Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement: What’s Next?

In October, Microsoft announced the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) 2022 Release Wave 2 enhancements that will be available between October 2022 and March 2023. To give you a preview of the improvements and an idea of which new functions might help your business, Bill Kinahan, a Senior Solutions Architect for Velosio, presented Dynamics 365 2022 Release Wave 2 during Aspire 22.*

To kick off the presentation, Bill first presented how CE—which spans marketing, sales, customer services, and field services—fits within the context of the overall Dynamics 365 universe. This includes tight integrations with Dynamics 365 ERP solutions (such as Business Central and Finance & Operations) as well as the Microsoft Office suite (Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). Microsoft also provides tools for advanced reporting (Power BI), custom configuration (Power Apps), automation (Power Automate), and data sharing (Dataverse). You can also connect with certified third-party apps through AppSource and set up Internet of Things networks via Azure.

Bill then highlighted the major CE enhancements in sales, marketing, customer service, and field services.

Sales

Your sales team can now see a deal dashboard from within Teams that shows opportunities, customer contacts, related documents, and scheduled meetings. They can also immediately access customer records stored in CE. Any communication notes entered into Teams will also flow automatically into CE.

Within CE, there are individual seller dashboards powered by the integration with Power BI that present current leads and opportunities. To facilitate managing the leads and opportunities, sales managers can create automated sequences for guiding the sales team on the processes to follow.

To further assist the sales team, CE will provide AI-driven conversational intelligence, which captures data from customer phone calls and then recommends follow-up tasks. By processing call transcripts, this feature tracks stats on how well phone discussions go and the customer sentiment. This will make it easier for your team to identify and react to both positive and negative comments.

Marketing

Your marketing team will be able to better personalize customer journeys based on data aggregated from multiple sources. This includes enriching the information with transaction data, sentiment data, sales volume, and intelligence on a customer’s likelihood to churn. With this information, marketing can determine what to do next in communicating with customers to direct or alter their journeys.

Marketing can also then trigger steps for the sales team, providing pre-determined customized tasks. Over time, the marketing and sales teams can work together to analyze how well those tasks work to make adjustments where necessary.

Another key feature marketing will appreciate is the ability to support multiple company brands from one console view when managing social media posts. They won’t have to bounce around among all the brand accounts.

Customer Service

With 2022 Wave 2, CE will allow your customer service team to “swarm” around each other when handling cases requiring extra help or specific expertise. As a rep takes a call, they can share case details with specific team experts or request a certain skill set. They can also set up a Teams channel with multiple agents to discuss how to handle a challenging service incident.

The team can also process incoming calls more efficiently. This includes the ability to allocate a percentage of reps to a queue that’s reserved exclusively for tier-one customers. Managers can also configure the system to automatically route calls to agents who have been idle the longest and give preferred customers the ability to directly connect with an agent of their choice.

You can also give customers the option to interact with the call center as they prefer—voice, live chat, virtual agent, or receive a callback. All these features combine to build stronger relationships with customers and avoid overworking your reps.

Field Service

The enhancements to the Field Service component of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement focus on keeping technicians on schedule, improving their efficiency, and controlling the costs of service incidents. For example, CE will provide a feature to prevent over-lapping bookings by more accurately projecting time to complete service calls and travel times to customer sites.

Your technicians will also spend less time viewing tasks and entering information on their mobile devices with the ability of the system to streamline repetitive tasks. You can also set not-to-exceed thresholds for both technician time and inventory so managers can control the cost of each work order.

To Learn More

To learn more, check out Bill’s full presentation where he takes you through a demo of various screenshots. Bill also shows how you can refer to your Dynamics 365 Admin Console to see which Wave 2 features are currently available to turn on in your environment. Some new functions start up automatically while others will require you to configure the service. The Admin Console will talk you through the steps.

For more information on what’s next for Dynamics 365 CE via the 2022 Release Wave 2 enhancements, you can also check out the Microsoft Release Planner, which includes screenshots, videos, and the projected release dates of each new feature. And if you need assistance with deploying or setting up Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to help your sales, marketing, and service teams work more efficiently, contact Velosio today. We will be glad to help!

*Aspire 22, the annual Velosio conference, brought together Dynamics users, finance and business leaders, and IT professionals from across the country. The one-day online event showcased the business possibilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions powered by today’s modern technologies.