Microsoft’s release wave updates are a bi-annual series of updates and enhancements that the company rolls out to its business applications. These updates bring innovative new features, capabilities, and improvements that businesses can leverage to streamline their operations and enhance their customer experiences.
In this blog post, we’ll dive into some of the most significant changes and features being introduced in the Release Wave 1 update for Dynamics 365 CRM applications, exploring how they can help businesses improve their processes and customer engagement.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales provides market-leading tools that allows teams to better understand their customers and work smarter through the selling process. 2023 Release wave 1 provides updates across multiple areas of the application, focusing on the use of data and AI to prioritise efficient engagement with personalisation.
Revenue intelligence
With release wave 1, Microsoft are introducing new capabilities that allow sales teams to manage revenue more efficiently. Features include a new and enhanced opportunity management experience which visualises your sales funnel, along with intelligent forecasting functionality.
(deal tracker)
Sales execution
Sellers can now be more efficient in their roles with new productivity tools being added to Dynamics 365 Sales. Tools are being introduced to easily create opportunities, prevent duplicate leads, automatically create follow-up tasks, AI-powered suggestions, and more.
Sales engagement
Sales engagement capabilities allow sellers to accelerate and standardise the sales process through AI-driven insights. With Release Wave 1, users can expect improved conversation intelligence and insights, prepopulated emails, SMS communication, bots for initial customer outreach, and various productivity enhancements to sales accelerator.
See the full list of changes for Sales here
Dynamics 365 Marketing
The updates to Marketing with Release Wave 1 focus on four themes, leading to transformation of customer experience.
Collaborate
Deliver personalised customer experiences and enable teams to optimise marketing activities with the introduction of lead scoring builder, seamless CC on email campaigns for stakeholders, and conversation routing.
(lead scoring builder)
Data and AI
Leverage the power of data and AI to make real-time interactions easy and optimise your marketing activities to drive performance and efficiency. Capabilities being introduced in Release Wave 1 include Copilot content ideas & AI-powered natural language segments, out-the-box analytics, contact insights, automatic UTM tagging, and ability to send up to 300M messages per month.
(Out-the-box analytics)
Moments-based
Successfully engage customers effectively with relevant touchpoints shared across the best channels. New capabilities include a new intuitive form experience, enhanced customer journey workflows, quicker email campaigns, and prevention to message fatigue with limits.
Personalisation
Drive unique, personalised experiences for your customers with further personalised journeys, redesigned segment builder, intuitive event registration forms, tailored communications, and more.
(Event registration builder)
See the full list of changes for Marketing here
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
2023 Release wave 1 brings new functionality to enable you to provide best-in-class customer service. Investment areas include:
Administrator experiences
Administrator experiences enable you to quickly get up-and-running with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, improvements have been made to allow customisation of data models for historical analytics reports and integrating external knowledge sources.
Agent experiences
Enable agents to easily handle multiple interactions and deliver quality services with new features to create and manage cases efficiently, simplify case management, forecast agent demand, accelerate resolution with AI-suggestions and more.
(AI-suggested responses)
Omnichannel
Omnichannel capabilities enable instant engagement between agents and customers, regardless of what channel is being used. Features including Nuance Gatekeeper, customer service workspace, and customer call back requests help deliver a more secure, efficient service experience.
Supervisor experiences
The enhancements for supervisor experiences allow for real-time monitoring reports with custom visualisations and analytics, empowering managers to monitor key metrics, make corrections when necessary, and keep service levels high.
Teams integration
Enable best-in-class automation and collaboration with embedded Microsoft Teams functionality. Improvements with release wave 1 include customer support swarming and further integration between Dynamics 365 fields and cards.
Unified routing
Enable the flexibility and automation of AI-enabled workflows with unified routing. Enhancements have been made to assignment diagnostics, conversation routing, and skill/capacity matching for agents.
(Agent skill matching)
See the full list of changes for Customer Service here
Dynamics 365 Field Service
Dynamics 365 Field Service is designed to help your organisation move from paper-based, reactive service to predictive, world-class service.
Empower frontline workers
Enabling technicians and frontline workers to perform better service is key to Field Service. With release wave 1, users can expect improvements in the mobile app, with improved offline capabilities and tenant switching.
Optimise service operations
Release wave 1 helps increase service manager productivity with improvements being made to maintaining assets and spaces, as well as new capabilities to support service delivery.
Resource scheduling
With this update, the option for users to revert to the legacy schedule board experience has been removed.
See the full list of changes for Field Service here
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Project operations connects your departments and provides them with powerful tools to transform services from the ground up. Release wave 1 will bring various improvements to user experience and budget & time management during projects.
See the full list of changes for Project Operations here
Dynamics 365 Human Resources
Dynamics 365 Human Resources brings together all HR processes, removing disruption and connecting employees in your organisation with ease.
Benefits management
Release Wave 1 simplifies the management of benefits by adding bulk editing capabilities, as well as enabling employees to easily select their benefits within the application
Integrations and extensibility
Integration with learning management providers provides a single view of training alongside all other employee data, and resource management integration makes it easier to find the right resources for projects.
See the full list of changes for Human Resources here
That wraps up an overview of the upcoming changes for each of the Dynamics 365 CRM applications with release wave 1 2023. These updates will be live between April and September 2023. For updates on Dynamics 365 Business Central, please view our blog post here. Alternatively, for the full list of all changes in Release Wave 1, click here.
If you would like to talk about any of these changes in further detail or are thinking about implementing Dynamics 365 in your organisation, please leave your details in the contact form below!
