At its Fall 2021 Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced new capabilities across Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Office, and Teams, to make collaborative working across hybrid services more feasible. Alongside that, the Redmond firm also unveiled a new Customer Experience Platform that works as a unifying software-as-a-service (SaaS) product to personalize customer experiences, while simultaneously focusing on improving the feature set of Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing.
As far as the former is concerned, three key points have been remarked upon specifically, including accessible business data, increased collaboration, and real-time engagement. To make results from business data more efficiently retrievable, the Microsoft Search service can be utilized, followed by making it more viewable through actionable cards in Outlook and Teams.
For increased cohesiveness across these platforms, meanwhile, Dynamics 365 sales records can now be collaborated on within a Teams chat or channel, alongside a "chat now" pop out capability anywhere in Dynamics 365 to communicate via Teams. And finally, live co-presence to view who is working in real time has also been released across various Dynamics 365 apps, with further information on how to engage with these participants via call or message being showcased as well.
The Customer Experience Platform will offer the following key features with its release:
- Consent-enabled Consumer Data Platform (CDP): This feature, in preview, enables the chief data officer (CDO) to use consent data directly in the CDP as an integrated, first-class capability. Organizations can utilize consent enablement to build complete customer profiles, manage known and pseudonymous aliases, ensure consumer data practices are compliant and protect that data with robust privacy and security controls, all in real-time.
- Expanded business-to-business (B2B) tools: A business-to-business CDP combines customer data from all sources – CRM, email, websites, point-of-sales, partner systems, social networks and more – and performs identity resolution at the contract and account level to generate unified profiles for individuals and accounts. This feature is now generally available.
Content snippets that are generated through AI will also be utilized to fine-tune the content composed in emails, while a nifty segmentation builder that is now GA will aim to improve return on investment by targeting the right audience. More on these changes can be found on the Dynamics 365 blog.