Microsoft

Sandra Loyd

Microsoft will add new capabilities to its Dynamics 365 cloud-based business applications and Power Platform in a wave of semi-annual updates that provide a unified data model and artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and automation capabilities for modern enterprise management role-based, modular software. As a result of the restrictive measures introduced last year, companies have also experienced how difficult it can become to communicate with their customers and employees. At the same time, it drew attention to the role of technology, the importance of digital solutions that the software company is constantly developing for its applications, said James Phillips, president of Microsoft’s Digital Transformation Platform team, at an online event on Dynamics 365 and Power Platform’s first update wave.

More than half a million organizations – 97 percent of the world’s five hundred largest companies – use Dynamics 365 and Power Platform applications and services every month to digitally transform their business, said James Phillips at the Business Applications Launch Event in early April.

These modern applications are very different from traditional ones, as they are continuously collected and analyzed in real time from customers (products, services and they provide companies with predictive capabilities to customize products, services, offerings, predict needs, and prevent failures, meaning they can make their previous, follow-up approach to business proactive, the president said.

The software company has also integrated Dynamics 365 applications with Microsoft 365 and Teams platforms, which combine Windows, Office, Outlook and endpoint management, and has been building industry-leading cloud solutions since last fall. First in the healthcare sector, and then in February this year, players in the manufacturing, financial and non-profit sectors received such a cloud. Recently, commerce has also joined this camp, and demos from the current online event have also exemplified the latest capabilities in business applications, following the example of the latter industry, with a particular focus on optimizing the customer experience.

Artificial intelligence smooths the customer path in real time

One of the great innovations of the Dynamics 365 Marketing application in this year’s first update wave is the real-time coordination of the customer path. customer journey orchestration), which combines customer experience management with marketing automation.

By coordinating the customer journey, companies can take the level of customer experience management as their segmentation-based marketing campaigns are driven by interaction, such as browsing a website or store. , chat, phone call, or in – store dialogue – in real time yre can be triggered by a tailored, comprehensive and consistent customer experience, Microsoft demoted at the event. The company’s new Dynamics 365 Marketing capability breaks down the walls separating teams working in marketing, sales, sales and service, so companies can respond to new needs in real time and with full customer knowledge at every point of contact, which is probably good for their relationship.

Personal content can also strengthen the brand – customer relationship, but creating such effective content as quickly as possible poses a serious challenge for companies. Dynamics 365 Marketing’s built-in artificial intelligence helps companies properly associate messages and recipients by recommending content, channels, customer segments, and analytics capabilities. Microsoft has now enhanced the application’s built-in mail editor, which allows users to click on personalized e-mail even when chatting with a customer by inserting images, videos, documents, and other information suggested by the AI.

artificial intelligence is also aided by targeted customer segmentation, channel optimization, and the ability to experiment, which shows marketers what a considered step is expected to yield for a given customer. This is complemented by additional analytics capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing that allow companies to analyze how they are moving toward their business goals, what, and how to change to achieve better results.

Talking Virtual Agent Gets Experience

Chatbot Optimizer AI capabilities are also being augmented in the current upgrade wave by Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, which is available in December 2019.

has been helping companies to develop dialog-based virtual agents since its introduction.

With the proliferation of chat robots, the amount of content generated during customer dialogues is rapidly increasing, so the relevant speech topics will sooner or later be present in all companies. they overlap. Robots are being forced to ask back more and more often to clarify the question being asked, which customers may find confusing. To avoid the resulting problems, Microsoft has developed an AI-based tool that detects overlapping speech topics to help fine-tune virtual agents – and robots that better differentiate shades are less likely to ask back.

Also suggests new topics with the fresh ability of Power Virtual Agents. By analyzing transcripts of customer conversations with the company’s robots, the solution identifies passages of text that did not evoke any of the topics already defined in the system – and their associated recommendations – and suggests adding new topics based on that. For example, if customers talk about Christmas hours instead of the holiday opening hours, the system recommends creating such a topic and linking it to the content that helps answer the questions.

Does this mean that answers to type… feedback are not taken either. wasted, Power Virtual Agents also identifies these in each dialog and automatically uses them to teach virtual agents not to ask the same clarifying question again. It’s also a new AI capability in Microsoft’s solution that makes chat robots smarter the more and more people talk to them.

In their conversations with customers, virtual agents also use Microsoft Graph and Azure Active Directory solutions. available information is also used, recycled to further personalize future interactions. For example, if a customer enters their full name, email address, zip code, these properties will be remembered and they will no longer be asked to be dictated again during new conversations. In the near future, Power Virtual Agents will also use data available in other applications (Power Apps Portals, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, etc.) through Microsoft Dataverse (formerly known as Common Data Service) to make conversations with customers even more robust.

Power Virtual Agents combine multiple AI models and capabilities into a single service, but understanding natural language plays a key role among them. The NLU (natural language understanding) model of the solution is based on deep neural networks that allow learning through examples. Teaching such large-scale models requires a huge amount of data and supercomputer performance, but only once, because they can then be easily and quickly prepared to perform specific tasks by presenting a few examples. As part of Microsoft’s AI at Scale initiative, Power Virtual Agents democratizes AI development by enabling business users to independently and intuitively create virtual agents and work with content created by robots.

Our article is Computerworld 2021/7.

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