New features and updates in the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights

Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s comprehensive suite of applications, continues to evolve with innovative features and enhancements across its Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights modules. The latest advancements in the 2023 release wave 2 empower organizations to revolutionize their strategies, elevate customer engagement, and optimize decision-making. From seamless data integration to AI-driven innovations, these updates offer a glimpse into the future of customer-centric technologies. In this blog post, we will highlight key updates and new features that users can expect to be released from October 2023 to March 2024 for the following applications: 

• Dynamics 365 Sales 
• Dynamics 365 Marketing (now called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys)
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights (now called Dyamics 365 Customer Insights – Data)

It is important to note that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights began to be sold together under a single product SKU called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.  Microsoft renamed the individual applications to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data, respectively. For the purpose of this blog, we will continue to reference the original names of the products.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales’ 2023 release wave 2 brings a range of innovative features through Copilot. These advancements streamline processes, enhance productivity, and empower sellers to drive meaningful customer interactions and achieve exceptional sales outcomes. Whether it’s AI-generated account summaries, content recommendations, or streamlined task management, these new features underscore Dynamics 365 Sales’ commitment to equipping sales teams with the tools they need to excel in a competitive marketplace. 

• Know your account better with AI-generated account summaries: Dynamics 365 Sales’ AI-powered account summaries offer a consolidated view of customer data, including buying behavior, opportunities, cases, and news. Sellers can swiftly access comprehensive insights, enabling personalized engagement and effective prioritization. 
• Elevate your customer engagements with AI-recommended content: AI-driven content recommendations streamline access to relevant documents, enhancing sales teams’ ability to resonate with decision-makers. Contextually appropriate and summarized content saves time and enriches customer interactions. 
• Gear up for meetings with AI-generated preparation notes: AI-generated preparation notes consolidate essential meeting data from various sources, equipping sellers with key points for informed conversations and impactful interactions. 
• Stay on top of your deals with AI-generated opportunity summaries: AI-generated opportunity summaries provide instant overviews of opportunity progress, helping sellers tailor strategies and prioritize efforts for successful deal closures. 
• Stay on top of your leads with AI-generated lead summaries: AI-generated lead summaries leverage data from Dynamics 365 Sales, Bing news, and LinkedIn to deliver quick insights, allowing sellers to personalize approaches and focus on high-potential leads. 
• Stay updated with contextual news within Copilot chat: Bing’s contextual news integration keeps sales teams informed about customer industries, trends, and news, enabling more insightful conversations and informed sales strategies. 
• Follow up on emails using recommended actions: Recommended actions automatically identify and prompt follow-up tasks from email conversations, reducing manual tracking and ensuring timely task completion. 

The 2023 release wave 2 introduces a range of features to Dynamics 365 Sales to streamline assignment processes and empower sales managers with insights for improved decision-making. These features revolutionize assignment management, enabling sales teams to operate with agility and responsiveness, drive better engagement, and maximize business outcomes. 

• Notify sellers and sales managers after assignment rule execution: Swiftly address unassigned leads/opportunities to prevent delays and business loss. Immediate notifications empower sales managers and sellers to take action, troubleshoot, and prioritize, while customizable settings ensure timely awareness. 
• Improve success rate of assignment rules with harmonized pipeline monitoring: Optimize automation effectiveness by tracking unassigned leads/opportunities through comprehensive pipeline monitoring. Refine assignment rules and enhance efficiency based on error insights, streamlining the sales process. 
• Empower sellers to proactively pick next prioritized record based on business rules: Elevate productivity by allowing sellers to choose high-priority leads/opportunities. Business rule-driven self-assignment optimizes workloads and empowers teams for better outcomes. 

The 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Sales introduces an innovative feature to facilitate seamless teamwork while optimizing sales strategies. With the capability to guide multiple sellers concurrently through distinct yet coordinated sequences, sales teams can now achieve unparalleled collaboration. In scenarios where various sellers collaborate on the same account or opportunity with tailored actions, this feature ensures visibility into team members, their activities, attached sequences, and account changes. Assigning diverse sequences to different sellers for a single record enables synchronized efforts, empowering teams to work cohesively toward successful deal closures. For instance, an account executive and a solution architect can simultaneously pursue a target account with individually tailored sequences, enhancing engagement and outreach. 

• Assign different sequences to multiple sellers for the same record simultaneously. 
• Enable seamless collaboration among sellers working on a shared account or opportunity. 
• Facilitate parallel efforts with distinct yet coordinated sequences. 
• Sellers can view team members utilizing sequences on a specific record. 
• Attach additional sequences to records with existing sequences. 
• Access sequence details and track completed and upcoming activities, even if not the record owner. 

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft refreshes and modernizes the user experience. The refreshed design introduces captivating drop shadows and vibrant background colors, elevating visual appeal and user engagement. Embracing fluent-based controls across forms, business process flows, and dialogs enhances operational efficiency, guiding users toward optimal outcomes. A redesigned command bar ensures intuitive navigation, while refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows simplify interaction. Streamlined input and error message styling further enriches the experience, ultimately fostering increased productivity, user satisfaction, and empowered decision-making. 

• New styling with drop shadows and vibrant background colors. 
• Fluent-based controls for modern, efficient interactions. 
• Intuitive command bar design for streamlined usability. 
• Refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows. 
• Enhanced input and error message styling for clarity and ease. 

Please note: Microsoft recently renamed Dynamics 365 Marketing to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. 

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft introduces Copilot. This innovative feature harnesses AI to seamlessly guide marketers through domain authentication, content optimization, journey creation, and quiet time scheduling, enhancing efficiency and delivering exceptional results. 

• Effortlessly authenticate your domain with step-by-step Copilot guidance: Maximize email deliverability and brand reputation by seamlessly authenticating your domain with Copilot. Enjoy intuitive, step-by-step guidance through the setup process, eliminating technical complexities and enabling your team to focus on crafting captivating customer experiences. 
• Perfect your message with Copilot text editing and rewriting: Elevate content creation with Copilot’s rapid text iteration capabilities. Effortlessly rephrase messages, adjust tone, and refine content length across emails, templates, forms, text messages, push notifications, and event registration pages, enhancing engagement and delivering superior results. 
• Create journeys by describing them using Copilot: Empower effortless journey creation through Copilot’s generative AI. Describe your desired journey using everyday language and let AI bring it to life. Accelerate collaboration, stakeholder alignment, and personalized customer experiences while focusing on content creation. 
• Prevent messages from sending during unwanted times by setting up quiet times using Copilot: Enhance engagement and compliance by setting up quiet times with Copilot. Ensure messages align with customer expectations and regulations. Copilot simplifies the process by enabling natural language-based quiet time setup, allowing tailored control over channels, message types, and business lines. 

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft introduces enhancements to make it easier for marketers to create highly personalized and engaging experiences for your customers using pre-built templates. These templates not only empower marketers to achieve more with less effort but also provide a wealth of creativity and best practices. 

• Leverage out-of-the-box templates for various scenarios, including inbound marketing, outbound marketing, e-commerce, event hosting, customer service, and more 
• Seamlessly adapt and customize templates to suit your specific use cases 
• Harness your team’s collective knowledge by creating, sharing, and reusing journey templates 
• Easily generate new templates from existing journeys, tailoring them to include specific assets or journey structures 
• Organize and discover templates effortlessly through tagging 
• Preview templates before implementation in live journeys for confident decision-making 

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft introduced customized reporting capabilities to cater to diverse data aggregation needs. Marketers can now effortlessly create custom Power BI reports tailored to their business needs by leveraging Microsoft Fabric capabilities. Seamlessly access data for deeper comprehension of campaign dynamics, lead management, market performance, and customer engagement, aiding in the identification of novel opportunities. 

• Integrate Dynamics 365 Marketing with Microsoft Fabric for effortless data access 
• Create tailor-made Power BI reports aligning with business requirements 
• Utilize your premium Power BI license to harness insights without data replication, ETL pipelines, or external integration tools 

In addition to the features above, here are a few other noteworthy updates: 

• Capacity increased from 30 million marketing contacts to 100 million marketing contacts 
• Monthly interactions capacity increased to 300 million monthly interactions from 100 million 
• Personalize customer experiences using calculated metrics from Customer Insights 
• Qualify leads and route to sales when buying is likely 
• Accelerate your pipeline with integrated analytics 

Please note: Microsoft recently renamed Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Data. 

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Microsoft introduces Copilot. The newly introduced data prep report from Copilot streamlines the process of transforming raw data into insightful customer information, encompassing segments, measures, and predictions. AI-backed recommendations empower you to proactively enhance data quality, resulting in accurate insights and optimized business outcomes. 

• Leverage AI-generated summaries to evaluate data quality. 
• Gain insights into overall data quality, enabling improvement efforts. 
• Understand data suitability for different insights and predictions. 
• Access actionable recommendations for enhanced data quality. 
• Elevate business user focus on generating valuable insights and experiences. 

In the 2023 release wave 2, you can now further augment personalization for your customers by using customer measures from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and tailor journeys and content based on loyalty, lifetime value, and any other calculated measure. With this data seamlessly accessible, you’re empowered to deliver experiences such as personalizing offers based on their average order size or frequency of visits to the store. 

• Amplify personalization by utilizing customer measures from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights 
• Tailor marketing messages and journey branches with attributes from customer profile entity tables 
• Access customer measures without data migration, facilitating streamlined insights 
• Customize content variants and journey branches through intuitive, no-code personalization tools in Dynamics 365 Marketing 
• Empower personalized experiences like tailoring offers based on average order size or store visit frequency 

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Customer Insights, you can now ensure customer profiles and associated insights are updated in real-time based on these signals, allowing you to provide the most targeted and personalized experience as they engage with your website or mobile app. This empowers you to foster loyalty, increase engagement, enhance satisfaction, and drive higher conversion rates. 

• Foster loyalty and engagement by delivering immediate, targeted experiences 
• Enhance satisfaction and drive higher conversion rates with real-time personalization 
• Unify and synchronize customer data in real-time for a comprehensive view 
• Ensure up-to-date and synchronized demographic data across systems and profiles 
• Capture and update customer activities in real-time for timely, relevant interactions 
• Utilize the Customer Insights API in tandem with various platforms for tailored online experiences 

Harness the power of Azure Data Lake storage’s Delta Lake format to seamlessly enhance your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights experience. Delta Lake integration allows you to onboard your customer data directly, eliminating the need for additional data integration efforts. The inherent compatibility of Delta Lake format expedites processing times while ensuring accuracy, resulting in more current and actionable insights. By streamlining data movement and formatting, this integration accelerates time-to-insight, enabling organizations to stay agile and responsive in dynamic business landscapes. 

• Effortlessly attach Delta Lake-format data from Azure Data Lake storage as a source in Customer Insights 
• Avoid data reformatting and intermediate processing, enabling rapid insights and reducing operational complexities 
• Leverage Delta Lake capabilities for seamless upserts, maintaining data accuracy and consistency. 
• Accelerate insights processing with incremental updates, ensuring up-to-date customer profiles and insights 
• React to fast-changing customer interactions promptly with the most current information 
• Optimize segmentation, measures, and predictions processing for timelier and actionable insights 

In addition to the features above, here are a few other noteworthy updates: 

• Create moment-based experiences with real-time segments 
• Leverage customer insights in other business applications 
• Increase control and flexibility of customer data from Microsoft Dataverse 
• Get insights by automatically unifying your customer data from Dataverse 

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 support partner to highlight new Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing features that your organization should utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as planned after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 2? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.