We are pleased to announce that Dynamics 365 Customer Insightsis now generally available! The newest addition to the portfolio of Dynamics 365 AI offerings, Dynamics 365Customer Insights enables every organization to unify disparate data be it transactional, observational or behavioral sources – to gain a single view of customers and derive intelligent insights that drive key business processes.

Watch Customer Insights video now

A key tenet of every organizations unique digital transformation journey focuses on customers. Customers, both existing and potential, leave digital footprints. Every support call, event registration, online and offline purchases or website interactions provides valuable input into better understanding that customer across their customer journey be it marketing, sales or service. When brought together, this data becomes an asset, giving organizations the intelligent insights they need to deliver personalized experiences, at the right time and right channel.

Heres how you can deliver personalized customer experiences and move your business forward with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights:

It all starts with data:

Get a holistic view of customers

• Connect all your customer data: Bring in transactional, observational, and behavioral data from popular data sources with ease by leveraging prebuilt connectors
• Transform customer data intelligently: Unify and standardize data to conform to the Microsoft Common Data Model
• Enrich customer profiles: Build a richer, more complete view of your customers by incorporating aggregated audience intelligence from Microsoft Graph

Unlock insights and take action

• Act and activate: Discover and create high value segments to power business processes and deliver targeted messages and content.
• Spot trends and patterns: Gain actionable insights with configurable metrics and KPIs
• Predict customer intent: Get guidance on the next best action and predict churn by leveraging AI and custom machine learning algorithms.

Adapt and extend

• Take action: Drive personalized engagement with contextual customer insights infused directly in business applications such as Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service, and Marketing or any other application using rich APIs
• Gain deeper insights: Leverage an out-of-the-box connector for Microsoft Power BI to customize dashboards and reports that enable informed decision-making
• Build custom apps: With Microsoft PowerApps, create custom business apps with embedded customer insights to empower everyone in your organization
• Automate customer-centric experiences and processes: Setup workflows in response to customer actions and signals using Microsoft Flow

Rely on a productive and trusted platform

• Get started quickly: Optimize for time to value with a finished SaaS application and self-service experience built on the Azure cloud platform
• Maintain control of your data: Help your business support data privacy and GDPR compliance with enterprise ready security and built-in governance tools
• Invest with confidence: Put your trust in Microsofts expertise and experience in world-class AI research, cloud, data and developer platform

Here are additional resources for you to learn about Customer Insights:

• Dynamics 365 product website and trial signup
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights product overview video

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is a major step in our journey to enable organizations to centralize key customer data and infuse AI-driven insights into business processes. We are truly excited to see what organizations will be able to do with Customer Insights!

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is now Generally Available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Whats new

In November 2018, AI for Sales started on a journey, aiming to introduce AI driven insights to every sales organizations. At the time, Dynamics 365 AI for Sales (Now called Sales Insights) was only available in North America.

Today, we are happy to announce that Dynamics 365 Sales Insights has expanded availability to also include Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Customers and partners alike can join the product preview, start a trial as well as purchase licenses to empower users across the sales organizations with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights.

Region and language availability for Dynamics 365 for Sales

Before November 2018, we used the term international availability to capture multiple intentions: the physical location of the data, where the data is stored (Region), and the language in which information is displayed (Display language). Following the release of the new Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, we introduce a new intent: the Model language, specifically the language of the data that is parsed by the model to produce insights.

Region

With Dynamics 365 for Sales, System Administrators can specify the region where customer data will be stored. In the process of creating a new org, customers can select a geographic location (Geo) to determine where data will be stored. Data will not move from one geo to another, and Microsoft will not limit the geos/locations where customers, or their end users, can access data.

Starting today, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is available across multiple geos, including North America, Europe and the UK.
We plan to extend the availability to additional geos: Australia, Asia Pacific, South America, Canada, India and Japan, by April 2019.

Display language

When creating a new org, System Administrators need to select a base language for the org. The base language determines default regional and language settings for the org. Once base language is selected, System Administrators can enable additional languages for display as well as for assistance (Help). Dynamics 365 for Sales currently supports 45 display languages.

Currently, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights for Sellers supports all 45 display languages.

Model languages in Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

With the new Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, some features use natural language algorithms to derive insights. Those capabilities analyze text (such as email communications or notes) as well as voice utterances (from call recordings), to develop relevant and actionable insights.

Following is the list of features that use text and voice analysis:

Text Based Insights

Talking points: This feature identifies conversation starters from emails. Talking Points include topics that are related to sports, time-off, family and entertainment, giving sellers an opportunity to start their customer meetings on a personal note.

Notes analysis: When users enter notes from a recent meeting or discussion into the timeline, Dynamics 365 for Sales monitors these notes and offers intelligent suggestions for follow up.

Relationship assistance:

• Exchange cards: The action cards are generated based on an analysis of emails. When users receive an email, Exchange and Dynamics 365 for Sales work together to scan the body of the email and extract relevant phrases that suggest the email is related to Dynamics 365 for Sales customers.
• Productivity cards: Productivity cards provide timely information that is relevant to users location and plans.

Dynamics 365 Sales Insights supports only English as the modeling language. However, we plan to extend support to German, French, Dutch and Italian by July 2019.

Voice Based Insights

Call intelligence: Transcribing call recordings in order to analyze and extract meaningful insights, including sentiment, competitive mentions and more.

Currently Dynamics 365 Sales Insights supports English, French, German and Italian as the modeling language for voice. Our roadmap includes plans to extend support to Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish in the future.

Whats not included

From the full list of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights capabilities, two features are still limited to North America. These include Who Knows Whom and Relationship Analytics from Exchange. However, Customers in Europe, Middle East and Africa can still benefit from Relationship Analytics, to analyze the health of their customer relationships, based on activities within Dynamics 365 only.

Whats next

Going forward, we will extend Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to the rest of the world, adding additional model language support, to help sellers be more proactive and productive, and to ensure they are able to personalize their pitch to improve customer engagements.

Below you can find a detailed table of the features:

The post Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is now available in Europe, Middle East and Africa appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

For v2, weve dramatically enhanced the Nonprofit Accelerator itself and the underlying Common Data Model (CDM) to unleash a wealth of new capabilities and standards for nonprofits and the growing ecosystem of partners who serve them.

Building out the Common Data Model

Central to our approach is our commitment to building a CDM, publishing that openly, and working across platforms. This enables powerful interoperability to fuel greater insights and efficacy, while also providing true data transparency. Microsoft has long been committed to open data, and we believe this approach is key to driving innovation in the sector.

The v2 doubles the size of the CDM. Last year we delivered 35 different entities with about 700 attributes. With v2, weve grown the model to 75 entities with 1,400 attributes. These entities and attributes represent sector-specific data elements, relationships, and best practices as defined by Microsoft, our partners, and a group of nonprofit experts.

The CDM also includes the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Organization and Activity standards, which we have made available via GitHub. Not all nonprofits subscribe to IATI, but for many organizations working with institutional donors or government agencies, its a requirement. Recognizing this, we made the IATI modeling available as an add-on so organizations have the freedom to choose whether to add it to their solutions.

Deeper functionality with Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator v2

Microsoft is the first and biggest consumer of the CDM and has incorporated all the best practices the CDM represents into Dynamics 365 through the Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator. We are committed to helping nonprofits around the world implement these best practices consistently and efficiently. By incorporating the CDM into the Accelerator, what once required customization is standard today, with the schema included in your Dynamics 365 subscription.

The driving principle behind the nonprofit sector is trust. The Accelerator is designed to help organizations build that trust, communicating their stewardship of donations and grants and demonstrating their impact. With v2, nonprofits have access to a robust set of new features designed to support their most important business needs, including:

The post Dynamics 365 Nonprofit Accelerator: a community solution to drive social impact appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In 2018, we announced a new update cadence for Dynamics 365 applications to help you stay current in a consistent, predictable, and seamless manner. Today, with One Version, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations customers have easy access to new capabilities and innovation in an environment that eliminates the cost and disruption that defined enterprise software upgrades in the past. All of this comes as part of One Version, without sacrificing the control that is essential for mission-critical workloads.

In the past, business application vendors delivered innovation slowly. Customer deployments, characterized by extensive customizations and complex integrations, could not adapt new capabilities without expensive, disruptive upgrade projects. The result was that most customers faced even longer delays and increased expense before they could realize the benefits of the new capabilities and in many cases, customers never reached that goal. With One Version, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations innovation will be delivered rapidly and regularly, and every customer will immediately have the ability to opt in to leverage the new capabilities. With One Version, Microsoft delivers tailored service updates for mission-critical enterprise business software.

As a product owner of the new retail solution on Dynamics 365, and my more than 20 years within this industry, I have never seen anything like it. We are already looking forward to version 10 and One Version. Dynamics 365 for Retail is on the right path, and we cannot wait to see whats next from Microsoft.

– Kim Guldager, Retail Circle Product Owner, BESTSELLER

One Version also raises the level of quality that customers can expect in their enterprise software. Historically, a landscape of almost every customer running a different combination of software versions and hot fixes made the challenge of ensuring quality incredibly difficult. With One Version, when Microsoft fixes an issue in one environment, the same solution can be rapidly propagated to all customers. With One Version, Microsoft raises the quality bar for mission-critical enterprise business software.

The One Version journey begins now, but our investments to make this possible started over two years ago. One of the first innovations was the introduction of the extension-only model for customization. This is a critical enabler for the One Version continuous update process, and it extends the coverage of the model to our ecosystem of ISVs and implementation partners, and our customers. This allows them to innovate more quickly and extend the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations product, preserving the promise of One Version.

Having the DXC Eclipse ISV extensions on One Version is enabling our customers to continuously keep up to date with Microsoft’s latest fixes and new features with a minimum amount of effort.”

– Ivan Cole, DXC Technology

The move to One Version enables us to deliver our accelerators to the market faster, saving us time and money while allowing our clients to see business value from our solution.Moving to one-version ensures we have One Version of our solution to maintain, which frees up our capacity to deliver customer enhancements of our solution. The regression suite automation tool allows us and our clients to take these updates with a peace of mind.

– Rachel Profitt, MVP, Director, Client Solution Architect, RSM

The idea of a single version of cloud software that delivers continuous innovation is central to Software as a Service, however core enterprise software is mission-critical, often customized, and generally wrapped in multiple integrations. This raises the bar of the importance of the customer being able to validate software updates before they deploy and have full control of when those updates move to production. Microsoft has developed six essential innovations that let One Version meet this bar:

• Safe deployment rings Each software update progresses through a series of rings, starting from internal Microsoft deployments, and progressing to partners and customers requesting early access before full deployment. At each stage, both the version and the update process are exercised as they will be in general availability. Telemetry is collected at each stage, with the update moving to the next stage only with successful results.
• Regression Suite Automation Tool (RSAT) This new tool empowers customers to efficiently script regression tests specific to their organization, which can be used to validate pending updates in their sandbox environment, before updates progress to production deployment.
• Release Validation Program (RVP) With this program, multiple customers provide their RSAT suites to Microsoft and Microsoft deploys shadows of their environment and runs their RSAT suites as part of the internal deployment ring validation. Running both our own tests and this diverse set of customer specific tests before production deployment is another key level of quality assurance.
• Enabling new features Customers need to control when new capabilities that change business processes or user experiences are enabled for their deployment. As part of One Version, the ability to manage new features has been added, ensuring that customers maintain this critical level of control.
• Control of update timing Every organization has critical periods when system maintenance can and cant be performed. One Version allows customers to control the timing of production environment updates, and even allows the ability to opt out of selected updates for critical periods.
• Reduced downtime updates With continuous updates, the time spent making updates can add up. To make One Version practical and actually improve system availability, the One Version program includes investments to reduce update downtime.

The words upgrade and “easy” aren’t typically used in the same sentence for ERP, that is until the One Version service updates from Microsoft made it so. As a regulated industry, it is important for us to have the right processes to be ready for continuous update and we have developed processes and are investing in the RSAT tool to experience an evergreen ERP world.

– Jeff Ketelhut, Vice President and Head of IT, Atara Biotherapeutics

We now have a longer-term view on modifications and enhancements that benefit our company. Within hours after we refresh/upgrade an environment, we can have scripts run that create a known set of scenarios in various states – every time.

– Tom Ashbrook, CIO, 5.11 Tactical

While we’re officially starting this journey at scale today, we have already been exercising our muscles with our early customers and partners, and have done thousands of updates in customer sandbox and production environments to create a robust process.

One Version begins NOW. Join us in the transformation to modern application management!

Learn more

• One Version service updates FAQ

The post Modernize ERP updates with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Delight your customers with fast turnaround times to consistently and accurately configure prices and quotes by leveraging Dynamics 365 for Sales integration with partner configure-price-quote (CPQ) solutions.

Dynamics 365 for Sales now makes it easy to discover CPQ solution providers that deliver solutions to enable sales people to quickly identify the right configuration of products to fit their customers needs and rapidly create accurate quotes and contracts with the right pricing, considering all the variable factors including discounts.

Administrator users of Dynamics 365 for Sales can now discover related partner apps on AppSource from within the Sales application. If youre a user with administrator privileges, check out partner apps by going to Settings, then App Extensions, and clicking on Partner apps.

You can check out additional applications available on AppSource by clicking on the All Apps link.

This year we worked with two pilot partners, Experlogix and PROS, to seed the page. We look forward to our ongoing efforts with our additional CPQ solution providers focusing on Dynamics 365 for Sales so they too can be featured in our solutions area. These partners include but are not limited to Apttus, e-Con, and DealHub. If youre currently interested in these solutions, please follow the hyperlinks to view their individual offerings.

Experlogix and PROS are the two initial CPQ partner solutions that are currently featured in our market place. Both applications provide:

• Best in class CPQ capabilities and are leaders in the application space
• Support the Dynamics 365 Sales Hub app and other unified client apps
• Support reading and writing product catalog and configuration data to and from the Dynamics 365 for Sales application

To learn more about these great partners, we encourage you to review the details below:

Experlogix

Accelerate sales, improve profits, and delight customers with Experlogix CPQ for Dynamics 365. Powerful and flexible with enterprise-ready integration to Dynamics 365, Experlogix CPQ enables reps to quickly and accurately configure complex quotes for virtually any industry, including manufacturing, IT, professional services, software, telecommunications, utilities, and more. Proven with organizations of all sizes, Experlogix enables business users to learn and maintain the system and no coding or special scripting is needed.

Experlogix CPQ combines with Dynamics 365 for a seamless quote and order experience across an omnichannel selling environment. It can be used with Dynamics 365 in the office, on the road, or by customers and/or channel users, and works with all Dynamics 365 CRM and ERP platforms and web portals.

For manufacturers, Experlogixs unique modeling workbench enables product managers and engineers to define component relationships that drive unique combinations of parts, materials, sub-assemblies, routings, or lean schedules. New items with dynamic part numbers can be created and seamlessly shared with ERP systems such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and Business Central, with the flexibility to leverage existing BOMs and routes or create new ones.

With Experlogix Visual CPQ, sales reps can visualize configured products on-the-fly to instantly see products come to life. Users can apply color or texture, add optional product components, make dimensional changes, and much more to solidify brand loyalty and increase sales.

Get started

• Experlogix home page
• Experlogix CPQ Overview on AppSource

PROS Smart CPQ

Customer experience is the new battleground and providing a great experience for customers starts with your ability to respond quickly to buyer demands. In fact, studies show that 50 percent of buyers choose the vendor that responds first. Your customers demand a frictionless buying experience, and PROS Smart CPQ can help deliver that experience by automating the configure, price, and quote process, and enabling sales to deliver fast, error-free quotes.

By infusing AI into the quoting process, PROS Smart CPQ increases your sales teams ability to deliver targeted offers that win. PROS Smart CPQ uses cutting-edge AI and machine learning algorithms to provide personalized product and pricing recommendations that enable salespeople to tailor offers to each customer, while also maximizing the value of every deal. Whether your sales team is selling a subscription service or a complex product requiring configuration, PROS Smart CPQ accelerates their response times from days or even weeks to minutes and helps them win the deal.

In addition to expecting fast responses from your sales people, buyers are increasingly looking to self-serve. With PROS Smart CPQ, you can extend to customers the same great capabilities that your sales team enjoys, such as the ability to find and easily configure your products and services.

The out-of-box integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables you to accelerate the delivery of your quote-to-cash strategy. PROS Smart CPQ supports the latest version of Dynamics 365 for Sales utilizing the Unified Client Interface.

PROS Smart CPQ integrates into all leading commerce platforms. With PROS Smart CPQ, you can streamline and optimize your sales processes while maximizing your revenue and improving your profitability across all of your sales channels.

Get started

• PROS home page
• PROS CPQ Overview on AppSource

Configure-Price-Quote solutions are key components to enable organizations to better understand customer needs, engage more effectively, and win more deals. We are truly excited to see what organizations will be able to do with our partner solutions!

The post Leverage partner apps for a seamless configure-price-quote (CPQ) experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Last week, as I walked through the trade show exhibit halls at Hannover Messe, I was awespired. Yes, I had to create a new word to capture the moment.

I was in awe of not only the sheer size of the conference, but also the excitement in the air generated by the thousands of attendees. At the same time, I am inspired by the amazing stories of innovation and digital transformation.

Industry 4.0 is here, now, and organizations are looking to break through the barriers that prevent them from delivering exceptional new products for their customers. And while most of the focus at the conference was on product and production innovation, the Dynamics 365 for Talent team showcased the importance of workplace culture and modern workforce management.

Keeping the pace of innovation requires the right people in the right roles at the right time, as well as the HR operational programs required to support a modern workplace and workforce. To address the myriad of challenges facing manufacturersthe challenge of an aging and multi-generational workforce, the gig economy, shortage of skilled talent, and the need to up-skill workersHR needs a new approach to workplace culture to lay the foundation of the talent life cycle.

Maybe youve seen the articles imploring you to stop hiring for culture fit. How to Hire from the Harvard Business Review, is a perfect example. It calls hiring for culture fit a misguided strategy that can contribute to a companys lack of diversity. It highlights that individuals with different personalities can be great at the job you need done.

Thats absolutely true. But the problem here and in many similar articles is that it conflates hiring for culture fit with hiring thats based solely on personality type. In fact, hiring for culture fit is far more encompassing and it requires a rigor that many companies lack.

What is hiring for culture fit and what isnt it?

First off, hiring for culture fit is not about hiring candidates whose personalities all fit a similar mold. That would create a talent echo chamber that shuts out diversity, creativity, and valuable alternate viewpoints. As a recent article in the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) observed, hiring managers define culture fit in terms of personality traits, favoring certain job candidates because they are friendly or have a good attitude, those managers hinder their organizations ability to innovate because of its homogenous workforce.

Hiring for culture fit also is not about relying on gut instinctsi.e., selecting candidates who feel right for the organization. Companies that do a good job of leveraging a culture fit in making high-quality hires do so by acknowledging the culture and making it translate to specific skills, abilities, values and motivators of candidates, the SHRM piece notes.

That insight cuts right to heart of hiring for culture fit. In order to do it properly, you must be able to:

• Identify the essential elements of your companys culture including your vision and values, preferred behaviors and work processes, even the language, habits and beliefs that fuel successful performance.
• Map these elements to your open jobs.
• Use your interviewing and assessment processes to determine which candidates best fit your culture/jobsand, equally important, which candidates can add to your culture, bringing in qualities that fill gaps and help your company progress.

Clearly, the process of hiring for culture fit is the antithesis of hiring based on gut instincts or on personality type alone.

In addition, hiring for culture fit doesnt ignore traditional job fit criteria such as career history, relevant experience, or the core competencies required for a role. It also does not ignore personality type or soft skills such as communication style and emotional intelligence. It actually takes all of these qualities into consideration but they must be mappable to specific aspects of your company culture.

By ensuring that personality is just one component of hiring for culture fit, employers protect themselves from creating homogenous work forces that lack diversity and the capacity for continuous creativity and innovation.

Why hire for culture fit

Even in the current talent environment, where workers are changing employers with greater frequency, you want to onboard people who will stay with your company and add value for a reasonable period of time. Thats crucial to holding down costs, maximizing employee productivity and engagement, maintaining continuity within departments and functional areas, and building a strong employment brand.

By hiring for culture fit, youre bringing in people who are intrinsically aligned with your companys mission and values. These individuals want to join your company, not just for a paycheck but because theyre passionate about the work being done and eager to contribute to it.

People who are naturally aligned to your company culture are far more likely to understand your priorities, your customers needs, the needs of their teammates, and how they can personally facilitate success for everyone. Whats more, these individuals are more likely to gel with the rest of their teams faster, start making meaningful contributions quicker, and willingly give you their very best day after day.

Manufacturing leaders, as well as those in retail, banking, and professional services can gain a competitive advantage in the fight for top talent by incorporating culture into their employer brand.

In part two of this blog series, Ill drill in a bit deeper to provide a step-by-step actionable approach to culture-centric talent acquisition.

Learn more about how Dynamics 365 for Talent can help your organization hire top talent and enable their success from our demonstration experience.

The post Talent at Hannover Messe 2019—Hiring for culture fit: Should you or shouldn’t you? appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps version 9.x
Applies to Common Data Service

The maximum user session timeout of 24 hours is being removed. This means that a user is not forced to sign in every 24 hours to use the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps and other Microsoft service apps, like Outlook, that were opened in the same browser session.

Honor Azure AD session policy

By default, the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps leverage the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) session policy to manage the user session timeout. Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps uses the Azure AD ID Token with Policy Check Interval (PCI) claims. Every hour a new Azure AD ID Token is fetched silently in the background and Azure AD enforces the Azure ID instant policy. For example, if an administrator disables or deletes a user account, Azure AD instant policy will force a user password reset and revoke the refresh token.

This Azure AD ID token refresh cycle continues in the background based on the Azure AD token lifetime policy configurations. Users continue to access the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement/Common Data Service data without needing to re-authenticate until the Azure AD token lifetime policy expires.

Resilience to Azure AD outages

In an event that there are intermittent Azure AD outages, authenticated users can continue to access the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement/Common Data Service data if the PCI claims have not expired or the user has opted in the Stay signed in during authentication.

Set Custom Session timeout for individual environment

For environments that require different session timeout values, administrators can continue to set the session timeout and/or inactivity timeout in System Settings. These settings override the default Azure AD session policy and users will be directed to Azure AD for re-authentication when these settings expire.

For detailed information, see Security enhancements: User session and access management.

The post Release Notes for User Session Timeout Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

One might think that the worlds oldest brands are least resistant to changeas if innovation and heritage are opposing ideas in business. Instead, we can learn a lot about endurance in modern business from brands that have adapted to change for decades or, in the case of luxury linen maker Frette, for more than 155 years.

Since 1860, Frette has crafted luxury linens found in the worlds most prestigious hotels, private homes, royal palaceseven the Titanic and Orient Express. Now the company is taking a big step to bridge its past, built on a tradition of quality and customer service, and its future, as an omnichannel business built on Dynamics 365.

Frette initially set out to update its point-of-sale system in its boutiques across the U.S. and Europe. Behind the scenes, however, the company was struggling to present customers with an omnichannel retail experience. The business operated on over a dozen legacy, outdated systems, so there was a need to unite lines of business across European and North American operations.

As Paolo Fabiocchi, CFO of Frette explains, We started just by looking for a solution for our stores, but once we learned about Dynamics 365, our vision became having true omnichannel capabilities to better serve our customers. That the solution (Dynamics 365) has global, Tier 1 capabilities but is still so much less complex and costly to maintain was what really put it over the top for us.

Frette met with Sunrise Technologies, an award-winning Dynamics 365 partner, to help modernize the business. Sunrise focused on solving several key challenges, connecting Frettes business ecosystem, improving visibility across the organization, and automating manual, error-prone processes.

Unifying operations on a modern cloud platform

For many companies, legacy modernization is a daunting initiative, and Frettes challenge was no exception. The company has multiple divisions to handle hospitality, wholesale, consultancy, and retail businesseswith divisions segmented across Europe, North America, and Asia. With disjointed systems and databases, customer service agents had limited access to inventory and orders, and customers experienced increased order processing times and wait times to check order statuses.

On Dynamics 365, Frette is unifying international systems and business processes. By dismantling data silos, they now have a single platform to run operationsfrom production to back office to POS. Best of all, Frette can unlock company data for a holistic, 360-degree view of the business, customers, and employees. For example, they can now follow an order from production in Italy to a boutique in New York, with real-time order and inventory status available to frontline workers. Frette also expects to explore IoT, machine learning, and other emerging technologies that will provide pervasive intelligence to reveal insights and trends across the organization.

Automation, everywhere

With company data like orders and inventory scattered across silos, Frette struggled with highly manual processes and a lack of visibility at every level of the organization, from the call center to the C-Suite. Overstocking was common to ensure popular items were on hand. The B2B hospitality business had increased staff by 30 percent in three years to keep up with manual order entries. Ecommerce orders had to be manually duplicated between the POS system and distribution systems. And returning an ecommerce order in store caused hassles on the back end.

Sunrise Technologies focused on streamlining and automating the business, including implementation of its custom supply chain solution that seamlessly integrates with Dynamics 365. Now Frette has a single platform that eliminates time-consuming, error-prone processes while seeing everything from inventory levels, orders, and allocation scenarios in one place.

The takeaway

Frettes story shows us whats possible when ingenuity and foresight are baked into a companys values and culture. By modernizing its entire operation on future-proof business solutions, the company has ensured its 155-year tradition of first-class customer experiences is preserved for generations to come.

Check back for more success stories from retail throughout 2019.

Ramp up 2019 with insights from the retail frontline

In case you missed it, we just released the 2019 Retail Trends Report, a survey of six trending areas of focus to create an exceptional shopping experience for customers. Its a great companion to our new eBook Why Choose Dynamics 365 for Retail?a great overview of whats possible when you transform retail operations with Dynamics 365.

The post How Frette modernized a heritage brand on Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights

Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights enables you to quickly connect to your customer service data and use out-of-the-box AI-powered insights to take informed action to increase customer satisfaction. Interactive dashboards use AI, business intelligence, and machine learning to give you a comprehensive view into engagement patterns, agent performance, and call center operations on multiple dimensions. Armed with actionable insights into critical performance metrics and emerging trends, service teams are empowered to anticipate and deliver what customers need, increase operational efficiency, and implement data-driven service improvements.

In October 2018, we announced Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights is available in public preview, and since then we’ve written blogs to help you get started and to learn about support for custom CDS data entities. If you havent already, try it out at https://aka.ms/trycsinsights.

The team has been working hard to enable more capabilities for you, and today were excited to share the latest updates. In this blog post, you’ll learn more about these additional features weve introduced since October, including:

• View related cases in a topic
• Give feedback to cases in a topic
• Move cases to another topic
• Rename topics
• Set topic granularity
• Refresh dashboards on demand
• Persist filters across dashboards
• Improved experience in the website header

View related cases in a topic

Customer Service Insights uses AI to automatically group similar cases into topics. These topics allow customer service managers to get more visibility into key drivers of various KPIs. A topic represents a group of three or more similar cases discovered through artificial intelligence. One top requested feature is the capability to view cases that AI automatically groups into topics. Now you can do that through the new Topicspage.

Figure 1: The new Topics page

TheTopicspage lists all the AI-discovered topics from your case data and sorts them by case volume. You can search for the topic of interest and choose the topic name to browse the top 200 related cases, including their names, case numbers, status, agent owners (if assigned to an agent), and the case creation date.

Figure 2: View top 200 cases grouped into a topic

When you choose a case title from the cases list, the corresponding case form for Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is opened in a new browser tab, which gives you more case details and allows you to take immediate action on the selected case.

Check out this how-to article, Manage and improve artificial intelligence grouping of support cases as topics, for more details.

Give feedback to cases in a topic

Topics in Customer Service Insights are generated from a general AI model that weve fine-tuned and configured to cover most cases. However, we also know that different organizations have different business needs. The same model configuration doesnt fit all organizations. That’s why we introduced the capability that allows you to provide your feedback to the cases grouped in a topic based on your business needs.

When you hover over or select a case on the Topics page, the thumb-up and thumb-down buttons display. If you see any cases that match perfectly to the topic and you want to keep them in this topic over time, choose the thumb-up button. If you want to exclude any cases from a topic, choose the thumb-downbutton. Once you do that, in the next workspace refresh, the AI model will pick up all your feedback and improve the cases grouped to a topic.

Figure 3: Give feedback for case grouped in a topic

Move cases to another topic

If you see any cases grouped in a topic that should belong to another topic listed in the Topicspage, you can now move those cases to the desired topic right away. In addition, when a case is moved to another topic, the AI model will consider this action implicit feedback (for example, a similar case should belong to the other topic that the case is moved to and shouldn’t belong to the original topic) and improve the topic generation results in the next workspace refresh.

To move a case, on the page that lists cases in a topic, when you hover over a case, you see the Move option by choosing three dots at the end of the Case title column.

Figure 4: Move option to move a case to another topic

Then you select the destination topic from the Move casetitlepanel to move the case:

Figure 5: Select the destination topic to move the case

Rename topics

To make each AI-discovered support topic easy for customer service managers to understand, Customer Service Insights automatically assigns the case title as the topic name from the most relevant case in a topic. If you want to give your topic a better name (for example, a shorter name that is easier to manage), now theres a way to do it. And no worries, renaming a topic wont affect future topic clustering results.

You can rename a topic either in the topic list or in the case list of a topic. On the Topicspage, when you hover over a topic, you see the Rename option by choosing the three dots at the end of the Namecolumn.

Figure 6: Change a topic name from the Topics page

When you view cases in a topic, you can choose the pencil icon next to the topic name on top of the page to rename the topic. After you complete the edit, select the Enter key to save your new topic name.

Figure 7: Change a topic name inline

Check out this how-to article, Manage and improve artificial intelligence grouping of support cases as topics – renaming a topic, for more details.

Set topic granularity

As mentioned earlier, although Customer Service Insights is shipped with a fine-tuned general AI model out of box, we know that different customers have different business needs. Another common request weve heard from you is for the flexibility to control the topic granularity: some organizations want to track support topics at a higher level to gain a bigger picture of where problems live, while other organizations need to track more issues with more specificity. Thats why we introduced the topic granularity settings where you can control the AI model to generate topics with a more general or specific scope.

Figure 8: Change topic granularity through the workspace settings

This setting supports five levels of granularity. The illustration on the Settings page explains the corresponding topic granularity impact for each level. Please note that the topic granularity impacts the scope of a topic instead of the total number of topics that will be generated. Depending on the similarity between your case titles, you may see more or fewer topics when the granularity is more specific.

You’ll find more information in this how-to article: Set the granularity of how Customer Service Insights generates customer service topics

Refresh dashboards on demand

Customer Service Insights refreshes dashboards automatically each day. If you make any changes in your workspace, now you can trigger a refresh on demand without waiting for the next automatic daily refresh. The on-demand refresh option appears at the top of dashboards when you make any of following changes:

• Update data mapping settings
• Change case title cleansing settings
• Change topic granularity settings
• Rename a topic
• Move cases to another topic

Figure 9: Refresh workspaces on-demand

The maximum number of times you can do an on-demand refresh on a workspace is 10 times per day. Because refreshing a large amount data consumes a lot of resources, the limit is to ensure a stable and scalable service across all our customers. We welcome your feedback if you find this limit doesnt work in your scenario.

Persist filters across dashboards

Now the filters you set on any dashboard persist across all dashboards in the same workspace, until you refresh the browser. If you use filters to focus only on a subset of data, this capability gives you consistent data slicers when you switch between different dashboards, without any extra clicks.

Improved experience in the website header

You may have noticed the new look and feel of the website header. The new header allows you to browse and manage your workspaces more efficiently. It also enables an integrated experience to access other Microsoft apps.

With the new header, you can browse all your workspaces, switch workspaces, create a new workspace, or delete an existing one by choosing the workspace icon(the first icon in the header). You can also quickly access the Dynamics 365 for Customer Service environment connected to each workspace by choosing the URL below the workspace name in the drop-down list.

Figure 10: Use new header to manage workspaces

The Settings icon (gear) in the new header makes it easier for you to access individual settings functions with fewer clicks.

The header is also closely integrated with other Microsoft apps, which let you easily access the other applications via the Apps launcher on the left side of the screen.

Figure 11: Access more Microsoft apps from the new header

Summary

In the coming weeks, you’ll get more features that can help you to better manage your workspaces and improve the AI-driven topics over time. Please stay tuned!

The product team is eager to hear your feedback. If you have any questions about these (or other) features, we are available at the Customer Service Insights forumto help you.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, please do not hesitate tocreate an idea or vote on others ideas.

Enjoy!

Xiaoying Guo

Senior Program Manager

The post Announcing new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service Insights appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Applies to: Dynamics 365 for Marketing

The April 2019 update of Dynamics 365 for Marketing is rolling out starting now! The roll-out schedule will follow that of the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement platform team as they apply the prerequisite platform updates in each region. To see when the update should be available in your region, see When will the April 2019 features be enabled for customers who did not opt in to the preview?

Though we update the product every month or so, this is the first major new update to the product for 2019. Many features that were previously in preview are now generally available, plus it includes many new features and plenty of performance and stability improvements.

Customers updating to the April 2019 version of Dynamics 365 for Marketing will also receive all features that were released for new (but not updated) instances installed in February and March 2019.

Keep reading to learn how to get this update and which new features it includes. For more information about this update, including known and recently fixed issues, see the Dynamics 365 for Marketing readme page.

How to get the update

To benefit from this update, you must manually apply it to each of your Dynamics 365 for Marketing instances as described in Keep Marketing up to date. Check the roll-out schedule to find out when the update should be available in your region.

Personalized marketing

Personalized marketing now extends to landing pages, which can provide content that’s personalized for known visitors, and marketers can achieve more on social channels by posting right from the app.

Website personalization

Landing pages continue to be the most common call-to-action items within marketing emails. You can now personalize these pages for each prospect based on their attributes and past behavior. This personalization can affect the layout, dynamic content, branding, and more. For example, a prospect receives a tailored email that shows the logo of their local sports team. When they click a link, the personalization continues by opening a page that shows their local weather and sports news. This maintains a continuum of personalized experience and is likely to improve demand generation.

More information: Provide personalized page content

Social posting

Create social content for multiple channels and schedule social posts to hit the web in sync with your overall campaign. This lets you synchronize audience communication across channels using a single platform. Social posting is enabled by a new outbound activity that can post directly to your accounts on social-media sites, starting with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. We will be adding more channels over time.

More information:

• Schedule and post messages on social media
• Configure your social media accounts

Improved dynamic personalization of Emails

We’ve both simplified and expanded the dynamic-content capabilities for marketing emails. For example, the new assist-edit dialog makes it much easier to place dynamic values in the message body, especially when referring to related records. We’ve also expanded support for relations in the from-address and from-name for email messages, which means, for example, that your marketing emails can now show each recipient’s personal account manager as the return address. Emails that show a familiar from-address are much more likely to be opened than those that show a generic or unfamiliar address.

More information:

• Use assist-edit to place dynamic field values
• Dynamic values in To, From-name, From-address, and Reply-to fields

Easy onboarding

We are overhauling the onboarding experience so that new customers can sign up quickly and new users can easily get started on their marketing tasks. The product looks modern and welcoming, and users can discover its value instantly. Key improvements include:

• The new get started dashboard prominently calls out key marketing tasks like building a campaign and using insights.
• Simplified trial sign-up now enables customers to sign up for a trial in just a few steps.

More information: Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Integrate and extend the solution

Platform extensibility enhancements help customers and partners meet specific needs, deliver turnkey projects, and support vertical scenarios. New APIs will enable you to link journeys to business processes, and to create target segments programmatically. You can use your own content management system to submit information directly via forms, and to set up event pages or landing pages. Social integration is further enhanced to include social-posting capabilities. Sales users can now influence marketing with a few clicks.

Extensibility for campaigns and segments

This release provides a rich set of APIs for customer journeys and segments. These APIs provide key integration points for external services integration and can easily connect with Microsoft tools like Flow. For example, you can build a customer journey programmatically and modify its properties as neededor build a new segment based on any existing segment. You can also control entity lifecycles, such as starting, stopping, or editing a journey. Customers and partners can use these abilities to extend the marketing app, address self-service and lightweight usage scenarios (such as automating repetitive processes) and enable complex scenarios (such as triggering from external systems).

More information:

• Basic operations on segments using the Segmentation API
• Basic operations on Customer Journey using the API
• CRUD operations on customer journey using code

Integration with third-party content management systems (Portals optional)

Marketing campaigns need good content with consistent branding, so most organizations already use a content management system (CMS) to help manage and host their online content. With the April 2019 release, Dynamics 365 for Marketing can seamlessly integrate with any third-party content management system while still providing the same level of capabilities and insights.

Previously, the application required Dynamics 365 portals to host features like the subscription center and event portal, but in this release, portals will become optional. Now you can choose to host all Dynamics 365 for Marketing forms and content on an external CMS while still collecting rich interaction data like visits, submissions, registrations, and more.

More information:

• Create interactive features with or without portals
• Integrate with landing pages published on an external website
• Provide personalized page content

Sales integration enhancements

We continue to break down the silos between sales and marketing departments by enabling salespeople to add contacts to running journeys or specific segments. Dynamics 365 for Sales users could already review some Dynamics 365 for Marketing information through the marketing calendar and contact insights, and now they can influence it, too, with just a few clicks.

More information: Manage segment memberships from a contact record

Fundamental investments

Fundamental investments continue to deliver improved usability, performance, scalability and throughput for campaign execution and email marketing. The segmentation interface has been improved and optimized for frequently used marketing scenarios. Usability improvements in insights provide complete visibility across all campaign elements, form interactions, email messages, and more.

Lifecycle enhancements and deeper insights

Many entities, such as email messages, travel through a lifecycle that takes them, for example, from draft, to live, back to edit, and then live again. We’ve improved lifecycle management throughout the app to provide a more intuitive and consistent experience across all the phases of a campaignwhether you’re drafting an email, crafting a segment, going live with a journey, managing events, or editing a lead-scoring model. This provides a more consistent approach for how and when records can be published, deleted, or deactivated. We’ve also improved our built-in insights pages to make them more comprehensive and easier to use. Marketers can easily understand how journeys are running and see which communications were delivered, which weren’t, and why.

More information:

• Analyze results to gain insights from your marketing activities
• Insights glossary
• Go live with publishable entities and track their status

Marketer friendly segmentation experience

Dynamics 365 for Marketing enables you to create dynamic segments based on rules that combine demographic, firmographic, transactional, and interaction data without requiring technical knowledge or IT support. In this release, we continue to simplify the process of creating segments. For example, we’ve made it much easier to traverse complex relationships and build segments based on marketing interactions. We’ve also improved segmentation performance across the board, so designer load times, segment deployment, and segment provisioning are all significantly faster.

More information:

• Design profile-based dynamic segments
• Marketing segments vs. marketing lists

Enhanced event registration experience

The event-registration experience is crucial for marketers because it contributes to prospects’ early impressions of the related brands or products. Any inefficiencies can result in a potential loss of leads. With this release, we introduce a few enhancements to the event registration experience:

• Session registration for free events enables marketers to capture registrations at the session level for free events, which can help you plan room capacities, and indicate sessions already at full capacity.
• The ability to provide waitlists for events has now been extended to support waitlists for individual sessions (for free events). This provides improved control for event planners, helps them to gauge interest in individual sessions, and helps them plan capacities and services accordingly.
• QR codes for event registration can be embedded into emails, making it easy for registrants to check in using their mobile devices on the day of the event.

More information:

• Set up session-level registration and waitlisting
• Event registration QR code elements

The post The Dynamics 365 for Marketing April 2019 update is rolling out now appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In this blog, you’ll find the following sections to help you use Microsoft Flow to automate tasks in Dynamics 365 for Marketing:

• Prerequisites
• Scenario description
• Solution
  • Prepare Dynamics 365 for Marketing
  • Create a Microsoft Flow to automate segment creation
• End-user experience
• Taking it further

Prerequisites

The solution proposed in this blog has the following prerequisites:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales or Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement subscription with customization permissions
• Microsoft Flow subscription
• Dynamics 365 for Marketing subscription with administrator permissions

Scenario description

Within organizations today we increasingly see staff diversify their roles to cover activities which may not be their core discipline. This situation often leads to challenges for the individual to learn an area which may only be used on occasion, and to receive training in applications which are used sporadically. For occasional users of Dynamics 365 for Marketing, the terminology and controls used in the application would be unfamiliar and could lead to resistance to adopting processes that span multiple applications or that are not explicitly tailored to their tasks.

Consider a scenario where a company desires to implement a process in which on a quarterly basis, on-the-road salespeople need to trigger email communication to the primary contact of accounts which have had orders fulfilled in the last quarter. These salespeople work primarily on tablets and want to retain ownership of the action so to align with their needs, goals and targets but are unfamiliar with the Segmentation process in Dynamics 365 for Marketing. For this user scenario, there are only a few parameters which are changing (start and end date of the quarter) but creation such segment, would require the salesperson to traverse the data model. Instead, providing a simple input dialog for the key variables would allow segments to be created quicker and correctly.

Solution

Using Microsoft Flow, it is possible to automate the creation of records in Dynamics 365 for Marketing, including those that can drive key functionality like segmentation and customer journeys. The example below illustrates a possible solution aimed at allowing a minimal effort on behalf of the salesperson, following a simple setup by the Marketing team.

Prepare Dynamics 365for Marketing

1. Ensure all the relevant entities are synched to insights. For the purpose of this scenario, we are adding the Sales Order entity to the Customer Insights Sync, first navigating within the Marketing App to the Settings Area.

In this area, when selecting Customer Insights Sync in the Marketing Settings section, we are able to view the entities which are currently synchronized. These are the entities that can be used in segmentation.

For more information, see this article: Marketing settings.

After the relevant entities are added, publish the changes. For this scenario, we added Order only because the entity already connects to Contacts.

2. In the Marketing app, create a segment to be used as a model for the dynamic segments to be created by users. (See Working with segments.)

Using the Explore view, we can confirm the data model is being navigated correctly by the created segment.

3. In the Query tab we can see the details of the query created as part of the segment. This will become an important part of the automated creation. In our example, the resulting query is:

PROFILE(salesorder).FILTER(datefulfilled >= DATE(2019, 4, 1, 0, 0) && datefulfilled <= DATE(2019, 4, 30, 0, 0)).TRAVERSE(salesorder_account_customerid).TRAVERSE(account_contact_primarycontactid)

4. Create a Customer Journey template which the salespeople will be able to use to communicate with the end-users. (See Create and manage customer journey templates.)The Customer Journey template can start with a segment and have a predefined email message to use, thus making it easier for salespeople to send the communication.

At this point, our Dynamics 365 for Marketing app has the necessary building blocks enabled. Order has been added as entity that can be used in the segmentation and we have obtained the model of the segment we will creating in an automated fashion.

Create a Microsoft Flow to automate segment creation

5. Next step is to create the Microsoft Flow which will be used by the end users. Documentation for Flow is available at https://docs.microsoft.com/flow/.

• From the Segment view, click Flow and select See your Flows.
• Create a new flow from blank.
• In the new flow, search for the trigger Manually Trigger a flow.

• Add two date inputs (for example, Start Date and End Date).
• Add a step after the trigger to create a new Dynamics 365 record.

• Select the relevant organization and the entity Segments.
• Ensure the mandatory fields contain data. For option set fields, the numeric values of the desired option should be selected. Because in this example we want the segment to be activated immediately for evaluation we are using the following values:
  • Activation Status = 192350000 (Active)
  • Segment Type = 192350000 (Dynamic)
  • Status Reason = 192350001 (Live)
• In the query definition we use the query from the model segment, substituting as necessary the input parameters captured in the manual trigger. The input may require conversion to match the query syntax. In the example, the resulting Step should look similar to this:

• In order to correctly convert the date inputs into the text to substitute, the following Expression was used:

concat(formatDateTime(triggerBody()[‘date’],’yyyy’),’,’,formatDateTime(triggerBody()[‘date’],’MM’),’,’,dayOfMonth(triggerBody()[‘date’]),’,0,0′)

6. The Flow can now be saved, tested and shared with the relevant people (in this case the sales individual).
7. After the configuration has been tested, the users may wish to be able to view the segments they create. For this, you can add Segment and Customer Journey as an entity to the Sales Hub App and to its Sitemap. For a description of the various options available in the Sitemap, see the documentation. The screenshot below shows an example.

In this section we have now defined a Flow process which will prompt the users for key parameters that need updating on each segment creation. Our Sales Hub App is also ready to consume the Dynamics 365 for Marketing functionality we have decided to expose to the salesperson.

End user experience

With the configuration in the solution, users working on a tablet, will be able to view segments and also trigger Flows to allow for the creation of new segments based on the input criteria. Lets take a look:

1. Salesperson can now sign in on their tablet.

2. In the navigation menu, the entities for Segment and Customer Journey now appear. Selecting Segment, allows navigation to the latest list.

3. From the list of segments, the salesperson can go to Flow –> See your flows

4. From the list of Flows, run the Flow that has been shared with the user, entering values for the start and end date of the fulfilled orders to use in the marketing communication

5. Back in the Dynamics App, review the list of segments to find the newly created one.

6. Create a Customer Journey from the template

7. In the new Customer Journey, user can select the segment that has been created by Microsoft Flow and “Go Live” with the Customer Journey

Taking it further

Through this process we have created a code-free extension to our Sales Hub App to expose targeted Dynamics 365 for Marketing functionality to our salespeople. In addition, we have simplified the segment creation process by using Microsoft Flow to reduce the learning curve and the potential for errors by users who are not focused on marketing activities. Finally, this was made available for on-the-go users in their mobile devices.

An alternative approach to the one described could be to use Microsoft Flow to create a copy of the model segment but leave it in a Draft state by changing the value of the Status Reason. The benefit of this approach would be that users would not have to interact with the Microsoft Flow input dialog and could change any other parameter in the segment. In this approach, it should be considered that the end users would need to become familiar with the segment creation controls and understand the activation process to complete the task.

We hope you find this approach a useful scenario in addressing cross-app and automation scenarios.

Thank you for the interest in the topic and feel free to comment and give your feedback.

Emanuel Caraza

Principal Solutions Architect,Microsoft Dynamics FastTrack

The post Use Microsoft Flow to automate tasks in Dynamics 365 for Marketing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Organizations can automate repeatable sales activities and respond to external events by standardizing best practices using the Playbooks feature in Dynamics 365 for Sales. Playbooks can include guided actions and contextual sales materials that sales representatives need for closing deals and can be triggered manually or automatically based on entity record events.

Lets look at the basic expectations of sales managers and sales representatives.

Playbooks help your organization to meet the expectations of sales managers and sales reps and in driving sales efficiency, productivity, and consistent outcomes.Here are some scenarios where your organization could use playbooks:

• A sales representative working on an opportunity suddenly comes to know that the key decision maker and top champion of the product has left the organization in the middle of a deal. This event could possibly jeopardize the entire commercial transaction. With playbooks, automation can trigger a play that creates a set of tasks and activities needed to mitigate the situation. A task to reach out to current contacts at the customer account and identify the new stakeholder could be immediately followed by an introductory phone call to better understand the new stakeholders priorities. This carefully crafted orchestration of activities ensures that the new decision maker is successfully identified and turned into a new champion for the product so that the deal can be salvaged.
• A seller receives multiple leads from the marketing team, which they must follow up on. From experience, many of the leads turn out to not show any true interest and are a waste of the sellers time. With playbooks, organizations can automate the sequence of emails and activities to effectively communicate with the potential customer and only involve the seller when a connection is initiated.
• After closing an opportunity, there may be certain products, industries, or regions where the seller must provide some post-sale deployment support. Playbooks can help automate a set of defined tasks or activities that would help the customer get up and running, and potentially adopt the product or solution faster.
• Contract renewal is a key process that helps sales teams to boost their recurring revenue. Playbooks can provide a guided set of best practices when contracts are nearing renewal. These can be based on contract types, such as license, support, and maintenance agreements. You can configure tasks like checking any open customer issues and the latest NPS score as part of the information the playbook gathers to assist sellers in achieving their planned revenues.

Learn more about how to create and use playbooks, including links to step-by-step instructions, by going to Enforce best practices with playbooks.

How are playbooks different from business process flows?

While a playbook may seem like a business process flow conceptually, there are some fundamental differences between the two. Lets have a look.

Primary usage

Configuration / authoring

Runtime experience

Conclusion

Playbooks are a great way to automate repeatable processes and respond to events, thereby improving sales reps’ efficiency and productivity, and helping to ensure more consistent outcomes for your organization.

Dynamics 365 for Sales is making strong investments toward helping sellers automate their work and guiding them on their next best action. The Playbooks feature is the initial step in that direction. Stay tuned for future innovations from our product in this area!

The post Use playbooks for guided selling in Dynamics 356 for Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The Field Service (FS) solution will enable system-driven, automatic updates, in alignment with other Microsoft announcements that have highlighted the improved update process for Dynamics 365 (online):

• Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence – Business Applications Summit
• FAQ for Dynamics 365 Update Policies

New Field Service Update Policy:

• Manual updates lead to irregular and delayed updates which increase risks to the customer, support difficulties, and potentially increase downtime.
  • This required organizations to increase update planning and testing across their instances.
  • Leading to longer gaps between updates and often required deeper customer investments into their upgrade planning and testing.
• FS will move to an automatic update approach.
  • Many other solutions already push minor updates into customer orgs, automatically (i.e. Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing).
  • This will reduce customer risk, improve system supportability, and will make the update motion smoother and more predictable.

Field Service Version Eligibility:

• The new policy will be rolled out to instances with FS v7.5 and later as early as May 13th.
  • Microsoft will gradually exercise the new policy for instances eligible for automatic upgrade, so customers may not see any immediate impact to their eligible instances.
  • Customers can still update from the Admin Center if there is an update that has not yet been applied.
  • For instances with FS earlier than v7.5, customers should plan to manually upgrade the org to the latest available version, bringing them in line with the new policy.
• For customers using FS v8, the automatic update policy will be enabled in the months following enablement for FS v7.
• Stay tuned for upcoming information on the overall move from FS v7 to FS v8; however, Microsoft will not automatically upgrade any customers on FS v7 to FS v8.

Scope of the Automatic Updates:

• Field Service releases new updates of the solution roughly once a month with occasional hotfixes being released more frequently.
  • These monthly updates will include patches to resolve issues and may include minor functional, reliability, and performance improvements.
• For major updates, Field Service will follow the approach employed across Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
  • Field Service will deliver two major updates per year, in April and October.
  • These will offer new capabilities and functionality.
  • Major new capabilities will be enabled in a public preview prior to this delivery period so customers can validate major updates in a sandbox environment.

Solution Upgrade Timing and Impact:

• FS updates will undergo testing to ensure the solution upgrades successfully while also safeguarding that no breaking changes are shipped through upgrade.
  • Major changes to the user interface, solution behavior, or significant new features will be shipped twice yearly after theyve been available behind a preview.
  • Automatic updates will be completed during periods of low traffic for the hosting geographical region with minimal service disruption.

The post Automatic Update Policy for Field Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Were thrilled to announce Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian will be our special guest keynote speaker at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, coming to Atlanta, Georgia on June 10 and 11, 2019.

Dubbed the Mayor of the Internet by Forbes, Ohanian cofounded Reddit in 2005, sold the site to Cond Nast in 2006, then returned in 2015 as executive chair of a newly independent Reddit. Today, Reddit is one of the internets most powerful community gathering spaces and the 6th largest website in the world.

Ohanian has invested in and advised more than 200 tech startups, was a partner at Y Combinator, and cofounded Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital firm, where he now serves as managing partner. He also created and hosted two seasons of Small Empires, a series profiling tech startups and their communities. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list two years in a row, Ohanian is the bestselling author of Without Their Permission, a guidebook for harnessing the power of the internet for good.

Ohanian will bring his fresh new vision to this one-of-a-kind keynote you wont want to miss. Its sure to inspire you to take your organization to the next level with innovative new solutions. Register today!

While youre there, check out the session catalog

Were gearing up for an incredible event this year, with 150+ expert-led sessions and workshops (plus 16 pre-days!), filled with demos, hints, and hacks that will help you ramp up your skills and transform your business.

Our session catalog is live, and its growing every day. Weve got all things Dynamics 365, Power BI, Excel, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, mixed reality, and more under one roof. No matter your skillset, no matter your level, weve got you covered with sessions featuring your favorite tools that will help you innovate at every level. Plus, youll learn about the latest trends and product roadmaps before anyone else.

All this, plus our vibrant community

Were building an incredible community of power users, analysts, technical architects, and more youll have plenty of chances to connect and collaborate at the conference. We hope youll join us for 2+ days of total immersion to drive better data, stronger solutions, and bigger transformation.

The post “Mayor of the Internet” to keynote Microsoft Business Applications Summit appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The Project Service (PS) solution will enable system-driven, automatic updates, in alignment with other Microsoft announcements that have highlighted the improved update process for Dynamics 365 (online):

• Modernizing the way we update Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 and Update Cadence – Business Applications Summit
• FAQ for Dynamics 365 Update Policies

New Project Service Update Policy:

• Manual updates lead to irregular and delayed updates which increase risks to the customer, support difficulties, and potentially increase downtime.
  • This required organizations to increase update planning and testing across their instances.
  • Leading to longer gaps between updates and often required deeper customer investments into their upgrade planning and testing.
• PS will move to an automatic update approach.
  • Many other solutions already push minor updates into customer orgs, automatically (i.e. Customer Service, Sales, and Marketing).
  • This will reduce customer risk, improve system supportability, and will make the update motion smoother and more predictable.

Project Service Version Eligibility:

• The new policy will be rolled out to instances with PS v2.4 and later as early as May 13th.
  • Microsoft will gradually exercise the new policy for instances eligible for automatic upgrade, so customers may not see any immediate impact to their eligible instances.
  • Customers can still update from the Admin Center if there is an update that has not yet been applied.
  • For instances with PS earlier than v2.4, customers should plan to manually upgrade the org to the latest available version, bringing them in line with the new policy.
• For customers using PS v3, the automatic update policy will be enabled in the months following enablement for PS v2.
• Stay tuned for upcoming information on the overall move from PS v2 to PS v3; however, Microsoft will not automatically upgrade any customers on PS v2 to PS v3.

Scope of the Automatic Updates:

• Project Service releases new updates of the solution roughly once a month with occasional hotfixes being released more frequently.
  • These monthly updates will include patches to resolve issues and may include minor functional, reliability, and performance improvements.
• For major updates, Project Service will follow the approach employed across Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.
  • Project Service will deliver two major updates per year, in April and October.
  • These will offer new capabilities and functionality.
  • Major new capabilities will be enabled in a public preview prior to this delivery period so customers can validate major updates in a sandbox environment.

Solution Upgrade Timing and Impact:

• PS updates will undergo testing to ensure the solution upgrades successfully while also safeguarding that no breaking changes are shipped through upgrade.
  • Major changes to the user interface, solution behavior, or significant new features will be shipped twice yearly after theyve been available behind a preview.
  • Automatic updates will be completed during periods of low traffic for the hosting geographical region with minimal service disruption.

The post Automatic Update Policy for Project Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We are pleased to announce the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection public preview is now available! With Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection were providing a cloud-based service for online merchants to help increase revenue, lower fraud-related costs, and improve customer experience. In this release, Fraud Protection preview supports payment fraud detection and account creation protection.

Watch Fraud Protection demo

Like many other ecommerce merchants at Microsoft, both our in-store and online channels have been hit by high fraud costs during our retail digital transformation over the past few years. With the large variety of products, diverse buying experiences, and the scale of our operation, we couldn’t find a vendor to meet our needs, so we designed a solution in house. Our internal solution helps protect against payment fraud and much more. At the heart of the system, the solution focuses on finding the right balance between reducing fraudulent transactions without blocking legitimate transactions we receive from our customers. It has been nominated by The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as a finalist for the 2019 Franz Edelman Awardan international award for achievement in advanced analytics and operations research. The solution we delivered for Microsoft is the basis for the technology that we are now commercializing.

Our approach with Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection combines our expertise as a merchant, with our world-class AI and fraud protection technology, and a depth of valuable data. With this product were focused on helping customers achieve three outcomes:

• Help lower fraud-related costs through the fraud protection network, our connected knowledge graph, and advanced AI that adapts to the changing fraud landscape. The product builds a graph of data that provides a view of suspected fraudulent behavior across participating Fraud Protection customers while still helping to protect the privacy of shoppers and the competitive intelligence of merchants. As a result, Fraud Protection customers can get increasingly accurate fraud assessments delivered by advanced adaptive AI that uses both their own real-time data and that of the connected graph.
• Help increase revenue through innovative bank and issuer partnerships that share fraud related information which can help increase acceptance rates for legitimate transactions.
• Create a better customer experience by reducing wrongful rejections and lowering friction during the buying experience. If a legitimate transaction gets blocked, we provide tools to help your customer support team quickly resolve the problem.

Get started with a fraud diagnosis

In early feedback from customers, we learned many are frustrated that the only way they can get a sense of whether a fraud prevention vendor may help them is to run a long proof of concept. While this is often the best evaluation approach, its also time consuming and comes with hard-to-justify expenses. For this reason, one of the differentiated experiences in Fraud Protection is the ability to preview the products capability to detect fraud in your business using your data, through the diagnose experience. By uploading historical data into Fraud Protection, the product will present an AI-driven analysis of the fraud-protection and revenue opportunities. This provides you with a way of helping to justify the investment in a proof of concept.

Do a real-time evaluation through API integration

After doing a diagnosis, you should have an initial understanding of the opportunity to improve your fraud protection. At this stage, we typically recommend that you proceed with a deeper evaluation of the product using more of the products features. You can start by implementing our device fingerprinting on your ecommerce portals and sending real-time transactions to the Fraud Protection APIs, so those transactions can be assessed for fraud risk. Our detailed KPI dashboards will help you shadow-test Fraud Protection relative to your incumbent solution. Your fraud analysts can use the AI-based virtual fraud analyst to help them set the right operating point to optimize the balance between fraud detection rate and false positives. Finally, when you are comfortable with the products performance in your business, you can enter the protection experience where you can further evaluate the products risk assessment in your purchase flows, and optionally choose to send trust knowledge to issuing banks to help improve acceptance rates.

Both of the above marquee features, diagnosis and the virtual fraud analyst, and many more, can be experienced today in the newly available preview. If you want to get a better understanding of how Microsoft might help you improve fraud detection in your ecommerce business, request the Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection preview to get started!

More resources to explore

• Learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection in the April 19 release notes.
• Stay connected and read about how to get started
• Engage with us in the Dynamics 365 community

We look forward to your feedback and input!

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection public preview is now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In the next release of Lifecycle Services (LCS), were excited to unveil a major update to the look and feel of the user interface (UI) in LCS. This change is in alignment with our goal to create similar experiences for the different Dynamics 365 products. There is no change in the functionality with this change.

The following changes are in this UI update:

• Accessibility is now built into LCS.
• Alignment in the user experience and controls used across Lifecycle Services and Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
• Alignment in the new Dynamics header that extends the Office header.

This is just the beginning. We will be making changes in the future as part of a longer journey to improve the usability and align the experience with the rest of Dynamics 365.

The post An update to our UI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

We want to notify you of the changes that were making to the servicing flows that will be released in the May 2019 update of Lifecycle Services (LCS).

Sign off on maintenance operations triggered through LCS

Today, on completion of any maintenance operation (servicing, database movement, upgrade, and putting system in maintenance mode) you have the option to sign off or sign off with issues as the last step to indicate completion of the operation. Only after you indicate sign off, is your environment ready for the next operation. The following changes we will be made to streamline the sign off process:

• Going forward the environment will be ready for the next operation after the current operation has been successfully completed. This means that sign off is no longer the terminal state but rather it is the completion of the operation. Operation completion states are now Successful, Rollback Successful, or Aborted.
• The Sign off button will be moved to the Environment history page, so after the operation is complete, you can navigate to the Environment history page to indicate sign off if you want to validate and capture this information.
• The release candidate check for moving packages from sandbox to production will continue to check if the package was successfully applied in a sandbox before you can move it to production. It does not depend on you signing off on the update.
• The sign off will only apply to servicing operation as that is the main operation where you validate the environment state to verify if there are any issues. For other operations, such as database movement, upgrade and maintenance mode, sign off does not apply and will not be visible.
• For service updates pushed by Microsoft, if the environment is not in a terminal state (environment has a pending sign off), then we do not apply the update. We see many instances where customers forget to sign off on a previous operation and because that is the terminal state we skip the environment and don’t apply the update. As a result, many customers ask us why we didnt update their environments. With this change, sign off is managed separately, so if your environment is in a Deployed state we will apply the update.

Provide a single package containing all customizations and ISV solutions

One recommended best practice is to provide a single package containing all customizations and ISV solutions when doing updates to your environment. The reason for this best practice is that with a single package containing all the changes it is easy to recreate the environment because you don’t need to worry about the order of packages applied. This also helps with CI/CD pipeline and provides reliability when doing the updates, as all the dependencies are included in the package. However, we dont have any validation checks that enforce this best practice. Soon we will be adding a warning check for Application deployable packages to highlight that there is a difference in the modules that exist on the environment and what is available in the package that is provided during deployment. This will initially be a soft-check but will later become a hard check that will prevent you from applying updates if all the modules on the environment are not accounted for in the package and in the list of modules to delete. If there are modules that are listed in the ModuleToRemove file, then those will be deleted. With the new self-service deployment feature, it is required that you use a single package because whatever is available in the package overwrites what is on the environment. Today, self-service deployment is available only to new customers signing up for Finance and Operations; however, existing customers will be soon be migrated to this feature based on their Azure region. We are adding this new check to help with this transition and enforce the recommendation. In addition to this, today you can manage customizations andthird-party models from your build server. In the near future we will also be adding a feature that allows you to create such a package from your development environment.

The post Upcoming changes to the servicing flows triggered through Lifecycle Services (LCS) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Last month, we announced the availability of new features in Lifecycle Services (LCS) that would enable you to configure when you get updates to your production environment and how you can pause an update if youre unable to take the update due to a critical business activity. At that time these features were only available to customers using version 8.1 and above. However, starting today these features will also be available to customers that are using version 7.3. For customers that are on 7.3, we will update their sandbox and production environments to the latest Platform update each month. For customers that are on version 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0, you can apply the latest platform update manually using the servicing flows. With the features now available in LCS, you will be able to do the following:

• Configure whether to get Platform updates for your production environment in the first, second, or third week of the month and in what time zone.
• Pause updates through LCS if you are unable to take the update. You can pause a maximum of 2 continuous updates. However, if you are more than 2 releases behind, then you will not be allowed to pause updates. For example, if you are on Update 23 and the currently available platform update is Update 25, then you will be able to pause. But if you are on Update 22, then you will not be allowed to pause.
• Get notified about upcoming service updates through LCS.

For more details, visit theONE Version FAQ.

The post Configuring LCS for monthly Platform updates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Many manufacturing organizations are transitioning from a traditional product business model to an as-a-service business modelincluding flexible consumption models (FCMs) and Anything-as-a-service (XaaS)that lets them pay for what they use. As-a-service models provide compelling benefits, such as:

• Predictable and renewable revenue streams
• Greater value to the customer, as they only pay for what they consume
• Deeper insights into consumption patterns to help inform add-on sales
• Lower operational costs by serving customers through a common platform

There are benefits and risks to an as-a-service model in manufacturing. For manufacturers, the service has value in that it provides a consistent revenue stream. Conversely, the risk lies in the service not being available for the customer to consume. Any downtime interrupts revenue for the manufacturer as consumption is halted and frustrates the customer with costly interruptions of service.

For the customer, the benefit is that there is a set recurring cost and no capital outlay. Plus, the customer doesnt have to keep up with the latest technology as its not their device. Upgrades and maintenance are typically factored into the service fee. The risk lies in the reliance on the service provider to provide a steady, reliable service and the possibility of the customer increasing usage of the service.

In manufacturing, the move to a service model is made possible by IoT and analytics, which enable the equipment to be part of a broader ecosystem. This process is known as connected field service and can detect and diagnose issues before the customer is even aware. Data generated from the device and analyzed by the manufacturer can drive predictive and preventative maintenance. The data gives the manufacturer a better understanding of how the device is being used and helps to form part of a digital supply chain to get the right equipment to the right place at the right time so there are no interruptions of service.

As a Service, or servitization, shifts the focus from the product to the end solution. It creates a frictionless customer experience. It takes the complexities of owning a device, including capital outlay, installation, maintenance, and other considerations out of the hands of the customer to the service provider for one consistent and recurring charge.

This transformation from product to service model is changing the manufacturing landscape. In an IFS research report of 750 decision-makers in 16 countries, 70 percent reported offering some level of servitization.

Companies that experience a downfall in demand can reinvent themselves as a service. For instance, a car manufacturer experiencing an economic downturn with an oversupply of vehicles can create a car rental service. Then, when the economy returns to its former good health, the car rental service becomes just another revenue stream.

Consider Siemens Gamesa, a renewable energy manufacturer of wind turbines. Siemens Gamesa is leveraging field service to extend the field capacity of its wind turbines. The company produces the wind turbines and performs on-going maintenance as a service offering. Siemens Gamesa performs predictive maintenance through IoT and analytics, by way of connected field service, collecting volumes of data from the wind turbines and leveraging artificial intelligence to pinpoint potential repairs.

Using Dynamics 365 for Field Service, Siemens Gamesa continuously monitors the turbines and leverages the power of IoT to collect data from the blades. If an anomaly arises, Siemens drone solution called Hermes, is launched to fly across the turbines to take images of the blades. Later, the images are stitched together in the cloud, removing the blade from the background so cracks along the blade can be easily seen. What took days to identify a crack in a turbines blades, now takes just minutes. Field service is scheduled and the most qualified technician is dispatched. Tickets are generated only when there is a need, reducing operating costs and ensuring first time fix rates.

According to Siemens Gamesa, its wind turbine and service portfolio creates value that reduces the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE), ensuring long-term returns for customers. Siemens Gamesa has significantly differentiated itself in the market by servitizing their renewable energy offerings.

Watch Siemens Gamesa video

Learn more about the Microsoft Connected Field Service solution.

The post Transition from a product to service model with connected field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365.