New Updates and Features in the 2023 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement
With regional deployments of new features and updates set to roll out in April, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what you can expect from the 2023 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
Let’s look at what’s new in Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Service.
Using Data and AI to Help Sellers Prioritize Engagement and Personalize Sales Interactions with Dynamics 365 Sales
People who buy your products expect a personalized experience when interacting with your sales staff. That means you need to find ways for employees to stay focused on selling, becoming trusted advisors for your customers, and making data work for them. This is the main focus for the 2023 Wave 1 Release for Dynamics 365 Sales.
Revenue Intelligence
This feature lets your sales staff manage revenue by simplifying the selling process from establishing pricing and discounts to finalizing a sales order.
Microsoft has planned the following capabilities for this release:
- A new and enhanced opportunity management experience that helps you visualize your sales funnel and track your deals while being able to edit opportunities on-the-fly
- Ability to create forecasts with yearly and weekly recurrence
- Support for adjusting forecast values at the drill-down level
- Ability to configure forecasts for each business unit in your organization
Sales Execution and Sales Force Automation
Enhancements in this wave release are aimed at limiting distractions and keeping your sales staff on point.
The capabilities planned for this area are:
- Prevent duplicate leads from entering the system either through manual creation or bulk import
- Get follow-up tasks created automatically based on information from various Office applications like emails, Teams messages, and call transcripts, and get friendly reminders to help you complete those tasks
- Create opportunities with ease by using the new version of input forms that declutter information with an enhanced visual layout
- Use the AI-powered solution to get account-based suggestions for targeted selling and precise workflows to leverage
- Create a customer org chart so that sellers know the roles of contacts in the organization and view the relationship map
Sales Engagement
Previously known as sales accelerator, the sales engagement allows your sales staff to engage with customers through AI-driven insights about your customers and through tools that help to speed up and streamline the sales process.
The planned capabilities include:
- Engage a bot for the initial customer outreach so only good quality lead reaches sellers at the right time, saving precious time for sellers
- While you’re on a call with a customer, get insights and tips based on past interactions with the customer and communicate effectively based on the suggestions
- With conversation intelligence support extended for third-party telephony providers, you get seamless insights regardless of the call providers you are using
- Prepopulate emails based on the content you frequently use while drafting emails such as self-introduction and product details
- A whole host of enhancements around sequences, including sequence step visibility, sequence performance, custom templates, step loops, sequences assignment, personalization, automated replies, and more
- Improvements to sales accelerator through enhanced worklist items, up-next widgets, and better performance
Emphasizing Meaningful and Customized Customer Interactions with Dynamics 365 Marketing
Many sales interactions start with marketing activity. Enhancements in the wave 1 release are focused on providing marketers with solutions and tools so they can collaborate and deliver effective and genuine experiences.
The release revolves around a few key points in the customer experience:
- Engage your customer in moments that matter across all touchpoints to build holistic experiences
- Enable collaboration across your organization, connecting sales and marketing to transform customer experiences
- Make faster and smarter decisions leveraging the power of data and AI to achieve higher levels of marketing maturity
- Drive unique experiences through personalized content, images, and channels tailored to your customers
Here is a quick look at each of the core investment areas for this release:
Data and AI
This release will help you mature your marketing by making it easy to scale real-time interactions, drive efficient work and give you the chance to reflect on and improve your marketing activities based on performance analytics.
Moments-based Marketing
You get to define the best channels for your message and identify key touchpoints that will trigger interactions and engage customers.
Personalization
You collect lots of data on your customers, especially repeat ones. The updates in this Wave 1 release will enhance your capability to leverage that data to deliver personalized messages, content, and images through the optimal channels.
Collaborate
Build a sturdy bridge between Marketing and Sales by giving both the ability to identify, target, and nurture leads and collaborate to expand and accelerate your pipeline.
Provide Best-In-Class Support with Dynamics 365 Customer Service
The better equipped and empowered your customer service team is, the more likely they are to provide excellent customer service to your buyers. The 2023 release wave 1 aims to ensure your support staff can have easy access to the data and resources they need to do their jobs effectively.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps you get there and can turn happy customers into advocates. For the 2023 Release Wave 1, they are focusing on the following areas:
Agent Experiences
Happy agents make happy customers. That’s why upgrades to the agent experience are a key factor in this release wave. Microsoft says sit is focusing on the following features to further empower customer service workers:
- Create and manage cases efficiently with enhanced case form
- Case management enhancements
- Enhancements to the email template selection experience
- Enhancements to the email template creation experience
- Enhanced Customer Service workspace layout
- Enhanced conversation auto-summarization experience
- Accelerate time to resolution with AI-suggested replies
- Mark knowledge articles as favorite
- Forecast case volumes daily and at 15-minute intervals
- Forecast agent demand to handle customer conversations daily and at 15-minute intervals
Supervisor Experiences
Let’s take the concept of happiness one step further up the ladder. Happy supervisors make happy agents and happy agents make happy customers.
Enhancements in Release Wave 1 will empower supervisors with access to historical and real-time insights into the performance of their contact center. That way they can identify areas for improvement as well as areas of success that can be celebrated.
Teams Integration
One exciting development Microsoft is pushing is that you can manage most of the things you need for work right out of your Teams environment. Updates during this release include process automation, collaboration, and communication between Microsoft Teams embedded in D365 Customer Service. The partnership between the two programs means conversations in Teams are linked directly to customer service records.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel capabilities allow you to connect with your customers instantly through live chat, SMS, voice, and social channels. 2023 release wave 1 updates include:
- Integrate Nuance Gatekeeper to reduce fraud and improve trust
- Integrate Nuance interactive voice response (IVR) system to provide continuous self-service to your customers
- Enable your customers to request a callback from agents and help them avoid waiting in queues to speak to agents
- Enable Customer Service workspace to be available by default for security roles in Omnichannel for Customer Service
Administrator Experience
Microsoft says there are two main enhancements to the administrator experience that will help consolidate their entire experience into a single app:
- Allow customization of data models for historical analytics report
- Integrate and use external knowledge sources in knowledge management search
Empowering Employees to Optimize their Work Day with Enhancements in Dynamics 365 Field Service
D365 Field Service equips your front-line workers with tools to help them streamline work order management, resource scheduling, and asset management capabilities.
In the 2023 release wave 1 for Field Service, Microsoft is focusing on the following areas:
Empowering Frontline Workers
Microsoft is focused on empowering technicians by giving them the best digital tools and enabling them to engage with their peers back at the office and with customers who will no doubt have questions.
Ideally, your field service workers will know what the issue is and how to solve it before they even get to the site. 2023 release wave 1 will provide several enhancements to the mobile application feature.
Resource Scheduling
In this release wave, Microsoft aims to give users the option to revert to the legacy experience if the schedule board is removed. This will allow you to triage work orders while you figure out who you should send. For example, you might want to just send the closest technician, or perhaps it’s a more specific problem and you need to send a specialist.
It gets your dispatchers, project managers, resource managers, and technicians on the same page.
Want to Learn More about the 2023 Wave 1 Release for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement?
Please reach out to us! Our team will be diving into these new enhancements leading up to and beyond when many of them are released at the beginning of April.
We will be happy to assist you or answer any questions you have.
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