Dynamics 365 2020 release wave 1 - Summary of key points
Posted on 28th January 2020 at 18:02
The release wave announced by Microsoft on 27th January 2020 detailed the plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform from April to September 2020. If you followed the links from the Microsoft Blog you will find there is a great deal of information and many links you can follow through.
Here we have summarised for you the key information relating to the main Customer Engagement apps – Sales, Customer Service and Marketing. Our next blog will be covering the Power Platform updates.
Sales
The themes for the 2020 wave 1 enhancements are Simplify, Enhance Productivity, Accelerate, Transform Forecasting and Offer Mobility.
Products – enhanced functionality for adding Products to Opportunities with the ability to look up products from the catalog, add multiple products at one and compare products before adding to an opportunity.
Email Templates – easier selection using previews and categories for email templates.
Activity Management – improved grids, simplified navigation, drag and drop pipeline management using Kanban board automatically updating the status, calendar view.
Kanban View for Opportunity management – drag and drop opportunities from one stage to another.
Forecasting – a new set of capabilities to create and manage forecast processes.
Sales Insights – adding business value to Sales Insights with enhancements covering pipeline intelligence, Dynamics 365 Assistant, Relationship Analytics and Auto Capture.
Customer Service
The 2020 wave 1 release focusses on 3 key areas – Agent Productivity, Omnichannel for Customer Service and Connected Customer Service.
Knowledge Articles – improvements to the layout to simplify search results, the ability to review articles in a separate full screen and a new search function available outside of a Case record.
Case Resolution – a much needed feature to allow administrators to customer the case resolution entity.
Customer Service Team Member App – available to users with a Dynamics 365 Team Member Licence.
Queues / Case Routing Rules – usability improvements
Improved email experience – enabling agents to author and send emails within the context of the current record, navigate between records and have multiple draft emails open at the same time.
SLA’s – will be able to use out of the box actions from Power Automate.
Omnichannel for Customer Service - This app offers contextual customer identification, real-time notification, integrated communication, and agent productivity tools like knowledge base (KB) integration, search, and case creation to ensure agents are effective.
Connected Customer Service – connection IoT with Customer Service to enable businesses to look for issues with customers’ devices through IoT signals.
Customer Service Insights - These features include new views across the dashboards to help customer service managers focus on key support areas that need attention.
Marketing
There are a number of new or improved features within the Marketing App geared towards improving the customer journey by triggering personalised emails based on a recent record change.
Improvements to make compliance with GDPR easier.
Support for surveys using Microsoft Forms Pro.
Improved email content designer
Improved event management experience
Enhanced segment designer – including drop-down lists for easier selections, templates for typical marketing use and hybrid segments allowing hand-picked members.
Summary
With all features mentioned above, these are planned to be released from April to September 2020. Some topics may not have been released yet and timelines and functionality may change. You should familiarise yourself with the full Microsoft Policy relating to this.
The details of this release will change over the coming weeks and we will provide updates as soon as possible. As soon as we can try and test the functionality in wave 1 we’ll let you know the results.is content will only be shown when viewing the full post.
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