Since we launched the tool internally here at Microsoft, we’ve learned a few best practices for deploying it easily and making full use of its features. This post shares some of our learnings so you can take advantage of our experience when you activate Copilot for Sales at your organization.

[See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. Get insights from our Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers on the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. Explore getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.]

Taking the tedium out of sales tasks

Copilot for Sales maximizes productivity with an AI assistant specifically designed for sellers. Like our other AI-powered tools, it increases productivity and efficiency by providing intelligent digital assistance within Microsoft Teams and Outlook.

The added value of Copilot for Sales is working with Dynamics 365 or Salesforce to access, use, and input customer relationship management (CRM) data. As a result, it eliminates distracting tasks that eat away at their time and get in the way of what they do best—building relationships and solving problems.

“Everything we’ve done in terms of our Dynamics 365 sales platform aims to give time back to sellers so they can invest it into customers,” says Alexandra Jones, senior business program and change manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “With AI and copilots, our technology is doing even more to help us reach that goal.”

The sweet spot exists at the intersection of AI-enabled intelligence and CRM integration into the spaces where salespeople operate every day. Within Microsoft Teams, Copilot for Sales delivers real-time call insights, AI-generated meeting summaries, post-call analyses and action items, and more. In Microsoft Outlook, its abilities include crafting contextual email responses, summarizing lengthy threads, and creating Teams Collaboration Spaces associated with accounts and opportunities.

Across both workspaces, Copilot for Sales makes it easier to create, update, or view CRM contacts, opportunities, and other data associated with sales accounts. That mitigates the need for sellers to migrate to a different tool as they conduct the essential business of using or updating their CRM.

“For sellers trying to do their jobs, it’s all about that flow of information within the flow of action,” says Kerry Barrass, director of business programs within Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions. “While the conversation is fresh, the tool distills information down into consumable chunks and actionable items.”

Those features come in handy because sales are complex and require strong coordination across large teams. One of our typical sales accounts involves anywhere from 20 to 50 individual employees, each with a vital role to play. As a result, it’s extremely difficult to get everyone on a call or piece together the narrative underlying email threads.

“When I get copied into an email thread, I used to need a knowledge transfer meeting to get up to speed,” says Emilio Reyes Le Blanc, a technology specialist in Microsoft Sales. “This technology means I can just open an email thread, have Copilot generate a summary, and contextualize my existing relationships from the integrated pane within Outlook.”

Taken together, these features deliver greater contextual understanding, more efficient workflows, and higher data fidelity within our CRM systems.

Our top seven tips for adopting and using Copilot for Sales

Our deployment experience and  of Copilot for Sales have provided some helpful insights. These seven tips should help with your adoption and everyday work with this AI-powered tool.

Seven tips for deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

01

Ride the wave of excitement

02

Align enablement with your employees’ needs

03

Leverage leadership at every level

04

Ensure our underlying data policies are secure

05

Start simple and work up from there

06

Prioritize CRM data resilience

07

Practice effective prompting

Deploying and using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally at Microsoft has taught us important lessons that we hope will help you deploy it at your company.

Ride the wave of excitement

Sellers have an eye for value, and when they saw what Copilot for Sales could do, it generated a lot of excitement. The tool’s intuitive features mean that, from a user perspective, it isn’t a complicated solution. As a result, we’ve experienced a substantial organic boost to adoption.

“One day, a magic button popped up in my Outlook and I got a prompt to try Sales Copilot, so I taught myself to use it,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “One of the beautiful things about this tool is that its time to value is extraordinary.”

When you’re deploying Copilot for Sales to your own sellers, focus on visibility first. When the excitement takes hold, it will boost adoption among your self-motivated salespeople. Encourage that uptake to score some early champions.

Align enablement with your employees’ needs

Not everyone is a self-driven early adopter—and that’s perfectly alright! Effective change management starts with understanding your audience and the complexities of your sales environment.

We recommend building hero scenarios for each user persona by taking a granular look at their challenges, sales processes, and day-to-day work. Dig into their role descriptions and documentation and ask what they’re trying to accomplish. From there, you can piece together your enablement materials based on what provides value.

Using video For video enablement content, we’ve discovered that the ideal length is 30 seconds to one minute.

Consider different learning formats and modalities as well.

“You want to make readiness consumable and provide options,” Jones says. “Some people want to show up to a demo session, and some people want to watch a video on their own time, so it’s important to offer a variety of pathways to adoption.”

Multimodality that includes courses, demos, written documentation, and more will help your readiness efforts reach the most people with the most impact.

Engage leadership at every level

It’s always important to engage your leaders. That includes both organizational leadership and product champions.

“Advocates and champions are always important, not just for leading from the front,” Barrass says. “You also get more candid feedback by empowering these people to be part of pilot groups.”

Naturally, enthusiastic executive sponsorship is essential, especially with new technology. Not only do leaders provide direction and encouragement for their organizations, but they can also choose to give people space to allocate time and prioritize learning. Cultivate those sponsorships early and actively.

The same goes for employee champions. By running internal pilots targeting key user scenarios, you’ll ensure you receive early feedback to guide product development and a core of users who can help lead adoption across your organization.

Ensure your underlying data policies are secure

Your organization might be cautious about how AI tools interact with their data repositories, so deploying Copilot for Sales is a good opportunity to review your data-loss prevention setup. By ensuring your policies are up to date, you can prevent accidental data loss or exposure.

“Copilot for Sales sits on top of our existing data repositories, so it engages with that data in the same way as any other connected tool,” Jones says. “It’s less about the solution and more about having a robust infrastructure of administrative policies and technologies safeguarding your organization.”

It will be essential to initiate reviews within several key disciplines. Those include HR, legal, security, and the IT team responsible for maintaining and protecting your data estate. Within your sales teams themselves, administrators may have concerns about access. If that’s the case, encourage them to conduct a thorough security and role review.

Guide those conversations using Copilot for Sales’ extensive product documentation.

Start simple and work up from there

For sellers themselves, building trust in a new technology takes time. People might need to work up the confidence to try more intensive or involved features, especially if they’re reticent about AI technology.

“Just start with two or three features that are really going to appeal to people,” Jones says. “Encourage sellers to ask what works best for their role.”

We suggest salespeople start small with meeting and email summarization capabilities. They might not be ready to trust email drafting tools just yet, but when they see how the intelligence works through summarization, they’ll understand how Copilot for Sales engages with information.

After sellers have built up their understanding and confidence around how this tool engages with data, they can experiment with different features that apply to their work.

Prioritize CRM data resilience

Anyone in sales operations will tell you that high data fidelity in your CRM is crucial. Leadership needs to know their institutional data is resilient. Accuracy and completeness ensure up-to-date contact data along with a comprehensive view of relationships across internal and external teams.

All this information helps sales managers make effective decisions, generate accurate forecasts, and properly understand attrition. In other words, the business value of CRM data management is enormous. It’s also prone to disarray because it formerly required salespeople to switch over to the CRM and input information. Copilot for Sales changes all that.

“Historically, the way for this to work is you would write the email, then go to a different window, find the account record, go to the contacts list, create a new one, put in all of the contact’s information, and save it,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “But here, I can do all that in one fell swoop.”

If you’re a seller, get used to creating and updating CRM contacts from within Microsoft Teams and Outlook using Copilot for Sales. This feature eliminates the need to re-enter information directly into the CRM and builds healthy habits around data fidelity.

That flow of information works the other way as well. Be sure to use the contact card feature to view summaries of customer information from within Microsoft Outlook and Teams. That ensures you’re working with the most up-to-date data directly from your CRM.

Practice effective prompting

Prompt creation will become increasingly important as AI tools mature, so it’s worth honing those skills using Copilot for Sales’ email drafting feature. A simple rule to remember is that the more you put in, the more you get out.

“If you have specifics off the bat, like you know you want to schedule a meeting or there are a few key points to express, include those in your prompt,” Jones says. “Be succinct and save your own time, because that’s what the technology is for.”

Prompting is just like any other practice. The more you work at it, the easier it becomes.

The expanding possibilities of AI assistance

Microsoft salespeople have already seen amazing success, and we’re just getting started. Within our sales organization, 12.5K out of 35K sales roles are Copilot for Sales monthly active users—more than a third of the workforce. For a technology in its first year, that’s remarkable progress.

Reyes Le Blanc estimates that he’s saving two hours each month creating contacts in Dynamics 365 and five hours a month reviewing emails. With over 6 million seller emails sent in our first quarter of this fiscal year, the potential for email time savings alone is enormous.

He also finds his meeting notes much more accurate now that Copilot for Sales has his back, especially when it comes to long lists of technologies or technical requirements. It’s the ideal tool for gathering details via the meeting review feature and performing keyword or conversational analyses.

“This is a way to do more with less,” Reyes Le Blanc says. “As a seller, I can’t imagine working without artificial intelligence.”

Considering our average salesperson participates in 17 meetings per week, those efficiencies really add up. As new features and integrations come into play, Copilot for Sales’ horizons will only widen.

Start using AI to streamline your selling experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

• See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Get insights from our Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers on the power of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.
• Explore getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Discover how we’re using Microsoft 365 to bolster our teamwork.
• Learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales on Microsoft Learn.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Seven things we learned deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Engaging our employees with AskHR

AskHR is our internal employee-engagement application that Microsoft Digital (the IT organization) built for supporting inquiries to Microsoft’s HR department and managing ongoing cases related to those inquiries. Our employees use the app to submit many diverse requests, from ones as basic as “Where can I get drinking water?” or “How do I apply for a specific benefit?” to more complex cases like moving to a new location or job or dealing with an illness. Based on these requests, the team of advisors at Microsoft HR engages with employees to ensure that their requests are fulfilled in a timely and efficient manner.

AskHR supports an intake of more than 4,500 new inquiries per day, using an array of channels, including email and web integrations with other HR platforms. Our global AskHR team consists of more than 1,400 HR advisors spread across 12 HR functions and divided into more than 250 HR support teams. Microsoft has more than 220,000 global employees.

Employee inquiries have been increasing exponentially in parallel with the increase in employees hired each year at Microsoft. In the past 10 years, we’ve gone from supporting a few thousand inquiries a year, to supporting more than 1 million employee inquiries and transactions annually. In addition, we now have rigid controls around access provisioning, review, country/region-mandated compliance, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and annual privacy reviews. We’ve also broadened our request intake mechanisms from email-based intakes to several other intake channels including Web API and virtual agent. Processes supported by AskHR include:

Support for global new-hire onboarding and internal employee transfer. We use AskHR for the complete employee onboarding process for new employees and employees transferring to new positions and business groups within Microsoft.

Support for former employees’ queries related to their employment history. Former employees can use AskHR to retrieve personnel files even after they’re no longer a Microsoft employee.

Transactional queries and access management for data-management teams. Our data teams can capture important insights across all aspects of the employee-inquiry process.

Employee and dependent benefits queries. All benefits queries are channeled through AskHR, and employees can retrieve applicable information and processes for researching or claiming benefits.

Complex employee inquiries. Hundreds of requests come through AskHR each day that range from hybrid-work support to employee performance to policy and governance reference. Many of these require specific involvement of HR staff and complex case-management activities.

Center of Excellence support queries. Many company programs originating from our central HR teams including rewards and hybrid work leverage AskHR as the primary employee experience interface to address questions and, where appropriate, route to experts for further consultation.

AskHR gives Microsoft HR the ability to react quickly to changes within our corporate environment. When COVID-19 hit, we were able to organize and prioritize pandemic-related cases, allocate advisors to the proper queues, and shift the focus of our HR support to meet needs on an ongoing basis, whether day-to-day or week-to-week, as different demands and situations came and went.

—Andrew Winnemore, general manager, HR Services

The need for AskHR reflects a larger trend in which HR—and the integral role it plays in key decisions—is becoming central to operations for companies of all sizes. With this change, the role of how HR engages with organizations’ employees has also shifted. For example, it’s understood that retaining employees today requires more than competitive compensation and benefits. Microsoft and other organizations must also consider how they engage with employees in critical support scenarios, while making sure that engagement is performed in a timely, relevant, and authentic manner.

“AskHR gives Microsoft HR the ability to react quickly to changes within our corporate environment,” says Andrew Winnemore, a vice president in HR Services. “When COVID-19 hit, we were able to organize and prioritize pandemic-related cases, allocate advisors to the proper queues, and shift the focus of our HR support to meet needs on an ongoing basis, whether day-to-day or week-to-week, as different demands and situations came and went.”

Transforming HR interaction with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform

We’re transforming the way we interact with our employees on AskHR with Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform. The tools and capabilities that these solutions provide have enabled us to build a robust and resilient employee engagement system that both our employees and advisors love to use.

We’ve built our entire HR support platform around Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform technologies. We’re using many of the built-in capabilities to better support Microsoft HR. Using technologies including AI and machine learning, Power Virtual Assistant, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams collaboration, and Customer Voice, we’ve enabled Microsoft HR to deliver a highly intuitive employee interaction solution that engages our employees in ways that were previously only equated with customer interactions.

—Mahesh Sharma, director, AskHR Cross Industry Solutions

Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides a suite of capabilities that enable us to deliver the best experience for our employees and HR advisors throughout the inquiry and case-management process. With its omnichannel capabilities, Customer Service allows Microsoft HR advisors to take customer requests from many different avenues, manage multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools.

AskHR is built around the core of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform. Most AskHR functionality is hosted in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and supported by other Dynamics 365 components and solutions built from the Power Platform. Examples of this functionality include HR case management, employee interaction, knowledge-base management, service-level agreement (SLA) management, and sentiment analysis.

“We’ve built our entire HR support platform around Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform technologies,” says Mahesh Sharma, a former AskHR Engineering PM Lead in Microsoft Digital. “We’re using many of the built-in capabilities to better support Microsoft HR. Using technologies including AI and machine learning, Power Virtual Assistant, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams collaboration, and Customer Voice, we’ve enabled Microsoft HR to deliver a highly intuitive employee interaction solution that engages our employees in ways that were previously only equated with customer interactions.”

Additional capabilities in AskHR are supported by several Dynamics 365 services and Microsoft Power Platform–built capabilities:

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice supports our employee feedback process with survey forms and workflows that are easy to create and manage. Customer Voice offers an agile and user-friendly interface to manage surveys that helps ensure that our employees feel empowered and encouraged to provide open-ended feedback. Employees can also provide timely and near-immediate feedback directly from the email they receive, which makes it more intuitive for them to respond to. These changes have increased our survey response from 9 percent to 22 percent over the last year.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights and Microsoft Power BI. Real-time reporting, insights, and analytics are an important part of day-to-day operational decisions by our advisors and key planning decisions by HR leadership. Customer Service Insights uses AI and analytics capabilities to identify and predict trends and other insights. The real-time insights that we receive from Customer Service Insights provide managers with business-critical information on the case volumes within their teams and trending topics that help them to better coordinate with other HR teams. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics built into Power BI reports are used to inform most HR-related support decisions.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Knowledge Management. Our HR teams use Microsoft Knowledge Base articles to curate, maintain, and govern responses to thousands of common requests using a single point of management and a common feedback loop. This process ensures that the articles are accurate and current. It also provides a single repository of answers for employees, eliminates duplication of materials, and reduces circulation of conflicting information.

Power Virtual Agent. Our Power Virtual Agent chat bot is becoming the default first triage agent on the web for AskHR. Power Virtual Agent has been managing approximately 15 percent of all AskHR inquiries globally. It’s emerging as the fastest growing method to respond to our employee inquiries and reduce the ever-increasing burden on our advisors due to the growth of our employee population over the past few years.

Power Platform AI Builder. We use AI Builder to analyze user sentiment, predict HR case activities, and triage cases to the appropriate queues. AI Builder provides prebuilt models and the ability to create custom models that support scenarios relevant to AskHR. These models continually learn and refine their behavior based on AskHR data. The models inform many aspects of employee engagement, including case routing, sentiment analysis, spam filtering, and automation activities.

Power Automate. We use Power Automate to simplify and expedite communication and process workflow activities throughout AskHR. These include notifying an advisor when a case is assigned to them, sending out an acknowledgement when employees create a case, or generating notifications whenever activities need to be created based on an event.

Generating business and technical value with native functionality

In an organization as large as Microsoft, the HR environment is broad and complex. Using Dynamics 365 and Power Platform enables us to achieve quality, resiliency, flexibility, and accurate observation in AskHR that far exceeds the capabilities of our previous solution and requires far less customization.

Deep collaboration with our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product groups has helped us deliver several advanced HR-related features, avoiding costly customizations. This has been a very symbiotic relationship where we proactively reach out to them for capabilities we want in the product and where they reach out to us to help validate future functionality they’re building into the product.

—Gayatri Garapati, AskHR engineering SWE lead, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Most functionality that we use in AskHR is based on native, out-of-the-box features supported by Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Services, which handle our large array of HR needs, from managing onboarding for almost 200 employees per month to ensuring that questions about benefits and resources are answered quickly and effectively. As a result of this simplicity, our design and engineering principles and practices are more easily achievable, and more robust and reliable.

Engineering excellence

Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital are Customer Zero for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Power Platform product group teams. By collaborating actively with the product groups, we help them implement several features that are critical to not only our HR needs but also to many external customers. As Customer Zero, we work with the product group teams, testing features and ensuring that the design and quality are completely ready for production environments before features are released for General Availability. At any given time, we have several Customer Service and Power Platform features in beta release that we’re co-innovating on with the product group.

“Deep collaboration with our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform product groups has helped us deliver several advanced HR-related features, avoiding costly customizations,” says Gayatri Garapati, an AskHR engineering SWE lead in Microsoft Digital. “This has been a very symbiotic relationship where we proactively reach out to them for capabilities we want in the product and where they reach out to us to help validate future functionality they’re building into the product.”

Monitoring and alerts

We have alerts created for all applicable scenarios across AskHR use cases. We can audit alerts, perform proactive monitoring, and consolidate alerts as a result. The alerting system connects directly with our operations management and ticketing systems, using out-of-the-box capability. We use several monitoring scenarios and alerts to ensure that our employees and advisors receive the optimal HR experience and notify our engineering teams of potential issues. Some key examples include:

• Intake activities that aren’t converted to tickets.
• Emails that aren’t successfully sent to customers when advisors respond.
• Employee information that doesn’t match data stored in Azure Active Directory.

Data insights

Built-in data insight capability lets us leverage all data sources that support AskHR. We have reporting capabilities within each component, but also the capability to report across the entire AskHR landscape with Power BI. AI and machine learning capabilities support data analysis that helps our advisors and leadership understand all aspects of employee engagement.

For example, our Escalation Management dashboard helps HR teams identify important and urgent requests coming through AskHR. We introduced sentiment analysis as part of the Escalation Management dashboard to better understand escalation needs across employee requests, even if the employee didn’t mark the request as urgent in the interface. Sentiment analysis parses all inbound correspondences and communications from the employee, then identifies occurrences of negative sentiment or urgency and marks such cases as potential escalations. Escalation management functionality also reviews other information such as the number of queue hops and number of times a case is reopened to also flag them as potential escalations. These potential escalations are moved to the top of their queues so that HR advisors can proactively address these cases before they truly become escalations. Sentiment analysis has flagged more than 250,000 inbound conversations to date.

Driving dynamic and intelligent case-management activities

Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Platform enable our advisors and employees to work across the entire span of AskHR activities seamlessly and interactively, with real-time responsiveness and trackable processes. The following list contains the supported activities and components:

• Intake. Case intake is the entry point for employees to submit requests to Microsoft HR. AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Virtual Agents, and Microsoft Azure API Management to support a huge array of intake channels including our web-based portal, Virtual Agent, email, and API.
  
  Example: An employee in California uses the web portal to contact HR support requesting details on parental leave and policies. The AI builder model parses the details of the incoming conversation and associated employee metadata and identifies the Benefits Service Line as the best team to support the request. The case is routed to the queue for US benefits support.
• Handling. HR advisors need to understand and categorize incoming requests in preparation for engaging with employees to resolve a concern. Power Platform AI Builder, Power Apps component framework, and Dynamics 365 dashboards enable our advisors to capture case details quickly and easily by using AI for classification and sentiment analysis and providing relevant contextual information.
  
  Example: A benefit-related case raised by an US-based employee, flagged for urgent attention, surfaces onto a queue manager dashboard. The queue manager consults a real-time availability dashboard and assigns the case to an available advisor who specializes in US benefits policies.
• Assignment. Advisors are responsible for ensuring that cases are triaged properly and assigned to appropriate team members for resolution, but they don’t need to do all the work. AskHR uses Power Automate Workflow and the Dynamics 365 plugin framework to support automated triage for most activities, while routing difficult assignments to advisors for quick, efficient triage.
  
  Example: Upon receiving a new case in their dashboard, the advisor checks recent case history and other work-related details for the employee, using the contextual information associated with the case. They use Teams collaboration to reach out to a benefits specialist consultant to gather more information and ask questions. They can add notes into the case details.
• Response. Advisors engage with employees to provide answers, perform a transaction, gather information, or determine if they need to involve another team member in the case. AskHR provides automated insertion of knowledge-base articles into cases, use AI-based intelligent pre-search for surfacing relevant articles, and sentiment analysis to understand employee sentiment.
  
  Example: Advisor responds back to the employee with a Dynamics 365 article that answers the inquiry and provides some real-time details.
• Escalation and routing. AskHR supports automated escalation and routing across many scenarios, including employee sentiment, case lifecycle, and case classification. AI Builder and Power BI dashboards enable our advisors to manage and observe escalation and routing behavior at any point in the lifecycle.
  
  Example: After the employee has reviewed the details requested, they want to follow through with the parental-leave process. The benefits advisor contacts the employee to understand the details of their query. At any point in the escalation and routing process, the advisor might consult with subject matter experts in the query subject area, including the Center of Excellence program team.
• Resolution. Ensuring that a case is resolved properly is critical to engaging our employees effectively. AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service case categorization and the PowerApps control framework to provide advisors with the functionality they need to confirm resolution efficiently.
  
  Example: Having clarified all employee questions, the benefits advisor is ready to resolve the case. They verify the categorization done earlier and add closing case metadata that will help with analytics.
• Survey. After resolution, AskHR uses Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to collect employee feedback. Power BI reports and dashboards are in place to help advisors and Microsoft HR leadership identify successes and opportunities for improvement throughout the case-management lifecycle.
  
  Example: When the case is marked as resolved, a survey is automatically sent to the employee. Upon survey completion, the consultant’s manager can check the employee’s feedback and ratings for HR support.

AskHR uses Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to support the case management lifecycle at Microsoft HR.

Next steps

We’re not done. This is a continuous journey and we’re focusing on improvements to several areas, including advisor productivity, process automation, and live assistance. We’re also working with the product group to add and improve Dynamics 365 Customer Service capabilities, including unified routing, improved knowledge management, and deeper natural language understanding AI.

The HR advisors and front-end line managers love the low code flexibility that Power Automate provides. It helps them support complex business processes, while still working within the constructs of a well-defined case-management lifecycle. This allows the engineering team to focus on critical infrastructural and technological advancements, while HR advisors are empowered to create flows that best support their processes in a rapid and efficient manner. We’ve seen a steady 20 percent year-over-year increase in adoption of the platform through some of the most complex employee scenarios presented by COVID-19, hybrid workplace management, and employee investigations.

—Abhinav Jhingan, AskHR HR solution lead, HR Services

With Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Power Platform, AskHR has been resilient, scalable, and dependable, while giving us the freedom to adapt AskHR functionality to change and grow with our organization. We expect that flexibility to continue to improve as we seek to increase employee engagement, better support our advisor user base, and prepare for future HR-specific needs at Microsoft.

“The HR advisors and front-end line managers love the low code flexibility that Power Automate provides,” says Abhinav Jhingan, an AskHR HR solution lead in HR Services. “It helps them support complex business processes, while still working within the constructs of a well-defined case-management lifecycle. This allows the engineering team to focus on critical infrastructural and technological advancements, while HR advisors are empowered to create flows that best support their processes in a rapid and efficient manner. We’ve seen a steady 20 percent year-over-year increase in adoption of the platform through some of the most complex employee scenarios presented by COVID-19, hybrid workplace management, and employee investigations.”

Continued adoption of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform features across AskHR has delivered significant benefits for our HR users. Movement to our browser-based unified client interface has saved more than 3,000 advisor hours each month due to the streamlined interface. Our AI-based spam model has helped eliminate hundreds of thousands of incoming spam emails at 97.89 percent accuracy. We’ve also used AI to interpret user sentiment for approximately 1.4 million employee messages in the last six months. We’ve seen significant improvement in several areas of employee engagement and HR efficiency, including:

• Reduced case resolution time. Due primarily to automatic routing and contextual data sharing, we’ve reduced case resolution time by 18 hours per case, on average.
• Improved NSAT ratings. Our net satisfaction (NSAT) rating for employees and advisors has increased by almost 10 percent.
• Improved advisor productivity. Our advisors are spending approximately 12 minutes less per case than they did before AskHR.
• Increased first-time fix rates. Our rate for fixing an issue or closing a case after the first point of HR contact is 29 percent.

• Learn how Microsoft is helping its employees understand their value with the Total Rewards Portal.
• Find out how Microsoft is updating its core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors.
• See how Microsoft is reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world.

The post ‘Got a question?’ Boosting employee engagement at Microsoft with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The threat landscape is constantly evolving, and data breaches—originating from outside or within organizations—are commonplace. Organizations now acknowledge that securing their digital perimeter is an insufficient and inherently reactive approach. That’s because modern security solutions, to be robust, must protect the entire enterprise environment, including core business processes, the sensitive data that those processes might expose, and the systems that support those processes. This recognition prompted Microsoft to seek a more complete, continuous, and dynamic solution to better protect its SAP assets—Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud-native SIEM platform that uses built-in AI to quickly help analyze large volumes of data across an enterprise. Microsoft’s SAP assets include applications that support Microsoft’s core business processes and combined, comprise an impressive 24 terabytes (TB) of data.

Microsoft had a two-fold rationale for developing its new Microsoft Sentinel SAP SIEM solution: to better detect suspicious activity and to fully document security incidents and how the organization resolves them. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems like SAP are facing increasing cybersecurity threats, across the industry spectrum, from healthcare and manufacturing, to finance, retail, and e-commerce. Threat actors, recognizing such systems’ vulnerabilities, have identified ERP systems as a prime target. SAP vulnerability is a critical concern for enterprise executives and senior security professionals, given that the average cost of an SAP breach is $5 million per attack. That cost doesn’t figure in the reputational damage a breach or attack might confer, which is often substantial and prolonged.

[Using Microsoft Azure AD MFA at Microsoft to enhance remote security. Moving to next-generation SIEM with Microsoft Sentinel. Using shielded virtual machines to help protect high-value assets.]

Identifying threats—and a solution

Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft’s SAP Security teams defined a roadmap to address current challenges and chart a path to using the preventive and detective capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Azure. Additionally, the collaborative efforts of SAP and Microsoft Azure increase end-to-end visibility across enterprise systems and applications and help bolster system resilience. Although Microsoft has tools in place to detect and log threats across its SAP landscape, the challenge was managing the number of tools, the data sources, and the effort required to analyze and help remediate a threat.

Considering that any breach in Microsoft SAP applications could have catastrophic consequences for us, we knew that we needed a solution that enabled rapid vulnerability detection and monitoring capabilities to reduce risks to the organization. We needed an internally managed and configured SIEM solution that could baseline user behaviors and detect anomalies across SAP to include the OS and network layer, the database layer, and the application and business logic layers.

—Kusuma Sri Veeranki, senior software engineer and SAP security lead, Microsoft Digital

At the same time, Microsoft also wanted to implement a centralized SIEM solution that detects and helps prevent threats. The SIEM tools in use were effective, but the monitoring structure was inherently reactive because it didn’t allow for real-time monitoring. When a potential threat or an active security incident was identified, an alert was generated. However, the time to assess and remediate threats was variable, and response lags were common. Further, the process for addressing some vulnerabilities involved patching, for example, so any exposure remained viable until patches were applied across the system. Finally, there wasn’t an easy way to follow an SAP security alert through the system to determine the remedial actions taken within Microsoft and by whom.

Microsoft also recognized that the existing SAP SIEM solution didn’t always meet its stringent compliance requirements and didn’t permit sufficient visibility into the entire threat environment. And from an enterprise-wide perspective, Microsoft was essentially operating separate corporate and SAP security solutions, an outdated model that the company sought to replace. The new monitoring solution, when operational, would include a separate Sentinel instance for SAP but would also fully integrate with the Microsoft corporate Security Operations Center (SOC).

We’re excited to be able to use the capabilities that Sentinel provides our customers out of the box along with SAP specific capabilities on an initiative as important as Microsoft SAP security. This represents a new approach in SIEM solutions.

—Yoav Daniely, principal group product manager, Microsoft Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management

“Considering that any breach in Microsoft SAP applications could have catastrophic consequences for us, we knew that we needed a solution that enabled rapid vulnerability detection and monitoring capabilities to reduce risks to the organization,” says Kusuma Sri Veeranki, a senior software engineer and SAP security lead for Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company. “We needed an internally managed and configured SIEM solution that could baseline user behaviors and detect anomalies across SAP to include the OS and network layer, the database layer, and the application and business logic layers.”

The ideal solution, Veeranki says, would also permit visibility into all other systems, products, and applications that interconnect with SAP.

SAP as Microsoft Sentinel ’customer zero’

To develop its new SIEM solution for SAP, the organization decided to use Microsoft Sentinel, a relatively new product, in conjunction with Microsoft’s existing security, orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform. Developed initially for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Sentinel is designed to collect data and monitor suspicious activities at cloud scale by using sophisticated analytics and threat intelligence. Recently cited in a Forrester Consulting study as an efficient, highly scalable, and flexible SIEM solution that incorporates Azure Log Analytics, Sentinel is also the first cloud-native product in the market.

Our objective is to deliver a configurable solution that has the ability to monitor end-to-end processes and take the appropriate action as defined within the system, including those that should be stopped. Many of the current products on the market are SAP-centric but are limited in their integration capabilities. So, we’re customer zero for leveraging Microsoft Sentinel for SAP security and for enabling that cross-correlation capability.

—Aaron Hillard, principal software engineering manager and SAP security lead, Microsoft Digital

“We’re excited to be able to use the capabilities that Sentinel provides our customers out of the box along with SAP specific capabilities on an initiative as important as Microsoft SAP security,” says Yoav Daniely, principal group product manager on the Microsoft Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management (SCIM) team. “This represents a new approach in SIEM solutions.”

To configure Microsoft Sentinel to monitor the entire Microsoft SAP environment—it includes 15 SAP production systems including six Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) systems—the engineering team and the Microsoft Azure product group recognized that the solution also needed to provide cross-correlation coverage. Cross correlation is the ability to surveil the entire organization to include junctures where SAP integrates with other systems and applications such as Microsoft Dynamics 365. For example, Sentinel could detect a hypothetical scenario in which a user who creates a new payee in Dynamics but also “pays” that customer in SAP without the activity being detected.

“Our objective is to deliver a configurable solution that has the ability to monitor end-to-end processes and take the appropriate action as defined within the system, including those that should be stopped,” says Aaron Hillard, principal software engineering manager and SAP security lead in Microsoft Digital. “Many of the current products on the market are SAP-centric but are limited in their integration capabilities. So, we’re customer zero for leveraging Microsoft Sentinel for SAP security and for enabling that cross-correlation capability.”

Ultimately, the goal is to equip Microsoft Sentinel to assess and respond dynamically to all security threats across all enterprise hosts, platforms, applications, and business processes, and then provide automated remediation as feasible and appropriate. The risk scenarios that Microsoft Sentinel addresses will continue to expand as the product evolves.

“Sentinel gives us the ability to monitor the data and activities holistically, because Microsoft, like many other enterprises, uses numerous systems throughout the operations environment,” Veeranki says. “That’s a key differentiator of Sentinel compared to SIEM systems that are designed purely for SAP.”

Microsoft Sentinel incorporates advanced machine learning and AI capabilities that identify suspicious patterns and activities that previously defied detection. Additionally, it is able to readily integrate numerous platforms and products that enterprise companies use and enable organizations to customize configuration to meet their security-monitoring needs.

Managing massive inputs efficiently with an innovative data connector

To date, the Microsoft SAP and Microsoft Sentinel SAP threat monitoring engineering teams identified an initial 27 initial high-risk scenarios that encompass a broad range of use cases. These use cases involve changes in system, client, or audit-log configuration, and suspicious or unauthorized user logins, data access, or role assignments. Monitoring also covers account-modification or password-change activities, and any audit-log manipulation or brute-force attack, among others. Other risk scenarios are being identified with respect to highly sensitive business and financial threats, and the teams are developing and completing proofs of concept for those scenarios. The SAP and Sentinel teams will continue to expand the threat-detection capabilities of Microsoft Sentinel and the risk scenarios that it addresses the product evolves.

The Microsoft SAP footprint is massive and change management within the platforms is highly complex. Therefore, to prevent system overload because of memory requirements, the engineering team must deploy a robust yet nimble mechanism to accommodate the vast amount of data coming into Microsoft Sentinel. To that end, the engineering team developed a Microsoft Sentinel-specific data connector that manages SAP inputs in a manner that’s specific to the underlying applications. The connector facilitates a complete security solution to visualize, alert, and respond to threats, and it’s easily configurable through built-in watchlists that match specific environment needs.

The data connector extracts data for monitoring, stores it, and then moves it through Sentinel in an incremental manner that the system can “understand,” says Anirudh Dahuja, an SAP platform engineer in Microsoft Digital. “Otherwise, there’s a risk of overloading the system, an issue that we’ve encountered,” he says.

To accomplish efficient use of the new tool, the engineering team used indexing to accommodate unwieldy tables and expedite querying. The team also incorporated secrets connectivity by using the Microsoft Azure Key Vault, which provides a secure store to create, store, and maintain keys that access and encrypt cloud resources, apps, and solutions. To manage the requisite memory optimization, the team leveraged Docker containers to accommodate the data connector functions before moving data into Microsoft Sentinel using custom Microsoft Azure APIs.

There’s another challenge that Microsoft Sentinel engineers are experiencing and working to remedy: how to reduce the “noise” in the monitoring system to differentiate between authorized, permissible activities and real threats that warrant action. Because Sentinel is designed to detect a very broad range of potentially suspicious or intentionally malicious activities, the number of alerts it raised initially produced many false positives.

“That’s something we’re working on now—improving alert fidelity and fine-tuning the system to produce fewer false positives,” Veeranki says.

That’s the biggest advantage of using Sentinel for SAP monitoring—the analytics. There are a lot of other tools in the market that alert you to SAP threats, but that’s where they stop. Microsoft Sentinel offers a scalable cross-platform solution to detect and mitigate threats in near real time. We’re not only detecting threats but also quickly responding to and remediating them.

—Anirudh Dahuja, SAP platform engineer, Microsoft Digital

She adds that Microsoft will continue to share the challenges and remedies that teams discover as the Microsoft Sentinel implementation proceeds. Customers then can accelerate their own implementations by using these learnings.

Tallying early Sentinel benefits and moving forward

Microsoft Sentinel allows for comprehensive cross correlation across enterprise resources, in addition to SAP, thereby helping identify known and previously difficult-to-detect security threats in near real time. That’s a capability high on the wish list for many of Microsoft’s existing enterprise customers. Interestingly, two other critical Sentinel benefits are emerging. Despite the initiative’s early development stage—it’s been less than a year since its inception—Microsoft Sentinel has proved highly scalable and customizable from the outset. It also promises to engender efficiencies generally for Microsoft security operations, by providing a single SIEM system and “pane of glass” through which to continuously view security logs, alerts, and incidents across the enterprise.

Further benefits, still in development, are the advanced analytics being integrated to help detect anomalies in activities involving SAP systems and the automated remediation that Microsoft Sentinel will eventually provide. That’s a winning combination, in Dahuja’s view.

“That’s the biggest advantage of using Sentinel for SAP monitoring—the analytics. There are a lot of other tools in the market that alert you to SAP threats, but that’s where they stop. Microsoft Sentinel offers a scalable cross-platform solution to detect and mitigate threats in near real time,” Dahuja says. “We’re not only detecting threats but also quickly responding to and remediating them.”

• Using Microsoft Azure AD MFA at Microsoft to enhance remote security.
• Moving to next-generation SIEM with Microsoft Sentinel.
• Using shielded virtual machines to help protect high-value assets.

The post Protecting Microsoft’s SAP workload with Microsoft Sentinel appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft is in the productivity business, with a mission “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.” What matters to Microsoft is not just helping to envision the workplace of the future, but to create it as a sustainable model of productivity and empowerment for its employees.

Microsoft’s headquarters is like a small city. Located in the Puget Sound region near Seattle, the busy corporate campus encompasses over 100 buildings spanning nearly 14 million square feet, accommodating more than 60,000 employees and external staff, plus numerous visitors each day.

We had a pretty audacious vision for what we wanted to do. We were looking for a bold example of a logistics and operations system that could provide efficient business processes, support sustainability, and enable best-in-class employee and guest experiences. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform was the perfect solution.

—Michelle Schaefer, principal product manager at Microsoft

In 2021, we saw an opportunity to digitally transform our campus logistics and operations. The vision? Empower a relatively small logistics crew to do more with less, resulting in better employee experiences, cost savings and efficiencies, and support environmentally responsible practices.

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhA72nAk6cs, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

“We had a pretty audacious vision for what we wanted to do,” says Michelle Schaefer, principal product manager at Microsoft. “We were looking for a bold example of a logistics and operations system that could provide efficient business processes, support sustainability, and enable best-in-class employee and guest experiences. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform was the perfect solution.”

But Microsoft’s vision wasn’t limited to our own campus. By using our technologies to implement a best-in-class system at home, we aimed to create a showcase, one that would inspire other companies to transform their own logistics and operations processes, for a campus or for any purpose.

The Solution

To help make this dream a reality, Microsoft turned to our trusted partners and Microsoft ecosystem experts: Accenture and Avanade—a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft.

The team has focused on configuring Microsoft solutions and tools and integrating third-party applications into the overall user interface. Avanade’s in-depth knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform helped define the requirements for external vendor applications, ensuring that they could integrate seamlessly and securely with the overall solution.

So, how does the reimagined logistics process look in practice? Consider a day in the life of the small but productive crew working behind the scenes to provide a great experience to an employee who has ordered a new keyboard:

• After the order is placed, a third-party package carrier logs into a Dynamics 365 portal to book an appointment at a campus logistics center to deliver the keyboard.
• The package carrier is checked-in by a campus dock manager with Dynamics 365 Field Service. A Logistics Control Tower Dashboard built on Power BI is used to make delivery schedules more efficient.
• A campus driver loads the keyboard, along with many other packages, onto their vehicle and consults the integrated route optimization and delivery management system to ensure the most efficient route is used and service level agreements are met.
• Once the new keyboard is delivered to the productive employee, a waste and recycling manager uses Dynamics 365 Inventory Management to track reusable items and ensure the old keyboard is properly disposed of and other supplies are re-used if possible.

The solution also includes capabilities to measure and report results, both from a logistics aspect as well as from an employee experience perspective. Easy access to this data will allow the team to address issues and look for opportunities to improve both operations and experiences.

“By transforming our back-of-house logistics, we can closely identify the movement of deliveries and materials as well as evaluate employee feedback,” says Katy Flaherty, senior district facilities manager at Microsoft. “This provides our team with up-to-date status on these deliveries.  We’ve moved beyond more manual processes and lists to real time tracking data. This also gives us the ability to learn from this information and adjust our operations to be more efficient and cost effective.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8azD8E2ZtM, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Results

Microsoft’s campus logistics digital transformation provides employees and suppliers with an experience unlike any other workspace in the world. The entire modernization effort has been guided by a commitment to sustainability, with a focus on waste reduction and energy optimization. Benefits include:

• Route optimization for all logistics and operations vehicles results in increased efficiency and a smaller carbon footprint.
• The hundreds of suppliers visiting the campus each week benefit from reliable and efficient delivery and offloading times, enabling them to quickly resume their journey to the next delivery.
• Through efficient ordering, tracking, and management of supplies, the logistics and operations team can visualize data quickly and efficiently for quick decisions and cost savings.
• By automating delivery orders for food, packages, furniture, and more, Microsoft improves the employee experience through improved compliance with service level agreements, reduces costs, and works towards its sustainability goals.

The consolidation of disparate data sources through Microsoft’s digital transformation unlocks exciting new opportunities to leverage Generative AI and other data-driven technologies.

“Transforming the logistics and operations for the entire Puget Sound campus really shows the Microsoft, Accenture and Avanade partnership at its best,” adds Schaefer. “We’re bringing possibilities to life and showing the true power of the Microsoft platform. And, at the same time, we’re living out our values of sustainability and empowering people to do more.”

Digital Transformation for Efficiency and Sustainability:

• Microsoft’s campus logistics digital transformation exemplifies how leveraging technologies like Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform can significantly enhance efficiency and sustainability in operations.

End-to-End Integration for Seamless Operations:

• The success of Microsoft’s initiative is attributed to the end-to-end integration of Microsoft solutions and third-party applications, showcasing the importance of a comprehensive approach.

Measurable Results and Continuous Improvement:

• Microsoft’s commitment to sustainability is reflected in its ability to measure and report results, enabling the team to address issues promptly and identify opportunities for improvement.

Get started with a Dynamics 365 free trial.

• Watch how Microsoft used Dynamics 365 to transform campus Facilities Management
• Discover creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.
• Explore transforming Microsoft’s lobby experience with a new Microsoft Guest Management System.
• Unpack how Microsoft is delivering smart building experiences with CI/CD for Azure Digital Twins.
• Transforming facilities management with Dynamics 365 at Microsoft

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The post Modernizing campus logistics and operations at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

I like to think about how to make expenses less expensive. We were seeing employees spending 15-20 minutes for a simple expense. Can we automate it or give them a better experience?

—Amruta Anawalikar, senior program manager, Microsoft Commerce Financial Services

“I like to think about how to make expenses less expensive,” says Amruta Anawalikar, a senior program manager for Microsoft Commerce Financial Services (CFS), the team responsible for expenses in Finance Engineering. “We were seeing employees spending 15-20 minutes for a simple expense. Can we automate it or give them a better experience?”

Whether it be travel for business, a working lunch, or supplies for a home office, employees everywhere are familiar with the process of saving the receipt, filling out an expense sheet, and then filing for reimbursement. Depending on how many items a user must sort through, this small-but-necessary piece of housekeeping can take up significant time.

In rolling out the new OneExpense architecture, Microsoft gains access to automation and flexibility to implement future capabilities in a cloud-based environment that’s supported by Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure.

[Check out how automating expense reporting at Microsoft boosts the company’s employee experience. Learn how Microsoft is transforming its corporate expense tools with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Discover how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning. Learn how Microsoft migrated critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.]

Making it easier to do more

“When we think about Microsoft’s mission to empower end users to achieve more, that applies to internal customers as well,” says Ashley Park, a program manager with Microsoft Financial Operations.

MyExpense, the new expense app that runs on the OneExpense architecture, was developed with that principle in mind. Previously, Microsoft employees relied on a legacy on-premises system to manage expenses. This limited what users could do with the environment and meant that filing was a manual process.

Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations and leveraging Microsoft Azure services, MyExpense is a modern cloud platform with the ability to introduce automated expense reporting through OneExpense.

When an employee swipes a corporate card, OneExpense will identify which expense category it falls under—travel, home office, or meals, for example—then proactively sends an email a week later asking the employee to confirm.

From there, users can make micro-changes without having to go into the tool. If there are no changes, the user can submit the expense report, which is automatically delivered to the appropriate destination for approval.

It’s a better experience for everyone, which should see users spending less time on manual documentation.

“We want to go from 600,000 hours per year spent on expenses to 300,000,” Park says.

And CFS has an idea as to how they’ll reach that goal.

The things you can do with a modern system

OneExpense does more than automated expense reporting.

“There are local, national, and international policies to take into account,” Anawalikar says. “We have to think about automation differently. Dynamics 365 on Azure is such a rich infrastructure; we can make changes to the system that are separate from automation, which makes automation that much easier.”

A byproduct of the automation is that we can decrease the number of manual touches using AI. This supports compliance by design and reduces the number of audited expense reports downstream.

—Ashley Park, program manager, Microsoft Financial Operations

By layering automation within MyExpense, Microsoft can process functions separately. Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers agility, giving the team enough flexibility to make changes without affecting scale. Differences across regions, including tax implications and other reporting requirements that differ around the globe, can be quickly addressed, enabling the team to transition from the legacy platform to MyExpense for over 180,000 users across 112 countries in approximately 12 months.

It also means the automation can be used differently, leveraging OneExpense and Microsoft Azure services to support several efforts and teams across the expense lifecycle.

“A byproduct of the automation is that we can decrease the number of manual touches using AI,” Park says. “This supports compliance by design and reduces the number of audited expense reports downstream.”

Approvers can now see if something has been flagged.

When a manager gets an expense report, they’ll see a risk score applied. Using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and artificial intelligence, OneExpense can look at an employee’s spending history and attributes of the report and identify if it is a low, medium, or high-risk submission.

Eventually, OneExpense will be able to use AI to understand why a report has a high score, pointing the manager directly to the risk factor.

This feature helps elsewhere as well.

“Downstream, the audit will have fewer reports added to the post-mortem,” Anawalikar says. “The same risk score is part of our audit system. A threshold will show us whether an expense report should be audited.”

Readying Microsoft for MyExpense

To help migrate 180,000 Microsoft employees around the world to the new system, Kris Jolma, a group finance program manager in Finance Operations, focused on the benefits of transitioning to the new MyExpense solution.

“It’s not just ‘Here’s a new tool, have fun,’” Jolma says. “There are 80,000 Microsoft employees in the United States, there’s a lot of change management as we launch.”

Acceptance of automated expense reporting will take some time, as users are familiar with the traditional process of manually filling out and submitting sheets. But as employees recapture time and re-allocate it to something meaningful, the value of MyExpense becomes clear.

This message is helping Microsoft ready users for a new experience.

While configurations for specific expense categories across different regions will take some time to set up, the result is still improved productivity. This has helped improve adoption, as   was recently rolled out in 66 of the 112 countries and regions where Microsoft has offices.

Saying ‘Hello’ to a better experience

As MyExpense has become the go-to solution for Microsoft’s expense reporting, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) has now retired the old on-premises servers that ran the legacy solution. This has created savings in support, maintenance, and operational costs, and also reduced the amount of time users spend on expenses.

“Users weren’t satisfied with the previous expense tool, it took too much time away from them,” Anawalikar says. “We cannot provide an automated experience unless they’re migrating to MyExpense.”

With more and more reports being submitted via automation instead of manual submission, Microsoft will soon reach a tipping point where time saved doing expenses is a measurable outcome. MDEE is closely engaged with new MyExpense users to further refine the process.

We have scalable automation capabilities for expenses now. We can showcase this to our users and external customers.

—Kris Jolma, group finance program manager, Finance Operations

“We’re working on features where users can customize their experience,” Park says. “Right now, the automated expenses are sent out to everyone a weekly basis, but we’re adding ways to let users decide their own cadence.”

New automation and functionality added to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations will continue to grow the OneExpense environment, transforming more tasks, making life easier, and strengthening compliance. This will be a big deal at Microsoft and the rest of the world.

“We have scalable automation capabilities for expenses now,” Jolma says. “We can showcase this to our users and external customers.”

• Traditional processes, like filing expenses, give users peace of mind, but demonstrating the value of automation creates an opportunity to introduce more improvements.
• Always look for ways to simplify. In evaluating Microsoft’s environment, the Program team reduced the number of categories from 400 to 120.
• MyExpense is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations and a few Microsoft Azure services, which has given the organization access to core functionality without any custom work.
• Digital transformation helps to streamline, but it doesn’t mean creating a one-size-fits-all approach. Use a layered approach to create macro and micro levels of customization.

• Check out how automating expense reporting at Microsoft boosts the company’s employee experience.
• Learn how Microsoft is transforming its corporate expense tools with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
• Discover how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning.
• Learn how Microsoft migrated critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.

The post Meet OneExpense, the automated expense reporting backend transforming Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

That may sound pretty handy, but all those tools can also be a burden, especially for the engineers who have to keep them sharp. It can also be confusing for employees to have to switch between different tools and user interfaces for filing expenses.

Microsoft has built up its collection of corporate expense tools over the years, onboarding various internal and third-party expense management platforms through acquisitions and because of different business needs. As the weight grew heavier, so did the need to address their maintenance issues.

“We had multiple tools that needed streamlining,” says Amruta Anawalikar. She is a senior program manager for Microsoft Commerce Financial Services (CFS) in Finance Engineering, the team under Azure Cloud + AI that manages expenses at Microsoft. “We wanted to reduce employee productivity costs and improve operations, engineering capacity, and business capacity.”

[Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and machine learning. Learn more about migrating critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.]

Flipping the design

These disconnected systems were working across 110 countries and regions with no synchronization, each with its own vertical infrastructure. The system to manage them all had been built up piece by piece.

Because of varying configurations specific to local environments, deployments were no small task. Expense categories, policies, and payment rules differed across tools. None of the systems even spoke the same language—“report name” in one tool might be called “report description” or “expense purpose” in another.

Solving for these issues through tool customizations wasn’t an option, either, because one of the primary tools (a third-party product) didn’t support the API integrations needed for that kind of flexibility.

Standardization and unification were badly needed.

We’ve flipped the whole design. By generalizing the entire ecosystem and focusing on a modern Azure-based design, it allows multiple tools to exist.

– Sumeet Deshpande, Microsoft CFS Finance Engineering

“Historically, the efforts were really focused locally within each tool and over the years, each ended up having its own over-customized, tool-centric designs built around them,” says Sumeet Deshpande. He is a principal software engineering manager for CFS Finance Engineering. “Even though the systems were very similar, we couldn’t leverage the same components.”

Deshpande’s team set out to create a unified expense management experience that put engineering before process.

“We’ve flipped the whole design,” Deshpande says. “By generalizing the entire ecosystem and focusing on a modern Azure-based design, it allows multiple tools to exist, and the problems we were having in over-aligning to the specific tools have gone away.”

The modernization journey

Microsoft’s journey to build a modern backend pipeline to unify its corporate expense tools began two years ago, with a milestone that became a catalyst for change.

In 2019, the legacy tool MSExpense 1.0 was being retired. Faced with 110 countries and regions to migrate (and myriad tax and statutory regulations to go with them), the team expected the migration to MSExpense 2.0 to take two to three years and cost an estimated $2 million. But then they decided to try a new strategy.

“That’s the point where we started thinking differently in how our tools need to be either onboarded or retired,” says Mohit Jain, a senior software engineer who led the retirement for CFS Finance Engineering.

They started breaking big problems down into smaller pieces, dividing countries and regions into buckets based on their level of complexity and tackling the migration one at a time.

The entire migration took just six months, and cost nothing.

“This was a really important part of our journey and how we approached problems going forward,” Jain says.

Building on that momentum, the team implemented a major overhaul of the user experience in 2020 and introduced OneExpense, automating much of the process with built-in machine learning to essentially eliminate the need for employees to file expense reports at all.

According to Deshpande, that’s what set the stage for remaking the back end.

“MSExpense 1.0 was retired at rocket speed,” he says. “We built on that and delivered end-to-end automation. That was a powerful story for leadership—people started to listen to us after that.”

Meet the hero: Microsoft Azure’s architecture

With a firm engineering mindset and funding to move forward, the mission to modernize was on.

Microsoft Azure provided the cloud base that would help the team achieve their internet-first, top-down goal. Whereas the structures of the third-party expense tools were locked, Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company’s powerful suite of business solutions software, swooped in to stretch their flexibility.

Key to that flexibility was building a disconnected architecture that allowed the team to create a plug-and-play modular design that enabled any individual system to be swapped in or out.

“We can literally replace any component, with Dynamics 365 as a unified mechanism for any expense tool that exists,” Deshpande says. “Our primary hero is the modern Azure-based design, which really synergizes reusability across expense tools and allows multiple tools to exist because they have been there for a valid reason. The most important piece within it is Dynamics 365, but that’s just one part of the puzzle.”

Standardization was also a fundamental piece.

As part of the earlier automation project, Anawalikar had gathered extensive market research data to standardize policies. By reaching out to different markets as well as other large tech companies to investigate the sources of governance, they were able to trim a lot of fat and create a universal set of standards and definitions.

This enabled Jain to create what they called the OneExpense contract: a common data language that would allow the siloed systems to understand each other.

“Whatever expense tool you run your infrastructure on, eventually we converted that tool-specific data to a OneExpense contract,” Jain says. “It was a very important piece to make a contract that’s tool agnostic—that’s what we need for our downstream needs.”

Anawalikar calls it something else: “The holy grail.”

“Everything in this ecosystem, right from automation to expense reporting, is based on the expense contract,” she says. “We need to protect it at all costs.”

Those vertical structures in the architecture that made management of the corporate expense tools so labor-intensive were up for disruption as well, and were restructured horizontally.

This is where Dynamics 365 really has an edge. It gives us that flexibility of customization, which will make it extendable for any future needs as well.

– Mohit Jain, senior software engineer, Microsoft CFS Finance Engineering

“When they’re horizontal, they’re the same across different systems,” Jain says. “Even with different tools, the overall experience remains the same because the tool-specific data was converted to a generic OneExpense contract.”

At the core of the system, the team built its Data Integration Service: an orchestrator that controls various microsystems for calculating taxes, sending statutory forms, and sending emails to approvers. Functioning much like an orchestra conductor, the orchestrator queues each system at the right time to perform the right function, sometimes each playing solo, and other times in harmony with other instruments.

“Adding up all of those microservices would have been really difficult in any other system,” Jain says. “This is where Dynamics 365 really has an edge. It gives us that flexibility of customization, which will make it extendable for any future needs as well.”

The tool belt of the future

The Finance Digital team is already enjoying life in the modern expense management world.

Deployments are easy, having gone from 100 percent manual (with a lot of typos) to standardized configurations deployed with 90 percent automation.

Modular plug-and-play components include a tax calculation system and a centralized automated auditing system that’s more efficient at flagging errors. Plus, self-monitoring and self-healing tools detect and fix issues behind the scenes before they’re flagged by employees filing help tickets.

With all of this comes greatly reduced operational costs, higher productivity, and employees who no longer have to view expense filing as a laborious, confusing task that interrupts the main focus of their jobs.

As Anawalikar says, one of the primary goals achieved is to “make expenses less expensive.”

“This expense story today is a showcase of everything Azure Cloud + AI has to offer, namely the power of Azure Cloud, the use of AI and ML, and the use of Dynamics 365,” Deshpande says.

What gets Deshpande and his team really excited as they iterate further is the architecture’s modular ability to work with any corporate expense tool.

“If Dynamics 365 evolves and rolls out multiple advanced versions, it will still work,” Deshpande says.

Jain is also looking forward to a future state in which the architecture is even lighter-weight and Microsoft Dynamics 365 is truly functioning as the Swiss Army knife of all corporate expense tools.

Along the way, the team has experienced what it feels like to be part of a team that’s empowered by research, data, and its own supportive leadership.

“We were encouraged to challenge the status quo and ask questions,” Jain says. “We used disruption for a positive outcome.”

• Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and machine learning.
• Learn more about migrating critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.

The post Transforming Microsoft’s corporate expense tools with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Like everywhere else, filing expenses has long been a chore most employees at Microsoft sought to avoid.

And the numbers back that up.

Instead of spending their time developing new technologies, Microsoft employees spend more than 500,000 hours per year itemizing and filing expense reports.

That’s about to stop.

The team that manages expense report filing in Microsoft Digital at Microsoft has a plan for eliminating 70 percent of that effort.

What’s their plan?

Automating expense reporting.

Ask about filing expense reports at Microsoft, and it seems everyone can recall a horror story of tedium, whether scanning endless receipts, calculating currency conversions based on different daily exchange rates, or manually entering the individual names of 25 employees attending an off-site to cover coffee.

Worse, many times they have to use three different tools to get the job done.

With such high figures of lost productivity—and employee dread—it’s no wonder the Microsoft Finance Management team saw potential for major improvement.

“Because the experience was pretty bad, the confidence we had that we could solve complex business problems with engineering solutions led us to improve the user experience,” says Sumeet Deshpande, a principal software engineering manager who led the effort for Microsoft Finance. “We decided to show what the power of AI, machine learning, and end-to-end automation can be.”

[Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning. Learn more about how Microsoft automates revenue processes with Power Automate.]

Engineering over policy and process

Like many innovations at Microsoft, the launch pad for the automating expense reporting project was born out of the Microsoft annual Hackathon, an event where employees are encouraged to gather to develop breakthrough ideas. In this case, the Microsoft Finance engineering team used the 2019 hackathon to successfully prove that they could use automating expense reporting as a solution to relieve one of the company’s biggest employee pain points.

With leadership support in hand, Deshpande’s team laid the groundwork by identifying the most painful steps in the expense filing process. They then bucketed them into a dozen different engineering problems to solve.

One of the biggest challenges was the fact that expense filing processes varied greatly across regions and countries. Even more challenging, all these systems were implemented across multiple expense tools.

Extensive research to track down original policy decisions that regulate what an employee is allowed to expense revealed a pleasant surprise, though, says Sahil Garg, principal director of software engineering for several domains of Microsoft Finance.

“We found that 90 percent of the processes were common across countries,” Garg says. “They looked different, but they could actually be standardized.”

The next key piece on the way to a pilot launch was to identify the easiest and lowest-risk expense transaction categories that would begin teaching the machine learning (ML) models. For this, they turned to Microsoft’s “road warriors”—employees who travel frequently and have highly categorical and predictable expenses, such as airfare, taxis, and hotels.

“These are also people who need to file a lot of expense reports,” says Amruta Anawalikar, senior program manager for Microsoft Finance. “One person said that creating a report is so long and tedious, they have to put on a ‘Game of Thrones’ episode, and that’s the only way they can get it done. That really struck a chord with me—we want to ease that pain.”

It required a lot of experimentation, and how we thought of things theoretically wasn’t necessarily possible. But now we feel there’s a fully-tuned solution.

– Sumeet Deshpande, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Finance

Drawing on data from two primary sources of truth—receipts and credit card transactions—the engineers made the decision to take a “receipt first” approach to automation. Whereas credit card data may take a couple of days to flow in, receipts are generated immediately upon a transaction, which makes this the most expedient initial input.

Finally, the team brought in other technologies that were readily available to them within the Microsoft Azure stack, integrating them together on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 business platform. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology would help scan the receipts and extract data, then apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Azure ML models to provide context and meaning to the data.

“All of these tools at our fingertips allowed us to build an enterprise-level expense system,” Deshpande says. “It required a lot of experimentation, and how we thought of things theoretically wasn’t necessarily possible. But now we feel there’s a fully-tuned solution.”

UnXpensing expenses

The new way of filing expense reports at Microsoft is to not file an expense report at all.

“As engineers, we want to make life easier for all of us,” says Chinmaya Rath, a senior software engineer and lead developer for expense automation who coded much of the solution now called OneExpense. “Why does the employee have to go to a tool? Let’s bring it to them, and let’s make it a nearly touchless experience.”

Now, when an employee makes a purchase on their corporate credit card, they immediately get an alert via Outlook Actionable Emails (or wherever they want to receive their alerts).

A familiar user interface meets the employee wherever they are, thanks to the use of Microsoft Adaptive Cards which uses small snippets of UI code that can adapt to any environment. This taps into the power of multiple enterprise scale platforms Microsoft offers, like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or an internal employee app known as MyHub.

It’s all about letting employees choose the experience they like best.

The system reads the receipt, auto-populates an expense line for it, intelligently applies the appropriate cost category, and sends it to the employee for review. The employee can make any necessary adjustments and submit it then and there. Or if they take no action, the system automatically submits the expense four days later.

“Instead of asking the user to go do one big boring monolithic report in the expense tool, we have broken the experience into smaller, logical micro-actions that happen in context,” Deshpande says.

In addition to taking the compliance burden off employees, the team needed to build employee confidence and trust into the system while keeping employees compliant with corporate expense rules.

So, the machine learning is trained to detect anomalies by applying a line-level confidence score to each transaction. Only high-scoring expenses are submitted automatically, while low-scoring items are flagged to the employee or their manager for additional review.

“We found an intelligent way to only submit the pieces that make sense,” Garg says. “And our intelligence grows stronger all the time.”

For example, a $500 coffee charge may raise a red flag, but when cross-referenced with other API inputs, such as a Microsoft Outlook calendar item for a large off-site, it could make sense. By shifting the auditing process from manual work to automation, the system is expected to meet greater compliance levels than ever before.

Configurability was also key to creating a smooth experience.

“We recognize that employees want flexibility,” Rath says. “Maybe they want to be notified for individual transactions, while others just want to see them all at the end of the day or week.”

So Rath and the team created functionality allowing employees to set preferences to automatically bundle transactions according to a particular category or timeframe.

“Let people spend money where they need to,” Garg says. “On the back end, we’ll intelligently connect the dots. Expense as an entity is gone.”

A complex expense report that would have taken someone at least 40 minutes to complete can now be done in less than five minutes. Overall, this time reduction is estimated to translate to $50 million in potential soft-dollar savings each year.

“We just eliminated ‘complex’ from the expense dictionary,” Deshpande says. Deshpande even has a new word for it: “UnXpensing.”

The road to nirvana

There is still much work to be done.

After the pilot phase, the new OneExpense experience is ready to be rolled out to all 140,000 Microsoft expense users. As the system continues to learn and get smarter, Deshpande and their team are dreaming bigger about what automating expense reporting will allow them to do.

Some of that includes refinements, such as standardizing hotel inputs and tackling the variety of evolving receipt categories the system might encounter. In the future, actionable alerts will be extended to additional platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cortana, and the employee MyHub mobile app.

The team is also working on further reducing the attention required by managers and approvers by applying those line-level confidence scores to document headers for easier reference.

Pooja Sund, a principal program manager who recently joined the effort to help roll OneExpense out company-wide, says the beauty of OneExpense is just how limitless it is.

“We have gone above and beyond just solving the problem,” Sund says. “We’re building on the big bets like the goodness of the Azure stack and building layers of flexibility on top of it.”

Deshpande says that means potentially extending the framework beyond expenses.

“This can work for any employee reimbursement scenario at Microsoft,” Deshpande says.

Plus, thanks to the inherent agility built into the Dynamics 365 platform, the system has no external dependencies, says Mohit Jain, a senior software engineer and lead developer for Expense automation.

“It doesn’t matter which expense platform you’re working on top of. It works with any expense solution on the market that offers an API,” Jain says. “Dynamics 365 is great in that way—it has a very future forward-looking architecture.”

Down the road, Sund says, there is broader potential for automating corporate expense reporting at enterprise level.

“We’re connecting different siloed teams and tools, building on big bets and the goodness of the Azure stack,” Sund says. “You’re not just creating new experiences for our internal employees. You can leverage that functionality and power, take the feedback you get, and bake it into the product so you can take it outside. That will be the nirvana state.”

The team really embraced that entire mindset of creating delight, meeting the user where they are, being compliant and secure by design, and getting the human out of the loop. That cultural work we’ve done pays off with this kind of innovation.

– Brad Wright, director of software engineering, Microsoft Finance Management

For the Microsoft Finance team at large, this larger automating expense reporting opportunity represents more than just a major accomplishment in redefining an age-old corporate process.

This transformation is also about pride of ownership.

“The team really embraced that entire mindset of creating delight, meeting the user where they are, being compliant and secure by design, and getting the human out of the loop,” says Brad Wright, director of software engineering for Microsoft Finance Management. “That cultural work we’ve done pays off with this kind of innovation.”

• Find out how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning.
• Learn more about how Microsoft automates revenue processes with Power Automate.

The post Automating expense reporting at Microsoft boosts employee experience appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

A new machine learning model and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and automation enables Microsoft smart buildings to keep company employees as comfortable as possible. Microsoft’s real estate operations team relies on energy smart buildings, structures with interconnected automation and sensors, to responsibly maintain a base level of comfort.

Microsoft has deployed more than 50,000 sensors in roughly 100 buildings throughout Microsoft’s Puget Sound region in Washington state. The company is using data captured from these sensors to identify issues and inefficiencies as they happen, allowing them to be fixed before employees even notice them.

“Hot and cold calls are the biggest part of our facilities management requests,” says Mark Obermayer, a senior program manager on the Real Estate & Facilities (RE&F) team, the group responsible for managing the buildings across Microsoft. “A lot of our work is making sure our employees are comfortable and productive. It makes a big difference.”

Fortunately for those responsible for responding when one of these sensors goes off, the vast majority of all the signals emitted from Microsoft smart buildings don’t necessitate a response. Puget Sound could see hundreds of thousands of signals in a single week, with fewer than 1 percent being actionable.

“A portion of a building being off by a couple of degrees might not be a big deal,” Obermayer says. “It might be that the wind is blowing from the north that day.”

What Microsoft Digital came up with was a way to not only generate work orders in a quick manner—a few clicks—but also to predict which faults are a priority.

– Mark Obermayer, senior program manager, Real Estate & Security

To wrangle and maximize this data, RE&F tapped Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company, to figure out when a response is needed.

This meant finding a better way to parse the plethora of IoT data that the sensors were producing. In short, artificial intelligence and machine learning were needed.

“In the past, someone would manually enter tickets to check out a group of faults,” Obermayer says. “What Microsoft Digital came up with was a way to not only generate work orders in a quick manner—a few clicks—but also to predict which faults are a priority.”

[Discover how Microsoft’s smart buildings showcase Azure Digital Twins. Learn about Microsoft’s new era of smart building in Singapore. Find out how Microsoft promotes environmental sustainability from the inside out.]

Making sure work orders work

As sensors from Microsoft smart buildings feed this IoT data to Iconics (a third-party solution), faults, or specific violations of established rules, are identified. When a fault is recognized, a technician creates a ticket in Facility Link, the building management system Microsoft Digital built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 to manage work orders.

“Iconics and Facility Link weren’t communicating,” says Garima Gaurav, a senior program manager with Microsoft Digital, who identified several opportunities to introduce improvements across Microsoft’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. “Some technicians were spending the same amount of time writing tickets as working on the fix.”

In addition to being inefficient, manual processes were generating errors due to incomplete or inaccurate tickets. Incorrect work orders left jobs unfinished, leaving equipment running suboptimally and requiring additional technician visits.

To fix this, Obermayer and Gaurav reached out to Kundan Karma, a senior software engineer with Microsoft Digital.

“Technicians had to go to two places,” Karma says. “They went to Iconics, to perform the analysis, and they used Facility Link to submit the ticket. The new IoT Connector that we built brings them together.”

Built on Microsoft Azure, the IoT Connector immediately removed manual steps, reducing errors, and improving communication. Creating a ticket became a one-click process, with greater accuracy and faster processing time for technicians.

“In the IoT Connector, we take care of all the data,” Karma says. “It’s a bridge between two systems.”

Designed with auto-healing and telemetry fail-safes, the IoT Connector gives RE&F confidence that faults will be captured and reported as tickets with greater accuracy.

“If messages between the two systems fail, the IoT Connector will resubmit,” Karma says. “After a certain number of retries or if there’s a major problem, it will create a ticket for an engineer to look at.”

Improved communication introduced a handful of ancillary benefits—specifically, visibility.

Where a technician might previously circumvent inputting information into a work order, automated copying facilitated by the IoT Connector made tickets in Facility Link a single click away.

“In cases where someone just does the fix without a work order, we don’t know what’s been done,” Obermayer says. “This left us with an incomplete history. We couldn’t see the demand for certain things.”

Now capable of tracking work orders, RE&F has a better understanding of what’s going on within specific buildings and assets. These insights are improving decision-making, especially as it relates to energy efficiency.

A firehose of IoT data

The IoT Connector shines a light on some challenges that come with scaling energy smart buildings.

“The target was 100 buildings,” Karma says. “We were so focused on integrating Iconics with Facility Link that we didn’t consider the volume of data. When we first rolled out the IoT Connector, we had to stop at 13 buildings. One building was generating approximately 2,000 faults per day.”

Extrapolated across Puget Sound’s 100 buildings, that amounted to roughly 200,000 faults in a single day. The scale of data being generated by IoT sensors could overload Microsoft’s entire Dynamics 365 system, bringing things to a standstill.

“The issue was conversions,” Gaurav says. “Only meaningful faults require an actionable response. We only want to check on real issues.”

Getting useful information out of IoT sensors is a challenge.

“There are different tolerances and different polling schedules for different pieces of equipment,” Obermayer says. “It changes from building to building.”

Microsoft Digital needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

“If you have data generated in the thousands, it’s easy to miss important alerts,” Gaurav says.

Reducing the number of faults meant rethinking the way alerts from energy smart buildings were generated.

“What we realized is that 75 percent of the total faults were coming from one source, terminal units, and most of them were never converted to any work orders,” Gaurav says. “It was taking up most of the UI and creating too much noise. The way this data is now processed has adjusted how we’re digesting and prioritizing alerts.”

Terminal units, for example, were reordered and reprioritized to reduce the amount of noise being generated.

“We tried to group faults together,” Gaurav says. “One fault can trigger other alerts, but you don’t need multiple work orders.”

We want the model to mimic the behavior of a technician. It can go through the same decisions a human being can and reach the same conclusion.

– Kundan Karma, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital

Instead of treating all alerts as individual issues, alerts could be grouped so several related faults resulted in a single ticket.

“Would a technician investigate that?” Karma says. “We want the model to mimic the behavior of a technician. It can go through the same decisions a human being can and reach the same conclusion.”

Teaching a machine to think like a technician

To get things started, Microsoft Digital looked at the history of faults and determined how they were converted to work orders.

Brendan Bryant, a mechanical engineer with DB Engineering, one of Microsoft’s partners, helped translate the technician’s process to the team. These inputs allowed the Microsoft Digital team to build a machine learning model that could mimic the behavior of a technician.

“We had key performance metrics from six to eight months’ worth of IoT Connector data,” Bryant says. “I helped Kundan look at HVAC telemetry and all the IoT metrics to get his team the information they needed to train the algorithm the right way.”

But before they could get there, naming conventions for assets and structures had to be standardized.

“This is one of the reasons we put in our own system,” Obermayer says. “How things would work was that a vendor would decide on an asset name when the building was constructed, then we’d change vendors or use a different vendor for a different building.”

The result was a variety of similar, yet varied, naming conventions. Facility Link meant RE&F could standardize and align all data points for energy smart buildings across campus.

“We can now look at a data point and tell you the number of air valves in Puget Sound,” Obermayer says. “Data and problem types are now the same on every system, making energy smart buildings more precise and efficient.”

Alignment of nomenclature also meant Bryant could better convey priority issues.

“There’s a lot of engineering intuition involved, especially when checking what’s false and what’s true,” Bryant says. “It’s a large amount of data provided by all of the equipment, so you have to make a judgement based on what you’re seeing.”

To help train the model to identify real issues over false alarms, Bryant and Karma moved away from real-time response and started viewing faults in aggregate.

“Something might show up on a Tuesday and be gone by Wednesday,” Bryant says. “There’s no value in creating a work order for that. But if it’s an issue for most of a week, that’s something we want to flag.”

Once aggregated, certain key performance metrics became strong predictors of a fault.

“In order to maintain high confidence that a fault needs to be addressed, we need a longer period of data,” Bryant says.

As the team continued their efforts, items that would result in a work order were flagged while all others were archived. From this, the model began to predict the faults that would result in work orders, flagging them for attention and archiving the rest.

“The technician can view anything flagged as ‘false’ and review it,” Karma says. “If needed, the technician can pull the fault from the archive and review it on the fly. The model learns from the mistake when it’s time to retrain.”

Thanks to machine learning and new practices, the number of faults was reduced by 80 percent to 90 percent.

“When we were onboarding, we couldn’t do all of Puget Sound’s smart buildings because the number of faults was huge,” Gaurav says. “Once we were confident that the faults generated were manageable and convertible to work orders, we were able to quickly onboard the rest of campus.”

Predicting the future for smart buildings

With the IoT Connector, Microsoft’s technicians are more efficient, disparate systems are better integrated, and modern infrastructure is in place to further sustain energy smart buildings.

“Right now, we’re only looking at HVAC, but there are so many other IoT assets throughout Microsoft,” Karma says. “A/V, security cameras—you name it. The next phase is to integrate all of these items into the IoT Connector.”

Flexibility within the IoT Connector allows it to be utilized with any asset across any region in the world.

“It becomes a scalable implementation,” Gaurav says. “We can even use it in areas that will eventually become energy smart buildings to help support those efforts.”

Karma also sees the IoT Connector, which is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, as being available to other companies looking to improve the efficiencies of energy smart buildings.

“What we’re planning is to create the IoT Connector in a generic way so that other people can benefit from it outside of Microsoft,” Karma says. “Any other team should be able to use our learnings.”

The standardization of assets in Facility Link has helped spur other RE&F initiatives.

“Having this data is super important,” Obermayer says. “This will impact everything from procurement decisions to the management of movable assets.”

As Karma continues to refine the model, retraining hones prediction accuracy.

With each iteration, the model gets stronger.

“The big thing looking forward is helping to teach the algorithm so that we understand when it makes a decision and why,” Karma says. “Eventually the model will be able to assign work orders automatically.”

Gaurav agrees.

“The model is robust and converts some fixed number of alerts to tickets automatically. However, we also allow technicians to review through the list of alerts and allow them to manually create tickets as and when needed,” Gaurav says.

For Obermayer, all of this is a dramatic improvement.

“We started with thousands of faults but could only address about one percent of the issues,” Obermayer says. “We got the number of faults down so that we’re actioning 10 to 20 percent, which means we’re hitting meaningful faults. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are improving the business of energy smart buildings.”

• Discover how Microsoft’s smart buildings showcase Azure Digital Twins.
• Learn about Microsoft’s new era of smart building in Singapore.
• Find out how Microsoft promotes environmental sustainability from the inside out.

The post Microsoft smart buildings bolstered by machine learning model, IoT appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Bonnie Cowan, director of finance at OneFinance, a global Microsoft partner for financial transactions, had a problem: 1 million support tickets flooded her team’s resources each year. Handling simple queries such as cancel an order and find the status of an order left operators little time to provide individualized attention to more challenging customer requests. The OneFinance team needed a new tool to break this bottleneck.

OneFinance already used Microsoft Dynamics – a line of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software applications – as its customer service support tool, and Cowan isn’t shy with her praise for Dynamics: “Everything about it has been awesome.” Managing Microsoft accounts payable and buy center processes is no small task, and Dynamics is essential in orchestrating workflow at OneFinance.

To address the overwhelming volume of routine support tickets, Jovalene Teo, senior global program manager at OneFinance, collaborated with the Dynamics team to find a solution. Teo and the Dynamics team decided to leverage a Microsoft machine-learning technology called Language Understanding, or LUIS. The goal was to automate the management of 30 percent of support tickets—those that were deemed not to require human staff intervention. If the initiative succeeded, 300,000 tickets per year could be handled and closed by chat bots.

[Learn more about how Finance is using AI and chatbots to simplify finance tools at Microsoft and how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning.]

LUIS is a machine learning-based service that enables users to build natural language into apps, IoT devices, and bots – such as OneFinance’s chat bots. “LUIS builds apps around customers’ natural way of getting answers,” said Azharuddin Mohammed, a Microsoft senior software engineer. “Customers don’t need to learn something new. They talk to a ‘person’—a chatbot—to get their answers.” In other words, when a user tells an app to book a flight, order a pizza, or remember to call Dad, the LUIS technology translates these commands to the app so that the action can be executed. “LUIS is the bridge that converts natural language into something a machine can understand,” Mohammed explained.

At OneFinance, the LUIS service integrated seamlessly with Dynamics tools already in place, enabling staff to divert and resolve routine support tickets while funneling more complicated tickets to human operators. The suite of services even allowed the team to work in a variety of languages.

As a global organization, the OneFinance team responds to support tickets generated in dozens of languages, so LUIS had to work with the integrated Bing Translator. The Dynamics team anticipated and accommodated this need. Mohammed pointed out that now when tickets come into OneFinance in Japanese, Bing Translator automatically rewrites the ticket in English. Most translated tickets are resolved quickly by the chat bot or operators, saving the company from paying premiums for translation services. In fact, LUIS supports 37 languages.

Recently, Microsoft’s voice-controlled virtual assistant Cortana and LUIS joined forces at OneFinance. Customers seeking support can speak their requests or call in, just as they would with a live operator. “Now users can go ahead and talk to our chatbot and get those same answers, instead of waiting for up to two days to talk to an agent,” said Mohammed.

LUIS has quickly streamlined OneFinance’s customer service. About 20 percent of users now direct their simple queries to chatbots and operators, and 97 percent of those tickets can be closed at “first touch.” “People can come in today and interact with the bot,” Cowan said. “If their question is answered, their query is closed, and we don’t have to go any further. For more complicated queries, they can choose to chat with an operator.” At this time, bots can answer 200 standard user questions, and to date, users have interacted with the chatbots 28,000 times.

LUIS’ positive impact on OneFinance operations is clear. “It is producing cost savings because we can drive efficiencies, but it is also about improving the customer experience,” said Cowan. “Because we have so many simple queries and we are trying to get to all queries, we weren’t able to provide the high touch we are looking for.” When the resolution of simple queries is automated, Cowan points out, complex queries can receive a “white glove service without an increase in costs.”

Mohammed agrees, describing the LUIS integration solution as a win-win situation for customers and businesses. “The benefits are huge. Customers are getting information faster, and they’re getting information accurately,” he said. “When machines take care of things an agent used to cover, you save money.”

Looking ahead, OneFinance plans to push LUIS to its full potential. Next in line: utilize LUIS’ active learning capabilities. “We are collecting data from chat logs with our bots and using that data to see what has been useful to our users and what hasn’t,” Teo said. “We are working on how to translate that feedback into improvement through LUIS.”

Using LUIS’ active learning capabilities, businesses can constantly update and improve the service. For example, when a user asks LUIS a question that it cannot process, the business can review the chat logs to adjust right away. “The best part is that this is easy to do. You can see in real time what users are doing and saying,” said Mohammed, “and then change the model to incorporate that input.”

Based on the quick success OneFinance has experienced by incorporating LUIS, Cowan now believes her team’s goal is in sight. With technical support from Dynamics, OneFinance should be able to close 300,000 simple queries per year—approximately 30 percent of all support tickets—using chatbots by next year. “The technology is new, and our volumes are low but our quality is high,” Cowan said. “We are just now starting the process of spreading the word across Microsoft. We are right on track.”

• Learn more about Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS).
• Unpack using AI and chatbots to simplify finance tools at Microsoft.
• Explore creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning.

The post Learning to Listen: OneFinance Improves Customer Service with Microsoft LUIS Tool appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.]

Managing financial transactions can be a tricky business.

When Microsoft employees and external payees run into invoice or payment problems, they turn to our expert support agents for help. But how do those agents know what’s working for their customers and what isn’t?

“As a customer-obsessed organization, we simply want to know how well we’re serving our customers,” says Jovalene Teo, senior technical solution manager for the Center of Innovation within Finance Operations. “When you come to us for help, are you getting the help you need?”

Finance Operations knew feedback and user insights were crucial to a great customer experience, so they created opportunities to harvest data at every stage of a user’s support journey. But not everyone has the time or inclination to share their thoughts. For users who don’t provide feedback, the team has developed a way to unlock those insights through machine learning sentiment analysis.

[Find out how Microsoft is reimagining employee support with Azure. Learn how Microsoft rebooted its internal app support with Dynamics 365. See how Microsoft is streamlining its global customer call center system with Azure]

Making it easy for users to share their experience

Our procure-to-pay (P2P) process covers everything from onboarding new suppliers to invoicing and payments. Both internal employees and external suppliers engage with the P2P process, so a robust support structure ensures that people without a finance background can deal with any issues promptly.

Finance Operations wanted to standardize the user feedback experience across every support team that touches the P2P process. That would help our frontline agents serve users better and provide deeper, business-wide insights into pain points and support trends.

“The idea came up that we should build a system where all these teams work through the same platform,” says Dhwani Kamdar, senior product manager for Financial Experience Applications within Finance Operations. “That way, they can talk to each other, and every single ticket or inquiry that comes into Microsoft Finance is tracked.”

The conventional feedback process used external surveys where employees or suppliers initiated a support ticket by contacting the team via email. Once the ticket was complete, users received a link to an external site where they could provide feedback. That extra step was a serious barrier because it asked users to interrupt their workflow by traveling to an entirely different website.

“We thought about how we could integrate feedback into a CRM experience that agents can see and interpret as they’re working on the tickets,” says Rajiv Maheshwari, principal software engineering manager for Financial Experience Applications. “So we went from after-the-fact tracking to more dynamic, interaction-focused insights available to agents in real time.”

Their solution evolved into a new tool that integrated user feedback into the flow of email communications during the support ticket process. As a result, they could incorporate the results into UniFinance, a platform based on Dynamics 365 that 25 Microsoft Finance teams use for support and feedback management.

Integrated, dynamic feedback powers meaningful conversations

Finance Operations worked to implement best practices that would make providing feedback more natural to users. Through collaboration with 25 team leads who manage 850 support agents, the engineers worked to ensure that the tool’s interface was stylish, accessible by design, and smoothly integrated into the email support process.

First, they updated the depth of possible responses. What started as a binary “satisfied” or “dissatisfied” choice evolved into a five-point satisfaction scale. That provided a wider array of feedback and aligned with the highest industry standards.

Next, the team needed to integrate feedback into ongoing support conversations. Fortunately, existing Microsoft Outlook features provided the basis for dynamic, in-email feedback.

The tool collects two different categories of user feedback. The first is known as “active feedback.”

This tool enables the user to provide their feedback more readily and easily and for us to collect those insights. So instead of just post-mortem feedback, we collect insights during the conversation so we can actually work with it to improve our service.

––Jovalene Teo, senior technical solution manager, Center of Innovation, Microsoft Finance Operations

Active feedback provides the opportunity for ongoing sentiment collection from the end user. In the signature line of every support email, users can click on one of five icons—with faces ranging from angry to overjoyed—indicating how they feel about their experience within the flow of communication.

UniFinance routes that user feedback through Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, making it available to support agents so they can understand the customer’s level of satisfaction and whether any course corrections are necessary. If a user submits feedback on the lower end of the spectrum, the CRM automatically keeps the ticket open, allowing the agent to offer further support.

“This tool enables the user to provide their feedback more readily and easily and for us to collect those insights,” Teo says. “So instead of just post-mortem feedback, we collect insights during the conversation so we can actually work with it to improve our service.”

When the support ticket is closed, the system requests a more extensive response, known as “closure feedback.” At this stage, users receive a final email featuring an Outlook actionable card that asks for an overall assessment on a five-point scale as well as a field prompting a textual response.

Closure feedback represents the end user’s final sentiment on the ticket’s resolution. Their input contributes to the support team’s key performance metric: customer satisfaction (CSAT).

On top of providing concrete guidance for frontline support agents, aggregating feedback data through Dynamics 365 allows the Finance Operations team to collect, analyze, and surface insights to business owners throughout the group.

Since the implementation of the tool, the participation rate for users providing feedback has soared. Before in-email feedback, the response rate was just 0.01 percent. That rate has now skyrocketed to 8 percent.

Completing the picture with machine learning

But what about the other 92 percent of cases? Finance Operations knew valuable insights were hiding in those interactions as well.

“Actual customer feedback is more common when the experience is on the high end or the low end, so either I’m super happy as a customer and I give you five stars, or I’m very frustrated and I give you one,” Maheshwari says. “But we were missing out on the middle of the spectrum, so we didn’t have the insights to improve that experience.”

Even when the customer doesn’t give feedback, the machine is giving us some insight. So we can still course-correct and make sure we’re doing our best to serve our customers..

––Dhwani Kamdar, senior product manager, Financial Experience Applications, Microsoft Finance Operations

Their solution leveraged machine learning to analyze the sentiment of user emails. Within the tool, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services compares users’ language against established, extensively trained positive and negative sentiment language models. Then the system returns a positive or negative sentiment score to the support agent.

“Even when the customer doesn’t give feedback, the machine is giving us some insight,” Kamdar says. “So we can still course-correct and make sure we’re doing our best to serve our customers.”

Interpreting language and tone is complicated, so support agents use these sentiment scores cautiously. Even if a message receives a positive score, they still review it carefully. But when the system throws a negative score, agents know they should pay special attention to that message and potentially modify their approach.

Between dynamic user feedback and machine learning sentiment analysis, support agents now have powerful tools in their corner to help them provide excellent service.

Intelligent outcomes in finance

UniFinance has become a powerful engine for improving the finance support experience, providing both frontline and business-level insights.

“Just having sentiment analysis enabled wasn’t the only goal,” Kamdar says. “The goal was to use that data for building Power BIs and executive-level dashboards to see where we are and calculate customer satisfaction. So there are a lot of discussions around the data analytics and insights to create those dashboards and make sure we don’t stop at building the five smileys.”

The team is already piloting ways to use machine learning beyond sentiment analysis. Dynamic categorization is an exciting new feature that engages Azure Cognitive Services to scan user messages for keywords.

It associates those keywords with primary topics like “invoicing” and then breaks them down into increasingly granular subtopics such as “invoice payment failure.” Over time, the goal is to identify trends, build predictability, and even automate responses, saving finance professionals time to focus on more significant challenges.

In the meantime, UniFinance’s email feedback feature continues to improve the user experience through streamlined customer feedback, powerful data insights, and machine learning.

Here are some key lessons to keep in mind if you’re planning to rework the support process at your company:

• Start by reimagining the possibilities: When you work in a traditional field, moving out of the status quo is the goal.
• Think in terms of the customer experience because that’s where you’ll find your innovations.
• Design matters: Never underestimate how aesthetics can drive results.
• Keep an open mind: The more you talk to users and the more demos you run, the better and faster your work will be.
• When you’re working with machine learning and text, start small with specific scenarios, find success, then build on it.
• Having a diverse team is very advantageous because they bring skills, languages, and insights you won’t find elsewhere.

• Learn how Microsoft is integrating ServiceNow with Microsoft Azure Monitor.
• Find out how Microsoft is modernizing its support experience with ServiceNow.
• Learn how Microsoft is enabling a modern support experience.

The post Maximizing Microsoft Finance’s support experience with dynamic feedback and machine learning sentiment analysis appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Just ask the 25,000 people who pitch the complex array of products and services that the company sells to customers across the globe.

Those sellers used to wade through more than 30 homegrown applications to get their jobs done, often spending more time filling out forms and cross referencing tools than talking to customers.

“We needed to modernize our toolset,” says Kim Kunes, who leads the Microsoft Digital team that provides the tools and experiences that the sales and marketing organizations use to sell the company’s wares. “We needed to turn what had been our sellers’ biggest headache into an asset that would help them flourish in a connected, cloud world.”

A complete overhaul of the company’s tools and processes is fully underway, says Kunes, but it’s not complete.

“We’ve winnowed a disconnected, heavily seamed group of tools down to a core group of critical experiences connected in ways that make sense for our sellers and marketers, but there is still work to do,” she says. “We’re in year two of a multiyear journey to revamp our sellers’ toolset.”

Kunes says her team, like all of Microsoft Digital, is shifting its focus from working for internal partners in a traditional IT manner to building experiences in partnership with the business that make sense for users. In this case, those users are the heart and soul of the company’s revenue-generating selling community.

“Now, just like any other product team at Microsoft, we operate with a baseline budget that funds a group of FTE (full-time employee) engineers and a continuous prioritization and planning process to deliver functionality most critical to our users and businesses,” she says. “Now we’re thinking, ‘What should the seller experience be from start to finish? Are we doing everything we can to make their experience as seamless as possible?’”

This transformation has Microsoft Digital’s Commercial Sales and Marketing Engineering Team working in new ways. It’s centralizing and standardizing the many channels of feedback and data to derive a picture of users’ unmet, unarticulated needs. The shift is built around a new focus on how Microsoft Digital approaches customer research. It’s adopting a fluent, modern look and feel that’s consistent with how the rest of the Microsoft is approaching design. It’s using DevOps and other agile engineering principles that truly keep the team focused on the user’s end-to-end experience as it moves, fast and flexibly.

“All of our sellers’ regular tasks need to be in one place and arranged so that it’s efficient and virtually seamless to flow through them,” Kunes says. “Everything has to be intuitive. There should be no big learning curves. They shouldn’t have to figure out how to use a new application every time they want to get something done.”

This laser focus on the customer experience has required the team to think and work differently.

“I’ve seen our team’s culture shift,” Kunes says. “In the past we were focused on incremental improvements to make the process and tools better. Now we’re thinking bigger. For example, we’re beginning to use AI and machine learning to curate the gold mine of valuable data we have to surface critical next best action insights to our sellers and marketers.”

This transformation is driving results that are paying dividends, says Siew Hoon Goh, the Microsoft director of sales excellence in charge of making sure the tools and experience that Microsoft Digital is building meet the needs of the company’s digital sales force.

“Our sellers do recognize that there has been lots of progress,” Goh says. “Technology is one of the best enablers for us to scale to bigger and better things and increased revenue for the company.”

Microsoft’s umbrella tool for sales is Microsoft Sales Experience. Known as MSX, it’s an integrated solution built on Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure products, Office 365 productivity and collaboration services, and Power BI. In July, MSX was upgraded to the new modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales user experience. It includes a simplified user experience and integration into LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, and several internal tools.

“Our MSX instance is one of the largest implementations of Dynamics 365 in the company,” says Ismail Mohammed, a principal program manager on the Microsoft Digital team working to make life better for the company’s sales field. “Ultimately, we want to make our tools more intuitive and help our sellers get their time back so they can focus more of their time on selling.”

MSX is the gateway to several important seller experiences that you’ll read about here:

• Portal, a second generation of MSX meant to be a true single pane of glass for sellers to work from
• Account Based Marketing, a transformed approach to sifting through marketing sales leads to find the ones that are worth pursuing
• Daily Recommender, a machine learning-based discovery engine that advises sellers on the specific leads they should pursue next
• Account 360, an aggregated view of customer content that helps sellers find the right customer information before they reach out to leads

Charting the evolution of MSX

When MSX launched in 2015, it replaced eight on-premises instances of Dynamics CRM 2011, each of which was highly customized and complex. Built on Azure Cloud Services, MSX brought all those experiences into one cloud-based platform.

Though it was a big improvement, it was still just a beginning.

“For perspective, MSX started out as a collection of links,” Kunes says. “It was nice to have a place where you could get to everything, but it really wasn’t the seamless, single-pane-of-glass experience that we are working toward.”

The team has continued to refine MSX, pushing hard to evolve it into an experience in which sellers feel more productive. They felt less so when they pieced their sales story together with their own offline Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and secret contact lists (the latter of which are no longer allowed anyway, because of GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation).

The original MSX solution is gradually making way for MSX Portal, a new, transformative experience that is being rolled out to the company’s sellers role by role, says Steffie Hofmann, Microsoft Digital’s lead MSX Portal program manager. MSX Portal debuted in February, when the experience was provided to the company’s customer-success managers, a specialized sales role at Microsoft.

MSX Portal helps sellers figure out what the next best action they can take. They get suggestions on their homepage and in context-driven ways within their workflow.

“Each time we ship MSX Portal to a new group of sellers, the experience improves dramatically,” Hofmann says. “They no longer have to leave the tool to get their work done.”

The goal has long been to have MSX provide sellers everything they need as they reach out to customers to sell the company on a daily basis , says Steve Thomas, Microsoft Digital’s lead software engineering manager for MSX Portal.

“We built MSX Portal with the idea of making it a great place for our sellers to start their day, to get their work done,” Thomas says. “We wanted to get past the notion that it was something they had to work around.”

The rollout of MSX Portal is expected to be complete by the end of the 2019 calendar year.

Sifting through the noise

Sales leads pour into a company the size of Microsoft from all directions, at massive scale. After their interest gets piqued by the company’s wide-ranging marketing efforts, leaders at other businesses watch webinars and make decisions:

• Should CIOs invest in Microsoft’s stack?
• Should CEOs ask Microsoft to see how the company can help them digitally transform?
• Should IT pros ask for Microsoft’s help via product websites and customer-service lines and at conferences?

[Read this case study on how Microsoft uses a bot to improve basic lead qualification to see how millions of potential sales leads received each year are qualified down to thousands. Read about how we use AI to serve up the next best lead to sellers.]

All those many thousands of leads get funneled into the Microsoft Global Demand Center.

“Before we move a lead to one of our sellers, we nurture them in the Global Demand Center,” says Prabhu Jayaraman, a group engineering manager who helps lead Microsoft Digital’s marketing effort. “They don’t go to our sellers right away—first we need to make sure our leads are high quality and have a high propensity to result in wins before we transfer them.”

It used to be that all those marketing-driven leads would get dumped on sellers, tossed over the fence with little vetting or insight.

“Sellers would look at these queues, they’d see 25 pages of leads, and randomly say, ‘This looks interesting, let me go talk to them,’” Jayaraman says. “The problem was the lead they picked out of the 10,000 options might not be the next best lead to pick.”

To help sellers get to the right lead, Microsoft adopted a new approach to how it markets to larger customers by infusing AI into its Account Based Marketing (ABM) program.

“ABM is not a tool, it’s a concept,” Jayaraman says. “It’s about stitching these opportunities together in ways that make sense—when one company contacts us in five different ways, we will connect those together into one opportunity.”

To Vinh Nguyen, ABM is about bringing marketing and sales closer together—something it does by weaving relevant contacts and insights together in ways that help sellers be more effective.

“It may sound simple, but it hasn’t been,” says Nguyen, the senior program manager leading Microsoft Digital’s efforts around Account Based Marketing. “We’re trying to use machine learning and automation to optimize when sellers should engage with a customer on products that their employees have shown interest in.”

The team has been working for more than a year on getting it right.

“We’re using Marketo marketing software to listen to our customer interaction signals,” Nguyen says. “When signals come into the Global Demand Center, we feed them into our machine-learning models.”

Those ML model-fueled recommendations are fed into the Daily Recommender, where sellers use them to decide which leads to pursue on a daily basis.

Finding the best leads with Daily Recommender

Until recently, Microsoft’s most successful sellers were those best at finding gold nuggets of customer information hidden in the company’s many sales tools. That was when star sellers were known for maintaining their own offline databases and sales pitches more than they were for building close relationships with customers.

“Why should our most successful sellers be the ones who are the best at navigating complex systems?” Kunes says. “Why shouldn’t success be about having intelligent, human connections with customers?”

This culture was fed by the fact that the company’s sales strategy was built around educated guesswork—each quarter, SWAT team-like groups of sellers would gather, discuss the indicators that each of them were seeing, talk it out, and use that war-room discussion to set sales targets for the upcoming quarter.

All of this made selling more art than science.

The team looked to change that when it developed Daily Recommender, a machine-learning tool that makes individualized recommendations for each seller, says Hyma Davuluri, principal program manager in Microsoft Digital.

“With Daily Recommender, we’re pushing the envelope on using AI to influence large-scale selling at Microsoft,” Davuluri says. “It’s also helping us accelerate our digital transformation journey across the company’s sales organization.”

Launched three years ago, Daily Recommender has been rolled out to about 1,000 sellers and, as it has learned and matured, is starting to show very promising results. So says Salman Mukhtar, the director of business programs who leads the selling community’s use of Daily Recommender.

“It’s Microsoft using Microsoft,” Mukhtar says. “We’re using SQL Server, Azure Fabric, Azure Machine Learning—we’re using a lot of our own technology together and connecting it on top of Dynamics.”

Microsoft started small with the intent to prove the value of an AI-enabled discovery engine that would improve targeting of new business while reducing the preparation efforts by sellers. So far, the results have been promising—one in four recommendations pursued by sellers result in a customer opportunity or engagement.

“Machine-to-human AI requires a mindset change,” Mukhtar says. “It requires legacy processes to be enhanced and new habits to be formed across the sales force.”

For example, sellers must give up their personalized Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks. “The sponsors and developers of our legacy toolkits and processes need to be bold and decommission where necessary,” he says.

The needed changes are happening but are not complete yet.

“Digital transformation is a journey—for us it involves data, tools, processes, and people all enabled by AI,” Mukhtar says. “We are scaling up our enablement efforts to transform Daily Recommender into the primary discovery engine for the business.”

Account 360 stitches the customer story together

Historically, it has been a challenge for sellers, as they reach out, to understand what relationship a customer has with Microsoft.

“The key challenge for sellers was to gather consistent insights in order to have a productive conversation,” says Alioscha Leon, Microsoft Digital’s program manager for Account 360, a new MSX sales tool that seeks to stamp out that legacy of opaqueness. “They would have to go to several tools with different interfaces and search functionality in order to get the information required to have a productive conversation, and there still was no guarantee that they were getting the full picture.”

To change that, Microsoft Digital rolled out Account 360 in May 2019.

It was introduced in beta form to an initial wave of sellers from Microsoft Inside Sales. Built into MSX Portal, it aggregates multiple tools into one, with a consistent user interface, giving sellers a comprehensive view of their customers. More than 1,300 sellers volunteered to try out the tool, exceeding the goal of 800.

“We allow sellers to very quickly prepare for an interaction with a customer,” Leon says. “We’re making it easy for them to have relevant conversations without having to do huge amounts of research, increasing the seller productivity and interaction quality.”

Account 360 allows sellers to see Microsoft’s agreements across modern and legacy systems, revenue across products, marketing interactions, partner association, and account profiles. It also shows what opportunities and leads are already being pursued, and what products and services the customer is already consuming. The insights are available and delivered in a fast and consistent manner, using an interface tailor made for sellers.

The goal is for the sellers to get all the info they need to enable a productive customer interaction in the Account 360 interface. But if they need to go deeper, a linking strategy allows them to navigate to additional resources.

A first version of Account 360 went live in July for all seller audiences. “We continue to have exponential growth in both monthly and weekly unique users, with 3,000 unique monthly users and a run rate of 1,300 weekly unique users in August,” Leon says.

Dynamics 365 is the backbone of selling at Microsoft

MSX’s heavy use of the Dynamics 365 platform is very helpful, says Linda Simovic, principal group program manager for the Dynamics 365 product group.

“I think the way we’re drinking our own champagne inside the company is amazing,” Simovic says. “With 25,000 sellers or more in the company, it gives us a lot of great ways to test out our products and services.”

Showcasing the way Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 products also helps other companies understand what they can do with the platform, she says.

Simovic says the Dynamics team continuously talks with the Microsoft selling community and Microsoft Digital, weaving their steady stream of feedback into Dynamics 365 as fully and quickly as possible.

“We actually say to the MSX team, ‘We’re thinking about building this—what do you think?’” she says. “We want them to use it and to let us know if it works. It’s a litmus test to see if what we’re thinking is a good idea or not.”

The recent decision to upgrade MSX to the latest version of Dynamics 365 helps with this—now the Microsoft Digital team can try out new features as soon as they’re ready for testing.

“We want to be able to cover their needs out of the box as much as possible,” Simovic says. “The better we can support the company’s complex sales motion, the better we can support our external customers.”

Mohammed agrees, calling out how the two teams have worked together to bring new enterprise-level capabilities into Dynamics 365.

In fact, he says, the teams are working so closely together that in some cases the Microsoft Digital Commercial Sales and Marketing Engineering Team is co-developing directly with the Dynamics team to add features that the sales teams need.

“That’s a big change from our historical approach of building in-house bridge software,” Mohammed says. “This is a pretty major leap forward for us—we’re working hand-in-hand with the product group to build new capabilities for customers.”

For Kunes and her Microsoft Digital team, the successful partnership with Dynamics is just one more signal that their new, transformed approach to supporting the company’s complex sales motion is working.

“We’ve laid the groundwork for us to finally get this right for our sellers,” Kunes says. “Now we just need to go finish what we started. It’s an exciting time to be working on this team.”

• Read this case study on how Microsoft uses a bot to improve basic lead qualification to see how millions of potential sales leads received each year are qualified down to thousands.
• Read about how we use AI to serve up the next best lead to sellers.

The post Retooling how Microsoft sellers sell the company appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Two years ago, the IT and legal teams from Microsoft joined forces to completely overhaul the work visa process. They did it to add simplicity and to make it less stressful. Microsoft Digital partnered with the US Immigration team in Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) to build and launch Microsoft Immigration Management System (MIMS), a Dynamics 365 portal that has since massively improved the way foreign nationals apply to work in the US for Microsoft.

“We’ve made it much, much easier for our foreign national employees to navigate the United States immigration system,” says Tharanian Mahendran, Microsoft Digital’s senior engineering program manager who is the MIMS product owner. “When they need immigration help, now it’s very simple for them to log into our tool, get the help they need, and move on.”

Getting the immigration process right is critical to Microsoft, which continues to grow its diverse, global community of foreign national employees, which is 15,000 strong and growing. The need to revamp the work visa program was also fueled by the anti-work visa posture taken by some US leaders. Employees abroad worried if they would be able to return home, and those in the United States that they would be forced to leave. Families feared being separated.

Streamlining the immigration process helped ease some of those fears while helping Microsoft continue to bring in people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and expertise, says Bob Ulmer, MIMS business product owner within CELA’s US Immigration team.

“Hiring employees with diverse backgrounds really helps Microsoft,” Ulmer says. “When people with different experiences and backgrounds come to work here, it helps us build better products and services.”

How the Microsoft immigration tool works

MIMS enables employees to easily view their immigration status and the status of their families, and to quickly take any needed actions. On the CELA side, MIMS allows the Microsoft immigration team to handle forms, store documents, review a record of case-related emails.

“All of this was designed to smoothly integrate the experience of all people involved in an immigration case, including immigration specialists, attorneys, external vendor partners, CELA, and the employees going through immigration process,” Mahendran says.

Recent improvements to MIMS have made it much more effective, Ulmer says.

“It has given us a lot of flexibility,” he says. “The new platform gives us the ability to quickly adapt to the ever-changing immigration environment. Instead of building workarounds, we’re helping our foreign national employees work through the changes.”

Now data is seen in real time, which allows critical decision-making to happen faster, lowering the employee’s chances of having their work visa rejected (and of them possibly being deported). The changes substantially speed up the application timeline.

“Previously, it could easily have taken a week or month to have an update or important alert come through,” Mahendran says. “Now, let’s say a denial comes through (when the US government turns down a visa application), and we need to make a decision quickly to remedy the situation. We are alerted to the update in real time. One example is how candidate recruitment data can flow from college and industry partners in HR straight to CELA US Immigration.”

The improvements are layered over the unique experiences that US Immigration team members have with the tool. They can use it to interact with internal partners like Human Resources, and to take actions like submit bills and fill out forms. Each has its own workflow, billing, and auditing requirements. MIMS now uses data to manage documents and reuse information, something that especially important when it comes to auto-populating forms.

“We worked hard to consider each of the immigration team user needs when it comes to daily operations, and this helped us design a product that innovates immigration at companies like ours,” Mahendran says.

The net result is that it is now much easier for Microsoft to work with foreign national employees who are moving to the US to work for the company, while making it much easier for the employees to navigate what can be a stressful process.

MIMS is so successful that Microsoft has been able to productize it through the AppSource (marketplace for D365 reusable solutions commonly referred as accelerators), says Iliyas Chawdhary, the principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital who led the architecture and engineering of this solution. He says three companies are already in the process of deploying this to manage their immigration needs.

“We’re continuing to enhance and mature this solution,” Chawdhary says. “We’re adding new features and capabilities that would continue to enhance the employee experience and make the process more efficient. Our goal is to simplify this through the reusable components, so anyone can leverage it.”

The post Immigration tool removes hurdles for Microsoft employees appeared first on Inside Track Blog.