Microsoft has now published the release plans for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 2022 Release Wave 1, the first major update of the year. This release will roll out between April 2022 and September 2022, bringing a variety of new capabilities to the applications.
As usual, the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform notes are separate. You can read our summary of the Power Platform notes here.
Below, we detail our top picks from the release notes, across Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and Field Service.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing
Personalise interactions using a unified view of customer interactions across Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales and Customer Service
Users will be able to view all Dynamics 365 Marketing interactions in the unified activity timeline under contacts, alongside data from the Sales and Customer Service applications. This single view of all activities enables businesses to get a 360-degree view of their customer base and personalise experiences across channels.
Feature highlights:
- View both real-time and outbound marketing activities in the Dynamics 365 unified timeline
- Search and filter Marketing-only activities such as “All emails opened by Contact ‘X’”
- Preview your email content within the timeline view
Collaborate with your team using built-in Microsoft Teams chat
When it comes to working on marketing content and customer journeys, you are often required to work as part of a team and collaborate on various areas. With built-in Microsoft Teams chat, users can easily collaborate with other team members without leaving the journey canvas or email editing experience.
Feature highlights:
- Use all Teams chat capabilities directly within Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Easily add and remove people from the chat
- Suggest people to add to the chat
- Show all recent chats
- Set up which entities to include chat on
Quickly personalise emails using predefined dynamic text
Delivering personalised content at the right time is crucial for marketers. This new feature enables users to personalise email content using a list of most commonly used dynamic text. Additionally, Teams can create and share dynamic text that is unique to their business.
For example, you can select “first name” from the list, and the content will be personalised with the recipient’s first name.
SMS replies
SMS allows you to communicate with customers, however just sending an initial message is not enough, it is important to act on responses. Users can now create customer journeys based on SMS replies, to continue the conversation.
Feature highlights:
- Set up communication keywords in a unified SMS admin experience
- Define how keywords will be used in the journey
- Set up a default SMS reply for unrecognised keywords
- Fuzzy matching and semantic analysis of keywords
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Conversation Intelligence
Currently, conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales provides salespeople with the tools they need to increase productivity and enhance relationships. To take this to the next level, presenting the data and insights gathered from conversations needs, at the right time and in context, is key.
In this release, conversation intelligence is more discoverable and with powerful new search functionality, salespeople can take advantage of the full value of this clever tool.
Feature highlights:
- Discoverability: Increasing conversation intelligence discoverability within D365 and surfacing relevant insights at the right time in a salespersons’ workflow. In-app notifications are also introduced to make sure salespeople don’t miss valuable insights and can easily follow up on their commitments
- Break the silos: Bringing the valuable strategy and coaching dashboards from Sales Insights into D365
- Collaboration: Enabling comments, mentions, and sharing of conversation intelligence artifacts will make it an integral part of day-to-day work
- Powerful search: A powerful search and filter toolset over conversation intelligence and D365 rich data will help salespeople get even more valuable insights
Learn more about the planned and upcoming new features for Dynamics 365 Sales
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Using email templates
Email templates are helpful for sending repetitive and recurring emails to customers, helping to save time, ensure consistency and maintain professionalism.
This new feature brings an enhanced experience to email creation in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, including a new insert template gallery that will provide multiple views and search capabilities to compose messages using existing templates.
On top of this, Microsoft will also bring a new email template creation experience in this release wave.
Relevance search integration for knowledge management in portals
Relevance search delivers fast and comprehensive search results, sorted by relevance. This provides portal users with a consistent and seamless search experience whilst looking for knowledge base articles.
Feature highlights:
- Content access levels: Provides another level of access control to knowledge articles on a portal. This is separate from web roles
- Filters: Filters knowledge articles by product, rating, and modified on date
AI-generated conversation summary for Microsoft Teams-based chats
This new feature provides an AI-generated conversation summary of Microsoft Teams chats, so users can easily share with other employees. This saves time reading through long conversation transcripts and writing summaries to be shared amongst teams.
Feature highlights:
- Auto-generated summaries that agents can use to share the context of their service conversations
- A summary format structure that provides insights about the customer’s issue and any solutions that the agent tried
- The ability for agents to edit the auto-generated summary
Analytics for knowledge articles and search terms
New capabilities will include a built-in, historical view of knowledge articles and other related metrics, allowing managers to understand effectiveness of knowledge content and identify opportunities for improving their knowledge bases.
Feature highlights:
- Dedicated reports that provide historical trends for key metrics, such as the number of views, number of visitors, average feedback rating, and so forth
- Ability to drill into each article to understand its detailed trends
- Ability to navigate to the KB authoring page from the embedded analytics report to make relevant changes
- Ability for authors to drill into the key search phrases used by users from knowledge search analytics, which provides insights about the articles that are chosen from search results
Contextual collaboration using embedded Microsoft Teams
Easily collaborate with anyone in the organisation to resolve customer issues, using embedded Microsoft Teams without having to leave the case or conversation. Chats over Teams will be linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience.
Feature highlights:
- Chat with contacts from within Dynamics 365
- Access key Customer Service contacts, such as supervisors, queue members, and support experts
- Access AI-driven suggestions of agents who resolved similar cases
- Access recent Microsoft Teams chat lists
- Link and unlink chats to case and conversation records
- Access linked Microsoft Teams chats
- View message avatars and presence, where users can easily see profile pictures of a chat participant and their availability
Learn more about the planned and upcoming new features for Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service
Windows 10 support for Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile
Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile is a next-generation app built on Microsoft Power Platform that provides a modern and intuitive user interface. Technicians on Windows devices, such as Microsoft Surface tablets, will be able to see their bookings, manage their work orders, and perform inspections with this application, deeply integrated with the rest of their Dynamics 365 applications.
The Windows Field Service app will be available for the new Power Platform-based mobile app and will include:
- Offline support
- Outlook-style calendar for bookings, with intuitive user interface for quick service tasks completion and more
- Tailored user experiences available with Power Apps component framework with hundreds of powerful controls out of the box
- Access to device camera to take pictures and scan barcodes
- Deep-link support into the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app
Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile usability enhancements
This release brings usability enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app, ensuring your frontline workers have all the information they need at their fingertips. These features aim to reduce the time spent in the app, so employees can focus on the task at hand.
The following usability enhancements will be available as part of this feature:
- Customisable quick actions from the booking calendar control provide handy shortcuts for users, such as navigating to customer location or changing booking status
- Layout optimizations for tablets
- Enhancements to lookup controls allowing simple selection from a list of items
- Highlight important asset details within the booking form
2022 Wave 1 Release Dates
On January 31st 2022, early access will be available for administrators, allowing administrators to test certain capabilities in a sandbox instance. General availability deployment will commence on April 1st 2022 and continue until September 2022.
A more detailed schedule of the rollout and regional deployment dates will be published nearer the time.
You can find out more about the timeline here.
Access the Full 2022 Release Wave 1 Notes
Hopefully, this article has given you a good overview of some of the features that will be included in the 2022 Wave 1 Release. At Pragmatiq Solutions, we are excited about what these new features will mean for businesses, enabling businesses to achieve more with their technology.
You can access a full breakdown of the features on the Microsoft website here:
If you have any questions about the release, or would like to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365, please contact us. Fill out the contact form and a member of our team will be in touch shortly, or if you’d prefer, email us at info@pragmatiq.co.uk or call us on 01908 038110.
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