As digital transformation continues to speed up and customer demands continue to rise, digital must become an integral part of the business core. Its main goal is to deliver relevant and valuable customer experiences.
To do that, businesses have to work with intelligent tools across their platforms in order to help them put the customer first and scale their marketing, sales, and e-commerce endeavors. This is particularly important as the demand for frictionless experiences is only getting more and more critical in e-commerce. Whether we refer to finding the right product, streamlining the payment process, or speeding up the delivery process, the e-commerce space is riddled with challenges as well as opportunities.
Let’s explore how businesses can evolve their e-commerce experience using Dynamics 365. It’s the fastest way to provide more value to their target audience with seamless and personalized offerings.
Dynamics 365 for Retail
Get more insights from data with a personalized CRM tool
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is the company’s product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Since 2019, the company has expanded its Dynamics 365 service to cater to particular needs in the retail space. As a result, it developed the Commerce and Connected Store applications to add new commerce and retail store management capabilities.
This development is particularly useful for retailers operating on multiple channels and seeking to unify their customer insights. Here is a breakdown of the benefits:
- IoT analytics tools that can help them provide additional support and services to customers
- IoT intelligence for supply chain management that can adjust production according to changes in the supply chain
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Commerce and Connected Store — What’s the Difference?
The goal of these two capabilities is to make commerce available anytime, anywhere — from brick and mortar stores to online platforms and channels. But let’s explore each feature in more detail:
Commerce
This is an omnichannel e-commerce solution allowing retailers to build their own website and link together brick and mortar with digital stores. Moreover, businesses can track customer behaviors and demands and adjust along the way in order to deliver personalized offerings, across channels and touchpoints. The insights recorded in the module can provide staff with opportunities to upsell a certain product in person.
Connected Store
It is currently available only in preview mode and its purpose is to make use of real-time observational data in order to enhance the in-store experience. It does so by making use of in-store cameras together with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and data collected based on in-store transactions, weather updates, nearby events, and others. However, because it also makes use of hardware equipment, it could prove challenging for CIOs to implement it accordingly.
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Taking the Customer Experience to New Heights with AI
Many people wonder about the future of customer service and how this will feed into the overall customer experience. The reality is that all experiences will be data-driven, based on dynamic intelligence derived from the overall customer journey. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making great progress in closing the gaps between customer expectations and experiences.
In fact, 77% of highly-successful customer service teams rate their AI capabilities as excellent or above average. So adding AI to your CRM will surely unlock the following capabilities:
1. Faster Customer Support
No one likes waiting, especially your customers. They are seeking quick solutions to their product-related problems, so a phone-call for help can quickly turn into a bout of frustration. But adding AI can streamline this process, as it is available anytime, anywhere, and can take on simple questions through live chat and share self-service articles with the users seeking support. This will free up your agents to deal with more complicated problems and focus on more strategic initiatives when it comes to the customer experience.
2. Enhanced Response Rates
Up until now, every ticket flagged implied a good amount of time of research for answers. This means more waiting time for the customers and less availability for your support agents. But adding AI into the mix means that your answers can be stored and used for future use. As a result, agents receive several options of answers based on the problem identified in the ticket.
3. Better Customer Engagement
Customer support is not just about solving customer problems. It’s about having meaningful interactions with your customers, which will ultimately add value to your customer experience efforts. AI can highlight key customer information based on the data stored in the CRM so that agents can approach customers with informed insights about their experience.
4. Predictive Insights
Predictive insights rely on a combination of existing data to identify patterns. They further use that data to make predictions and zero in on the risks and potential outcomes. When it comes to customer experience, predictive insights can contribute to higher engagement, better retention, and targeted lead generation. In turn, this means more sales and better ROI. Even if customer support agents are not able to provide recommendations on the spot, AI can do it for them so that they are better prepared to address customer demands.
5. Advanced Ticket Prioritization
Examining thousands of tickets and responding to them in due time is a challenge in itself. But how can you make sure that the agents are prioritizing according to customer needs? AI can help in this sense, by conducting a sentiment analysis over the messages coming on a daily basis. This can help agents understand when to escalate problems and who is the most equipped to solve them. With sentiment analysis, tickets can be labeled as “excited,” “frustrated,” or “neutral” so that agents can close critical issues sooner.
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Get AI in Your Business with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Having examined the benefits of AI for your business, it’s time to get practical and see how you can make them come true. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is no stranger to AI capabilities and can help you save time and resources by allowing your customer service team to leverage intelligent chatbots to engage directly with customers and employees. In turn, this will enhance productivity for your team and enhance their availability by automating tedious customer support issues.
Let’s explore some highlights you can see in your business with Microsoft Dynamics 365:
- Create virtual agents — no code required
Using the AI capabilities of Power Virtual Agents, your team can create sophisticated chatbots to address customer-related issues. Microsoft provides a guided, no-code intuitive interface that requires no development or data science experience.
- Improve customer satisfaction using evidence-based insights
With unlimited access to AI-driven insights, you can improve the customer experience based on real-time predictive data. This means that you can track trends across channels, target future areas for growth, and improve the customer support experience with AI capabilities.
- Take your virtual agents to the next level
With Microsoft, you can improve the performance of your virtual agents by connecting them to other products and services you use on a daily basis. You can choose from prebuilt connectors and develop custom workflows for the in Power Automate. Similarly, you can generate scenarios for it with Microsoft Bot Framework.
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Ready to Seize the Opportunities of Dynamics CRM?
Exploring the e-commerce opportunities warranted by Dynamics CRM can sure seem daunting if you are just getting started on your e-commerce journey. But AI is changing the game in the retail space. So if you’re not currently reaping the benefits of AI, your competition soon will.
To help companies compete and make the most of their e-commerce efforts, The Partner Sales helps companies upgrade their services in order to respond effectively to customer needs — now and in the future.
Contact us and let us help you drive more business opportunities and establish an online channel for growth.
