What is Dynamics 365?

Dynamics 365 is a full Suite of business applications everything from dealing with your customers right through to dealing with your back office functions all covered here and I'm going to take you through it in under 10 minutes as a starting point here they are modular applications that work together they can be configured or customized to meet your needs and importantly this is all part of the broader Microsoft stack so if you're using things like teams Outlook word templates Excel and so on you'll find all of those things built in and ready to go because Microsoft

stuff works well with the Microsoft stuff everything you see here can also be integrated with other applications that you already use as well so you can take one of these and work with other things you've already got or some of them or all of them as you like when we talk about business applications they generally fall into two main categories and Dynamics 365 covers both of these things the first one is CRM customer relationship management this is about all of those sort of front facing type things that interact with your customers customer service selling marketing

those types of things the other one is Erp enterprise resource planning which is more of your back office functions managing your finances inventory supply chain and so on so let's have a look at each of these in turn and the apps in the Dynamics stack that are available first up on the CRM side and within the dynamic stack these applications are often grouped together and called customer engagement we have applications for sales service and marketing first up we have Dynamics 365 sales this is the CRM piece and in fact it used to be called Dynamics

365 CRM as well so you'll find that label still out there this is essentially the PC used to manage your customer relationships the organizations you work with the people who work for those organizations your whole pipeline from getting new leads into your organization through an opportunity process to closing new business and all of the activities associated with that next up we have customer service at the core of customer service is a case management capability something comes in a ticket service request something like that and you're managing it end to end through that process that includes

having things put in queues they can be automatically routed to the right agent escalated service level agreements and so on you've also got a knowledge base in there and scripts and things that you can use for your agents this can also handle omnichannel customer service so any channel that your customers want to work with you in that's email phone chat WhatsApp SMS social media any of those things including self-service capabilities via chat Bots and a portal all of that is part of the customer service app best friends with customer services field service so if you

have a scenario where you need to dispatch skilled workers skilled technicians out into the field to provide service then that's what this one is for so this is using work order management it can also handle proactive service with iot to devices there's a mobile capability with this one as well and this connects seamlessly so that you can actually go from customer service through to field service if your scenario requires that concept of a service ticket that sometimes results in a work order and dispatching someone out into the field there's also some really cool scheduling capability

across both of these apps if you want to schedule agents buy skill by geography by availability by caseload all those kinds of things you can use that across both of those service applications we also have a really sophisticated marketing capability that is natively connected to everything we've just talked about no exporting or importing data it's part of the same platform so those contacts that you've got in your sales and service applications are the same contact the same database that's in your marketing application this is marketing automation you can segment based on all of that data

in your sales and service applications or you can set off real-time triggers like somebody visits a website or somebody visits a physical location as a way of communicating in real time this goes across email SMS push notifications and other channels that can come in there as well it also handles subscription preference and consent management you can set up forms for people to register for events you manage your end-to-end event process in there as well as well as marketing landing pages the concept here is complete customer Journey orchestration so this is not Standalone marketing automation this

is fully connected to everything else which means you can actually start with a marketing Journey where perhaps you're sending out an email but then maybe somebody you know makes a purchase over a certain amount and you want to notify a key account manager to follow up on that then you can create a task or hand that off seamlessly back into the sales application or into the service application you might for instance have as part of your journey to automatically exit someone from the journey if there is a customer service ticket or a case in there

so that you're not sending the wrong information at the wrong time so completely seamlessly connected marketing automation system with those sales and service areas also within this customer engagement type of concept we have a customer data platform called customer insights designed to unify your data so if you've got customer data sitting across a whole lot of different siled systems and you want that golden 360 degree view record of a customer single view of your customer individuals or accounts that can handle either it does that but it also goes a lot further it allows you to

do very sophisticated segmenting across all of those things including smart segmenting look-alike segmenting AI based predictions out of the box or bring your own machine learning models and then you take all of that and you activate it or export it you can send it out to social media Facebook advertising or to search engine providers or to your marketing application if that's not Dynamics if it is Dynamics then it's all seamlessly connected up there as well and finally customer voice there is a built-in survey tool this is a great little capability for customer satisfaction surveys it'll

do sentiment analysis NPS scoring you know scoring out of five like it scores all sorts of things and it can be triggered from anything that happens in those sales and marketing applications as well so when a customer service case is closed for instance in the service app I want to send a satisfaction survey and then when that comes back in that's connected back up to that same customer record on the Erp side finance and operations here we have a range of applications that help you manage the back office side of your business finance supply chain

Commerce e-commerce human resources and project operations I'm going to really focus on those first two here the finance system is a full Enterprise capable way of managing the finances for your organization you'll find this covers everything you need end to end for finance general ledger accounts payable accounts receivable cost accounting and project accounting we've also got within the platform here Supply Chain management capabilities so if you need to manage your inventory production and distribution planning and demand forecasting all of that is there as well the other applications in this side of things there's an e-commerce

platform fully connected back into that Finance system we've got a human resources system for managing your employees and your staff and also project operations for project management back into all of this as well also on the Erp side if you're in small business there's a fully contained app in here called business Central so this is actually providing you with a finance and operations capability for small to mid-sized business as well as some sales and service so if you're in that sort of size of business this is an app that's well worth looking at because it's

got the whole thing covered in one go but wait there's more there are also some other apps in here so we've got some amazing mixed reality capability there is remote assist which allows if you've got a technician out in the field they can be using a hololens and you can be guiding them through what they're doing so perhaps you've got a newer technician or someone who's not skilled in a specific task someone back in a head office can be looking at what they're doing and guiding them through it as if they were there in person

guides provides workers with a step-by-step holographic instruction type of screen and connected spaces in the retail area allows you to get visualization and real-time action on movement within those spaces or within those stores we've also got intelligent order Management on the supply chain side which can connect up if you've got an existing supply chain and e-commerce system that can connect up to those things and allow you to bring AI to optimize those processes and last but certainly not least fraud protection which uses AI to protect you against all sorts of payment and refund and online

fraud for your system the other important thing to understand about Dynamics 365 is that it's part of this broader Microsoft stack it's sitting sideways with all of the Microsoft 365 or Office 365 applications so all of that communication activity is part of the same platform it's also sitting on top of tools that allow you to configure and customize GitHub for pro developers and Microsoft Power Platform for low code extensibility across automation custom applications chat Bots reporting and portals all of this sits on Microsoft Azure so that is your active directory login when you log into

any Microsoft of product you're logging into all of the same things and all of that identity management and Security Management is part of that platform if you'd like to understand more about Power Platform check out my video here which goes through it or my other video here which is a demo of Dynamics 365 sales thanks for watching