Did you know Microsoft\u2019s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more?<\/p>\n
This year, we think they\u2019ve hit the mark. The 2022 Microsoft Release Wave 2 contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications, focusing on intelligence and collaboration. These focus areas seem especially appropriate given the time we live in \u2013 where AI continues to take off, and companies need to think more innovatively in terms of collaboration and communication due to the recent boom in remote work.<\/strong><\/p>\n The potential is inspiring.<\/p>\n In this blog, we will highlight some of the notable features in the 2022 Microsoft Release Wave 2 for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, which will launch in October 2022 through March 2023. We cover feature highlights for the Sales, Customer Service, Power Platform, Project Operations, Field Service and Marketing tools.<\/p>\n Microsoft uses customer feedback to determine its roadmap, along with insights from market trends for the demand for the latest tech and tools. As a result of their roadmap, they share a release plan which details all the new features and capabilities users can expect within their platforms. These include novel additions as well as fixes, enhancements and deprecations (so long Internet Explorer<\/a>).<\/strong> Each year, they release two waves, often previewing features as beta features to allow for final tweaks before their mass release.<\/p>\n Most of the features we\u2019ll cover are already available for public preview, so it\u2019s time to buckle up for the ride \u2013 the race has begun.<\/p>\n Conversation intelligence leverages AI to capture customer interactions, automatically transcribe calls, analyze content and deliver intelligent insights such as real-time tips during sales calls with suggestions for product and service details, pricing and battlecards.<\/p>\n During a sales call, Jadelyn gets a request from a customer regarding a new product. While he has not had a chance to become familiar with the product, conversation intelligence empowers him to access the information he needs.<\/p>\n At that moment, conversation intelligence prompts him with a suggestion to review the battlecard for the product in question. It can provide the customer with details of the product, benefits and pricing information to win the sale.<\/p>\n Sequences help sales managers enforce best practices by introducing a set of consecutive activities for sellers to follow throughout the course of a sale. A manager can connect sequences to leads and opportunities that appear in a seller’s work queue to help sellers prioritize activities to focus on selling, be more productive and better align with business processes.<\/p>\n Your company just hired three new salespeople and a new sales manager. The new employees have been onboarded but are still not 100 percent confident in memorizing the steps of your sales cycle.<\/p>\n By leveraging sequences, you can create step-by-step processes for your new employees to follow to help them through the sales process. You can use sequential steps, conditional branches, loops (for example: call the contact every five days until the deal is closed) and exit criteria to let them know when the process is complete.<\/strong><\/p>\n Since you likely have more than one person working on a deal at a time, you can now assign different sequences to different employees for a particular record at the same time. The sales manager\u2019s sequence will look a little different than the sales rep\u2019s sequence, but they can work on their processes simultaneously to work towards winning the deal.<\/p>\n Sharing links to Dynamics 365 records in email is common practice. Today, recipients of such emails need to select the link and open Dynamics 365 in a browser to view the information referenced, losing time and focus during the context switch. With the new Dynamics 365<\/a> messaging extensions for Outlook, users can now search for and insert Dynamics 365 records as information cards that display key preview information as part of the email body to increase conversation velocity.<\/strong> Recipients can view the preview as part of the email body and respond quickly, increasing their productivity.<\/p>\n Hannah oversees a large sales team, which is working on trying to close several deals for some key accounts. Hannah regularly sends out emails with the status of each of these deals. She is constantly flipping between Outlook and Dynamics 365 to grab links and copy over key information into her status update emails.<\/p>\n Leveraging this new extension in Outlook, Hannah can now search for and insert Dynamics 365 records into her emails without going into Dynamics. She can place \u201cinformation cards\u201d for each record in her email, making the information very easy to consume since the recipients no longer must copy the link and open Dynamics 365 in a browser to view the information she is referencing.<\/p>\n If Hannah wants to use information cards for the opportunities but not the account names, she can simply @mention inside her Outlook email to search for and tag the Dynamics 365 record in the email.<\/p>\n In the current fast-paced sales environment, collaboration features and guided assistance will be key to bringing your team to the next level and closing sales.<\/p>\n In part of several Microsoft Teams’ integration features rolled out in the customer service module, the mention capability allows users to reference CRM data like the @mention capability to reference people. This feature allows you to insert D365 CRM records as live-action cards as well as data from the records themselves.<\/p>\n A customer recently called requesting to update the shipping address for an order. Sasha is responsible for this case and is sharing the updated shipping address with her shipping team since this is a last-minute request \u2013 the order goes out this afternoon. From her email, she uses the mention feature to access her customer\u2019s record to quickly reference the order number and new address that was recently saved.<\/p>\n Collaboration across different sales teams happens primarily on Microsoft Teams<\/a> chat. This feature helps business users keep track of the latest in their conversations associated with a record.<\/p>\n Mark and Lisa are working on a hot new opportunity for one of their key accounts. They spend much of their day switching between Teams and Dynamics 365 to keep in touch about this opportunity. By enabling Teams collaboration in Dynamics 365, Mark and Lisa can now chat via Teams on screen in Dynamics (without opening Teams).<\/p>\n Lisa can minimize the chat to continue working on another Dynamics record and come back to the chat later to check for responses from Mark. Mark can link the chat as an activity record on the timeline, so they don\u2019t lose their conversation.<\/p>\n This new feature saves Mark and Lisa a ton of time by letting them work and collaborate on one application instead of clicking back and forth between windows.<\/p>\n Collab spaces in Teams is a tailored workspace created using Dynamics 365 templates for Teams. This release enables sellers to easily collaborate on Dynamics 365 records with their colleagues in Microsoft Teams.<\/strong> Additionally, the intelligent deal room dashboard provides a single pane for customer insights and activity coordination and intelligent activity recommendations.<\/p>\n Each time your team adds a new account in Dynamics 365, the project manager is responsible for going out to Teams to create a new Teams workspace. Your project managers try to use the same channels and folders each time they create a new Team to keep things consistent between projects. By leveraging this new feature, you can set triggers to auto-create Teams workspaces and use templates to define the channel and folder structure for each.<\/p>\n By setting the trigger to \u201cnew account created,\u201d your project managers will no longer have to create new Teams workspaces or manually add the channels and folders. Once in Teams, your project teams can use collab space dashboards to see all stakeholders and activities relevant to their key deals. They can also add intelligence to provide the next best actions based on account or opportunity updates.<\/p>\n Users can now create Power Virtual Agents<\/a> that support voice interactions and are available over telephony to assist with problems and obtaining information.<\/p>\n Myah is waiting for a package from your organization for a product she ordered and calls your help desk for a status update. Your customer service team is stretched thin due to a recent power outage that slowed down order processing yesterday, so it has been all hands-on deck.<\/p>\n A Power Virtual Agent responds to her call immediately and prompts her to select an issue category so it can help.<\/strong> Myah indicates she would like an order update since she hopes to receive her product before a special event.<\/p>\n Luckily, your Power Virtual Agent is well equipped to support her in finding this information, and your team can stay on task by catching up with order processing. After confirming her account information, the assistant identifies her most recent order and shares her package shipped out that afternoon and provides the carrier tracking number for her to monitor her package.<\/p>\n Myah leaves the interaction with the information she wanted and is satisfied with the efficiency of getting a quick response to her request.<\/p>\n The voice callback features allow the system to arrange for customers to retain their position and arrange for a callback when their turn arrives in a customer service queue during busy periods.<\/p>\n Damian has been working on installing a new security system in his home that he purchased from your organization and requires assistance with troubleshooting an issue.<\/p>\n He calls your help desk, but no agents are currently available to assist him. He does not want to wait on the phone as he would like to continue installing some of the other components and inform the bot that receives his call he would like to request a callback in 30 minutes.<\/p>\n Damian completes the other tasks for the installation and receives help finishing his project when an agent calls him back to troubleshoot his issue. Damian is satisfied with this customer service experience that saved him time.<\/p>\nDeciding on Features and Frequency for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform<\/h2>\n
Top Features: Sales<\/h2>\n
Get Tips and Suggestions While on a Call With Customers – Preview January 2023<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
Sales Accelerator Sequence Creation – No Public Preview<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
App for Outlook Improvements – Preview October 2022<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
Top Features: Customer Service<\/h2>\n
Mentions – Preview November 2022<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
Chat via Teams Inside Dynamics 365 – No Public Preview<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
Collab Spaces – Preview November 2022<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
Power Virtual Agents Support Voice Responses Over Telephony Channels — Preview November 2022<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n
Queuing and Call Back With Omnichannel – No Public Preview<\/h3>\n
Use Case<\/h4>\n