Copilot, Productivity Boosts Roll Out for Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer and Field Service

General availability for Dynamics 365 Wave 1 2024 features has begun, and some exciting new features are set to roll out to production environments through September. At this point, the features have undergone rigorous testing and refinement, and are a polished and reliable addition to the Dynamics 365 suite.

Given that, it’s a good time to take a look at the improvements users will see in the Sales, Customer Service and Field Service arenas, many driven by Microsoft’s undeniable focus on Copilot. The Dynamics 365 experience will always be about managing data, but it’s evolving to encompass Copilot features that help users make informed decisions swiftly, collaborate seamlessly, and optimize nearly every aspect of customer engagement. Here are some of our favorites.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Sequence Preview

Sales team members are always working together to win a deal, and often share responsibility for different tasks on a shared account or opportunity. Here’s where the new Sequence Preview feature is a bonus— it allows sales teams to view and follow the steps of a sales sequence, ensuring everyone is informed and no critical steps are missed.

Sellers can see all the details in the sequence side panel that opens on the right side of the sales record; things like the total number of steps in the sequence, the number of days spent, the activities in the steps, and so on. It gives sellers contextual guidance for what should happen next to advance to the next stage in securing a deal. Triggers automatically advance the sequence when the task— it could be emails, calls, or scheduling meetings, for example. It not only improves seller productivity by reducing admin but also standardizes sales journeys to drive consistency and increase the effectiveness of customer interactions.

Assign Leads Based on Seller Capacity

Sales managers seeking to optimize their team’s performance and prioritize leads effectively can benefit from Seller Capacity Management. This feature lets sales managers set and enforce capacity limits for sellers based on daily, weekly, or monthly cycles. It helps managers implement a better sales strategy by automatically assigning the most important leads to sellers, and limiting the number of lower-priority leads that could take up valuable sales time and effort.

Dynamically Group Opportunities

If you’re in search of a more effective way to manage sales opportunities and boost revenue, the new opportunity pipeline view  is a great add. It enhances your ability to segment and target specific areas of your pipeline, ensuring a more personalized and effective approach. You can group opportunities dynamically based on critical factors such as account name, seller name, or closing date/month. In addition to grouping, you can aggregate numeric values to easily assess the total estimated revenue within your pipeline or within specific grouped segments. With the ability to segment your pipeline and analyze total estimated revenue, you can better streamline sales strategies and prioritize deals.

Sales Copilot

Microsoft Copilot for Sales is a relatively new product, and Microsoft is committed to delivering generative AI capabilities for sellers by enriching the Copilot experience with capabilities for sales-specific skills, data, and actions. Here’s some great new productivity tools.

Copilot-driven Emails can Improve Sales Pitch

Crafting effective customer emails can be a struggle. But Sales Copilot can save you time, streamlining your emails for more engaging communications. Powered by generative AI and advanced natural language models, Copilot analyzes salesperson input, customer data, and historical email interactions to generate tailored email drafts by suggesting content, subject lines, and personalized messaging. The interface allows for easy customization of tone and length, saving you valuable time that could be spent connecting with customers, boosting sales and fostering lasting relationships.

Summarizing Lengthy Email Threads

In a related improvement, Copilot can also summarize lengthy email chains, extracting key information relating to a sale, identifying important topics, and condensing the most relevant details. Sales teams can quickly comprehend conversation history and save the output to CRM, enabling teams to grasp key points quickly for swift decision-making.

Copilot on the Home Page

Copilot has an expanded, immersive, workspace that sellers can use to initiate chats right on the home page, helping sellers stay on top of changes with real-time insights across different entities. It’s also easier to use Copilot’s natural language chat functionality— sellers can ask Copilot questions, access account summaries, view pipelines and recently-assigned leads, and see account record updates and emails that may need attention. It’s a much-improved, more interactive experience than using Copilot in the sidebar.

Access Sales and Product Information from SharePoint

If you spend a lot of time responding to questions that come your way, either via emails or chats, you may often find yourself buried under heaps of sales documents and literature, struggling to find quick answers to your questions. Now, using the chat interface in Copilot for Sales, you can find and receive rapid answers based on documents stored in SharePoint. This feature enables faster decision-making, reduces response times, and enhances customer interactions, all harnessing the power of genAI.

A related feature, product content recommendations, provides personalized content recommendations based on the products included in an opportunity: product information is presented with the right document at the right time, significantly enhancing meeting preparations, saving time, and fostering deeper customer connections. The recommendations are seamlessly integrated directly within the workflow to ensure sellers can remain focused and maximize the value of each interaction.

Customer Service

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is continuing to empower agents to work more efficiently through Copilot for Service. It’s only been generally available for a few months, but Microsoft continues to use it as an instrument to revolutionize customer service. Here’s some of the interesting updates.

Copilot for Service

Copilot for Service is being introduced across Microsoft apps and products, such as Teams, providing service-specific AI capabilities to help improve agent productivity. For example, agents working in Teams can use Copilot for Service to browse and update CRM records during a meeting, as well as recap meetings, suggest follow-up action items, and create tasks that can all be saved to CRM systems directly from Microsoft Teams.

Agents working in Outlook can use Copilot for Service to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and schedule meetings informed by case summaries and other relevant information from CRM. It’s all designed to help agents work more efficiently.

Convert Voicemails to Cases

Customer service and case management get a boost, with a convert-to-case option that allows agents to convert voicemails to cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. By integrating the voice channel seamlessly with the case management module, it’s a quick and hassle-free way to more quickly triage issues relayed in voice messages, and provides better visibility without having to transfer the case first to a relevant queue. This avoids delays in sending a first response to customers, improves average case handling time, and avoids service level agreement violations.

Field Service

In this wave release, Dynamics 365 Field Service is seeing the next generation of Copilot capabilities, a more modern scheduling UI, finance and inventory integrations, and a much-improved mobile experience.

A Better Schedule Board

If you’re tired of navigating through a schedule board with frustration, new optimized navigation is transforming schedule management by reducing the navigation steps on the schedule board. It’s a more user-centric experience, preserving the user’s position on the schedule board when they navigate away and return to it, aligning with the user’s context and reducing unnecessary steps. Check out Optimize schedule board navigation patterns to explore how these improvements can benefit your business.

Sync Work Orders with Inventory and Finance

With automatic updates as work orders are executed, your business gains front-to-back integration where financials, inventory, and procurement are tightly coupled with service delivery. Pricing and costing information can be integrated in real time from work orders into finance and inventory applications. It’s a great way to seamlessly integrate work order-related financial and inventory data for real-time visibility on both sides, without additional effort, cost, or complexity. All you have to do is enable a toggle.

Mobile App Gets a Productivity Boost

Managing work orders and service calls should be easier with an improved user experience in the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app. Technicians can save valuable time by quickly updating the status of a booking and getting driving directions to a customer site, changing or completing work order details, and adding notes with photos. They can even get detailed information about tasks with embedded Dynamics 365 Guides, which provide step-by-step instructions, pictures, and videos.

The list view for tables, assets, work orders or customer accounts can now be configured to optimize screen space and improve usability, and the agenda view allows technicians to get a quick overview of their scheduled bookings several days out.

Next steps

As you embark on the journey to implement these features, the potential for increased productivity, streamlined operations, and improved customer engagement is immense. The era of Dynamics 365 is evolving with the addition of Copilot capabilities every month, and businesses using these features will undoubtedly find themselves better positioned for success. It’s not just a wave release—it’s an incremental piece of a larger transformation.

If you’re interested in exploring how you can use the new genAI Copilots in Dynamics 365 Sales, Field Service or Customer Service, or take advantage of any of the features in the wave release, reach out today. We love to talk productivity and value-based outcomes, and can help get you on the right track.