With general availability starting from April 2023 and running till September 2023, the first release wave of the year will expand Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing and Customer Service with many optimizations and smart additions to improve the general experience of the platform. Read further for a list of the most interesting changes and additions for your sales and marketing teams!
The new opportunity view gives sellers a bird’s-eye view of the pipeline to manage opportunities more easily and intuitively than ever before. Designed with sellers in mind, this new experience will save time by removing unnecessary steps and processes that sellers would normally need to do, streamlining everything into one single workspace. Above all, using the opportunity view allows sellers to uncover deals that need attention and act on the spot, also including the ability to customize the view to one’s liking.
While managers can adjust forecast values directly for the top-level record, they also need the ability to adjust the forecast values at the drill-down level. For example, adjusting values for specific accounts or products under a user's forecast. With this enhancement, you can easily adjust forecast values for drill-down entities directly in the forecast grid.
With this enhancement;
Organizations track their sales objectives at varying intervals and want the ability to forecast accordingly. Sellers can now supplement their quarterly and monthly forecasts with a yearly forecast that surfaces the progress and projections for the entire year. In addition, weekly recurrences can be configured for sales organizations with short sales cycles to measure weekly sales goal progress.
As an administrator or forecast manager, you can:
As a seller or sales manager, you can:
This new functionality will provide your sales team with AI-powered suggestions that include the necessary insights and tools to optimize interactions with accounts and decrease the time searching for information.
The easy-to-use solution includes:
Viva Sales empowers sellers with access to customer information and relevant insights at their fingertips, allowing them to save time and focus on what matters most - building connections with customers and closing deals.
In the upcoming 2023 release wave 1, Microsoft is further enhancing the seller experience in Teams and Outlook with the help of data and AI. Bringing together productivity tools and the system of record will enable sellers to work seamlessly and stay in their workflow. This will create collaboration experiences within the context of a situation or task at hand to improve customer engagement, allowing sellers to regain time to concentrate on building meaningful connections with customers.
Selling is not always straightforward, and interactions with customers can take unexpected turns. In some cases, a potential customer may ask for information that wasn't scheduled for discussion or provide new information that requires a shift in the sales process.
With sequences, sellers currently follow a defined path template, but with this change, sellers can adapt a sequence and execute steps aligned more to the signals of the customer and their preferred working style. Sellers can personalize a sequence with their activities and adjust the order. This helps the seasoned sellers be independent of managers and have the flexibility to adapt to different customer conversations to help close deals faster.
With this update, sellers sequency capabilities are enhanced:
Typically, managers have to create sequences from scratch or rely on out-of-the-box templates provided by the system. While this works well, creating and customizing templates can be time-consuming.
With this enhancement, you can now create your own sequence templates:
Ensure that you never miss the most crucial sales call details, such as budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). In this release, conversation intelligence identifies discovery and sales-oriented mentions, surfacing these details in the call summary to ensure important signals are noticed to help progress their sale.
As a seller or manager, you’ll be able to see information related to budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT) in the following places:
As the world shifts towards a digital lifestyle, more and more customers prefer to be contacted via SMS as it is a convenient and effective channel for sellers to send reminders, provide updates, and respond to queries.
This feature will allow sellers a number of capabilities:
Track your pipeline development and analyze the impact and contribution of journeys, marketing messages, and content at different stages of your business process with new out-of-the-box dashboards. When using Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, further optimize your pipeline velocity by aligning marketing and sales teams on common goals through a shared view of the pipeline.
In real-time marketing, marketers now have the ability to fully customize the out-of-the-box preference centers. Customize your preference centers, enforce and track consents across multiple brands and business units to meet your business needs. Keep your customers engaged by giving them control over the topics and channels they want to connect with. Customers can subscribe to the topics that matter most to them, while ensuring that you capture the consent you need to meet legal and regulatory requirements.
With real-time marketing topic support, you can avoid embarrassing and costly configuration mistakes, maintain and enforce lists of subscribed customers, and take advantage of enhanced preference centers that better represent your brand.
These new functions allow you to design consent to match your brand and compliance needs:
Marketing messages can be a significant contributor to your website traffic, but it is hard to track their sources without UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters. They’re often left out entirely from the links in messages due to the time-consuming process of manually adding the tags to each link.
Dynamic 365 Marketing now automatically adds UTM parameters to your messages, following a consistent taxonomy. This provides a complete visibility into your marketing contribution to web traffic and, in turn, empowers you to optimize traffic and conversions.
To ensure optimal engagement with your key messages, it's important to make sure that customers receive the right message at the right time and frequency, while also preventing fatigue and avoiding unsubscribes. However, some customers may qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously, which can result in them perceiving the messages as spam and disengaging.
With the frequency cap feature, you can optimize engagement by controlling how many messages are sent across multiple channels over a period.
Deepen your understanding of the customer by viewing exact copies of sent emails, allowing you to build more personalized experiences. By reviewing sent emails, you can improve visibility, ensure compliance, and enable better auditing. Here are some of the benefits of this feature:
Going into public preview in April 2023, Customer Service will be powered by state-of-the-art natural language processing technology used in Nuance Agent Coache, learning and adapting from an organization’s chat history to suggest relevant and high-quality responses. This will drive significant improvements in key contact center metrics including handle time, throughput, and agent satisfaction.
You will also be able to keep track of conversations with the auto-summarization feature that will allow agents, supervisors and SME’s to get better summaries and an improved user experience.
In this release, more granular agent forecasts will be provided at 15-minute intervals that customer service managers can use to create agent schedules for voice and digital channels.
Agent forecasting for conversations (voice and digital channels) was released as a preview in October 2022 with the following set of capabilities:
In addition to a daily case volume forecasting, this release will provide a more granular forecasting at 15-minute intervals so that managers can perform agent planning and scheduling with higher precision.
Case volume forecasting was released as a preview in October 2022 with the following set of capabilities:
Enabling active callbacks by using automation for their customers means they don't have to remain on the call for an agent during busy periods. Direct callback provides better customer experiences and helps administrators staff queues more efficiently.
For companies using the voice channel, this feature provides their customers with an option to request a direct callback by retaining the caller’s queue position in the following scenarios:
This function will give visibility into the overall support performance through near real-time reporting, empowering managers to monitor key operational metrics, make course corrections at the right time, and keep service levels high.
Key capabilities to optimize agent allocation in real time and to provide top-noch support and boost customer satisfaction include:
Customer support swarming enables agents to bring together the right experts across their organization to resolve complex cases faster.
Want to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 release wave 1?
Discover all the new features included in Microsoft’s release wave 1 plan, or contact our experts to find out more about the opportunities these updates can bring to your business.
