2024 Microsoft Release Wave 2: what’s new for Customer Engagement?

It’s that time of year again: Microsoft Release Wave 2! We made a summary of the most important updates that will be delivered to the market from October 2024 to March 2025.

Sales: elevate your sales pitch with Copilot, benefit from a 360-view with Al and analyze opportunities

Do you want to spend less time on composing sales emails? Most probably, your answer is ‘yes’. With Copilot email assistance you can select a predefined category, or enter your text, and Copilot will suggest content with specific prompts and actions. You can adjust the tone and the length of the email and customize the content before you send it. 

Another great new feature is the account Al-generated summary. This summary gathers customer data, including buying behavior, opportunities, leads, marketing campaigns and news into a comprehensive overview powered by Al. This way, you can quickly research accounts and engage with customers in a more effective way.

Finally, for sales there is now the functionality to analyze opportunities with grouping and aggregating. It enables you to view your entire pipeline in a new way, with enhanced abilities to segment and target specific areas of your pipeline, ensuring a more personal and effective approach.

Customer Service: Dataverse & Copilot, queue membership and improved attachment experience

This Release Wave also brings several exciting updates for Customer Service:

• Extend Copilot: you can now connect Dataverse to Copilot through plugins and let your agents securely access data from these systems, without switching to other tabs and tools. This way, you can improve resolution time and customer satisfaction.
• Updated queue membership for agents in real time: this helps maintain low customer wait times (even during peak traffic) and avoid unintended work assignments of agents. 
• Improved attachment experience: this update allows agents to drag and drop attachments in an email. A nice additional touch: a reminder is sent to agents if they forget to include an attachment that they have mentioned in the email subject or body. This feature does not only save time, but also increases productivity.

Marketing and Customer Insights: Copilot to boost journeys & emails, gathering customer data & easy event registration

Copilot plays a key role in a lot of the updates, and this is no exception for marketing and customer insights. You can now create journeys by using Copilot to describe them. And that with just everyday words, without any prior experience with journeys. 

You can also create brand-consistent emails with the help of Copilot. It uses your own emails to generate customized email suggestions that match your brand identity and layout preferences. This brings many benefits for the email creation process, with quick customization and ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of communication.

Another new feature enables you to gather additional information about your customers, by using questions in the form editor. The best thing? It can do this without creating new custom attributes for your lead or contact entity. This streamlines data collection, and keeps the main database clean by storing responses only as part of form submissions.

Sometimes automatically generated URLs look unprofessional and suspicious, causing lower click rates and conversions. Now you can customize links to show your company name - to improve the trust of customers and improve brand recognition. Finally, it is easier for customers to discover and register for events. There is a new event portal, where they can easily access event details, speaker schedules and registration forms. 

Want to learn more about Release Wave 2 for Customer Engagement?

Contact our experts to find out more about the opportunities these updates can bring to your business