AI Continues to Accelerate Sales and Service Workflows

Taking care of customers is all about accelerating workflows. Whether it’s providing product and service information, scheduling deployments, or responding to service incidents, customers want it all right now.

To help with these challenges, many businesses turn to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE), which includes a wide range of sales, service, marketing, and project management capabilities. To keep meeting the needs of users, Microsoft issues waves of new features twice each year for CE.

For the 2025 Release Wave 1, Microsoft will deliver several new features over the coming months that continue to tap into the embedded Microsoft Copilot AI tools. Here’s a rundown of the key features to look for between April and September in Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Dynamics 365 Sales—Increased Conversion Rates

Collectively, the new features in Dynamics 365 Sales will provide a framework for effective sales qualification to drive better customer engagement and higher conversion rates:

• Customer and prospect research—Copilot AI agents will help solve business questions through enhanced data dialogs. A canvas tool orchestrates agents to gather, analyze, and transform data into intelligent, context-aware research results presented as rich visualizations and textural narratives. Users can easily delve into the findings to explore the output from different angles and gain new perspectives. Copilot will also provide recommended next actions surfaced by the underlying AI models and business logic.

• Sales team productivity—Sales teams spend a lot of time managing customer relationships, and businesses often struggle to scale seller experiences. The Copilot AI assistant will help take on this challenge to enable sales teams to work more efficiently. This includes a chat interface that provides a quick summary of opportunity and lead records, updates prospect communications and meetings, and the latest news about accounts.

• Lead management—Another sales challenge is determining if leads and prospects are a good fit for products and services. Copilot tools help understand the business needs of prospects and align those needs to specific solutions. A new pipeline generation process will also analyze prospect challenges and buying habits, and identify solutions that best meet the specific requirements. Dynamics 365 Sales further streamlines this process by offering capabilities for outreach, prospecting, researching, and qualifying leads.

• Pipeline qualification—Release Wave 1 features will also improve the pipeline qualification process with AI agent assistance. By discovering leads from service interactions, the sales team won’t overlook a potential opportunity, and the system will automate follow-up communications to increase response rates and keep prospects engaged. Additionally, the system will automatically disqualify low-intent leads to help maintain a focused lead pipeline.

• Personalized email engagement—A cool feature Microsoft will add emulates each user’s tone of voice within emails to improve interaction rates. As users create emails, AI tools will also supplement lead, prospect, and customer research with custom insights and knowledge sources. This will give sales teams relevant information to meaningfully connect with prospects.

• Sales management—Sales managers have a lot to look forward to as well in 2025. Enhanced AI tools will help monitor sales teams, manage quotas, and review forecasts in real time. Dynamics 365 Sales also provides feedback on how sales conversations are going with customers. This enables managers to identify coaching opportunities and track sales lifecycles.

Operationally, Dynamics 365 Sales will provide dashboards and embedded Microsoft Power BI reports to analyze sales results and guide seller activity through predefined sequences of actions. Managers can also extend custom capabilities using the Microsoft Power Platform to meet the unique needs of their sales processes.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service—Faster Issue Resolution

Key improvements in Dynamics 365 Customer Service will help service reps resolve issues faster and deliver more personalized experiences to customers:

• Service rep productivity—Generative AI will help reps find resources to resolve issues, handle cases, and automate time-consuming tasks. The AI tools do this by harvesting knowledge from internal and external sources to draft contextual answers to questions in email and chat conversations. Service reps can also ask questions as they conduct research for a case and generate case and conversation summaries in a single click.

• Service rep experiences—The customizable desktop, with infused AI and productivity tools, will enable seamless collaboration. By boosting service rep effectiveness, they can deliver personalized customer experiences across any channel.

• Unified routing—Service managers will appreciate how AI models and rules automatically assign incoming service requests from all channels (case, record, chat, digital messaging, and voice) to the best-suited reps. The assignment rules consider customer-specified criteria, such as priority and skills. At the same time, the routing service automatically classifies, routes, and assigns work items, which eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution. Other features—like percent-based routing and overflow management—assign cases to preferred service reps.

For system administrators, Dynamics 365 Customer Service will provide a consistent process setup experience that unifies system management, routing, and omnichannel activities. The admin center tool consolidates administrator experiences relevant to customer support and provides a guided experience to enable rapid first-time and incremental setup as well as proactive health checks to ensure the system has been set up and works as expected.

Dynamics 365 Field Service-Improved Scheduling and Collaboration

With the 2025 Release Wave 1, field service operations will find they can operate more efficiently. For example, Copilot AI will automatically generate inspections from templates.

Here are three other key features to look for:

• Optimized scheduling—Schedulers can use Copilot to get insights from a new scheduling agent that optimizes the schedules for frontline workers.

• Increased technician productivity—With the mobile app, frontline workers can use Copilot to quickly get key service information to complete tasks faster. This will allow technicians to achieve higher first-time fix rates as they have real-time access to detailed information on customers, products, and procedures for addressing specific service issues. These features also work in offline conditions.

• Optimized resource scheduling—AI will streamline the triaging of unscheduled work orders and cases while scheduling the nearest matching technician to deliver the designated service. In addition, the updated schedule board will offer capabilities for dispatchers, project managers, and resource managers in different views.

As with other Microsoft solutions, Dynamics 365 Field Service also integrates with Microsoft Teams and Outlook. This enables service teams to retrieve and add Field Service data while they work in Teams and Outlook. Because they don’t have to switch applications, they can work more efficiently.

Guiding You Through All the New Features

With so many new features across Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Field Service, it’s challenging to know which ones will help your business. To navigate all the Release Wave 1 enhancements, you can rely on Velosio.

As one of the largest and most recognized Microsoft Dynamics partners—with thousands of active customers—we are recognized as a leader in CRM, ERP, cloud productivity, and business intelligence. Our solutions repeatedly land us in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics Partners worldwide.

We advise you on when each CE enhancement will be available, which ones make sense for your environment, and how to sync each feature with the sales and service functions you already rely on. Contact us today to learn more.