Dynamics 365 CE Release wave 1 2023

It’s here, the release of wave 1 2023 is announced. Every year Microsoft hits us twice with the release wave, and yeah it’s always a long list of features, so I’m very glad it’s only twice and not three times a year 

The following is my top feature list on Dynamics 365 CE. I know it’s a bit of a long list, but there are so many good features this year that I couldn’t leave them unmentioned in this blogpost.

I’ve used the new experience to dig into the release wave documentation, so go I highly recommend it if you haven’t started using yet.

Before we go any further, it’s worth mentioning that everything in this list is subject to change and the following images are the same ones that Microsoft has released as part of the feature wave, including the quality of them.

Let’s start with Sales which by the way in this release wave many of its features contain AI, something to think about because it could be something more common in the next wave releases.

Sales

Engage with your customers using SMS conversation

Now the seller will have the ability to send and receive SMS messages to customers. What this means for sales rep is that they will receive real-time notifications on the app and interact with it on the side panel that you can see in the image. It is true that nowadays everyone is moving towards a digital way of life, however some customers prefer to be contacted via SMS.

And to be honest some people (including myself) find this less intrusive or more effective as a reminder channel, or to provide quick updates.

The key functionalities of this capability include:

• Allow sales managers to choose a service provider for sending and receiving SMS.
• Ability to add SMS and automated SMS as a step in a sequence.
• Create and add SMS templates as part of the configured sequence step.
• Send SMS from the Sales Accelerator workspace.
• Easily access past SMS interactions in context with relevant sales entities such as lead and opportunity records.
• Admins will be able to assign specific numbers to any user/team for SMS.
• Receive customer responses for SMS sent and revert to build an ongoing conversation.
• Send and receive SMS from all relevant Dynamics 365 Sales entity forms.
• Get real-time notifications for incoming SMS.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Apr 2023

GA: May 2023

Improve lead engagement rates with validated emails

We all know that a typical problem with lead databases is email addresses, which are often not validated on a regular basis, reducing the quality of the data over time. Therefore, the sales rep could end up with a database full of leads with invalid or inactive email addresses.

This feature will help the sales rep with that email addresses validation, resulting in lower email bounce rates, and overall, a better return on their time invested.

The key functionalities of this capability include:

• Administrators will be able to run a partial or full review across all email addresses maintained on active leads in the organization.
• Sellers will be informed of invalid email addresses associated with email-based tasks that are appearing in their sales accelerator worklist card, and the Up next activities widget on the lead.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Oct 31, 2022

GA: Mar 2023

Visualize key stakeholders and take action with the smart organization chart

It is vital for a sales rep to know the right people, and they often need help identifying the right people within the customer’s organization for their deals. Sales reps often interact with only a few members of the customer’s organization, which can lead to missed opportunities.

With this feature, sales rep can create and visualize your customer organization to maintain a healthy business relationship.

This new feature would have the following capabilities:

• Sellers/account managers can quickly create their customer org chart to understand the various stakeholders for an account.
• Maintain a relationship map to identify, engage and grow your network of customer contacts.
• Activity view of the contacts/stakeholders will enable you to understand your customer better.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Jun 2023

GA: —

Automate the creation of follow-up tasks

How awesome is to have an AI system that automatically captures the seller follow-up tasks from various Office applications like emails, Teams messages, and Teams call transcripts, then nudges the seller with friendly reminders, enabling them to take action quickly.

The idea of this feature is to forget that you have to remember!, so sellers can focus on critical tasks relying that the Up Next Widget will be there to help them in every deal.

As a seller, you’ll see that:

• Follow-up tasks are automatically created based on emails, Teams messages, and calls.
• Follow-up tasks are available for quick reference from within the Up Next widget.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Jul 2023

GA: —

Customer Voice

Allow survey responders to record partial survey response

It’s really typical that survey respondents sometimes answer a few questions and then close the web browser without submitting the survey. The result of this is ton of valuable user feedback lost. With this feature, partial responses can now be recorded.

This capability will allow survey owners to capture responses and insights even from partially completed surveys. It provides the ability to:

• Define survey settings to turn on the partial survey capability.
• Specify the number of days after which the partial responses should be recorded. By default, the value is set at 28, but can be modified to be set between 1 and 28 days.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Jun 2023

GA: —

Customer Service

Integrate and search external knowledge sources

I think on every customer service project the knowledge base is always a pain point, due to the already existent sources of this information, and this leads to many challenges that end up throwing away the Dynamics knowledge base.

This feature allow you to configure external data sources such as enterprise websites that are based on the sitemap protocol. Content is ingested from external sources into Microsoft Dataverse and then search capability is provided across all sources.

Highlights of the feature for administrators include the following:

• Configure data from external data sources.
• Set up a data refresh schedule to specify the refresh frequency of the ingestion service that will capture newly created or updated articles and also any data that might have been missed during syncing and ingestion.

Highlights of the feature for agents include the following:

• View a consolidated list of relevant search results from Dataverse and external sources for their search query.
• View the list of relevant search results provided in a single ranking across data sources.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Feb 2023

GA: Apr 2023

Accelerate time to resolution with AI-suggested replies

This one is about real-time suggested replies for agents, something similar as LinkedIn does.

This AI model learns from the organization’s chat history and adapts over time so that response suggestions are always relevant. This will drive significant improvements in the overall contact center support service.

The highlights of the feature include:

• Intuitive, real-time suggested replies for agents directly in the digital messaging experience.
• Automated named-entity recognition and population that provides personalized responses for each user.
• Simplified data configuration experience to curate the reply set.
• Robust reply management experience for admins that provides visibility into the discovered responses and the ability to edit or consolidate responses.
• On-demand model retraining to ensure the model is always up to date and accurate.
• Unique models for each organization trained on historical support conversation data

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Apr 2023

GA: —

Create and manage cases efficiently with enhanced case form

In this feature we have something that I never really expected to see, and that is the possibility of upload multiple attachment or take quick notes when creating a case. But there is more with this feature.

While creating or updating a case, the contextual customer data with past cases and previous customer interaction appears as a right-side panel so agents can verify and edit customer details without switching tabs and this also avoids case duplication.

In a nutshell this feature enables the agents to perform their daily case management operations with less effort and increases productivity

This feature allows agents to:

• Find information quickly and manage cases efficiently by leveraging the 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.
• Use the Description field along with RTE capabilities to capture rich case details.
• Access all the attachments related to a case in a consolidated view.

Create email templates with new template designer

Better later than never, finally we got the same Marketing email template designer into Customer Service module. And of course, email templates are one of the vital points of customer service they are a fast and easy way to send repetitive and recurring emails to multiple customers.

The new email template creation experience includes advanced layouts that are responsive and adapt to any screen size. Users can add elements like images, text, buttons or dividers easily while creating email templates.

Timelines:

Early Access: Jan 2023

Public Preview: —

Marketing

Close leads fast by automating handoffs with sales / Optimize your lead management process by engaging your sellers right away

Marketing and sales team working together! If you are on the marketing team, you can now invite the sales team to interact with leads at the right time and stage in their journey. What a combination!.

This feature allows to create sales activities such as tasks and phone calls directly from customer journeys so any lead can get an individualized attention at the right time when they’re most likely to engage.

This feature allows

• Respond quickly to incoming leads by routing them directly to sales agents.
• Add sales activities such as phone calls and tasks to your nurture journeys.
• Trigger a sales sequence in Dynamics 365 Sales to surface contextual recommendations for the seller picking up the lead.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Feb 2023

GA: To be announced

Prevent message fatigue by limiting the messages sent to a customer in a specific period

Some customers qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. This results in customers receiving multiple messages in a short period of time. Customers may perceive these messages as spam. So know when sending messages to a customer is crucial for a good marketing campaign.

This feature allows customers to receive the right message at the right moment and at the right frequency to prevent fatigue, avoid unsubscribes.

Feature Details:

• 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

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Feb 2023

GA: Apr 2023

Boost your productivity with enhanced journeys reminders / Send reminders within journeys to drive customer actions

How often we have customer who abandoned a shopping cart and we want invite them to re-take it. Sending repeating messages is essential in real time marketing.

Marketers now can send reminders to customers until they complete a call to action or until a certain date or time. This eliminates the need to create cascading conditions that check for the qualifying action after each step.

Using the reminder feature, if a customer abandons the shopping cart, the journey can remind them to check out and send multiple messages, including messages with certain offers, until they check out. Similarly, a customer who has started registering for a conference can be reminded to complete registration until they finish or until the registration window closes.

• Increase productivity by simplifying logic, increasing readability, and lowering maintenance.
• Create journeys that include a set of messages, such as reminders, until a qualifying event or activity occurs.
• Messages can end based on the customer taking an action or based on a certain date or time.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Mar 2023

GA: Apr 2023

Enrich marketing content by embedding additional file types from the asset library

Sending rich, compelling content to customers is key to keeping them engaged. Marketers can now add a wider variety of relevant information to their emails using additional file types such as documents, PDFs, presentations.

Feature Details:

• Additional file type support for files such as docx, pptx, pdf, JS, CSS, and much more.
• Updated user interface for document management in the Asset library.
• Link to a PDF file from a button in an email.
• Provide a link to downloadable content on a page.

Timelines:

Early Access: —

Public Preview: Jan 2023

GA: Apr 2023

There you have it, these were my highlights for this release wave. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Here you have the documentation of it, go and read it becase probably you will encounter other ones that are more interesting to you.

In any case I’m looking forward to diving deep into Power Platform release wave. Until next time!