It takes a team to close a deal and keep customers happy. Sales teams may need to collaborate with marketing colleagues, technical experts, or work with their finance team and ensure customer payment details are in order, or quickly pivot to follow up with prospective leads. Similarly, customer service agents may need to work with internal and external experts such as engineering to help resolve customer support incidents. In either scenario, both may be juggling between apps and communication platforms, or reaching out to multiple teams via multiple channels to piece together information to uncover key conversations around the account just move the business forward – all of which not only can slow the flow of work, but you may also miss a trivial context to the history of the account.
Dynamics 365 brings together a set of comprehensive intelligent business applications making it possible for organizations to run their business better and deliver great results. Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with their customers, take actions based on insights, and close deals faster. Likewise, Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps businesses to deliver the best customer service experience possible to their customers.
By embedding Microsoft Teams chat into Dynamics 365, we are bringing seamless collaboration and accelerating productivity across all scenarios. Dynamic users will be able to apply all the rich functionalities Teams is known for in chat -- from rich text editing, tagging people, threading conversations, sharing files, applying emojis and gifs while sending, editing, or deleting messages is retained.
Now, IT admins can configure the ability for users to initiate or join connected chats at a record-type level. This functionality can help tailor the user experience for your business processes, such as, easily locate the account information, connect to the team member right within their Dynamics 365 collaboration window, transfer a lead, or provide the full account context to a new user. Learn more about how to configure to allow users to join chats.
Teams chat embedded into Dynamics 365 comes at no additional cost for Dynamics 365 users.
Since the public preview for Teams chat embedded into Dynamics 365, user experience has been enhanced. We’re happy to announce that Teams embedded chat in Dynamics 365 will be generally available in September!
Dynamics 365 users will be able to:
- Start a connected Teams chat in Dynamics 365
- Connect an existing chat or channel from a record
- View all connected chats related to the customer record within Dynamics 365
Let’s walk through a few scenarios to illustrate how Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 enhances productivity
Below is a scenario for a sales team, which can easily apply to Customer Service, Field Service, Marketing, and more.
Start a connected Teams chat in Dynamics 365:
Imagine, a salesperson just took over a large new account in her sales territory that was previously managed by sellers in other parts of the company. She wants to understand what previously happened with this account and reaches out to a technical expert who supported this account. Because she reaches out from within a specific record in Dynamics 365, the account context is carried over to her initial message so the technical expert can easily understand what she wants to discuss. When the salesperson creates a new connected chat with an external partner, the template auto-fills with account information so that the context stays in the conversation and the external partner who receives the chat via Teams can easily follow along. The recipient doesn’t need a Dynamics 365 license to collaborate. They can reply directly from the Microsoft Teams app.
Meanwhile the salesperson notices another account representative from her organization is also looking at the same opportunity. She clicks on the avatar to open the people card and starts a Teams chat directly from there.
Connecting related Teams chats and channels related to a record
The salesperson starts preparing for a pipeline review with her team. Over the last week she has discussed her accounts with several different colleagues spread across numerous teams (sales, finance, operations, and engineering). Keeping her discussions organized is especially important to her. She goes into Dynamics 365 and connects recent conversations with the right accounts, adding valuable context.
During the pipeline review, she can use her account records in Dynamics 365 to retrieve individual chats, group chats, meeting chats, or channel conversations that are relevant to her deals. This allows her to quickly pull together the information and assemble her pipeline status update.
Seeing chats related to an account
To close out her day, the salesperson looks into a large account that was previously managed by an employee who left the company. She needs to make sure that any deals with that customer aren’t dropped as she takes it over. She opens the account in Dynamics 365 to find the latest communications with the customer, including a list of the chats that her predecessor sent. She reads through them and continues the conversation.
Start collaborating seamlessly and accelerate your productivity
With Teams chat embedded into Dynamics 365, we’re eager to see how our customers and partners unlock new capabilities for their organizations—winning more customers and closing more deals faster.
Try Dynamics 365 today and accelerate your productivity! Contact your IT admin to turn on Teams chat in Dynamics 365, at no additional cost to your organization. Read more about the feature.