Check Out What’s New In the Fall Release of Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales and Customer Service
Microsoft announced the new features coming in Dynamics 365 wave 2 release—including the modules for Marketing, Sales, & Customer Service.
Microsoft recently announced the new features that are coming in the Dynamics 365 wave 2 release for 2022—including the modules for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. Microsoft plans to make the new features generally available between October 2022 and March 2023.
Across the three modules, the Microsoft technical documentation website lists 53 enhancements. Below is a quick rundown of some of the top improvements to look for that will help your internal teams work more efficiently as they engage with customers.
Marketing
• Close leads faster by automating handoffs with sales—you can create sales activities such as tasks and phone calls directly from journeys so leads get individualized attention when they’re most likely to engage. You can also activate a sales sequence to accelerate deals, ensuring sellers receive automated recommendations based on the sales playbook associated with the pertinent campaign.
• Optimize marketing with a new analytics dashboard—track your pipeline development and analyze how different customer journeys, marketing assets, and channels perform to drive engagement and contribute to each stage of the pipeline.
• Boost creativity with AI-powered email content ideas—use content ideas created by artificial intelligence as a starting point when creating email content.
• Engage customers across multiple brands—implement a customer engagement strategy that spans multiple brands, regions, or product lines without re-organizing digital assets, content, and journeys. You can also match organizational structures by separating business and customer data across different organizational boundaries.
• Make incremental updates to optimize journeys—update journeys after they’re live to optimize journey experiences with the ability to make light edits to live journeys, such as renaming elements and adjusting goal percentages without creating new versions. You can also make complex and structural changes to journeys without impacting customers who are mid-flight in their journeys.
• Send journey reminders to customers while avoiding message fatigue—send reminders and repeat messages until a qualifying event or activity occurs—while also controlling how many messages are sent across multiple channels over a period of time. This improves engagement, decreases unsubscribers, and reduces messages marked as spam.
• Target the right audience using segment builder—build segments describing audiences in natural language or using a drag-and-drop logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures and logical operators.
• Create consistent content with brand profiles—manage different brands while creating consistent emails and reducing content errors with brand profiles that follow your business structure. You can also define default senders for emails, set default social links, and extend your brand profile entity with custom values that you can use when creating content.
Sales
• Access comprehensive sales product use insights—gain insights on the usage of the sales records and compare the usage across various parameters, such as business units, roles, and timeframes. Also analyze the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations performed by users on all COLA (contact, opportunity, lead, and account) entities.
• Track sales progress—dashboard summarizes progress highlights and insights so your sellers can focus on managing relationships and executing sales activities most likely to translate into revenue.
• Improve lead engagement rates with validated emails—review email addresses maintained as active leads to identify invalid email addresses associated with email-based tasks that appear on the sales accelerator worklist card.
• Improve sales processes using A/B testing in sequence—experiment with two or more variants of a customer or prospect outreach effort and compare their performances to determine the optimal method. Can vary email subject fields and body content to measure performance at the sequence step level—email open, reply, and download rate
• Track linked Microsoft Teams chat as activity in timelines—track the latest conversation activity in Teams associated with a record in Dynamics 365. This feature also provides an entry into the timeline for key chat events, like starting a linked chat, attaching documents, or restarting an existing linked chat conversation.
• Create collaborative spaces around sales processes—automate the setup of collaborative spaces with the correct channels, apps, and members using templates with standard channel structure and starter folders for document management. The Dynamics 365 app for Teams is installed as part of a team creation with the relevant record pre-pinned as a channel tab, enabling sellers to have easy access to CRM information from within Teams.
Customer Service
• Monitor support operations in near real-time—real-time monitoring dashboards provide information about the incoming workload, average handle times, queue lengths, and other key performance indicators—for the contact center across chat, digital messaging, and voice channels. Also see agent metrics such as capacity, presence status, and items they’re working on.
• Improve agent productivity with timeline enhancements—timeline provides your agents with an immersive experience for viewing customer history across interactions to enable more personalized customer service. Examples include showing only current email messages with the option to expand the full thread and the ability to preview attachments of supported file types.
• Suggest knowledge articles as agents type in the search box—auto-suggest capability enhances agent search experiences by showing relevant knowledge articles as they begin to type search keywords. Matched text is highlighted to explain the presence of results, and on selecting a record, the agent is directly taken to the record.
• Enable customers to keep queue spots, get callbacks, or leave voicemails—leverage automation for customers to give customers the option to maintain their queue spot or choose to get a callback or leave a voice mail so they don’t have to wait during busy periods.
• Route calls to preferred agents—set up the preferred agent for each customer and configure the process to assign work to that agent if available. Also select assignment logic if the preferred agent is unavailable.
• Route calls to agents who are idle for the longest duration—configure voice queues to use the most idle assignment method to assign work items to the agent who has been idle for the longest period.
Check for Availability
The preview and general availability timelines for all new these Dynamics 365 features vary and may change. There’s also the chance that some of the projected functionality may not be released. For the latest information on each Dynamics 365 module, you can visit the technical documentation landing pages hyperlinked below:
As you will see, you can opt into some of the new Dynamics 365 features now as part of early access, including all mandatory changes that affect users. To learn more about early access, go to this Microsoft FAQ. And if you need help implementing any new Dynamics 365 features or would like to discuss how the features can benefit your business, contact Velosio today.
