Spring 2016 Wave of Dynamics CRM general availability announced, better customer experiences on tap

Dave W. Shanahan

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The Spring 2016 Wave of Dynamics CRM was generally released on May 23, 2016. With the Spring 2016 Wave of Dynamics CRM, Microsoft is focusing on a more personalized range of customer experiences. The Spring 2016 Wave marks a special turning point for the Dynamics CRM business and how enterprise companies engage their customers.

The Spring 2016 Wave of Microsoft Dynamics CRM introduces new and enhanced capabilities that can help companies change their daily service processes with enhanced business intelligence. Microsoft is changing the way companies with their newly minted Connected Field Service solution.

With Dynamics CRM’s new Connected Field Service, companies can schedule, manage, and deliver onsite automation services to enterprise customers in several different ways:

  • Field service matches proficiency and competency requirements for service calls against available resources for intelligent resource allocation and workload balancing with a single process from case management through to work order completion.
  • Project service automation enables on-time, on-budget revenue-generating professional engagements. It extends Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide a single system of customer engagement for project sales, delivery and billing. It also supports back-office integrations to productivity and business applications, and offers a mobile experience for customer-facing resources. Field service and project service automation share a resource pool, and scheduled shared resources are surfaced in each application for enhanced visibility.
  • Connected Field Service is a new solution and will be available in preview on June 7, 2016.  Connected Field Service provides out-of-the-box IoT to field service capabilities, so IoT enabled devices are continuously monitored and anomalies are detected, generating alerts that trigger automated actions or service tickets and workflow according to service level agreements.

Dynamics CRM

In addition, Spring Wave 2016 brings new ways to keep customers involved providing user feedback with internal employees, external customers, and industry partners using Dynamics CRM.

  • Customer Portal makes it easy for customers to solve issues on their own with self-service knowledge and other support resources, allowing service agents to focus on issues of greatest impact.
  • Community Portal facilitates peer-to-peer support and deeper relationships between experts in the community, including both internal and external users, while also growing an organization’s catalog of knowledge and building loyalty.
  • Employee Portal increases employee engagement and productivity with easy access to authoritative and searchable enterprise knowledge for common domains such as IT and HR, and by streamlining common tasks, such as facilities requests.
  • Partner Portal allows businesses to scale through their channel by managing leads, opportunities and communications through established processes.

Microsoft will be holding a special online event on June 7, 2016, called “Customer Driven,” that will spotlight the Spring 2016 Wave and go more in-depth into all the Dynamic CRM features that are available for enterprise customers. Microsoft Dynamics CRM general manager, Jujhar Singh, will be joined by Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft, to do a walkthrough of all the new features available in the Spring Wave 2016. Blendtec and NAVCO, Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers, will also be on hand to discuss their experiences using Dynamics CRM.

For more information, visit the CRM Roadmap or see event details about Customer Driven.