Those days are gone when customers used to contact you via emails or calls for every small detail. That process was time-consuming, full of errors, slow, and irritating. Customers had to spend a lot of time on phones for answer to simple questions while their calls were being transferred from one agent to another. Such experience resulted in lower customer satisfaction, even though having a good quality product or service.
All these pain points were resolved with introduction to customer portals. Dynamics 365 launched portals that seamlessly integrated with their CRM. The Dynamics 365 customer portal has self-service features and a custom dashboard for your customers to access everything. Whereas for your business it provides you with automation to reduce manual tasks, a secured platform to ensure no document is tempered, Iot, flexible payment plans, and more.
All these features benefit your business and customers in enormous ways. There are various updates and upgrades in the Dynamics 365 portal this year that can benefit a business. Let us go through them one by one.
AI for Automation and Personalized Marketing
Dynamics 365 has started using Artificial Intelligence since their release in October 2018. They constantly improved the AI functionality in every release after that. The latest AI capabilities are way advanced and have extreme predictive powers that can help with data analysis. This data is useful in operation scoring, forecasting and probability of scenarios, etc. to handle the organization more effectively. They can detect any failures before they happen as it uses your previous data and current behavior for assessment. This can help your company from huge losses, financially and reputation wise.
Apart from prediction, AI is extensively used for automating processes like personalization and customization for customers. They offer personalized communication with customers and stakeholders. So when a customer reaches the trigger point in their journey, a separate journey is created to ensure they receive utmost attention and an appropriate personalized experience is offered to them.
Not only this, AI is useful for natural language processing, in speech recognition, fraud protection, in chatbots as virtual agents, customer insights, and whatnot. Hence, Dynamics 365 using Artificial Intelligence for their portals will keep benefiting the businesses, now and in future.
Mobile-friendly Portals
Business worldwide continues to adapt to remote working partially or full-time. Additionally, if working in different time zones, it is not possible to connect with colleagues over laptops or desktops all the time. Mobiles are handy and with us all the time. Dynamics 365 understands this and offers a mobile-friendly experience to all Dynamics users.
The main focus of improving mobile functionality in 2022 is towards sales. It streamlines the CRM experience for users with features like speech-to-text notes or task distribution amongst team members. As it is easier to keep the team updated on mobile phones, it gets easier to collaborate with teams and overall productivity of the team also increases. Thus, Dynamics 365 portals help fulfill all the customers demands as it offers freedom to work from anywhere, all you need is an internet connection.
Uniform Platform for Communication
To bring the team on the same page is difficult when working remotely. Collaborating teams and keeping the team members updated is a huge part of any project. Especially when there are some new additions and major changes. Dynamics 365 has all the solutions to benefit you in this case. Whenever there are any new changes or updates it will notify all the respective members to view, or note it down for future reference. Notifications are on the side panel for quick access.
Dynamics 365 works as the single point of communication for all the users and as a result it will boost efficiency and foster collaboration. In a few years, having singular software to communicate will be common. This will eliminate the need of viewing five different things for updates or communication. The messages are important and not the medium. Having one medium will ease out a lot.
Secured and Authentic Documents
A business needs to deal with a lot of documents. There is a high risk of documents getting tempered while sharing. Dynamics 365 found a way to deal with this and used blockchain technology. Well, blockchain is not only associated with bitcoin.
Blockchain technology can be used to know whether the document is tempered or not. With blockchain, agreements, processes, tasks and payments will have a digital record and a signature. It will identify, validate, share and store documents. If blockchain is adopted by each department, there will be no need for a notary. An organization would independently interact with one another.
Industrial Internet of Things
To have predictive insights and the urge to know your customers can benefit business in many ways. These things help in taking proactive actions and serving them the best. The manufacturing industry can benefit from Dynamics 365 by connecting it to all the floor information, i.e is data from machines and sensors. All the important data will reach you to quickly analyze it and take necessary actions. There are many parts where IIoT can help a business as follows:
- It helps in taking preventive measures and saves your machine from breakdowns. It will send your machine's conditions and performance data regularly for you to compare and take preventive action.
- This integration helps a business in monitoring the industry zone remotely. Dynamics 365 portal helps you with real-time updates with all the appropriate detailed information.
- This also helps in future production planning as you will have all the relevant information to take the right decision.
Easy to Use and Integrate
The Dynamics 365 portal has all the basic functionalities of a CRM and more. The portal dashboards are organized and stacked in a proper way which helps users to navigate the portal easily. Users just have to sign in and they will have access to all the relevant functionalities and data.
Users find it difficult to use multiple tools while completing their tasks. But, the Dynamics 365 portal can integrate with Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. so that you can directly access it from the portal itself. Portal can integrate with the external data source and cloud services. So, a portal can be the single source for all your organization's data from account database to website. Having all the functionalities on one single platform helps synchronize workflow to enhance performance.
Flexible Subscription Plans
Dynamics 365 portals have a wide range of subscription plans for you to choose from. It makes it affordable for small and medium businesses to pay only for functionalities that you need. You can choose per user, per month and pay accordingly. You do not have to pay a big chunk of money in advance. If your business demands additional functionalities then you can purchase plugins and pay only for functionalities that they need. These help SMBs in balancing their budget. Also, it is a smarter choice to pay for functionalities that you will actually use, rather than paying a huge amount and ending up not using half of the features.
Self-service and Community Forum
Dynamics 365 self-service portal reduces the call handling time as users will find answers by themselves. You can load the knowledge base with articles, videos, FAQs, etc. To optimize the content you can use text editors to format the content and attach images, videos and files. Also, updating the knowledge base is easy with portals as it manages new additions without disrupting live articles. To know what users are looking for in your knowledge base, you can have a view of analytics. It gives ideas on feedback, ratings, and views of the customers. In addition to this, you can also add a community forum. In the community forum, the customers can collaborate, share insights and tips on your products and services with other customers. Experts from the industry can also participate in the conversations and help others with their views and suggestions. Apart from helping users, the community forum will help you in increasing engagement with your customers. The customers will gradually feel more connected with your business, a small step towards them becoming loyal customers. Such customers help in growing a business.
Conclusion
To provide consistent and quality service to your customers is a key rule to provide satisfactory customer service. Consistency helps in winning the hearts of customers and convincing them to stay with you for long. Dynamics 365 portals benefit a business in various ways as discussed above. To leverage a portal for your business you can contact certified companies who can help you develop a portal that satisfies your business demands. One shoe does not fit all, similarly, one type of portal will not fit all the industries and businesses. Companies customize the portal as per your request. This way you will also save money as you will pay only for features that you want. The small and medium industries will benefit from this as they have budget crunch. If you wish to grow your business, portals can be your turning point.