Overview of New Features Coming to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in the Wave 1 2021 Release
The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Release Wave 1 for 2021 plans have been published by Microsoft. This first release of 2021 includes a variety of new features and functionality for each solution under the CE umbrella. These ongoing releases that include such powerful new functionality are one of the main reasons we are seeing so many businesses implement Dynamics 365. Let’s break down a quick overview of what is coming in the spring release and what you can look forward to.
Marketing
When Dynamics 365 Marketing was launched it admittedly had many areas where the functionality was lacking, making it impractical for today’s modern marketers to use. That has all changed now with the updates made over the course of the last year and a half. Now D365 Marketing is more than impactful, providing the functionality needed to deliver the right messages at the right time to the right contacts. The wave 1 release will provide even more functionality to strengthen the platform and empower marketers. A few of the features we’re most looking forward to including:
- Target AI-generated segments using attributes such as recency, frequency, and monetization to target high-churn risk or high-value customers.
- Ability to create emails quickly and with low effort using the new email editor.
- Create and send SMS text messages
- Deliver push notifications
- Experiment with the next action in a customer journey to optimize results
Read more about what is coming for Marketing here.
Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales empowers organizations to better understand their customers and how they want to buy from and communicate with your sellers. The software makes the customer relationship front and center and helps you to understand what your customers want and makes selling a more efficient process. The wave 1 release features three different areas of focus –
- Time Savers
- Automation and sequences that will adapt to the changing needs and behaviors of customers
- Ability to customize the workspace to your business requirements and trigger key actions
- Deal manager workspace where you can view deals, understand the context, and take action
- Intelligence
- Conversational intelligence provides insights on top of calls with multiple participants
- Advanced filters in the deal manager workspace
- out-of-the-box data visualizations, including calculated metrics to understand the pipeline
- Enhanced Mobile Experience
- Get up to date LinkedIn information on meeting participants, insights about a deal, accounts, and contacts integrated with AI
- Teams customer calls can be transcribed and assigned to a record in D365
Read more about what’s coming for Sales here
Customer Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service gives you the tools needed to execute flawless customer support through efficient case routing and management and effective customer communication. The key to ongoing success is highly rated customer service and satisfaction, which D365 can help any business achieve. The wave 1 release includes enhancements to help enable customers to be up and running quickly, deliver the all-in-one contact center, and transform contact center routing. A few of the new features include:
- Agent Experiences
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- Appointments data included in core service scheduling
- Navigation and visual improvements
- Agent Productivity
- Multiple language support for AI-suggested knowledge articles
- Case Management
- Improved analytics
- Configuration to allow updates for cases in resolved and canceled status
- Knowledge Management
- Configure knowledge article search filters
- Knowledge search analytics
- Omnichannel Chat and Voice
- Embedded analytics
- Historical topic clustering
- Call intelligence, recording, transcription, and analysis
There are many more new features coming to Customer Service. Read more about them here.
Field Service
Any company that sends employees to complete work orders at a variety of locations would benefit from Dynamics 365 Field Service. This solution allows organizations to streamline processes, route technicians or employees more strategically and provides those workers the details they need to complete the work order quickly. The wave 1 release is enhancing how the solution functions in three areas:
- Streamlined onboarding experience for faster time-to-value and ability to use Field Service in productive environments.
- Comprehensive customer engagement capabilities for companies to be in close communication with their customers.
- Broader resourcing options with embedded schedule optimization within core Field Service.
Features coming this spring include the following:
- End-Customer Engagement
- Technician location tracking and direct customer feedback
- Self-service scheduling for customers
- Proactive Service Delivery
- Capture work order resolution details
- Mapping features enabled by default
- Improve service account address usability
- Scheduling
- Map view and weekly/monthly view in new schedule board
- Resource scheduling optimization
There are even more features planned for the wave 1 release. Read about everything coming to D365 Field Service here.
If you’re not currently using one of these solutions but you’re interested in learning more, please reach out to our team. Make sure to follow our blog to get updates on when these features will be available for release into your production environments.
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