As the new leader of Microsoft’s CRM Business Applications group, it is my great honor and privilege to announce that Dynamics CRM 2016 is now available! The new release is not only our most comprehensive ever, but it also represents a huge leap forward in our journey to deliver intelligent customer engagement.
Over the past few years, we have been focused on transforming our CRM offerings to leverage the full power of Microsoft – harnessing the strength of the intelligent cloud to help companies deliver amazing customer experiences across the breadth of sales, service, marketing and social engagements. Our strategy is clear: to enable organizations to personalize customer experiences – engaging customers at the right time, in the right place and with the right content; to give them the tools to be more proactive, and to empower them with the intelligence to be able to predict trends and identify patterns — to know what the customer needs and wants before they do.
Available both as CRM Online and on-premises in 130 markets and 44 languages, Dynamics CRM 2016 is focused on empowering employees to deliver the optimal experiences to customers, as well as engaging customers across all channels. We’re bringing all Microsoft has to offer in productivity and intelligence into a single experience. We’re bringing the advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities of the Cortana Analytics Suite to preview our first intelligent, adaptive processes for sales, customer service and social:
- Intelligent selling with cross-sell recommendations so sales reps can predict which products and services a customer will need during the sales cycle.
- Intelligent customer service with knowledge articles recommendations to empower service agents with answers to questions so they can more effectively resolve customer cases and solve problems on the spot.
- Intelligent social with machine learning capabilities powering sentiment analysis, as well as the ability to process significant streams of data to detect social posts that are most likely to be customer service cases or new leads.
- Intelligent collaboration with Delve functionality to surface trending content that is most relevant to what a person is working on.
In addition, we are also delivering significant enhancements in productivity, mobility and customer service:
- Productivity – Capabilities in CRM 2016 are seamlessly embedded into productivity tools, including Office 365. In CRM 2016, we’ve enhanced the CRM app for Outlook, delivered templates for our immersive Excel experience, simplified the creation of personalized sales documents in Word and enabled seamless access to contextual CRM documents across SharePoint, Office 365 Groups and OneDrive for Business.
- Mobility – CRM 2016 features full offline mobile capabilities for phones and tablets, the ability to create task-based mobile apps, Mobile Application Management with Microsoft Intune and next generation Cortana integration that surfaces CRM data for key sales activities, accounts and deals, and mobile marketing with SMS capabilities available with Dynamics Marketing in four countries.
- Unified Service – CRM 2016 delivers a single, unified solution for Customer Service across self-service, agent assisted service and field service. Building on the integration of Parature knowledge management in spring 2015, we now have a new role driven agent experience with the Interactive Service Hub, native Knowledge Management, surveys to capture voice of the customer and field service capabilities with our recent acquisition of FieldOne.
The CRM team and I are very excited about capabilities we are delivering today, and we are also looking forward to the next phase of our journey. As we look to the future, we will continue to combine the strength of the intelligent cloud platform to our business application service where organizations will be empowered and proactive – saving costs, increasing customer loyalty and even saving patient lives. For example, combining the field service capabilities from FieldOne with the power of the Azure IoT suite, will be able to deliver predictive maintenance right to the user, so companies can move away from a break-fix model to actually provide service before a breakdown. This will save time while creating efficiencies and predictability and increasing customer loyalty.
Intelligent customer engagement is here with Dynamics CRM 2016. This comprehensive release further strengthens our position as a leader in the CRM market and most importantly, brings even more value to our customers. We can’t wait for everyone to give our new capabilities a try!
View article here.
