The purpose of the digital transformation capabilities? So companies can reach out and better connect with customers. Microsoft’s customer engagement solution, Dynamics CRM 2016, will be available worldwide. Their focus has been on transforming their CRM offerings to leverage the full power of Microsoft – harnessing the strength of the intelligent cloud to help companies deliver amazing customer experiences across the breadth of sales, service, marketing and social engagements. Dynamics CRM’s strategy is clear: to enable organizations to personalize customer experiences – engaging customers at the right time, in the right place and with the right content; to give them the tools to be more proactive, and to empower them with the intelligence to be able to predict trends and identify patterns — to know what the customer needs and wants before they do.
Dynamics CRM 2016 is bringing the advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities of the Cortana Analytics Suite to preview their first intelligent, adaptive processes for sales, customer service and social:
- Intelligent selling with cross-sell recommendations so sales reps can predict which products and services a customer will need during the sales cycle.
- Intelligent customer service with knowledge articles recommendations to empower service agents with answers to questions so they can more effectively resolve customer cases and solve problems on the spot.
- Intelligent social with machine learning capabilities powering sentiment analysis, as well as the ability to process significant streams of data to detect social posts that are most likely to be customer service cases or new leads.
- Intelligent collaboration with Delve functionality to surface trending content that is most relevant to what a person is working on.
In addition, Dynamics CRM 2016 is also delivering significant enhancements in productivity, mobility and customer service:
- Productivity – Capabilities in CRM 2016 are seamlessly embedded into productivity tools, including Office 365. In CRM 2016, they’ve enhanced the CRM app for Outlook, delivered templates for their immersive Excel experience, simplified the creation of personalized sales documents in Word and enabled seamless access to contextual CRM documents across SharePoint, Office 365 Groups and OneDrive for Business.
- Mobility – CRM 2016 features full offline mobile capabilities for phones and tablets, the ability to create task-based mobile apps, Mobile Application Management with Microsoft Intune and next generation Cortana integration that surfaces CRM data for key sales activities, accounts and deals, and mobile marketing with SMS capabilities available with Dynamics Marketing in four countries.
- Unified Service – CRM 2016 delivers a single, unified solution for Customer Service across self-service, agent assisted service and field service. Building on the integration of Parature knowledge management in spring 2015, they now have a new role driven agent experience with the Interactive Service Hub, native Knowledge Management, surveys to capture voice of the customer and field service capabilities with our recent acquisition of FieldOne.
The future? They look to the future, and will continue to combine the strength of the intelligent cloud platform to their business application service where organizations will be empowered and proactive – saving costs, increasing customer loyalty and even saving patient lives. For example, combining the field service capabilities from FieldOne with the power of the Azure IoT suite, will be able to deliver predictive maintenance right to the user, so companies can move away from a break-fix model to actually provide service before a breakdown. This will save time while creating efficiencies and predictability and increasing customer loyalty.
Intelligent customer engagement is here with Dynamics CRM 2016. This comprehensive release further strengthens their position as a leader in the CRM market and most importantly, brings even more value to our customers.
Interesting developments continue to come from Dynamics CRM. Looking forward to 2016.
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff
VP and Principal Analyst, Customer Facing Applications and IOT
