Insights, Sales, and Service Improvements in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 2023 Release Wave 1

The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 2023 Release Wave 1 is here. With customer expectations and activities changing frequently, how you engage with customers throughout their lifecycle plays a critical role in establishing long-term relationships. Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement—featuring Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service—gives you all the intelligence you need to nurture and sustain each customer relationship to maximize the value you deliver and the revenue you generate.

To give you a preview of what’s coming in the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 2023 Release Wave 1 for each of these solutions, this blog provides a rundown of the high-level enhancements to look for. The prevailing theme is that Microsoft is making it easier for you to demonstrate how well you understand the needs of your customers. You can break down the silos among sales, customer service, and other data sources to unify data and act as one in delivering valuable experiences. You can also build a real-time, universal picture of your customers—including their behaviors and predicted next actions.

New Dynamics 365 Customer Insights Features

Specific new features to look for during Wave 1 include insights generated from streamlined and privacy-compliant data flows so you can influence customer experiences across all touchpoints. You also gain insights from several new functions that enable a deeper and more accurate understanding of customer activities:

• Display customer activities across a timeline.
• Govern data access with role-based access control.
• Export customer segments to third-party service providers.
• Add insights to sales workflows that increase seller effectiveness.
• Automate predictions applied to imported data.
• Connect to custom machine-learning prediction models.
• Generate insights by asking questions in natural language.

By leveraging these Customer Insights capabilities, you can combine quick out-of-the-box insights with predictions generated by custom machine learning. This gives you the ability to provide collaborative intelligence and deeper insights into prospects and customers across your organization.

New Dynamics 365 Sales Features

Microsoft continues to use data and AI in Wave 1 enhancements to help your sales team prioritize prospects and personalize messaging—so they can work more efficiently and spend more time on closing deals. Improved revenue intelligence capabilities allow sales teams to manage revenue by setting up pricing and discounts for products, defining targets, forecasting sales, and visualizing deals to proactively manage the top line:

• Generate visual sales funnels.
• Tack deals while editing opportunities on the fly.
• Create forecasts with yearly and weekly recurrence.
• Adjust forecast values at the drill-down level.
• Configure forecasts for each business unit.

For execution and automation, the Dynamics 365 Sales improvements make it easier for your managers to initiate campaigns, generate leads, and assign leads to sellers. From there, the sales team will find it easier to manage leads as they turn into opportunities as well as nurture accounts and contacts until deals close:

• Prevent duplicate leads that enter the system during manual creation and bulk imports.
• Create follow-up tasks and reminders automatically based on information from email and Teams.
• Declutter opportunity information with new forms that use an enhanced visual layout.
• Use AI to generate account-based suggestions for targeted selling.
• Create customer org charts so sellers know the roles and relationships of account contacts.

The sales engagement capabilities accelerate selling processes by allowing your sales team to engage with customers through AI insights about the current relationship and past conversations. You can also engage bots during initial customer outreach campaigns to identify quality leads and get insights and tips on past interactions while talking to customers on the phone.

New Dynamics 365 Customer Service Features

The 2023 release wave 1 includes enhancements for both service agents and supervisors. Agents will appreciate the intuitive collaboration capabilities provided within a customizable workspace so they can increase their productivity and deliver more personalized customer experiences:

• Manage cases and experiences with enhanced forms and email templates.
• Review customer conversation notes through auto-summarization.
• Accelerate resolution times with AI-suggested replies.
• Bookmark favorite knowledge articles.
• Forecast case volumes and customer conversations—daily and at 15-minute intervals.
• Engage instantly with customers via live chat, text, voice, and social channels.

For supervisors, Wave 1 enhancements provide more operational metrics to monitor agent performance, make course corrections when customer sentiment is negative, and improve agent productivity. Other enhancements empower supervisors to get historical and near real-time insights into the overall performance of their contact centers.

You can also enable your customer service organization to deliver benefits that increase customer trust. This includes integrating with two Nuance services—Gatekeeper to reduce fraud and interactive voice response to provide continuous self-service. You can also enable customers to request a callback to avoid waiting in agent queues.

Another Customer Service enhancement to look for includes the ability to combine AI models with your internal rules to automatically assign incoming service requests. Features like percent-based routing, overflow management, and routing to preferred agents help you optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited agents.

To Learn More

Each of the capabilities above will become available over the next six months. To learn more about the entire set of capabilities and the projected release dates, check out the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 2023 Release Wave 1 Plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service. And if you need assistance understanding how the functionality of the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement solutions can drive your sales and customer service team to operate more efficiently, Velosio is glad to help.