The ability to quickly and accurately leverage insights and intelligence is becoming more and more critical for organizations looking to create personalized and differentiated experiences for customers, employees and everyone else across their supply chains and ecosystems.
Business and IT leaders are well aware of just how important insights and intelligence have become in building long-term customer relationships: Over the next 12 months, customer analytics will be the No. 1 customer-experience-related investment among TechTarget technology buyers surveyed.
Overall, TechTarget buyers ranked analytics as one of the top three factors central to their customer experience (CX) strategy—along with customer service/support and security/privacy. The reality is that most leaders view customer service, security and analytics not separately but as tightly interconnected aspects of a modern CX solution.
It’s also important to recognize that customer experience isn’t only about end-user customers; it is also about employees. The concept behind IT consumerization is that employees expect a digital experience at work that is comparable to what they experience in the consumer world—fast, mobile, glitch free, secure and analytics driven.
This was the case before COVID-19, but now, in a hybrid world with more people working from home, it is impossible and ultimately self-defeating to isolate the customer experience from the employee experience. More than half of the respondents to the TechTarget survey said it is equally important to prioritize the experience of customers and employees.
For IT and business leaders, it’s not about whether to use insights and intelligence to transform the customer and employee experience. Rather, it’s about how to maximize insights and intelligence—wherever, whenever and however they can be used to deliver a value-added, differentiated, data-driven experience.
The Advantages of Using Microsoft Dynamics 365
When it comes to delivering analytics and insights to maximize the customer experience, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has advantages other solutions can’t match.
Because the Microsoft cloud is built on a common data platform that includes connectors to external data sources, organizations can achieve a 360-degree view of customers across the entire customer journey to exceed customer expectations.
This level of accurate, secure, comprehensive, real-time and actionable data is essential to delivering a personalized, insight-driven experience. Within the Dynamics 365 platform, you can track engagement and analyze customer behavior with security built in across every customer touch point. You can use embedded artificial intelligence capabilities to predict customer behaviors, enable self-service insights and automate customer-centric experiences, among other capabilities.
Insights and intelligence are also essential to enabling best practices in customer service and in making customer-facing employees more productive and flexible—giving them the ability to do their jobs effectively from virtually any location, using a wide range of devices. Specific examples include:
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service uses built-in intelligence to deliver faster and more personalized support to add value to every customer interaction. AI capabilities help organizations gain comprehensive visibility into service operations; identify trends from intelligent dashboards; balance live and virtual agent workloads; and add common issue resolutions to Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service without writing code.
- Dynamics 365 Field Service leverages built-in intelligence to detect and resolve issues before the customer is aware of them and uses insight gathered by Internet of Things sensors to prevent service calls. Using AI, analytics and intelligent scheduling, it delivers an exceptional on-site field service experience for customers as well as technicians, and enables organizations to shift to an outcome-as-a-service model that increases value for customers, drives revenue and improves long-term customer relationships.
- Dynamics 365 Remote Assist uses mixed reality, combined with the insights and intelligence of the full portfolio of Dynamics 365 applications, to deliver interactive support and richer training. Field service technicians are more productive—they can work remotely and travel less often while collaborating in real time for faster decision-making, approvals, deployments and service. According to a Forrester Research Total Economic Impact™ report, field technicians can avoid 55 trips a year, throughput-impacting issues can be solved five days sooner than with other solutions, and organizations can not only improve the customer experience but also achieve a 138% return on investment over a 12-month period.
Takeaways
When it comes to using insights and intelligence to deliver transformative experiences for customers and employees, there is no room for compromises. You can’t use just some of your data, and you can’t really depend on a 280-degree view of the customer if you expect to compete in today’s data-driven world where customers and employees demand comprehensive, actionable insights. The fastest, simplest and most secure path to maximizing insights and intelligence is through Microsoft Dynamics 365. Visit Microsoft to sign up for your Customer Engagement Plan.
For more information, please visit Dynamics.Microsoft.com.
