Did you know that Microsoft Teams has more than 13 million active daily users and that over 19 million people use it every week?
As part of the April 2021 Wave 1 features, the seamless integration between Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 will be made available via Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) App.
This clever hybrid will empower your teams to collaborate, driving better business processes, allowing them to exchange information and knowledge and result in swifter business decisions and actions.
On a practical level, this integration allows users to view and edit customer engagement records directly from the Teams Application and have instant access to SharePoint, OneNote and Power BI. For those who don’t tend to use other Microsoft tools, OneNote is a collaborative note-taking app, SharePoint enables easy file sharing and PowerBI is a business intelligence tool.
Here are some of the most useful features that come from the collaboration:
Teams Call Dialler
Probably one of the more useful features among the other additions to Dynamics Sales, is a ‘Teams Call Dialler’ that lets users make calls via Teams without switching screens away from Dynamics customer record.
The call panel will also display real-time transcriptions of conversations with business-critical phrases and highlight suggested actions, it also offers a note-taking tool that is connected to the sales records.
Proceeding the call, a summary with follow-up actions and call sentiment analysis is created. This functionality enables users to update contact records directly to Dynamics 365 after the Teams call and follow up all activities and calls on the record. It also records the Teams chat in the Dynamics record so that the conversation can be viewed back. We expect this to save users a lot of time by making it easier to contact and speak with customers whilst viewing their customer records, and record that call all in one place.
Chat Tab
The Chat Tab, embedded in the Dynamics 365 app in Teams, enables users to search and show records within the Teams interface; for example, this could be a query to ‘show my active opportunities’, or a search across Dynamics 365 CE records using keywords. From the record summary the bot will suggest contextual views such as viewing all activities on the selected record, or all associated contacts. This is going to make finding information in the CRM much easier
User Display
In terms of user experience, Teams chats and channels are presented in a side-panel display in Dynamics 365, alongside suggested chats and contacts, which is based on colleagues who are working on a given account. There’s also a Dynamics Sales integration designed to make sales information more readily available in Teams, allowing users to search and share customer records; which can be viewed and edited by colleagues in the collaboration app.
Easy Follow Up
From the Teams app it’s possible to follow up with participants, export attendee information to Dynamics 365 Marketing, view customer segments based on audience attendance and coordinate future communications.
Collaboration on multiple records
By accessing the Customer Engagement app whilst in Microsoft Teams, records can then be embedded to the Dynamics 365 tab in the Teams channel. This enables users to collaborate not only on a single app record (like a sales opportunity) but also on multiple records such as accounts, invoices, contacts, orders and tasks making it easier for multiple people to manage one account across functions
The standard Dynamics 365 entities that support the Teams collaboration and file sharing capabilities include:
• Accounts
• Cases
• Contacts
• Invoices
• Knowledge Articles
• Leads
• Opportunities
• Orders
• Products
• Quotes
• Tasks
• Work Orders
Co-author documents
Users can co-author documents using Microsoft 365 which automatically syncs with the Customer Engagement app. The files are uploaded to a channel (eg Dynamics for Sales) and then made available for any record that is pinned to the channel. Files are saved to SharePoint and are accessible in both Teams and the Customer Engagement app making is easier to collaborate across documents pertaining to a customer record.
Access to other Microsoft tools
Customer Engagement is not the only app that can be embedded into Teams to enrich the user experience. Access to a wider range of Microsoft Applications like SharePoint, OneNote and Power BI, all in one environment, speeds up the process of recording and recalling information.
It is clear to us that the integration of Dynamics 365 with Microsoft Teams allows companies to streamline, building efficiencies in workflows for all staff, enabling the company to grow, thrive and compete, and we are excited about rolling out these new features to our customers
If you have any questions about Teams integration with Dynamics 365 or about implementing Dynamics 365, please contact us today
