I am extremely excited to announce that the Spring 2016 Wave of Dynamics CRM is generally available beginning today. Our increasingly connected world is enabling a fundamental transition to a new service economy, where companies are moving to everything-as-a-service models with managed services offerings. With our Spring 2016 Wave of Dynamics CRM, we’re enabling new personalized, proactive and predictive customer experiences.  And those new customer experiences will be at the core of the digital transformation businesses are undertaking to differentiate and rise above the competition. These companies will excel at engaging customers, empowering employees, optimizing operations and transforming products.  

Our Spring Wave hits at an amazing time of growth and momentum for the Dynamics CRM business.

Dynamics CRM Online seat-adds doubled year over year, now six quarters in a row.  In May, we were again named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center for the third time.* Within the past 3 months, we were named the winner of the 2016 TMC/CUSTOMER Magazine CRM Excellence Award, as well as the winner of the 2016 Gold Stevie Award for Contact Center Customer Service Solution. With our new innovation hitting the market today, we’re positioned for even more momentum.

The Spring 2016 Wave of Microsoft Dynamics CRM introduces new and enhanced capabilities that help drive user adoption with embedded learning path, and drive service productivity for field and project service employees through deep processes for field service delivery and project service automation. Dynamics CRM can help companies transform service processes with embedded intelligence. 

Enable the service economy with field service and project service automation and new Connected Field Service

Microsoft is taking the definition of service to a new level in the industry, so companies can take advantage of opportunity presented by the new service economy with industry-leading, end-to-end service, including our new field service and project service automation capabilities. Combined with our new ground breaking Connected Field Service solution which we announced today , Microsoft provides unparalleled capabilities for companies to transform their business models.

With our new field service and project service automation capabilities, organizations have the ability to schedule, manage and deliver onsite service, whether it be their field technician who is supporting multiple customers on a single day, or complex, multi-day projects. 

• Field service matches proficiency and competency requirements for service calls against available resources for intelligent resource allocation and workload balancing with a single process from case management through to work order completion. 

• Project service automation enables on-time, on-budget revenue-generating professional engagements. It extends Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide a single system of customer engagement for project sales, delivery and billing. It also supports back-office integrations to productivity and business applications, and offers a mobile experience for customer-facing resources. Field service and project service automation share a resource pool, and scheduled shared resources are surfaced in each application for enhanced visibility. 

• Connected Field Service is a new solution that we announced today and will be available in preview on June 7.  Connected Field Service provides out-of-the-box IoT to field service capabilities, so IoT enabled devices are continuously monitored and anomalies are detected, generating alerts that trigger automated actions or service tickets and workflow according to service level agreements. Availability and proximity of service technicians with the right skills and tools are then matched against the service requirement and routed to customer locations to take preventive action. For many service oriented businesses, this represents a truly revolutionary shift from more of a reactive break-fix posture, to a model that is built on predictive service. These proactive companies will be focused on outcome driven service, as opposed to work order billing business models.  

Engage external communities with portals

With our Spring Wave, we introduce portal solutions for companies to engage external communities across customers, employees and partners, providing access to resources and information, streamlining simple tasks and making it easier to get the right help for more difficult problems. Portal solutions empower customers, employees and partners to get the resources and information they need when they need it, streamlining simple tasks and making it easier to get the right help for more difficult problems. Web portals enable organizations to extend their Dynamics CRM engagement scenarios with self-service profile management capabilities, rich content publishing, secure access and permissions controls, configurable extensions, and many more features. These preconfigured portal solutions are built with responsive design for use on any desktop, tablet or mobile device:  

• Customer Portal makes it easy for customers to solve issues on their own with self-service knowledge and other support resources, allowing service agents to focus on issues of greatest impact. 

• Community Portal facilitates peer-to-peer support and deeper relationships between experts in the community, including both internal and external users, while also growing an organization’s catalog of knowledge and building loyalty.  

• Employee Portal increases employee engagement and productivity with easy access to authoritative and searchable enterprise knowledge for common domains such as IT and HR, and by streamlining common tasks, such as facilities requests.

• Partner Portal allows businesses to scale through their channel by managing leads, opportunities and communications through established processes. 

Empower employees with intelligent, adaptive processes 

Microsoft is the only CRM application in the market that provides embedded machine learning scenarios out of the box, enabling intelligent, adaptive business processes that apply powerful analytics to the treasure trove of business data to create deep insights into customer behavior and decision-making. New machine learning scenarios in Microsoft Social Engagement include adaptive learning and automated social triage.  

• Adaptive learning determines how a product, a campaign, or a brand is perceived by people on social media, enabling deeper insights into customer behavior. Sentiment scoring models help the system more accurately understand the language of customer communities — for example, what snowboard buyers mean by calling a product “crazy” or “sweet.”  This enables organizations to better predict customer trends and identify patterns. 

• Automated social triage automatically detects intention in social posts and routes them as cases or leads into CRM. By more accurately distinguishing an eager potential buyer from a customer with a complaint that requires quick resolution, automated social triage helps businesses deliver the right response more quickly, which improves sales and service performance and increases customer satisfaction. 

In addition, with this release we’re introducing Learning Path. These guided navigation capabilities provide context-sensitive interactive and scenario-based tasks and sidebars that are personalized to the user. Learning Path helps onboard new application users quickly, walking a user through the steps needed to complete a task, thus facilitating user adoption of the application, and improving user productivity.  We will be delivering guidance to support scenarios such as capability overviews for Trials, onboarding tasks for new paid users, sales scenarios for Service Reps, Sales Reps and Sales Manager, and What’s New content to introduce users to new features and capabilities within the latest release of the application.    

Learn more in the Dynamics CRM Customer Driven event on June 7 

If you’re as excited as I am about out these new innovations, please join us on June 7 to learn more. We will be hosting Customer Driven, an online event that will highlight the Spring 2016 Wave and drill into how we power the Service Economy. Jujhar Singh, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be hosting along with Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft, and industry thought leader Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group and author of “CRM at the Speed of Light,” as we showcase our stand-out service capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers including Blendtec and NAVCO will be on hand to share their insights about how Microsoft is helping them transform their businesses with the next generation of service.  Event details can be found here: www.microsoft.com/customer-driven

I couldn’t be more optimistic about the future of Dynamics CRM and how we’re helping our customers transform their businesses in ground breaking new ways. To stay up to date on the latest and greatest new capabilities, check out the CRM Roadmap site powered by the new portal capabilities we delivered in the Spring Wave! 

*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Michael Maoz, Brian Manusama, 04 May 2016

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