Author: Jennifer Morrison, Client Engagement Manager, Silverbear
It’s that time of year again when we’ve been eagerly scouring Microsoft’s 2023 Release Wave 1 plans to find the gems in the 441-page long guide, this time with a keen eye on those items that will help you recruit, retain and engage members.
As you might expect with a supporting guide of this length, the updates, which cover April 2023 – September 2023, are vast, and there are too many new benefits to go into each and every single one in detail here. And it’s highly likely that you wouldn’t want us to, so, to keep it brief, we’ve worked through the entire Wave 1 release guide and selected what we think are the best updates for Silverbear 365 and, of course, our customers.
In no particular order, here they are:
New email template designer
Email templates have had a massive overhaul. We've become accustomed to seeing slick branded emails and email templates that just weren’t quite to the same standard (unless you have great HTML skills). Email templates have always been used as a fast & easy way to send repetitive or transactional emails to your customers.
The new email template creation experience provides an advanced, digital content designer for creating and styling templates far more in line with tools we would use in the marketing platform. It includes advanced layouts that are responsive adapting to any screen size, and you can add elements like images, text, buttons, or dividers easily to create email templates.
Engage with your Customers using SMS conversation
This is bringing simple but effective customer engagement right where you need it. As the world is changing towards a digital way of living, more and more customers prefer to be contacted via SMS and this can be an effective channel to send reminders, provide quick updates, or respond to customer queries. The key capabilities of this feature include:
• Admins will be able to assign specific numbers to any user/team for SMS.
• Receive customer responses for SMS sent and revert to build an ongoing conversation.
• Send and receive SMS from all relevant Dynamics 365 Sales entity forms.
• Get real-time notifications for incoming SMS
Keep track of conversations with AI-generated summaries
Whilst this feature is still only in preview and won’t be available to mainstream users for a while, we still think it’s worth mentioning here as it really does showcase the path of travel Microsoft are on.
When calls are made via MS Teams the conversation summary feature will use the AI natural language model to summarise a transcript of the conversation. This will enable you to easily recap any customer interaction. The ever-evolving platform will allow you to confirm if the summary was usefully constructed ensuring that this truly becomes an essential tool.
Automate the creation of follow-up tasks
Manually creating follow-up tasks can be cumbersome and prone to misses whilst creating the follow-ups should not become another task. With this new AI-based feature, you can automate the creation of follow-up tasks, gaining back valuable time to focus on higher-priority items and ensuring important tasks do not fall through the cracks.
The system automatically captures your follow-up tasks from various Office applications like emails, Teams messages, and Teams call transcripts, then nudges you with friendly reminders, thus enabling you to take them toward completion.
Manage duplicates when importing leads in bulk
Bad data directly impacts brand reputation and revenue but also impacts your own confidence and trust in your data. With many of you adding leads via bulk imports, particularly after large annual conferences, it becomes essential to catch duplicates early.
With this enhancement, the system detects duplicates within the bulk imported leads. This way, the quality of leads imported improves significantly, and duplicates would be prevented from entering the system.
Improve lead qualification with intent detection
So you’ve imported the leads, or had them created via email or web forms, but now what? How can you tell which of these are truly worth spending a lot of time on in order to progress to a sale? Each lead requires time to analyse, engage and determine the potential customer's needs.
This new AI-based ‘intent detection’ feature would detect customer intent from emails and ensure good quality leads are acted upon at the right time, thus saving precious time and allowing you to proactively engage with customers. This feature assists in fast-tracking the lead qualification process, increasing effectiveness, and creating operational efficiencies in the lead management process.
Integrate and search external knowledge sources from Dynamics 365
Now, this is an area that we know few of our customers use – but you really should! The knowledge base function of Dynamics 365 is an incredible resource, whether it be for knowledge articles you need to send to your members or for resolution steps or guidelines on your own internal policies.
This wave release recognises that Organizations may have knowledge content spread across multiple sources. Having the ability to identify the most relevant and contextual content across knowledge sources will help you find the most suitable solution for your customers easily. The integrated search providers allow you to configure external data sources where the content is ingested into Microsoft Dataverse and then search capability is provided across all sources.
Allow survey responders to record partial survey response
I’m sure we can all say we’ve started a survey and closed the browser before completing and submitting it for one reason or another. In Customer Voice, these partially completed surveys may have contained valuable feedback but were lost entirely.
This feature update ensures that partial responses can be recorded and includes settings that indicate how long a survey will remain in a “paused” state before the results are captured back to Customer Voice.
And there are many, many more
You can, of course, download the entire release plan here. Alternatively, why not contact our team of membership experts on 01483 409409 or by emailing hello@silverbear.co.uk