Our Top Picks from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 2022 Release Wave 2 Plans

Seller Dashboard

For salespeople, managing relationships and executing sales activities are part of the day-to-day. With this feature, you will have a dashboard that summaries progress highlights and insights, so salespeople can easily keep track of what’s going on and meet sales targets.

The dashboard will show progress across contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, conversations, relationships, and more.

View key insights across activities, relationships, and conversations you have engaged in.

Image from Microsoft Release Notes (Preview)

This feature will be available for public preview in October 2022 and generally available in December 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/sales/dynamics365-sales/track-progress-using-seller-dashboard

Track linked Microsoft Teams chat as activity in timeline

Users can now associate Teams conversations with a record and view it in the timeline. This is a long-awaited feature so it’s great to see that this will soon be coming to Dynamics 365.

Feature highlights include:

• Track a linked chat as an activity in the timeline
• See important activities in the chat on the associated record’s timeline
• Get notified when a conversation gets updated, a document gets shared, or when a conversation gets linked or unlinked
• Search the timeline for specific chat activities
• Go directly to the conversation of interest from the record’s timeline

This feature will be generally available in October 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/sales/dynamics365-sales/collaborate-seamlessly-team-members-tracking-linked-teams-chat-as-activity-timeline

@mention Dynamics 365 data in Teams and Outlook

Another long-awaited feature, users will soon be able to use the @mention to insert Dynamics 365 data in emails and chats, just like you can @mention people today.

In the previous release wave, users were able to search and share business data using the Dynamics 365 app for Teams or Outlook and by pasting a Dynamics 365 record URL. In this release wave, this feature can @mention to search and insert key sales information like customer or prospect details in Outlook emails and Teams conversations.

This feature will be available for public preview in November 2022 and generally available in February 2023. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/sales/dynamics365-sales/use-mention-quickly-find-share-dynamics-365-records-outlook-emails-teams-chats

Enhanced sequence creation experience with new designer

Sequences help to propagate and support winning selling strategies. With this new feature, users will have a consistent automation experience across Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration and Dynamics 365 Sales sequences, making it convenient to use both systems.

Using the new sequence designer, you can:

• Edit a sequence step using a side panel that provides more space with an improved experience
• Discover and provide an exit criterion for a sequence
• Understand the end of any sequence branch with an exit icon
• Save all the changes of sequence steps with a single click

This feature will be available for early access in August 2022 and generally available in October 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/sales/dynamics365-sales/try-enhanced-sequence-creation-experience-new-designer

Intelligent deal room dashboard

Selling often involves multiple roles and coordinating activities can sometimes be a challenge. The new intelligent deal room dashboard provides a single area for customer insights, activity coordination, and intelligent activity recommendations.

Feature highlights include:

• Deal room dashboard provides the latest account/opportunity information that is relevant for collaborating with others
• Customer information and sales progress are visible to all stakeholders working on an account
• Tasks can be easily assigned and managed
• Key documents associated with the account are centrally managed
• Easily collaborate with other stakeholders via meetings; centrally access information and action items from the meetings
• Recommendations on the next best actions based on account/opportunity updates

This feature will be available for public preview in November 2022 and generally available in March 2023. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/sales/dynamics365-sales/enable-sellers-orchestrate-activities-teams-using-intelligent-account-or-deal-room-dashboard

New lead capture form

Marketing forms within Dynamics 365 Marketing have been around for some time, however, the feature is getting an overdue uplift in this release.

Businesses will now be able to create smart lead capture forms that will dynamically display fields based on the previous user interactions. This data will then link back into the relevant marketing journeys, leads and contacts in Dataverse.

Other feature highlights include:

• A modern editor guides you through the entire form creation process
• Use templates or start from scratch
• Increase usability for your customers with advanced form validation
• Leverage new interactions with customer journeys to, for example, send a thank you email

This feature will be available for public preview in October 2022 and generally available in December 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/marketing/dynamics365-marketing/create-lead-capture-forms-that-convert-visitors-customers

Personalised AI-powered next-best content

Creating compelling content and offers are crucial when nurturing leads, engaging leads or retaining clients. In addition to specifying manual rules for content and offer selection in a message, AI-powered optimisation can also be leveraged to predict and suggest what will be the next best thing that we should recommend to the customer

The AI-model analyses customer preferences, interests and motivations, based on rich customer data from all your customer data sources through Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and past interactions with your brand.

This feature will be available for public preview in October 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/marketing/dynamics365-marketing/delight-customers-personalized-ai-powered-next-best-content

New out-of-the-box analytics dashboard

It is important for marketers to understand how their efforts are contributing to the overall business pipeline. This new out-of-the-box analytics dashboard allows users to track pipeline development, analyse different customer journeys, marketing assets, channels that are driving the most engagement, etc.

Feature highlights include:

• Track leads moving through the pipeline (from lead generation to won opportunities)
• Drill down to understand how marketing efforts are driving key business outcomes across different stages of your pipeline
• Analyse top-performing journeys, channels, and marketing assets (such as emails or forms) that are contributing to pipeline development and revenue generation
• Seamless integration with Dynamics 365 Sales for a common view of the business pipeline

This feature will be available for public preview in October 2022 and generally available in December 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/marketing/dynamics365-marketing/optimize-b2b-marketing-new-oob-analytics-dashboard

Marketing to sales handoff

This new feature brings a fully connected sales and marketing experience.

When nurturing leads and opportunities with real-time journeys, you might want your sales team to engage with a particular lead quickly. Within Dynamics 365 Marketing, sales activities (such as tasks and phone calls) can now be created directly from journeys.

For example, your organisation might have a marketing journey in a place that emails prospects with the aim to download an eBook. If this action was completed, you then might want to put them on a journey that pushes them through to the sales team to follow up with. Previously, you could have set this as a separate task, however, you can now set this up as a sequence, so a salesperson has a clear series of steps to take.

This feature will be available for public preview in October 2022 and generally available in December 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/marketing/dynamics365-marketing/close-leads-fast-automating-handoffs-sales

Customer support swarming for complex cases

When it comes to complex cases, input from co-workers across various departments is often required to resolve these. Users can swarm cases in the applications they are accustomed to using, including Customer Service workspace and Microsoft Teams.

For example, if your team is working on a complex customer service case, they might want to bring in other people within the organization to collaborate across the data, however, these people might not have D365 licenses.

You can now create a swarm in Customer Service and it comes across into Teams, so even those who don’t have D365 access can work on the case in an application they are familiar with.

This feature will be available for public preview in October. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/service/dynamics365-customer-service/use-customer-support-swarming-complex-cases

Auto summarise conversations

Reading through a long conversation transcript to understand the context, or writing a summary of the conversation, is time-consuming. AI can automatically provide a summary of the conversation to be shared with other team members.

This feature was available for public preview in 2022 release wave 1, and will be generally available in this release wave with the following key capabilities:

• Auto-generated summaries that users can use to share the context of their service conversations
• A summary format structure that provides insights about the customer’s issue and any solutions that the agent has tried
• The ability for agents to edit or hide the auto-generated summary if they don’t want to include it in the Teams chat

This feature will be available for early access in August 2022 and generally available in October 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/service/dynamics365-customer-service/auto-summarize-conversations-support-teams-based-collaboration

Manage skills for customer service teams

For efficient skills-based routing in customer service centres, administrators should be able to quickly set up the skills for users, manage the skills for multiple users, and manipulate user skills based on the fluctuations in demand.

In this release, Microsoft has made improvements to the admin experience, allowing administrators to:

• Easily set up a skills-based workforce
• Manage the skills for multiple users
• Manipulate the users’ skills to meet the fluctuations in demand

This feature will be available for public preview in October 2022. Find out more here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2022wave2/service/dynamics365-customer-service/enhancements-user-experience-manage-skills

Hopefully this article has provided you with an insight into some of the features that will be included in the 2022 Wave 2 Release. At Pragmatiq, we are excited about what these new features will mean for businesses, enabling businesses to achieve more with their technology.

You can access a full breakdown of the features on the Microsoft website here:

• Dynamics 365
• Power Platform

If you have any questions about the release, or would like to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365, please contact us. Fill out the contact form and a member of our team will be in touch shortly, or if you’d prefer, email us at info@pragmatiq.co.uk or call us on 01908 038110.