The Total Experience Playbook
by Larry Mead, Kate Kompelien and Kurt Schroeder
This year’s Microsoft Business Application Summit hosted over 4500 members of the Microsoft community in Atlanta to showcase amazing customer stories along with their vision for the future. Major announcements were made on topics such as the Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Marketing.
To share our excitement, we’ve put together a list of what we believe are the Top 10 announcements coming out of this year’s Business Application Summit.
With support for surveys using Microsoft Forms Pro, you can create and use surveys to measure customer sentiment and satisfaction. With survey responses, you can make use of customer feedback to make data-driven decisions and automatically include the responses in the criteria for segmentation, lead scoring, or branching a customer journey.
Using the channel integration framework in Dynamics 365 for Sales, the soft phone dialer can easily be integrated with a customer engagement app. This will allow sales reps to make calls directly from the contact record using their telephony provider without ever leaving the form.
With A/B email testing built into the Marketing product, marketers can create alternative versions of a message and define what their business goals are. A few small test groups will be determined by the system based on their target segments with different versions of the message being delivered to group. Automated statistical analysis determines which design has the best results based on the pre-defined business goals and sends the winning design to the rest of the segment.
Since the release of CRM 2013, there has not been an out of the box method for qualifying a lead without an opportunity. Thankfully, this is about to change! Microsoft will be adding an organization-level setting that can be configured by admins, that when enabled, gives the ability for users to be prompted for which records they would like to create when the lead is qualified.
Along with this feature, they will be adding the auto-population of the contact and/or company-related fields when a sales rep selects an existing contact and/or account at the creation of a new lead.
Lastly, notes and attachments that were captured by a sales rep on the lead will now be shown on the opportunity record after the lead is qualified.
Some of the biggest changes coming to Power BI out of this year's Business Applications Summit are directly aimed at larger organizations. While PBI has always been a great tool for all sized businesses, many are looking for finer grained control. The most recent updates enable that control.
In addition, the ability to bring AI to Power BI was already good, but has gotten a whole lot better (and easier!)
And finally, there is a new Q&A visual that looks fantastic.
With the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service integration with chat, an organization can automate routine conversations, allowing agents to have more time to focus on high-value interactions.
Incoming chat requests can be routed to virtual agents that have been created with Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service, while allowing seamless escalation of conversations to a human agent.
In the event of escalation, while the human agent is engaging with the customer, the complete context of the interaction is made available to the human agent through the full transcript of the virtual agent conversations.
One of the longstanding issues with augmented and virtual reality experiences has been the need for a way to easily create content. The Dynamics 365 Guides PC app, enables employers to easily create interactive, customizable training experiences to empower employees by allowing them to learn with step-by-step instructions while on the job. Dynamics 365 Guides can be seamlessly integrated within the Field Service experience, allowing for incident types to have associated guides that can be accessed by technicians directly on the job site.
With the October 2019 update, administrators can now enable a customizable form experience for the opportunity close process. Instead of the standard prompt with limited options that is shown when closing an opportunity, users can now be prompted with a quick create form that is customizable to include additional information for why the opportunity is closing. This will allow businesses to gain insights and build new strategies for improvement based on past losses and successes.
Power Apps Portals gives the ability to build low-code, responsive websites that allow external users to interact with data stored in the Common Data Service, while merging the capabilities offered by Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement portals.
Organizations can create websites that external users can access either anonymously or through login providers such as LinkedIn, Microsoft Account, or other commercial providers. Websites can also be created for employees that can connect using their corporate Azure Active directory account.
The portal designer makes it easy to build pixel-perfect websites, manage webpages, sitemaps, and templates, and add custom website branding using bootstrap themes.
Power Apps Portals can also be integrated with other Microsoft services, such as Power BI embed, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft SharePoint, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Active Directory B2C, and Azure Application Insights.
More complex business processes can be accommodated using pro dev extensibility, which allows for the same capabilities as the Common Data Service platform and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Portal. This includes templates, code plugins and workflows to help cater to more complex tasks for your website.
The AI Builder is a low code artificial intelligence platform that supports the Power Platform.
Key capabilities of the AI builder that have been announced so far include:
We hope you enjoyed our list of the top 10 announcements to come out of the 2019 Microsoft Business Application Summit. If you would like to discuss anything from this year’s Summit or connect with one of our experts, please feel free to reach out.