As we move toward the latter quarter of 2023, the Microsoft Wave release is imminent, this time, with a whopping 700-page release plan.
For Silverbear customers, these fall under mainly 3 key headers:
- Dynamics 365 Sales
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Dynamics 365 Marketing
Within the Sales area, the key focus in this wave release is to continue to use data and AI to help sales teams prioritise their engagements; reduce the number of mundane tasks, and accelerate execution and positive outcomes by providing recommendations, summarising data, retrieving information and performing actions in context.
For Customer Service users there is a large emphasis on Agent experiences. Working collaboratively with more sophisticated call routing to available agents; receiving incoming calls and/or live chats with enhanced controls; better AI-generated call summaries and similar tools widely required in modern call centre type operation.
Dynamics 365 Marketing continues to weave through and embed in every part of your data, allowing marketing teams to utilise Copilot to describe their needs and it, in turn, helps generate ideas and content faster and complete time-consuming tasks. Some incredible features include the ability for Copilot to generate templated content already using your company branding.
As you might expect with a supporting guide of this length, the updates, which move into general availability from October 2023, are vast, and there are too many new benefits to go into each and every single one in detail here.
With a strong focus on AI in most of the changes, we’ve picked our top 5 functionality-based updates that are most likely to be of day-to-day value to many of our customers.
Pinning Notes in the Timeline
The timeline as you know is the list of phone calls; emails; notes; tasks and other activities which is generally front and centre of your contact or account record. With more and more being recorded automatically it is easy to lose sight of valuable nuggets of information. By default, the Notes activity type will be enabled with Pin functionality.
You are able to pin a maximum of 15 records which will remain pinned for a year unless you unpin them.
Pin or unpin records in timeline
Copilot enrichment
Copilot, Microsoft’s next generation AI, your “copilot for work”, once again appears in many of this wave’s updates.
Some of the simpler, quick easily adopted items include:
- Initiating a search asking to “Show the latest news for account” and then @ the specific account record. A Bing search will return within the copilot window any news articles found.
- Ask Copilot to help you “prepare for upcoming meetings” – this will return a list of your appointments for the next 24 hours. Pick on of them and Copilot will generate a summary based on the last 3 months’ worth of notes on the account.
- Show emails not yet responded to.
Release Plans
Refreshed user experience
Perhaps a subtle update, but this includes updated styling, including drop shadows and brighter background colours, fluent-based controls, refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows. There is a small “new look” toggle near the top right of the window which can be quickly enabled.
Timeline What’s new
Another timeline change, this one needing to be enabled by an administrator, but will show any items you’ve not already seen on the timeline with a blue banner to the side (very much like an unread email in Outlook)
Teams collaboration defaulted to ON
With many of the changes, they would need to be enabled by an administrator, for example, Teams collaboration introduced over a year ago. With this wave release the integration will be auto-enabled.
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Release Planner
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