Microsoft has recently revealed its plans for CRM as part of the Dynamics 365 Release Wave 2 update which will have general availability in October 2021.
In our latest blog article, we will showcase some of the best new features that we feel will be the most useful for Dynamics 365/CRM users coming this October.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Drive seller productivity with Teams meeting integration
Currently salespeople are in meetings throughout the majority of the week and want to be able to create and join Teams meetings through Dynamics 365. Whilst at the same time, when in meetings, salespeople want the capability to update their sales records much more easily. By making it easier for sellers to access records in addition to more refined note-taking capabilities in Teams meetings, sellers will be dramatically improving their productivity and efficiency as well as driving more revenue and giving their business much more valuable data. Lastly, premium conversation intelligence will make it easier to have more enriched conversations with their customers.
This feature will allow you to complete the following activities as a seller:
- Setup a Teams meeting when scheduling an appointment from Dynamics 365.
- Access Teams meetings directly from Dynamics 365.
- Easily access and update sales records during a meeting in Teams.
- Draft notes easily throughout a Teams meeting and get these notes automatically synced back to the records in Dynamics 365.
- Take advantage of premium conversation intelligence for real-time call analysis and insights during a Teams meeting.
NB: This feature is only available in Unified Interface!
Lead Routing
Being able to respond fast to inbound leads is vital, particularly if you operate within a highly competitive market. The older the business, the more sophisticated the customer’s needs become, the more difficult it then becomes to keep up a fast response and personalised approach.
Businesses that are growing on a rapid scale need well developed automation to make sure that they operative efficiently, leads are correctly spread out across their sales team & to ensure that no leads are missed.
The new and improved functionality will provide all types of businesses with the following benefits:
- The ability to dramatically improve operational efficiency
- Speed up lead qualification time
- Improve sellers productivity
- Quick lead assignment
- Boost lead conversion ratio
This feature also includes the following functionalities:
- Set rules for automatic assignment. The following elements are included:
- Segments: This is a group of leads that can be assigned to the rule.
- Lead Attribute: All lead attributes that need to considered should remain here.
- Seller Attribute: The attributes and skills set of the sellers that need to be assessed for lead distribution should be added in the rule.
- Distribution method: Lead can be allocated through the round robin or load balancing methods.
- Capability to assess seller attributes and allocate to the seller. Seller attributes can be defined for lead routing.
- Build a new segment for the assignment rules.
- Keep an eye on your sales team and capacity. The user can maintain the sellers who would receive the leads. The capacity of the sellers can also be used which would be used when looking to distribute the leads.
NB: This feature is only available in Unified Interface!
Improve predictive scoring by enabling intelligent field augmentation
It goes without saying that businesses collate vast quantities of CRM data as part of their day-to-day business operations. This data can provide useful insights when used to train an AI predictive scoring model. Certain characteristics may have key values that, when recognised by the model, can improve its efficacy and remove confounding data points.
Making use of field augmentation, you are able to identify the fields and key values to allow you to train the AI model.
Field augmentation can come to include the following:
- Whether a customer is a new one or returning one
- Whether an email is genuine or fake.
- Recent actions
- Phone number length
- Private or public email domains
- Contact ID
For this feature, as an admin, you are able to select one of the attributes as an augmented field from the edit fields page.
NB: This feature is only available in Unified Interface!
Dynamics 365 Marketing
Create a webinar registration experience in Teams, then design the participants’ journey in Marketing in just a few clicks
Your business can benefit from this feature with the capability to setup webinars as well as manage those registrations in Microsoft Teams that will be easily integrated with Dynamics 365 Marketing. Furthermore, within Dynamics 365 Marketing, you will be able to develop personalised messages and send automated emails to all participants using the registration and attendance triggers and then monitor the results achieved through analytics.
This feature will allow you to complete the following activities:
- Build branded registration pages in Microsoft Teams that are integrated out of the box with Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Manage registrations, including approve, decline, and waitlist functionality
- Easily trigger journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing based on user behaviors in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Dataverse
Microsoft Dataverse data archival
This feature allows support for regulator requirements, internal and external audit requirements as well as reducing non-active data from the transactional store. Furthermore, it will also give customers the flexibility to gain business insights as well as to drive actions, based on combining the historical data archived, with the active transactional data already available through the Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse feature.
The feature itself will enable customers to define criteria through the use a root table and allow them to schedule archival of the same. From this, the system will be able to automatically pick the related tables. When the scheduled time arrives, the process will then look to copy data to a new storage and remove the copied data from the primary Microsoft Dataverse storage. This primary release will support BYOL (Bring your own Azure Data Lake). Microsoft Dataverse data lake will be supported in a later release. A dashboard will give you the ability to be able to manage the lifecycle of the archival operations.
Furthermore, this feature will enable Dynamics 365 apps and third-party apps to leverage or build on the Microsoft Dataverse platform, to accelerate the archival feature as well as support business processes. Dynamics 365 customers will be allowed to archive functional blocks of data as the Dynamics 365 apps enable these features.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that is currently using CRM and want to get more out of the above updates or a business looking to implement Dynamics 365/CRM then please get in touch with our team of DyNAMICS CRM experts today to discuss your specific requirements.
If you would like a full list and details of the improvements coming to Dynamics 365 / CRM in October, you can download a copy of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 2021 Release Wave 2 document.
