In a recent “Copilot Podcast” interview that I did with Beth Burrell, Senior Global Black Belt Technical Specialist, Sales and Customer Adoption Leader at Microsoft, she shared a perfect synopsis of the differences in the customer experience space: “Customer service is helping out your customers and giving them support. Customer success is delighting your customers, making them happy with the service they’re getting.”
More and more, though, it has become tougher to create customer success as the retail industry, for example, has become very crowded. By comparison:
- In 2022, the total retail sales in the United States reached approximately 7.1 trillion dollars and the average number of products carried in a supermarket today is around 31,530 items.
- About 50 years ago, back in the mid-70s, grocery stores offered an average of just under 9,000 products, trading stamps were still common, and stores were exploring automation concepts.
Knowing this, how are retailers able to create personalized customer experiences that lead to customer success?
The Impact for Customer Experience Teams
Besides the data I provided above, there are numerous channels that are available for customers when they are looking to buy something – social media, review sites, forums, or manufacturer sites, for example. Further, consider the devices with which customers interact to make the purchases – mobile, computer, voice (i.e. Alexa or Google Home), and even AR (augmented reality) like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Apple’s Vision Pro.
These avenues present opportunities (and challenges) for customer experience teams to interact directly or indirectly with customers. So, let’s explore a few of these.
Customer Journeys to Customer Success
I don’t know about you, but the thought of having to manually pull things together or execute things manually seems overwhelming. It would be very easy to forget a step, overlook key data, or do something too soon or late. All of which could impact the overall customer experience and a successful outcome.
Recently, I discovered that Microsoft Copilot is bringing cohesion across marketing, sales, customers, and more to:
- Curate customer success by operationalizing consumer, retail, and market data.
- Surface insights into prospective buyers.
- Help craft personalized messaging.
From a marketing perspective, you can tell Copilot describe what you are looking to do, and it can create a detailed project that can be refined and adjusted to meet the exact needs.
From the input, Copilot created a detailed project board containing audiences, journeys, content, and suggested assets based on the brand.
However, things can be adjusted to fit the exact needs and goals. Again, Copilot can help with changes that must be made using natural language to make the request – but notice the updates must be approved by someone. Copilot will not automatically make the changes based on the initial input alone.
After the update is made, Copilot will inform you of the changes that were made.
Further, you can refine the touch points with the customers under the Promotion area. From here, you can see the details of interaction that the customer would take when they interact with the email promotion. Copilot can even create the email design by suggesting images, colors, subject line, and copy.
Now, once this campaign is launched, the power of scale comes into play with real-time segment capabilities of 20 million interactions per hour. From the prospective buyer perspective, the interactions with the email are captured, each new activity is refreshed in real-time, and new insights are generated to personalize the experience. All this data is fed into the lead scoring system which provides the information needed for the sales team to manage things going forward.
Within Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales, salespeople can see real-time data from major accounts. But, with specific sales goals in mind, Copilot can be asked to generate a list of leads that have shown interest in non-alcoholic beverages.
What I thought was cool was that Copilot can be asked to summarize the lead details to help salespeople save time instead of dig into all the notes, fields, related records, etc.
Additionally, Copilot can help salespeople draft an email, suggest meeting times, and include suggested documents to attach that are personalized to the customer.
Another great functionality that I like is the integration between Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Word with the combination of Copilot. Copilot can be asked to create a reference document to help salespeople with the meeting by providing a quick summary of the account, open tasks, and emails.
Closing Thoughts
The reason for going through this level of detail is to show how Copilot can span teams and processes – two areas that have previously been disparate, disjointed, and convoluted.
Caution:
As I did in my post on “Top Opportunities for Salespeople with Copilot in Dynamics 365”, there are some cautionary things to be aware of. For example, the real-time segmentation capability is not available yet and is currently slated for July 2024. Further, the sales function of qualifying leads based on the likelihood of buying is something that needs to be configured and is also not available yet.
Suggested Questions
Additionally, I would add that the full process cycle that spans marketing, sales, and customer experience teams should be discussed and planned prior to putting things in place. Yes, technology like Copilot can simplify and streamline how things are handed off from one team to another, but I suggest asking these questions to guide the project:
- Are our teams ready to use AI-powered apps like Copilot in the flow of their work?
- How long would it take to train people to adopt Copilot?
- Do our people understand how to create the right prompts to get the needed details or expected results?
- Which teams would best benefit from using Copilot?
- Do we have Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, Customer Insights, and/or Customer Journeys?
- If not, which do we need to purchase?
- What is the cost associated with each one?
- How long would it take for us to implement and configure each app and the Copilot functionality?
There are many more questions that could be asked, but by answering these questions, you will have a solid foundation to help you with your next steps. Lastly, I would highly recommend having a Microsoft Partner to guide you in your project as they would have the expertise necessary for you to reach your goals.
Notes:
Please note the following as indicated by the Microsoft Learn documentation.
- User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators.
- This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users, automatically” in the release plan.
- Features that must be enabled by application administrators.
- This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged “Users by admins, makers, or analysts” in the release plan.
Additional References
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2024wave1/service/dynamics365-customer-service/
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2024wave1/customer-insights/dynamics365-customer-insights-data/
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/release-plan/2024wave1/customer-insights/dynamics365-customer-insights-journeys/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_64PtwOm6_Y
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