Recently, Microsoft announced that it is launching a new duo of artificial intelligence and CRM: called Dynamic 365. Dynamic 365 promises to deliver powerful business software by blending CRM with enterprise resource planning (ERP). Dynamics 365 is a direct competition to Salesforce and Oracle. There are a couple of features that are designed with sales and service personnel in mind.
Customer Insights: a stand-alone cloud service that has partnered with Facebook and Trip Advisor to bring data to end users. Companies can integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. The solution includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don’t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).
It’s been designed as a stand-alone service that can work with any of the Dynamics 365 CRM components — sales, customer service or field service — and can also work with any external CRM tool with open APIs. This last point is particularly telling because it’s giving customers who might not be using Dynamics 365 (but are using other Microsoft tools like Outlook) access to this feature.
The second piece is called Relationship Insights, which as the name suggests gives sales people information about the status of their customer relationships at any given moment. It’s built on the on the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which Microsoft introduced in 2015 and uses tools like sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of the deal closing and the next best action to take.
Dynamics 365 is promising to be exactly what sales and service departments have been requesting for ERP. Its easy-to-use functionality and robust insights will be a game changer.
Dynamics 365 will be available on November 1, 2016.