Helping customers accelerate their digital transformation with intelligent business...

[News Bot]

In July we unveiled a new approach to business apps, and today I’m excited to share more about the capabilities coming to customers in Dynamics 365 – our new cloud service with purpose-built apps that enable you to address specific business needs (like sales automation, operations or customer service) and start small with the assurance that the solution can grow as your needs do. Powered by advanced analytics and machine learning – what we call Intelligence – Dynamics 365 will usher in a new era of business agility for you, our customers.

 

Intelligence for your entire business – backed by deep experience

 

Across Microsoft we’ve invested billions, over multiple decades, into cutting-edge AI research to help every person and organization achieve more. Office 365, Bing Predicts and Skype Translator are just a few examples of how we have put these investments to work for our customers. We are also bringing those investments to you through Dynamics 365. Designed to help improve manufacturing and supply chain execution, make field service operations more efficient, sell more effectively and ultimately deliver exceptional customer experiences, built-in intelligence capabilities are infused throughout Dynamics 365 apps including: sentiment and intent analysis, preemptive service, relationship insights, lead and opportunity scoring, product recommendations and up-sell/cross-sell, and many more.

 

You can extend these built-in intelligence capabilities with independent apps that provide targeted and domain-specific intelligence. One example of this is Dynamics 365 for Customer Insights, a new analytics app from Microsoft we announced today. Customer Insights connects and analyzes data from Microsoft – and other widely used CRM, ERP, web, social and IoT sources – and applies intelligence to it to give you a 360-degree customer view with automatic suggestions to improve engagement.

 

Marston’s, a leading hospitality brand with pubs, breweries and inns across the U.K., is an exciting example of a customer already using this application to better understand their customers by bringing together Wi-Fi registration data, point-of-sale transactions, table bookings, survey results and social media – a data problem way outside of the scope of traditional CRM systems. Using Customer Insights, Marston’s anticipates they will be able to sell one extra meal, and drink, per pub per day, which they expect will result in about a £7.7 million increase to their bottom line.

 

Built to take full advantage of the capabilities in Power BI, Office 365, Microsoft Azure and Cortana Intelligence, with Dynamics 365 you can start small and scale on demand to deal with your biggest business challenges.

 

A growing partner ecosystem

 

As we mentioned in July, Dynamics 365 uses a new common data model that allows customers to extend functionality and build custom apps using PowerApps, Microsoft Flow or our professional developer solutions.

 

Solutions from our ISV partners also use this common data model, which means you can easily extend your Dynamics 365 capabilities with the unique industry and function specific apps found in AppSource. Since July we’ve added 100 new apps and made it easier for you to discover, trial and evaluate from within Dynamics 365. We’re also adding Solution Integrator (SI) partners to AppSource so you can easily find a partner to help with implementation and deployment. For more on what’s new with AppSource, please visit the Microsoft Partner Network blog here.

 

General availability and innovative ways to buy

 

Dynamics 365, and many of these new capabilities, will be available to customers in more than 135 markets and over 40 languages, beginning November 1. Available through Enterprise and Business Editions, to meet the needs of large and SMB organizations, Dynamics 365 will offer subscriptions per app/per user and introduce industry-first plans that embrace the cross-functional way organizations and employees need to work today.

 

With the app-based subscription you pay for the app you need, licensed to a particular user. With our new plan-based approach you can create roles that have access to all the apps and functions employees in that role need to perform their jobs. For instance, customer service representatives would be more productive with access to data and capabilities from the field service, customer service and sales apps. With traditional app-based subscriptions this would require three separate subscriptions for each customer service representative; however, using our new plans customers get one holistic subscription to have all the information at their fingertips, and customers could save four to five times the cost of traditional CRM providers.

 

Learn more

 

With so much attention on artificial intelligence and the promise it holds, it can be hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. When it comes to business process – and your business – Dynamics 365 delivers the intelligence you need to transform, now, backed by decades of research and investment. You can see demos of Dynamics 365 in action, streaming live, from Scott Guthrie’s keynote at the Dynamics UG Summit 16 at 11:30 a.m. PT today or learn more at our virtual event site here.

 

The post Helping customers accelerate their digital transformation with intelligent business applications appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

 

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