What’s coming in Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 for Marketing & Customer Service
Microsoft have recently released the Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 2. This document shows the new features and improvements to the platform that will be released to the public between October 1st 2022 and March 2023
In this post we will be focusing on some of the new features and enhancements which are being rolled out for the Marketing & Customer Service modules of the Dynamics 365 Platform.
What is Dynamics 365 Marketing?
Dynamics 365 Marketing provides real-time customer journeys to enable you to highly personalised experiences to your customers and prospects across the entire buying process of your products and services.
It also provides intuitive lead capture forms that can be integrated into exiting website and e-marketing platforms, automatically drive lead nurturing with Microsoft-powered AI, and provides clear analytics dashboards and reporting that helps provide better alignment between sales and marketing efforts and integrated into the same Microsoft 365 platform you know and trust.
All of this combined allows you to confidently grow your marketing and customer experience efforts to existing as well as a wider range of potential customers each month safe in the knowledge that you can keep track and progress sales leads automatically.
Make incremental updates and optimize journeys while analysing all past versions
As we all know the backbone of Microsoft Dynamics 365 marketing is the customer journey and automation this provides in the overall campaign. You will be glad to hear that Microsoft is releasing functionality to make it simpler, safer, and faster to make minor tweaks and changes to marketing campaigns that are currently live.
Coming in Release wave 2 2022 Microsoft are adding the following features to marketing journeys:
Make easy edits to live customer journeys.
Automatic version control to compare to past versions if rolling back changes is required.
Collaboration between team members through change tracking and notes for each change made to the process.
Send reminders within journeys to drive customer actions (coming January 2023)
Microsoft Have also recognised the need for reminder functionality within customer journeys. It has been a long-requested item as users previously had to create their own logic using power automate or workflows for reminders.
Moving forward Microsoft has added a reminder process step to the customer journey which can be used to automatically follow up with campaign participants. An example of this could be that a customer followed a link through to your website and looked at some specific products but clicked off the form. Three days later the campaign could offer them a discount for the products they viewed without user interaction.
The follow-up process can be stopped in the following ways:
A user journey participant performing a certain action.
A specified date & time is reached.
X number of reminders issued.
Target the right audience using the new segment builder
Following the trend seen in other areas of the release wave Microsoft are again aiming to remove the complexity and knowledge required to use their business applications. With this aim they have redesigned the segment builder.
With the new Dynamics 365 Marketing segment builder, you can build segments by describing them in natural language or by using the easy drag-and-drop logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures and logical operators.
Dynamics 365 Marketing
What is Dynamics 365 Customer Service?
Dynamics 365 Customer Service is an end-to-end solution for any organisation that offers customer support for its products and/or services. Its scope covers everything from self- and assisted-service scenarios down to complex multiple customer and 3rd party supplier engagement.
Customer Service provides comprehensive and efficient case routing and management for all types of call, a knowledge base where users can author and consume knowledge articles, and robust insights through AI suggestions, automated case progression and esclation with easy to use workflow tools and while offering managers and owners a wide array of embedded performance reporting and analytics to keep track of everything.
With recent updates it now also provides add-ons for omnichannel engagement through chat, social channels, and can be integrated into phone solutions such as Microsoft Voice to record calls and create transcripts that will highlight actions to and follow up to be taken as well as provide insights into how the oepration and customer interacted with sentiment analysis.
Timeline Customisation
Within the new release Microsoft are enabling the ability for the Customer Service timeline to be customised to show only the interactions that are required for the snapshot view.
Enhancements to the Dynamics 365 timeline maker experience include the following capabilities:
Configure which actions are shown for each type of record.
Configure and show more than one timeline on a form.
Create and view each type of activity with main form dialog, main form, or when applicable, quick view.
Create and view fax and letter records on the timeline are disabled by default.
Enhancements to Customer Support Swarming for Complex Cases
Microsoft are continuing to lean into the integrations with Microsoft Teams and have continued to update the swarming feature for cases within Dynamics 365. Swarming allows case workers to find teammates skilled in the issue at hand and provide a swift resolution to the customer.
The enhancements this release wave are as follows:
Richer agent experience with improved swarm creation flow, ability to create notes and tasks to manage swarm progress, and enhanced wrap-up activities.
Streamlined admin experience for a faster setup. Admins also have increased flexibility to define which CRM users can automatically be added as participants to specific swarms.
Organisations can have additional CRM users beyond the existing default users. Roles such as the agent’s manager, account owner, and Team admin are available in the current release.
Route work items to Preferred Agents
Microsoft are no strangers to ensuring customers have the best customer experience and although there are many factors to this Microsoft area adding functionality to send specified customers to their preferred service agent if they are avaible.
With the proposed feature, the administrators will be able to do the following:
Set up the preferred agents for customers.
Configure their organization to assign work to the preferred agent if available.
Select the assignment logic if the preferred agent is unavailable.
Want to find out more about Microsoft Dynamics 365?
We have barely scratched the surface of the power Microsoft Dynamics 365 can offer any type of size of organisation.
So, for more information on how the Dynamics 365 platform can transform your business processes, to save time, costs and increase growth contact our solutions team at solutions@endeavour-is.com to setup a free consultation and demo.