Digital Disruption from EX²

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central is the current generation of Microsoft’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services. While both of these capabilities have existed under the Dynamics brand, the move to Business Central represents two big moves for Microsoft’s strategy.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a standalone platform or combined with Sitecore is a powerful tool for contextual marketing and digital transformation. By bringing together AX or NAV, and CRM into a complete enterprise solution, Dynamics unifies the capabilities of CRM and ERP.  Although marketers can clearly see the benefits and possibilities that it holds for digital transformation, licensing and scalability have proven to be somewhat more challenging to grasp. To get a handle on these aspects requires a basic understanding of the broader choices with Dynamics 365.

CRM solutions that are capable of agility and speed in terms of end user access are critical to boosting sales and overall salesforce empowerment. But for the many organizations that installed CRM software when the company was small, system challenges and limitations have begun to sneak up on them as the business grows.

Today’s multichannel shopping preferences and convergence of offline and online have retailers searching for ways to take the friction out of the customer experience. While large retailers like Macy’s have turned to AI-powered platforms to accomplish this goal, the expected growth of this emerging omnichannel and AI-powered landscape is clear from a recent Chain Store Age article.

Engaging customers, providing customized experiences and developing brand advocates are all important in the marketing world. For sales, the primary goals are converting qualified leads, forging strong relationships and retaining hard-won accounts. Customer service wants to anticipate what customers will need or want, be proactive rather than reactive and avoid customer experience failures. Although it might seem that marketing, sales and customer service need a variety of tools to accomplish their goals, each department can benefit from using social media to connect with customers. This task can be made easier by using the social insights module available in Dynamics 365.

In recent years, Microsoft has spent a great deal of time and money to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to the Dynamics 365 modules. "Insights" could well be the next catchword that Microsoft uses to market Dynamics. There are customer insights, relationship insights and organization insights, but the merging of Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Social Engagement to offer social insights may be one of the most important tools available for marketing, sales and customer service. Your customers are discussing you on Twitter, online forums, blogs and Facebook. Your prospects are discussing their needs and goals on their blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. Knowing what is being said and by whom can help your company in many ways, and social insights can help you obtain that information. Here are nine things you need to know about social insights.

It is no secret that customers have become increasingly demanding in recent years. It often seems that they expect you to know what they want before they do, understand how they prefer to be contacted and know whether they are ready to buy or just shopping. Furthermore, they want you to know which of your messages are of interest to them and deliver only those messages. Even if a customer interacts with you via social media, your mobile app, email, a kiosk located inside your physical store and your website, he or she expects you to track the entire communication journey and deliver content in the proper context. To accomplish this, you need data regarding every customer's purchase history, behavior, location and preferred method of interacting with you. You may already possess the data you need, but that does not necessarily mean that you can turn the data into actionable steps. However, combining the power of Dynamics 365 with the power of Sitecore can help you achieve your goals.

When properly analyzed and leveraged, big data enhances customer engagement through targeted, personalized and contextual marketing. The data also provides significant business intelligence that can help organizations achieve a variety of goals, including understanding their public image, increasing production efficiency or enhancing customer service. The primary problem with big data has always been the difficulty in correlating the information collected to obtain actionable insights. There is simply too much data for human analysts to find worthwhile information without the proper tools. Microsoft contends that humans need not be replaced in the process of extracting meaningful intelligence from big data, but they should be empowered to maximize the benefits that the data can provide. Adding support for Cortana and artificial intelligence to Dynamics 365 CRM is one way that Microsoft is attempting to give humans better tools for finding and using insights hidden in big data.

Effective outreach demands that you leverage technology to fulfill the needs of not only your consumers but also the team members who work so hard to see your organization expand. Could Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 help your teams activities evolve from hesitant undertakings into decisively smooth operations?

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, industry insiders immediately began to speculate on potential integrations. Although it is likely that Microsoft had performed a great deal of strategic planning prior to spending more than $26 billion for the acquisition, the company initially had little to say on how — or even if — LinkedIn would be integrated with existing products. Microsoft finally broke its silence in April 2017, announcing tools for sales and human resources that involved the integration of Dynamics 365 and LinkedIn.