Key features from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 2023 Release Wave 1 Plans

The Pragmatiq team have digested the release notes and pulled together our top picks across the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Applications.

Additionally, If you wish to see our top picks from the Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1 release notes, you can check out our blog here.

New features coming to D365 Sales

Enhanced SMS conversations

Public Preview April 2023 / General Availability May 2023

Businesses can use SMS to chat back & forth with a customer from the Dynamics 365 Sales application. Administrators will also be able to assign specific numbers to any user/team for SMS. The salesperson will get real-time notifications of incoming SMS messages and can interact from the chat displayed in the side panel.

Up Next widget

Early Access January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

The Up Next widget has been available in Dynamics 365 for a little while, but this release brings enhancement to the feature. The widget will show any scheduled activities to be completed that are assigned to a record, whether the activity was created manually or via a sequence. This is then visible to the seller within Sales Accelerator or added to the form for the specific record type.

Intelligent AI suggestions

Public Preview May 2023

This feature brings AI suggestions to help salespeople focus on the best tasks for the accounts they are working on. It pulls together a curated list of account-based suggestions for targeting priority accounts, so salespeople can clearly see what ones to work on next. This increases efficiency and improves sales effectiveness across the business.

Capture crucial details of a sales call (BANT)

Public Preview August 2023 / General Availability September 2023

This feature will help salespeople capture crucial details of a sales call. Throughout the call, the system can check if all of the key things have been captured; budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT).

Automate follow-up tasks

Public Preview July 2023

If you’re not good at remembering to follow up on things, this feature is going to be particularly useful for you! With this new AI-based feature, you can automate the creation of follow-up tasks. It works across the ecosystem, so will cover Dynamics, Teams, Outlook, etc., so nothing gets missed.

Follow-up tasks are available for quick reference from within the Up Next widget.

Enhanced opportunity form

Early Access January 2023

A new and improved version of input forms across different entities such as lead, opportunity, contact, and account. This update provides a cleaner visual layout, providing a better user experience. Feature updates include:

• Out-of-box opportunity form columns have updated proportions, to provide a wider central column
• Rearranged the command bar to provide the most frequently used buttons up-front
• The linked account is mapped in the header
• Added chevrons at the end of each Business Process Flow stage to highlight the button
• Added widget headers “Key details” and “More info” for clarity of information
• All of the header and field values are now in sentence case, to provide consistency throughout the opportunity form

Visualise key stakeholders with the smart organisation chart

Public Preview June 2023

Enable salespeople to quickly create their own customer organisation charts to better understand the various stakeholders for an account.

Redact sensitive personal data from customer calls

Public Preview February 2023 / General Availability September 2023

To protect customers’ sensitive data, Microsoft’s AI technology can identify and mask sensitive information, such as credit card numbers and identifiers, in customer calls. For salespeople, this information will be redacted from call summaries, transcripts, notes, and action items.

Get tips and suggestions while on a call with a customer

Public Preview July 2023 / General Availability September 2023

AI-driven insights that display real-time tips and suggestions to sellers whilst on a sales call. Get suggestions on product and service details, competitive battle cards, brand info, pricing, and more.

New sales pipeline view

Early Access January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

The new opportunity view in Dynamics 365 Sales provides salespeople with a better way than ever to manage their pipeline and quickly view opportunities. With this feature, salespeople can:

• Organise opportunities in the best way for you
• Personalise views
• Update information quickly using an editable grid and side-panel
• Add notes and tasks, and more
• See aggregations for pipeline value, number of deals in the pipeline, and other metrics

Administrators can customise the record side panel forms with custom attributes, add support for business rules and configure the charts.

New features coming to D365 Marketing

Auto UTM Tagging

Public Preview February 2023 / General Availability September 2023

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes help you track sources of traffic for your websites and landing pages. Marketing campaigns can be a significant contributor to this traffic, but it has to track without UTM parameters, however, these are time-consuming to manually generate and add to each link.

This new feature means that D365 Marketing now automatically tags all links in outbound messages with UTM parameters. There is also the option to override the default UTM campaign parameters and insert your own if necessary.

Frequency cap to prevent message fatigue

Public Preview February 2023 / General Availability September 2023

Sending too many messages can increase the chances of unsubscribes, lessen engagement and means key messages can get lost in the noise. Some customers might qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run at the same time, meaning that they could receive multiple messages through one channel in a short timeframe.

With the frequency cap feature, you can control how many messages are sent across multiple channels over a period.

• Define a specific cap per channel (email, text message, push, and custom channels)
• Enable daily, weekly, and monthly frequency caps
• Decide which journeys should have the frequency cap enabled or disabled
• Transactional messages will always be excluded
• Check which messages have been sent and which are still pending for each customer

New intuitive form experience in real-time marketing

General Availability April 2023

Easily create modern forms with advanced capabilities without relying on developers. This feature includes:

• Drag-and-drop editor to guide you through the entire form creation process
• Instantly publish a form as a standalone page or embed the form into an existing page
• Deliver compelling forms that match your brand

Send segment-based emails quickly without building a journey

Public Preview January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

Send emails to segment members, without the need to create a journey. This feature is optimised for any role or skill level, allowing anyone to use Dynamics 365 Marketing to send emails that take advantage of more advanced features such as email templates, personalisation, email analytics, and connected CRM.

Redesigned segmentation builder

Public Preview March 2023 / General Availability May 2023

The redesigned real-time marketing segmentation builder allows you to create segments based on customer interactions and engagement with your marketing messages, websites, events, and other channels. This data is combined with the demographic and firmographic attributes already available for segmentation.

Embed additional file types from the asset library

Public Preview January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

In outbound marketing, you can now add a wider variety of relevant information to your emails using additional file types such as documents, PDFs, presentations, and more. These can be easily uploaded to the asset library and then linked within emails.

Copy key recipients into email campaigns

Public Preview February 2023 / General Availability April 2023

Users can now add up to five additional recipients to emails in the cc field of an email campaign. Send to a specific cc recipient or use personalisation to automatically select the recipient based on the journey or audience.

Out-of-the-box dashboards across Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales

Public Preview July 2023

Use out-of-the-box dashboards to track your pipeline development and how marketing efforts are contributing at different stages of your business process.

A seamless integration with D365 Sales provides a comprehensive view to track accounts that are moving through the pipeline. This allows users to quickly understand the main drivers for lead generation and actions that can be taken to produce high-quality leads.

New features coming to D365 Customer Service

AI-suggested replies

Public Preview April 2023

Agents will receive real-time prompts and response suggestions in the chat, based on the context of an ongoing conversation. Organisation chat history is learnt over time, and the model will adapt over time so that the response suggestions are relevant.

New email template designer

Early Access January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

The advanced digital content designer will be available for creating and styling templates. It includes advanced layouts that are responsive and adapts to any screen size. Users can add elements like images, text, buttons or dividers easily while creating email templates.

Enhanced case form

General Availability April 2023

Enhanced user experience for agents, allowing them to upload multiple attachments and take quick notes, while simultaneously creating a case. Feature highlights also include:

• Find info quickly and manage cases by leveraging streamlined case form
• Add key information to the case quickly without losing sight of customer details, past cases, and previous interactions. This avoids case duplication
• Provide updates on existing customer cases without interrupting the case creation flow or switching tabs
• Take notes during case creation
• Upload multiple attachments directly to the case
• Access all the attachments related to a case in a consolidated view

Overall, this increases productivity as there is no need to switch applications/repeat processes.

Favourite knowledge articles

Public Preview January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

Knowledge articles are handy for agents to refer to resolve a customer issue. You can now add or remove articles from a favourites list, saving time spent searching for articles.

Favourited articles can be viewed in the form-embedded knowledge search control, app-side-panel-based knowledge search control, and independent knowledge search control.

View past support interactions using recent cases control

Public Preview January 2023 / General Availability April 2023

To provide a good customer experience, it is key that agents have easy access to previously reported customer issues.

This feature displays recent cases with colour-coded priority icons and the status of the case, allowing agents to quickly visualise the information.  To ensure that the most important details are displayed on the page, administrators can configure the most relevant case data.

New features coming to D365 Customer Insights

Display Customer Insights activities in a Dynamics 365 activity timeline

Public Preview April 2023

In Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, and Marketing, users can see all Customer Insights activities in the unified activity timeline (Dynamics 365 apps and Customer Insights must share a Dataverse instance).

Customer Insights activity data can appear within the same activity timeline already used today to add or view activities such as notes, posts, emails, and appointments. The unified activity timeline will be available across Accounts, Contacts, and Leads. This information can also be filtered, searched, and updated dynamically.

New features coming to D365 Customer Voice

Transfer projects if the owner leaves an organisation

Public Preview April 2023

Survey owners often don’t share their projects with team members. In such cases, if the survey owner leaves the organization, the projects they owned get lost because there’s no way to retrieve them. This new feature provides an option for the tenant administrator to retrieve these projects and assign them to other team members.

Record partial survey responses

Public Preview June 2023

When filling out a survey, respondents can often answer a few questions and then close their browser without submitting their responses. This results in a partially completed survey and leads to the loss of valuable user feedback. With this feature, partial responses can now be recorded.

New features coming to D365 Project Operations

Project budget management and time-phased forecasting

General Availability September 2023

This feature gives project managers more control over how much money they are spending and how much work has been done. It also helps them predict what will happen for the rest of the project.

Project managers can quickly see how they are doing with their budget and goals, and also make predictions based on how much they have spent so far. On top of this, they can keep track of it in different time periods using project calendars and work days.

Improved Expense mobile application

General Availability September 2023

The Expense mobile application allows users to itemize expense entries, such as hotel costs, confirm expenses, and receive expense-related notifications on the go. Improvements include:

• Expense itemisation – when required by your expense policy, you can split the total expense amount into the required breakdown, such as hotel day rate, fees, meals, etc.
• Review and approve expense reports that are submitted to you
• Get notifications about the expense reports your manager has reviewed and require action from you

New features coming to D365 Field Service

Organise service operations using the new trade feature

General Availability April 2023

This feature helps you to organise the different types of services that you provide for customers by creating groups called “trades.” Some examples of trades are plumbing, roofing, electrical work, and air conditioning services. This will make it simpler to create work orders, because only the types of incidents that are related to the trade you choose will be shown.

You can also connect trades to specific places and customers to make sure you only carry out the types of work you’re allowed to perform.