US47524621

The report highlights customer data management, including 360-degree customer view, improving customer experience, and globalization as top capabilities within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps customers unify all their B2C and B2B customer data to generate AI-powered insights in real-time, creating a single view of the customer. Interactive reports help marketers optimize their customers’ journeys, and AI-powered insights speed the prediction of customer needs.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights elegantly supports both technical and non-technical users—be it through a visual UI/drag and drop interface for marketers or through advanced analytics for data scientists. The IDC MarketScape said to, “Consider Microsoft if you have significant investments in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 applications such as marketing or sales or if you are looking for user-friendly AI/ML modeling capabilities that do not require marketers (and other LOB users) to be data scientists.” The report also noted, “Microsoft’s CDP segments are created through automated discovery powered by AI, API configuration, and visual UI/drag and drop interface for markets and through analytic/SQL queries for data scientists. Segments are updated based on a variety of factors such as streaming web session data, geolocation, and dynamic modeling and based on batch data updates.”

The IDC MarketScape noted, “Microsoft is strong in this important area for enterprise CDP buyers as the speed, scale, and response time for processing high volumes of customer data are an important enabler of personalization and customer experience.”

The IDC MarketScape also stated, “Microsoft has strengths in all aspects of globalization: number of languages supported in its CDP; number of countries with customers, sales, service, and support; and regional implementation partners.”

We invite you to read the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Customer Data Platforms Focused on Front-Office Users 2021-2022 report excerpt for full details.

Find out how Microsoft customers are creating great brand and customer experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Campari Group raises the bar for customer experiences with a 360-degree customer view that enhances the personalization of its marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.

Chipotle served up personalized experiences to convert more guests into loyalty program members.

Alpha XR Boots Alliance is unlocking insights that power more engaging, personalized customer experiences.

About the graphic:

IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market.  The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.

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Engaging with customers in today’s world is multifaceted, spanning everything from generating that initial spark of interest, to closing a sale and nurturing the relationship, to delivering exceptional ongoing service and support. Today, those experiences are often disconnected, and customer relationships are fragmented. On top of that, our expectations as customers have risen dramatically.

We expect that brands know enough about our preferences to provide high-quality interactions with us. We also prefer our experiences with a brand to be personalized and consistent across every touchpoint. However, this expectation is met with our own wariness about sharing personal information and fear that our data will be misused, or that we will be inundated with a barrage of advertisements, emails, and intrusive outreach. Yet, it is a balance, and most of us are receptive to content that is relevant to us at the right moment.

As we’ve worked with large enterprise customers around the world, their marketing leaders consistently stress that to meet today’s customer expectations and deliver privacy-aware, consent-enabled personalization, they need insights from multiple, diverse data sources—something they struggle with because data about their customers is often locked in silos.

This is why we are introducing the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, a customer engagement solution that gives you control of your customer data to deliver connected experiences. With full ownership of your data, you can connect directly to your customers—on your own terms. Rich out-of-the-box AI and insights enable you to better predict customer intent, accelerate your time to market, and deliver the right content on the right channel at the right moment. And, with AI-orchestrated journeys, you can engage your customers in powerful new ways, delivering connected experiences across every customer touchpoint.

Own your customer relationships

As the industry faces the imminent deprecation of third-party cookies and the continued fragmentation of digital identities, having a strong customer data platform is essential. Marketers need to build holistic customer profiles and protect them with robust privacy and security controls—all in real time. With Microsoft Customer Experience Platform, you can power customer data unification and understanding, enrich customer data with privacy-friendly insights from multiple sources, and ensure compliance, all while honoring your customer’s consent.

Data privacy and security, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, is top of mind for companies and customers alike. This is the reason Alpha XR and Boots Alliance, Inc. chose Microsoft to gain a unified, 360-degree view of their customers and deliver a world-class digital experience. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Alpha XR and Boots Alliance, Inc. is now able to deliver more engaging and tailored healthcare and shopping experiences, while protecting the privacy choices of patients and customers.

Create raving fans

Driving down customer acquisition costs and increasing lifetime value is a top priority for every business. And today’s marketers need granular data, scalable technology, and sophisticated analytics to achieve these goals. AI makes it easier to identify trends and insights to reveal new opportunities, but the average campaign led by data sciences can take months to execute, with a large portion of this time spent collecting data, cleaning it up, and running predictive models.

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform helps you understand the intent, journeys, and behavior of customers on your web and mobile properties to optimize funnels and trigger personal experiences. With Microsoft, marketers have access to powerful out-of-the-box AI and pre-built models to predict key customer attributes like lifetime value, churn, lookalike, and interests, all designed to accelerate your time to market and deliver results.

Chipotle serves millions of customers a year and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of individual customer preferences and how they change over time. They needed to put multiple sources of customer data to work for them, including a loyalty program with more than 17 million members, point-of-sale data, a customer care center, and digital platforms. To accomplish this, Chipotle needed a comprehensive customer data platform to drive business insights and improve their return on marketing efforts. Today, Chipotle can gather and analyze longitudinal data in a more effective way to track key performance indicators such as repeat visitors, customer lifetime value, and customer sentiment. With greater insight into customer behaviors and marketing analytics, Chipotle can now directly target customers with messages that appeal to them—at times when they’ll be most receptive.

Engage in new ways

Customers today want real connections with brands that go beyond simple personalization. They want high-quality experiences that improve the way they live and work. To maximize reach and ROI, marketers must think beyond a linear customer journey and connect experiences across marketing, commerce, sales, and service. This requires precise use of customer data, integration into line-of-business applications, and seamless activation across a growing number of customer touchpoints.

The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform provides AI-orchestrated journeys so you can acquire and retain high-value prospects based on their interactions across advertising, email, mobile, social media, custom channels, and in-person touchpoints. With the integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Microsoft Advertising, you can easily activate your audience segments, expand your target lists with lookalike audiences and auto-generated remarketing. You can distribute these segments into Microsoft Advertising and other ad platforms without barriers, further extending your reach by meeting customers where they are.

Leatherman, the originator and category leader in high-quality multi-tools, pocket tools, and knives, sought a solution to meet their growing D2C (Direct to Consumer) communication needs. Leatherman leveraged customer journey orchestration to curate a more personalized customer journey and to create user experience continuity with their online store. The team was able to create a multi-touchpoint journey which allowed them to engage their customers across their commerce and marketing solutions using real-time custom events. This journey was executed every time a customer signed up or started to check out on their website. This allowed Leatherman to seamlessly activate new customers and to create opportunities for continued engagement along the way.

When decision journeys bring customers to your retail website, Microsoft PromoteIQ helps you monetize that interest. This was the goal when the world’s largest home improvement retailer, Home Depot, partnered with PromoteIQ to enrich customer engagement on its e-commerce site in the U.S. Managing and scaling these vendor-funded digital marketing efforts generated incremental revenue for Home Depot while also giving Home Depot’s vendor partners enhanced marketing controls to drive better conversion, increase visibility and learn from real-time performance insights.

Tap into a rich ecosystem of partners and digital agencies

Microsoft is excited to be working with a growing list of digital agencies to help organizations more efficiently unlock their data, predict customer intent, and deliver impactful end-to-end journeys.

“We are excited about the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and how Microsoft continues to invest in this space. It has never been more important to have the right capabilities to unlock data to more effectively engage customers, to predict customer intent in the moment, and to deliver connected end-to-end experiences across the entire customer lifecycle.”—David Mitchell, CTO, VMLY&R.

“The advantages of digital transformation go well beyond a simple cost-benefit analysis. The announcement today of the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform gives businesses an end-to-end platform that encompasses transformation across infrastructure, data, and artificial intelligence to create real-time predictive customer experiences that create deeper understanding to deliver the right experience and brand behaviors and preferences clients want.”—Adam Good, Executive Director, Marketing Technology WPP Australia and New Zealand.

“Over the next few years, we’ll see the impact of the changes we’ve been through. We’re invested in experience because as we move to cloud, we’ll have data to make those experiences equitable, personalized, sustainable, & simple. Microsoft’s CX Platform helps pull it all together to make what’s next.”—José Reyes, PwC Partner, Chief Creative Officer and Experience Center Leader.

Learn more

Learn how to create tailored, delightful customer journeys with Microsoft Customer Experience Platform that safely leverage and protect your customer data while inspiring trust and loyalty. We help you get the most out of your data by connecting with customers on your own terms, applying rich AI capabilities to glean the best insights, and engaging in powerful ways across the customer journey.

All of this is made possible with the combined power of products like Microsoft Advertising, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft Promote IQ, Microsoft Clarity, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and Microsoft Azure Purview. Find out more at Microsoft Customer Experience Platform and Microsoft Ignite breakout webinar.

1- PWC, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right

The post Introducing Microsoft Customer Experience Platform: A solution for connected customer experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Many organizations face supply chain challenges that can be addressed through digital transformation, yet organizational limitations make this transformation difficult. Disparate and disconnected enterprise systems can prohibit companies from gaining end-to-end visibility into their supply chains, while outdated technology can create a lack of business continuity during disruptions or lead to an inability to rapidly adapt to changing customer demand. New technologies that enable and automate data-driven decision-making should be central to any strategy designed to meet these challenges. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is a nimble and modern, open platform that empowers businesses to do exactly that.

Intelligent fulfillment optimization

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management comes with a fulfillment optimization engine that intelligently manages order complexities, while also providing real-time end-to-end visibility into all inventory and order flows. Companies that ship direct-to-consumer, such as retailers, manufacturers, and distributors, face considerable challenges in this arena. This is one reason that in a recent Economist survey sponsored by Microsoft, ninety-nine percent of OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) believe that the digital transformation of their supply chain is important to meeting their organizations’ strategic objectives.¹

The challenge comes from the complexity created by combining a myriad of order sources such as e-commerce marketplaces, physical stores, and call centers. Plus, a growing number of options to fulfill, including distribution centers, third-party logistics providers, and supplier drop-shipping. And finally, any number of inventory holding locations from which physical inventory can be pulled to fulfill customer orders. Leveraging and optimizing the use of these options and assets is crucial for businesses seeking to profitably deliver on their order promise.

With our rules-based, event-driven, AI-infused fulfillment optimization engine, we make it easier than ever to connect to any of these enterprise applications via simple API interfaces. The result is that companies can quickly connect their existing order management systems, such as ERP and WMS, and extend these with our pre-built partner connectors. By giving businesses this unprecedented flexibility, Intelligent Order Management plays a pivotal role in digitally transforming the supply chain while also making supply chains more resilient.

Learn more in our recent e-book: The Savvy CSCO’s Guide to Transforming Order Management.

Spotlight on ShipStation integration

Last month we introduced our new integration with ShipStation. This month, we want to look at how ShipStation is used within Intelligent Order Management with a simple walkthrough.

Learn more in our recent blog post: Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management accelerates adaptability.

For those who haven’t had an opportunity to check out the recent blog above, ShipStation is a cloud-based e-commerce shipping platform specializing in creating shipping labels. With ShipStation, users can automatically import all e-commerce orders, create labels with discounted rates, send out shipping notification emails to customers, and send shipment details back to the order source. By integrating ShipStation with the Intelligent Order Management platform, users can bring all their carriers and order sources together within one unified solution.

When an order is received and ShipStation is selected for use, carrier service and delivery timeline information from ShipStation are captured in real-time by Intelligent Order Management to provide users with visibility of the shipment details.

The following screenshot shows the ShipStation information integrated into the Intelligent Order Management application. As you can see, Intelligent Order Management gives you visibility into the full details on the creation of the fulfillment order, including its unique timeline, which is added as a map to show how the delivery route looks.

In the screenshot below, you can see that ShipStation has also generated a tracking number that is automatically shown in Intelligent Order Management.

And the shipping label is also available from a single click without ever leaving the application, as shown below.

The label information generated by ShipStation is then passed back to the warehouse, which receives the pick list of items that need to be shipped to fulfill the order.

By combining new partner connectors like ShipStation with our fulfillment optimization engine, users of Intelligent Order Management can fulfill orders better, faster, and cheaper than ever before.

What’s next?

Organizations that ship direct-to-consumer need technology solutions to have end-to-end visibility into their supply chains, which will help them to achieve supply chain resiliency. A central part of a supply chain digital transformation is an order management solution with a fulfillment optimization engine. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management comes with a powerful fulfillment optimization engine that allows companies to simplify the complexity of managing numerous orders, fulfillment, and inventory sources. On top of this, we have added new provider connectors such as ShipStation so that companies can act before orders become late, gain access to discounted shipping rates, and offer customers greater visibility into order delivery status with email notifications.

If you would like to discover how you can turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage and enhance your customers’ experience, you can get started today with a free trial of Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management or check out our recent webinar to learn more.

¹ The Economist Intelligence Unit. Putting customers at the centre of the OEM supply chain. 2019

The post Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management enables fulfillment optimization and supply chain resiliency appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In a world where efficiency is more important than ever, companies are turning to new ways to unlock actionable insights to improve their businesses from the massive amounts of data they manage across their many data silos. This move to a new breed of “data-first” applications, which we introduced for other business processes through apps like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, is now coming to the supplier spend domain.

For most companies their financial data is locked in silos, making in-depth analysis difficult. With many companies facing rising costs and deteriorating margins, access to actionable insights for finance and procurement leaders is critical. They want to be able to bring down costs and manage their spend. For most companies, supplier spend represents a significant percentage of their revenue, yet most do not feel they are managing it strategically. But this has started to change, and Gartner* forecasts that by 2022, 50 percent of all legacy spend analysis software will be replaced by AI-powered, cloud-based solutions, and by 2024, 50 percent of organizations will have near-real-time procurement analytics.¹

Today, Microsoft is announcing the acquisition of Suplari, a leading provider of supplier spend insights that enable companies to proactively manage supplier spend by transforming data from multiple sources, such as contracts, purchase orders, invoices, expenses, and supplier risk, into valuable insight. By bringing Suplari’s spend intelligence insights together with the existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 capabilities, Microsoft is further helping organizations become insight-driven and enabling business leaders to take strategic action.

Suplari currently helps mid-size and large enterprises continuously manage costs and cash flow using unified, cleansed data, automated insights, and predictive actions. Together with Dynamics 365, the Suplari Spend Intelligence Cloud will help customers maximize financial visibility by using AI to automate the analysis of current data and historical patterns from multiple data sources. It will also help customers enhance financial decision-making by predicting the best spend management actions moving forward. The Suplari Spend Intelligence Cloud remains in market with no change for existing customers.

This acquisition will further empower Microsoft to help our customers turn data into actionable insights, including:

• Making comprehensive enterprise spend data and insights accessible to all. Customers can have a shared view of supplier spend everyone can use regardless of skill level. The simple, intuitive, and interactive user experience provides a single source of truth and insights for all users.
• Unlocking new financial insights to help with strategic procurement decisions. Microsoft is committed to helping customers transform data into immediate action and now with Suplari’s AI-powered library of over 175 insights, teams are empowered to manage demand, spend, and cash flow on a daily basis.
• Getting up and running with predictive insights in weeks, not months. Suplari’s data requirements are simple and flexible. Quickly access clean spend and operational data that includes your internal data sets as well as your external supplier data. Make better decisions faster, leading to stronger financial performance with measurable outcomes.

Today’s announcement also signals our continued commitment to enabling organizations to move beyond transactional financial management to proactive operations that enhance decision making, mitigate risks, and reduce supplier costs through our data-first approach. Learn more about getting started by visiting the Suplari website or request a demo. Learn more about Dynamics 365 by visiting our Dynamics 365 product page.

1- Gartner, Inc., Boost Supplier Management by Integrating Use-Case Driven Spend Analytics, Koray Kose et al, January 25, 2021.

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

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