The Microsoft Dynamics CRM development team have announced the latest update which will add even more new features that will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2016. This release is focused on the integration of two of recent Microsoft acquisitions (FieldOne and Adxstudio), providing customers with market leading capabilities for field service and portal solutions for community engagement.
Field Service enhancements for this release maximize effectiveness and customer satisfaction. Our solution matches proficiency and competency requirements against available resources, for even more intelligent resource allocation. And full integration with CRM provides a consistent look and feel that spans case management through work order completion.
Project service is a new end-to-end solution that helps organisations deliver revenue-generating customer engagements on time and on budget. It extends Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide a single system of engagement for project sales, delivery, and billing that uses optimised resourcing and intelligent, skills-based assignments. The solution supports back-office integrations to productivity and business applications, and offers a mobile experience for customer-facing resources. Field and Project service share a resource pool, and scheduled shared resources are surfaced in each application for enhanced visibility.
Employee self-service and the ability to create an efficient and well-informed workforce is now available worldwide through CRM and our new portal capabilities. Employee self-service streamlines common tasks by empowering every employee with definitive knowledge.
Community Engagement. With the recent acquisition of Adxstudio, Microsoft will now have web portal functionality integrated into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online as an add-on offering. Portals allow organisations to extend their CRM engagement scenarios with self-service profile management capabilities, rich content publishing, secure access and permissions controls, configurable extensions, and many more features. CRM portal capabilities are built with modern web standards in a responsive design for use on any desktop, tablet, or mobile device.
Intelligence. In this release, Microsoft will introduce guided navigation capabilities. Guided navigation provides context-sensitive interactive and scenario-based guided tasks and sidebars that are personalised to the user. Guided navigation helps onboard new application users quickly, facilitates user adoption of the application, and improves user productivity. This functionality will deliver guidance to support scenarios such as capability overviews for Trials, onboarding tasks for new paid users, sales scenarios for Sales Reps and Sales Manager, and “What’s New” content to introduce users to new features and capabilities in the latest release.
We will also introduce two new machine learning scenarios for Microsoft Social Engagement – Adaptive Learning and Automated Social Triage:
- Adaptive learning. Through sentiment analysis, Microsoft are able to determine how a product, a campaign, or a brand is perceived by people on social media. Previously, sentiment was calculated from a static algorithm in a post’s original language. In this release, adaptive learning has been introduced, powered by Azure Machine Learning, which enables you to customise sentiment scoring models according to your business or industry needs. If you start curating the sentiment value, the system will learn from it and create a custom domain-specific model for each customer so you can reach higher sentiment precision as every business is different (think about the gaming industry slang). The Azure Machine Learning team added new functionality for retraining and instrumentation to support this adaptive model – for example, a ski or snowboard manufacturer receives posts stating a product is “crazy “or “sweet”, etc. You can adapt the sentiment to this industry by categorising “crazy” as good and it will maintain that relationship going forward.
- Automated Triage. Based on machine learning technology, Microsoft Social Engagement will automatically detect intention in social posts and triage/route them as cases or leads into CRM. This will increase sales performance through suggestions on leads coming in from social channels as well as increase team efficiency for service organisations by identifying potential cases coming in through social channels. This helps improve team efficiency for sales and service organisations.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Spring 2016 Wave Release Preview Guide