Dynamics 365 2022 Wave 1 Release Highlights: Customer Engagement

Every six months, Microsoft announces new features and updates across their Dynamics 365 platform. Here, CTO, Kevin Ingrey, and Solution Architect, Aliem Mandan, have picked out a few Customer Engagement highlights from the 2022 Wave 1 release.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

The first wave of updates in 2022 brings a new Customer Service admin centre application, which will simplify all associated Customer Service administration processes, accelerating configuration.

An enhanced email template experience will provide a new template gallery that has multiple views and search capabilities based on title, subject and content. Meanwhile, diagnostics for unified routing have also been improved, with administrators and supervisors gaining the ability to see errors and exceptions that occur during the routing process. They'll be able to look at the assignments in detail to understand how the work items were assigned and why some of them remained unassigned​

Additionally, knowledge article analytics will soon include the ability to drill into each article to understand its detailed trends, with dedicated reports providing historical trends for key metrics, such as the number of views, number of visitors and average feedback rating.

Dynamics 365 Sales

We have some exciting updates for Dynamics 365 Sales coming in the next wave that add fantastic artificial intelligence capabilities and digital selling solutions into the mix.

Soon, data and insights gathered from conversations will provide context-rich and sensitive information for your sellers to deliver more engaging selling experiences. They’ll be able to understand when action items are noted in calls through intelligent transcription capability and ensure they stay on top of all the updates and outcomes.

Meanwhile, to accompany the relatively newly introduced forecasting capability, we now have significant usability improvements, including the ability to assign attributes at each sales stage to help further improve predictive score modelling capability.

Dynamics 365 Marketing

Creating content where entire sections target specific customer segments allows you to craft messages that align with your customers’ interests and preferences. In turn, this drives engagement and brand loyalty. Until now, achieving this level of dynamic content was complex and required coding, but with the new conditional content experience that comes with 2022 Wave 1, marketers can easily create messages targeted to specific segments or attributes without writing any code.​

Marketing teams can now interact with customers by creating journeys based on their replies to SMS messages, too. Create custom keywords and add them to your messages and journey branches to continue the conversation with your customers​.

Lastly, Microsoft has introduced the ability to trigger journeys based on data changes in any Dynamics 365 app to engage customers at the right time without writing any code.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

In the world of Customer Insights, Microsoft is introducing B2B scenarios, expanding the use cases from individual consumers and clients to businesses that you may deal with. This new feature opens up the tool to a whole new audience looking to solve disparate data problems in order to better understand their business customers.

General updates

Modern advanced find

With modern advanced find, you can access any table in a model-driven app through search and use advanced filters to explore the data easily. The new view management experience will provide you with the option to share views so you can collaborate with your team efficiently, and managing views is made easy with personalisation options to build your own set of views.​

Record sharing and co-presence​

Use the new share button to email a link or copy the link, to share records as easily as you share Microsoft Office documents. A link to a record can only be shared with users who have permissions to access that record, maintaining data security. Co-presence in records has also been introduced, so you can see who’s working on a record in real-time and start a conversation with collaborators.

Create and join Teams meetings from in-app appointments

You can now schedule Microsoft Teams meetings from an appointment in your model-driven app, and join a Teams meeting with a single click from the appointment or the timeline control.​

Editable grid control support

A new editable grid control will be released to allow for inline edits within views and sub-grids. This will also allow for unlimited scrolling, preventing the need to navigate through pages.