Release Wave 1 Overview for D365 Users

Release Wave 1 Updates for Dynamics 365 Users

Within the first release of 2022, you’ll see that Microsoft’s focus is on simplifying and streamlining data for those in sales positions. Too much data causes overwhelm and distracts from efficiency and relationship building. Data simply needs to work seamlessly, at every point in the sales cycle, across the entire D365 CRM platform.

In this blog, we will be highlighting a few updates across the D365 platform: D365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and the Power Platform so you know what’s ahead and can reach out to us if you’d like to learn more or need assistance deploying any new features.

To view the full release plan, you can download it from the D365 Release Portal on our website.

1. Mobile Enhancements for Sales in Release Wave 1

There are three new features that will help your sales team improve productivity and collaborate better when they’re on-the-go or working from home including:

Capturing mobile contacts and recent calls: Your sales team will now be able to create contacts in Dynamics 365 Sales directly from their mobile phone contact list and recent calls menu.

Using the mobile camera to log information: You’ll now be able to scan business cards and handwritten notes and associate them with the CRM record or activity. The feature converts the image into digitized text within D365 Sales and supports other languages, as well.

Improved Outlook Integration with D365 Sales Mobile App: You will now have access to email templates and relevant information will autofill from D365 Sales when composing an email within the D365 Sales Mobile App.

2. AI for Sales Relationships

To assist with improving relationship building across the organization, Release Wave 1 includes a Who Knows Whom feature within D365 Sales. This enhancement will help your sales team query interaction-based data stored within the system in order to provide a better understanding of business opportunities.

Having the ability to query relationship data will help your sales team:

• Find hidden relationships
• Obtain warm introductions into target accounts
• Locate additional key stakeholders

In addition to the above benefits, your sales team will be able to view an “interaction score” that represents connectivity and relationship strength of the contact.

The example below displays how this feature will show up within D365 Sales platform. Note the Relationship Overview, Top Contacts and associated score within the Who knows Whom tab.

3. Customer Service

Most of the updates for Customer Service focus on improves to the contact center, case routing, and knowledge base. Complete details of these updates can be found here:

Read the Release Wave 1 Overview for Customer Service.

A larger highlight of Release Wave 1 for Customer Service is Microsoft’s official release of the Modern Community app, which was previewed this past October. This app gives organizations a way to further improve customer experience, by providing a portal template that can be used to collect information and poll customers.

Peter Katz, Director of Sales & Marketing at TrellisPoint, describes the Community App as “a modern “suggestion box” for improving existing products and services”. The template makes it easy for businesses to create a portal for customers to post suggestions in a forum-like interface that offers things like upvoting, commenting, sharing, and flagging within the discussion threads.

Our team thinks this is a great way for Product Managers to collect ideas from customers about new features, or to prioritize enhancements to a product.

4. Field Service

In the upcoming months, Microsoft will continue to focus on two areas of the Field Service solution, including usability of the Field Service Mobile App along with Windows 10 support for the Field Service Mobile App.

For a full list of updates, view the Field Service Release Overview.

How to Proceed with Release Wave 1

If you’re an existing D365 user or TrellisPoint client and have questions about the any of the information we shared in this blog, be sure to contact our team before April to get all of your questions answered before the updates roll out.