Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 2023 Release Wave 2

2023 Release Wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) brings exciting latest updates for partners and their customers. This latest set of updates includes a range of improvements for Dynamics 365’s sales, service, and marketing-focused applications in the Customer Engagement suite and all the other applications rolling out from October 2023 through March 2024.

Not surprisingly, most major improvements revolve around introducing Copilot—Microsoft’s generative AI service integrating throughout Dynamics and the rest of its cloud platform. But many other notable updates are also coming, the highlights of which we mention here.

This post highlights the key updates partners need to know about in this latest wave. We break them down by application in the Customer Engagement suite—Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Field Service.

Watch the following video:

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Dynamics 365 Marketing is set to expand its Copilot features, offering marketers powerful tools to quickly create new and engaging experiences. These enhancements will allow you to offer a whole new level of personalization in your tailored email content, images, and layouts.

Microsoft is powering up its B2B dashboards and your ability to assign leads to the appropriate sales representatives directly. These improvements will help foster closer collaboration between marketing and sales teams, enabling them to function seamlessly as a united force throughout the entire customer journey.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing

You will see Copilot enhanced across the board. You can use natural language to describe your desired journey, and then Copilot will build it for you in real time. If you have used Copilot to work with marketing segments before, this new process with journeys will be familiar. It will be customizable, of course. Once Copilot has built the template, your customers can design the specifics.

Timing matters in marketing, and now Copilot can help schedule delivery of your content when you want your customers to receive it. Some new settings will be available so you can instruct Copilot to find the optimal time for individual audience members to receive new messaging.

Other Notable New Features

Beyond Copilot enhancements, many other improvements are on the way, including these.

Leverage Microsoft Fabric integration to create custom Power BI reports

This integration grants you seamless access to vital data, providing a comprehensive view of your campaigns, lead management, market performance, and customer engagement. With these insights, you can pinpoint fresh opportunities and make data-driven decisions.

Enhance customer experiences by incorporating calculated metrics from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into your strategies

You can personalize journeys and content based on factors like loyalty, lifetime value, and other calculated measures. This will help you create tailored experiences, such as customizing offers based on average order size or store visit frequency.

Qualify leads more precisely

Dynamics 365 Marketing already includes some powerful lead-scoring tools. But now, you can create more precise, granular scoring criteria. You can factor in alignment with your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), intent to purchase, recency, and engagement.

Accelerate your pipeline development with integrated analytics

Utilize premade dashboards to monitor pipeline progress and assess the impact of journeys, marketing messages, and content at various stages of your business process. For organizations employing Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, optimize pipeline velocity by aligning the objectives of marketing and sales teams, fostering a shared perspective of the pipeline.

Dynamics 365 Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales empowers sales teams by helping them prioritize and streamline digital sales processes. Microsoft is introducing advanced capabilities for managing sales processes, such as assigning and monitoring lead status, offering recommendations for next actions, summarizing critical lead data, retrieving essential information for far-reaching sources, and allowing users to take essential actions seamlessly within their workflow.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales

Sales in Dynamics 365 have always been the focal point for Copilot development, but they have yet to let it languish. Users will get new Copilot tools to help them understand what has been going on with their accounts. They will be able to see what opportunities are tied to each account and any associated cases. So, for example, a new sales representative taking over an account can request a summary of the company’s relationship with that client without having to dig through emails.

You can also use that summarization capability to ask Copilot to help you prepare for a meeting. It will generatively research that account or opportunity and gather all the relevant information you need for that meeting.

Users can also configure Copilot to gather contextual news relevant to each account. Based on that account, it will look up information in Bing and gather it for you in a single summary. Again, this is extremely useful before customer meetings.

Other Notable New Features

And again, beyond Copilot improvements, many new, exciting features are coming for Sales in Release Wave 2.

Assign multiple sequences to different sellers for a single record

Release Wave 2 will make it easier for sales reps to work together to secure deals. For instance, you can allocate one sequence to an account executive and another to a solution architect, allowing them to target an account collaboratively. Sales team members can attach sequences to records even if they are not the owners, simplifying sequence management and improving visibility.

User interface refresh

Users will see many experience improvements, like drop shadows and new background colors, enhancing the system’s aesthetics and user-friendliness. Implementing fluent-based controls across forms, business process flows, and dialogs streamline user interactions, enabling more efficient and effective work within the system, leading to better outcomes. Refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows on form pages simplify navigation and user interactions. The new command bar offers an intuitive and familiar experience, reducing the need for extensive training and fostering quicker user adoption.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Release Wave 2 includes new features for Copilot, of course, but also new Teams integration and enhancements to the visual aspects of the agent workspace.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Dynamics 365 will continue to empower customer service agents to work more efficiently using Copilot. They can quickly draft email replies with the click of a button based on what is in the case file and the context of that email. Copilot will present tailored reply types, such as suggesting a call, requesting more information, providing service, empathizing with feedback, or resolving the customer’s problem.

Copilot will also better help agents find relevant knowledge base content. Based on a case file’s subject, it will automatically search the knowledge base and see if we have any relevant articles. Soon, Copilot can do this with third-party knowledge bases, too. So, for example, you could have it look at an engineering KB for technical topics relevant to the user’s problem.

Other Notable New Features

Of course, more is on the way for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, including:

Pin and unpin records in the timeline

This new feature allows users to stick important activities or records to the top of the timeline for quick and easy access whenever needed.

Use the “What you’ve missed” feature in the timeline to locate records quickly

This feature boosts efficiency by helping users prioritize and scroll through recent updates they might have missed.

Enhance collaboration with the “Join me on Teams” feature

This new Teams integration enables agents to collaborate effortlessly with internal or external users in a single click. This feature improves support activities by facilitating screen sharing and video calls.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

The upcoming Dynamics 365 Field Service updates bring many new features catering to frontline workers, service managers, and dispatchers.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service

Copilot will soon easily convert sales quotes directly to work orders. So much like we are seeing with Dynamics 365 Sales, Copilot can now summarize a case and all associated files and customer profiles. For example, when you need to bring in a senior technician unfamiliar with that customer.

Copilot will also help create work orders within Outlook from a side panel in the app. That is a guided process, too. For example, Copilot can see if the field service team has any other work orders open for the same issue.

Other Notable New Features

Here is what also is coming in Release Wave 2.

Enhanced offline sync for field workers

Due to new synchronization settings, frontline workers now have more control over their offline experience. These settings not only assist in conserving cellular data but also contribute to prolonging device battery life.

Integration of Guides in Field Service Mobile

Field Service Mobile users can seamlessly integrate Dynamics 365 Guides into the Field Service mobile app. While working on a work order, users can access guides associated with specific work order service tasks, providing them with step-by-step instructions. These instructions are invaluable for service technicians, aiding in quickly resolving issues and achieving a high first-time fix rate. Organizations can leverage the same guides created for HoloLens and repurpose existing procedures.

Microsoft 365 app integrations for existing Field Service customers

Frontline workers and managers can now utilize Microsoft 365 applications, such as Teams and Outlook, for efficient work order management. These work orders will synchronize with Field Service, serving as the central system of record for streamlined operations.

Know What is Next for Microsoft 365 Dynamics Customer Engagement

These were just the highlights our Dynamics 365 experts here at Stratos Cloud thought you should know about. Much more is coming in Release Wave 2 over the next quarter. You can find the full list of updates in Microsoft’s Release Wave 2 Plan.