Microsoft has announced their release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and there’s a great deal of excitement as to what this means for our customers and each other! You can read more about the release plans in detail here.
There is a lot of information to get to grips with, so I've tried to distil this down to give you a quick overview of the key points in both releases.
Innovation for customer satisfaction
James Phillips, President of the Digital Transformation Platform Group at Microsoft, introduced the new developments that will be available in the 2021 wave 1 release.
He started by discussing how Microsoft have continued to drive innovation and that this has accelerated over the last year, during these trying times, to ensure they can support organisations using their technology.
Over 500,000 organisations a month and a whopping 97% of the Fortune 500 are leveraging the benefits of both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, to transform and grow their businesses.
This is a huge number of organisations that are benefitting from increased knowledge, advanced technology, real-time data dashboards. And perhaps most importantly, these businesses are gaining a predictive understanding of their customers’ behaviours and needs, ensuring they are equipped to adapt know how to serve them best.
Happy customers lead to……. We can all guess the rest.
Enhanced data and insights
For me, one of the most exciting parts of this release are the enhancements made to data and insights, and the power that this can give to businesses. For example, a planet scale footprint that contains an AI platform, inside Azure, that takes structured and unstructured data. Then, this is all turned not only into insights and predictions, but can also be taken up by the Power Platform and transformed into applications/automations.
Wow.
By also using the wider stack of Microsoft Dynamics 365, we can create systems that can predict the future, all wrapped up in the Cloud.
This is a completely different approach to previous applications that Microsoft have produced and that other large scale business application vendors are still providing now.
The solutions in practice
Over the years, we have heard of many challenges, from car manufacturers in particular, leading to questions of safety and mass product recalls. If the same scenario for a car manufacturer were to happen now but with Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform in place, data and predictions would be sent back to the manufacturer, making them aware that there is a fault before it develops into a wider problem.
This allows the right people at the right time to make changes or repairs before it fails, becomes a danger to the customer and takes down the manufacturer's production line.
You can’t deny, this is a game changer!
This innovation can be applied to any other industry or supply chain too, for both B2B and B2C
Just think of the possibilities.
This allows you to reimagine your processes, into one holistic, unified digital transformation platform, that contains all the identity, security, management and compliance that you require.
An industry focus
But that’s not all. To accompany this, Microsoft have also introduced five new Industry Clouds (fig 1 & 2) to take the horizontal business domains and tailor them to specific needs.
Fig 1
Fig 2
Streamlining your processes to improve customer experience
Microsoft’s mantra is to ‘deeply and totally understand the customer and to predict their needs.’
This flow of predictive data sits across your entire organisation, aligning your back office, marketing, sales, delivery, and customer service teams, as they're all fuelled by the same intelligence that the Microsoft Cloud provides. This is a huge departure from Microsoft’s previous business applications.
Microsoft has the only comprehensive, data first, AI-powered customer experience platform.
It is a single platform to connect data, enrich it, make sense of it and to activate it, all whilst maintaining trust and privacy.
This approach allows you to provide a personal touch to your customers and breaks down silos within your organisation, as it unifies data and engages customers through analysis of their actions.
By tying this data together, you can engage with your customers proactively.
Customer insights are embedded with Dynamics to surface data from third-party external sources too, like LinkedIn. Now you can gain an enriched view of your customer, so you can provide them with tailored approaches and services. You will also have insights to predict things such as customer churn, product recommendations and customer lifetime value, straight out of the box, in this wave.
This level of data and insights would normally take months to build to be this accurate. Business analysts with no coding experience will be able to train these models easily, to be shaped and customised to exactly what your organisation needs.
This new ‘Customer Journey Orchestration’ has been added to Dynamics 365 Marketing and will 100% change the way that organisations can interact with their customers.
Eager to find out more?
We can help you with all aspects of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 stack. From moving your operations into the Cloud to implementing Power Platform or exploring how Customer Engagement can transform your customer experiences.