Highlights From Microsoft Dynamics 365 And Power Platform 2022 Second Release

MARKETING

Scale your multi-brand business effortlessly

This feature enables you to easily work and implement marketing strategies across multiple brands and product lines at scale using modernised business units, AI and Microsoft Dataverse.

You now have more control over your marketing assets and data that go across brands as well as define their organisation structure and access roles.

What’s more, you will never lose sight of the broader picture while you delve deep into the performance insights of a specific brand.

Key Features

• Allow all brands to leverage on AI to extend and customise marketing assets.
• Control and organise all digital assets, content, journeys and customer preferences for perfect alignment with multi-brand strategies.
• Use out-of-the-box campaign and data segregation capabilities across organisational boundaries to reduce compliance risk.
• Get marketing analytics for each brand, region or department.

General Availability: NA  

Create lead capture forms that convert visitors to customers 

The new lead capture forms are an upgrade to the marketing forms in the Marketing Application and enable moments-based marketing with real-time journey orchestration allowing you to capture customer information, enhance customer experience and increase conversion rates. These forms vary based on past customer interactions, can validate data, and have dynamic fields for intuitive user experience. And, these forms enable new interactions with customer journeys.

Key Features

• Create intuitive and engaging forms with a modern editor or use eye-catching templates to convert more visitors into customers.
• Use smart forms to dynamically hide or display fields based on past interactions.
• Enhance usability for your customers with advanced form validation.
• Create new interactions with customer journeys whenever possible like sending a thank you email.                                                                                                                                                                          General Availability: Feb 2023 

Extend your outreach with custom channels

This new capability will enable you to leverage real-time marketing in your existing communication channels so that you can easily engage your customers in critical moments in their journey. You can also use real-time marketing personalisation, consent and analytics tools for effective content creation and efficient delivery through your communication channels like SMS or WhatsApp. What’s more, you can capitalise on proven channels and plug any of them into your journeys to boost customer engagement.

Key Features

• Create custom channels on top of built-in channels like email, SMS, and push notifications to allow additional extensibility and real-time personalised targeting to enhance customer outreach.
• Use Dynamics 365 Marketing editors to effortlessly create custom templates for your channels.
• Identify proven channel templates to plug them into your customer journey easily through a new tile.
• Review deliverability analytics for your custom channel quickly.

General Availability: Dec 2022 

Target the right audience using the new segment builder

This feature lets you target the right audience and improve returns on your marketing investment. With it, you will be able to effortlessly build segments using natural language and an easy drag-and-drop logic builder, which doesn’t require any technical know-how.

You can also build segments using leads and then target them directly using customer journeys. Moreover, you can also preview the members and estimate the size of draft segments to further help you build the right segments.

Key Features

• Create segments directly based on attribute data for both contacts and leads.
• Enrich your segments with more complex logic as you scan across all attributes in the right pane and add them to your queries.
• Preview and estimate the number of segment members as part of segment creation.
• Use natural language to assist and ease the segment creation process.

General Availability: Feb 2023 

Optimise B2B marketing with a new OOB analytics dashboard

This new out-of-the-box analytics capability will allow you to track your pipeline development and examine the performance of different customer journeys, marketing assets, and channels pertaining to engagement and their contribution to each stage of your pipeline.

And, by using both Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, you will be able to share the pipeline view to align your marketing and sales teams on common objectives, thereby, speeding up your pipeline development.

Key Features

• Track how your business pipeline develops from lead generation to won opportunities to optimise all its key stages using OBB funnel.
• Get a deeper understanding of the correlation between your marketing efforts and key business outcomes across different pipeline stages.
• Pin-point top-performing customer journeys, marketing assets and channels that drive engagement and contribute pipeline development and revenue generation.
• Integrate seamlessly with Dynamics 356 Sales for a shared overview of your pipeline and collaborate together to boost ROI.

General Availability: Jul 2022 

Grow your business with 3X maximum monthly interactions

Using this feature, you will now be able to reach up to 100 million contacts and send up to 300 million messages per month with Dynamics 365 real-time marketing customer journey orchestration.

It allows you to deliver personalised messages and experiences at scale so that you are able to delight them at key touchpoints of their journey.

You will also be able to increase your customer base in existing and new markets, reach more locations, promote new products and services, and expand your prospective customer pipeline to meet higher sales targets, all of which effectively grow your business incredibly.

Key Features

• Reach up to 100 million marketing contacts through emails, SMS, and push notifications (3X more than the previous 30 million contacts limit).
• Deliver up to 300 million monthly outbound interactions through email messages, SMS, push, or custom channels ( 3X more than the previous 100 million outbound interaction limit).
• Create segments of up to 100 million marketing contacts.
• Engage with customers in near real-time with a 30-second response time.

General Availability: NA 

SALES

Track your progress using seller dashboard 

The new seller dashboard with its standardised reports allows sales managers and admin users to analyse and gain insights into how the Sales Application is being used as well as how teams and individuals using the application are performing.

That way you can effortlessly and efficiently manage relationships and calibrate sales activities at any given time.

Key Features

• Access seller dashboard to monitor sales performance and get summarised insights into sales activities progress.
• Get a clear picture of all activities, relationships, and conversations.
• Manage permissions to access the seller dashboard with admin privileges.

General Availability: Mar 2023 

Get tips and suggestions while on a call with customer

This one is kind of big!

Sellers will now be able to get AI-driven insights that help them figure out what exactly to say during difficult sales calls.

With this feature, the effectiveness of remote calls increases with conversation intelligence automatically providing tips and suggestions to the sellers automatically while they are on a phone call or talking to a customer in Teams.

All customer calls are transcribed and the AI gives sellers contextual information about customers, talking points on product or service details, competitive battle cards, pricing, benefits, and more.

Key Features

• Enable sellers to close deals easily through remote calls with real-time contextual information about customers, products, and pricing.
• Leverage AI-driven insights and customer intelligence that sellers can access easily during tough sales calls.

General Availability: Mar 2023 

Try enhanced sequence creation experience with new designer 

Leveraging sales accelerator and process automation, you can now set up sequences to develop and implement winning sales strategies. On top of that, it helps you provide an improved user experience along with features of the sequence designer during sequence configuration.

Key Features

• Get a consistent and convenient automation experience across Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration and Dynamics 365 Sales sequences.
• Use the new sequence designer to enable managers to edit a sequence step using a side panel.
• Define an exit rule for a sequence and understand the end of any sequence branch with an exit icon.
• Save all the changes in sequence steps with a single click.

General Availability: Oct 2022 

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Route calls to agents who are idle for the longest duration 

With a combination of AI and definable rules, you can now assign incoming service requests to the best-suited agents or those who are mostly idle, which is definitely going to boost your operational efficiencies.

Classify, route, and assign work items with complete automation so that you no longer have to rely on manual queue supervision and work distribution. What this does is ensure improved customer satisfaction and proper utilisation of agents.

Key Features

• Match the best-suited agents based on their idle times on the voice
  channel.
• Configure their voice queues to use the Longest idle assignment method.

General Availability: NA

Route work items to preferred agents 

This feature is another step towards enabling you to provide hyper-personalised customer service, which, in turn, allows you to develop deeper customer relationships and improve customer experience as well as satisfaction. Customers often feel comfortable with their familiar service agents who are aware of past customer interactions and preferences.

Key Features

• Define the preferred agents for your customers.
• Configure assignment of work items to the preferred agent.
• Select the assignment logic if the preferred agent is unavailable.

General Availability: Oct 2022 

BUSINESS CENTRAL

Use new Excel report datasets

With the 2022 release wave 2, you can enjoy enhanced reporting capabilities as well. The key improvements include the ability to easily create Excel layouts on the report’s request page, the introduction of a finance API that makes reports compatible with both Excel and Power BI, and the ability for users to create their own detailed analysis of selected data.

Key Features

• Create dedicated Excel layouts for selected data.
• Generate report datasets easily based on general ledger data, including budgets, global dimensions, as well as customer and vendor ledger entries.

General Availability: Oct 2022 

Reverse payment reconciliation journal entries 

The second release also tries to improve bank reconciliations by enhancing the rest report, adding a statement report with two sections for outstanding reconciliations and providing better automation for cheque ledger entries. You will also be able to reverse payment reconciliation journal entries to easily keep the mistakes out of the books.

Key Features

• Use distinct number series in the payment reconciliation journals to register and apply customer payments for easy identification of specific journal entries.
• Reverse the entries that were posted through the payment reconciliation journal.
• Prevent double-postings with the Business Central feature to identify bank ledger entries that have already been posted.

HUMAN RESOURCE

Integrations and extensibility 

When it comes to Human Resources, Microsoft (D365 HR Release Wave 2) has plans to make new integrations available along with other features to streamline custom integrations through Dataverse and other Microsoft products. This will enable resource management integrations, integrate training data from learning management providers, and create employee profiles with Microsoft Viva integration. 

1. Enable resource management integrations  

This feature will pull all employee information around skills, time, and more in Dynamics 365 Human Resources so that resourcing projects become more effective. 

Key Features 

• Avoid errors and duplication of information pertaining to the availability, cost, and absence of employees or resources to align with the requirement and help in the accurate resourcing of a project. 
• Ensure financial tracking and documentation of all billable resources that contribute to a project. 

General Availability: NA 

2.Integrate training data from learning management providers  

By providing a single view of all training data from partner learning management systems right next to all other employee data, this new feature will improve employee, manager, and HR business partner experiences. 

Key Features 

• Assign, deliver, and track employee training more easily and accurately. 
• Integrate with partner learning management systems to fully utilise existing learning management systems using scenario-specific APIs based on Dataverse. 
• Enable end-to-end scenario of assigning online training to an employee for companies using a wide range of partner-learning systems. 
• Get a centralised view of training data right next to all their corresponding employee data. 

General Availability: NA 

COMMERCE

Chat in Commerce with Omnichannel for Customer Service 

This feature brings customer service functionality into Dynamics 365 Commerce. It allows you to leverage the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service to deliver a consistent, personalised, and delightful customer experience and support at multiple commerce touchpoints.

This helps you increase sales, boost personalised customer engagement, and enhance the quality of customer service by combining a human agent and self-service using Power Virtual Agents chatbots that are integrated within Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Key Features

• Configure a chat widget on their e-commerce site with proactive notification capabilities based on various criteria and the ability to be invoked proactively based on different triggers.
• Pass on the contextual information to the Omnichannel for Customer Service for the chatbot and the live agent to act on behalf of the customer.
• Allow service agents to provide better customer service with a unified view of customer profiles and transaction data across all Dynamics 365 apps in the Omnichannel for Customer Service support channel.

General Availability: Oct 2022 

Chat in Commerce with Power Virtual Agents 

With this new feature, you have an option to use Power Virtual Agent as a chatbot on your e-commerce site, without ever needing to rely on Omnichannel for Customer Service.

Key Features

• Allow admins to configure chat widgets on their e-commerce sites with proactive notification capabilities based on various criteria.
• Invoke the chat proactively based on different triggers.
• Pass on the contextual information to Power Virtual Agents.

General Availability: Nov 2022 

POWER PLATFORM

View form updates to command bar, business process flow, header, and tabs 

This update helps makers create complex multi-entity forms that allow them to work on related records seamlessly with added functionalities and full control of the form component.

Key Features

• Leverage form component that renders model-driven app forms that you can use on other forms or easily add to other pages in model-driven apps.
• Configure command bar and business process flows and show or hide tabs and form headers.

General Availability: Dec 2022 

Improved experience for selecting dynamic values 

This feature allows users to easily interact with the dynamic value picker while using the designer.

Key Features

• Get an improved experience using the dynamic value token picker while building the flows.
• Avoid potential runtime errors by viewing the data type of the tokens.

General Availability: Mar 2023 

Support for sequential approvals in Power Automate 

With this feature, you will be able to create more complex approval workflows within Microsoft Teams or Power Automate.

Key Features

• Define multiple levels as well as roles in an approval flow within Teams
  or from within Power Automate.
• Allow all approvers to see the approval history at each level along with
  the outcome.

General Availability: Jan 2023 

Dataverse tables integrated inside Power Apps Studio 

This update introduces Dataverse integration inside Power Apps and an improved ecosystem of connectors that enable makers to build apps that can collect data from multiple sources. Additionally, it provides an easy and efficient app-building experience.

Key Features

• Get started with Dataverse right away with a familiar table-centric experience directly from within the Power Apps.
• Provide an easy and quick onboarding experience for freshers.

General Availability: Oct 2022 

Connect to external data from Dataverse 

What’s next?

There are a ton of other useful features and updates that come with this 2022 release wave 2 of Dynamic 365 and Power Platform all aimed at facilitating business growth through digital transformation. And, Dogma Group, is your trusted advisor when it comes to guiding you through your digital transformation journey.

With more than a decade of experience in business technology implementation and as gold partners of one of the leading technology solution providers, Microsoft Dynamics 365, we can offer you the best advice and assistance to implement business enablement technologies. Call us today for a no-obligation consultation on 01296 328 689 or email us at info@dogmagroup.co.uk for all your business technology needs.