Microsoft Envision South Africa 2022

Microsoft Envision South Africa 2022

Inspirational

Microsoft Envision South Africa 2022

 Microsoft Envision South Africa 2022 was no ordinary event! It was a terrific opportunity for Microsoft Partners and customers to get a first look at new features, enhancements, and innovations to transform your business into a more agile, customer-centric organisations specific to all industries.

Upon arrival guests were given a warm welcome with arrival refreshments and a moment to network with various attendees.

The CRM Team was proudly represented by Wynand Roos (Johannesburg) and Rynhardt Grobler (Cape Town) who were part of the panel at the industry breakout session: Retail – Reimagine Customer-Driven Retail.

To kick off the session, Lidia Ngengebula – the Retail, Transportation & Logistics Director at Microsoft South Africa welcomed everyone. “I just want to firstly say thank you so much for the support that you have given us as the Microsoft team. I must tell you we have a lot of fun working with you as our customers and you as our partners. There has never been a more exciting time than today to be in retail right because speed of retail just continues keep accelerating retailers are looking for change, they are looking for ways to monetize the digital economy.”

Lolo Scrumpton, the Retail Executive at Microsoft South Africa, introduced the panelists which included, Wynand Roos – Managing Director of The CRM Team, Richard Swart – Chief Operating Officer at Ignition Group and Rami Sultan Microsoft UAE Government Director.

Lolo Scrumpton asked Wynand Roos, how retailers can get a centralised 360-degree view of who their customers are, where their customers purchase, how often they purchase and what they buy.

 

 

In which Wynand responded, “I’d like to start by saying that data and capturing data is not a substitute to strategy and to give a simple example, I recently had an urge to purchase some equipment and went on to Google to find the equipment that I was looking for and I found two retailers that sold what I was looking for. One retailer site stated that they were out of stock and asked for me to provide my e-mail address to notify me when new stock arrives. The other retailer side that they were also out of stock on the item that I was looking for. So, I sent an email to their email address asking to be notified when there will be stock again. Two days later I had no response, so I followed up in which they responded, and they said that they placed an order, but they do not know when it is going to arrive. I followed up with them week after week.

I received a notification from the first retailer to say that they received new stock. So, the next morning before work I popped into the store, and they said they were just about to phone me. They went on to say that they had received stock the previous evening and notified me and that was a wonderful experience for me even though I had to wait for the stock. With the other retailer I kept on following up and I had to initiate that conversation.

There is no substitute for strategy, so how do we make this real for customers? First, we implement a customer data platform in Microsoft world that is known as Customer Insights. Our customer insights allow us to connect to all different data and we must consolidate that data and go through a process that matches and merges that data in order to get a single view of a customer. Not just a single view of the attributes, but also a single view of their behaviour, what their customer lifetime value is, their loyalty points, the money that they spend online versus spend in store. That gives us a consolidated understanding of who those customers are, so once we have that understanding we then let AI (Artificial Intelligence) play its part and AI determines insights on top of that data.”

 

After the industry breakout sessions, all attendees were treated to a lovely lunch and dessert which everyone seemingly enjoyed.

After the delicious lunch, we all gathered to listen to Michael Jordaan who was the guest speaker at Microsoft Envision 2022.

Michael Jordaan is known as a legend in South African entrepreneurship, ex-CEO of FNB (First National Bank) and the founder of Bank Zero.

Jordaan took us on a journey of how technology and the business landscape has evolved over the past couple of years. He took us back to the 2002 Windows XP, the first consumer version of Windows, came out and all the incredible features it had.  He went on to say that everyone thought it was right and no one thought it would evolve to the way that it has today.

Overall, Microsoft Envision South Africa 2022 was a treat to all those who attended. The different sessions left everyone excited to see what more Microsoft is going to do in the next year.

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Microsoft expands cloud services in South African data centres to drive growth and competitiveness

Microsoft expands cloud services in South African data centres to drive growth and competitiveness

Digital Transformation

Microsoft expands cloud services in South African data centres to drive growth and competitiveness

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are now generally available in Microsoft’s enterprise-grade data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Microsoft’s move further reinforces its commitment to investing in South Africa and increasing cloud capabilities. Through innovation, agility, and resilience, this will enable organisations in the public and private sectors to accelerate growth.

The multiple hyperscale data centre locations within South Africa now provide Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform online services to support organisations as they reimagine ways of doing business to adapt to the rapid pace of change in today’s world.

“Leaders in organisations across industries and sectors are focused on finding ways to improve the flow of innovation and knowledge across the business in order to respond to market changes, customer needs and specific business and industry challenges at speed. They need digital solutions that break existing silos between data sources, people, processes, and insights,” says Karin Jones, Director Business Applications GTM at Microsoft South Africa.

Through South Africa’s expanding data centres footprint and an ongoing investment in Microsoft Business Applications, commercial cloud services are becoming available and extending. This provides leaders with the portfolio of digital solutions they need to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.

Microsoft Cloud provides a flexible platform, productivity, business applications, as well as intelligent software for rapidly storing, analysing, and acting on data at scale and securely. Additionally, it makes it possible for people to connect with business resources – data, documents, databases, networks, and systems – wherever they are, at any time. Through this, collaboration, sharing, productivity, and learning are enhanced.

By delivering these cloud services from South Africa, local companies can move their businesses securely and reliably to the cloud while maintaining data residency and sovereignty. As a result, they will be able to comply with regulatory requirements.

Combined with the launch of Azure Availability Zones in 2021, they are further supported by the low latency, resiliency and high availability of business-critical applications and data that comes with in-region data centres – guaranteeing uptime and continuous access to critical data, applications, and workloads.

“Organisations in South Africa are increasingly recognising the value of the cloud, driving continued growth and adoption,” says Jones. The IDC State of Cybersecurity in South Africa report showed that nearly half (48 percent) of organisations in the country are using cloud as a platform and driver of digital innovation, and 61 percent of South African organisations said they were spending more on cloud solutions in 2021 than 2020. South Africa’s public cloud services market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.5% through 2025, up from $1.6 billion in 2021.

New services continue to open up opportunities. Integrating cloud-based services and products with industry-specific clouds – such as retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services – can help extend the value and benefits of the cloud even further. Microsoft’s cloud portfolio includes these capabilities, solutions, and tools to help organisations transform – driven by Microsoft Business Applications and the capabilities of Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

In this era of connected operations, Microsoft Business Applications provide organisations with integrated, purpose-built, adaptable business solutions that allow them to manage specific business functions, foster customer relationships, and quickly create low-code solutions.

On top of the Power Platform layer is Dynamics 365, a pre-built set of applications that helps companies optimise operations, empower cross-functional innovation, and improve customer engagement. With these apps, companies can quickly onboard users, deploy them quickly, customise them for their own workflows and processes, and provide ready-made business scenarios for marketing, sales, commerce, supply chain, and customer service.

Anyone in the organisation, from business users to professional developers, can build, test, and deliver customised solutions tailored to meet their unique needs in production with Power Platform, a low-code/no-code solution. IT resources are scarce, so the solution requires minimal coding. “This means businesses are able to adapt and respond to rapid developments in real time,” says Jones.

“Microsoft’s ongoing investment in local infrastructure and the expansion of cloud services in South Africa is helping build the capability and improve operational efficiencies of organisations of all sizes across sectors. This will accelerate digital innovation in the country by enabling businesses to become more agile, resilient, and competitive. This in turn will help unlock broader economic growth for South Africa,” says Jones

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Are you delivering a connected customer experience?

Are you delivering a connected customer experience?

Digital Transformation

Customer Engagement Trends

The customer is the centre of every successful business, and digital technology allows you to interact with them in more ways than ever before. It is also important to remember that customers expect more as well. A lot more.

Create a bad experience, and you’re more likely to lose that customer. Improve your customer’s experience and get more business.

The question is, how do you create better customer experiences that will encourage new business and loyalty from your customers?

New business opportunities are being created as a result of seismic shifts in the global business landscape. Customer-experience-focused executives understand that a linear process based on megaphone messaging is no longer sufficient to connect with customers. Hyper-personalised, orchestrated journeys, which elevate customer experiences, are the future of marketing. Customer-driven journeys that deliver customer-centred messages in real-time will succeed.

Create personalised interactions

It is essential that customers have the ability to construct their own paths to purchase decisions in order for personalisation to succeed. A better understanding of customer needs will enable organisations to develop hyper-personalised messages that are more tailored and relevant. Further, there needs to be a greater focus on nurturing and retaining long-term, high-value customers.

 

Drive personalised interactions with real-time customer journey orchestration

Engage customers in real-time with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing. By applying these technologies, organizations have the ability to establish close relationships with each of their customers, and they can communicate with them in the channels they prefer, with a great deal of assistance from artificial intelligence.

 

Personalise customer experiences, messages, and channels with Artificial Intelligence

In order to provide personalised service to customers, organisations should consider the range of experiences their customers have with them. Dynamics 365 Marketing uses AI to help determine which channel—email, text, push notification—a customer will be most receptive to. Business users of this application can also draw on a new AI-driven content library to help select the content elements that will resonate better with the customer. Focus on your best opportunities.

Dynamics 365 Marketing supports:

  • Real-time customer journey orchestration.
  • Customer-led, event-based journey triggers.
  • AI-driven recommendations for channels and content.
  • Stronger integration with Microsoft Teams for nurturing webinars and meeting attendees.
  • Works well with Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
  • The collection of detailed feedback using Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys.
  • The development of customer trust with a secure, unified, and adaptable platform.

All of which help you win customers and earn loyalty.

 

Optimise customer journeys

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides real-time customer journey orchestration to help organisations understand, orchestrate, and engage their customers better across marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Dynamics 365 Marketing has a unique, direct connection to data and insights from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and can use its continuously updating, multi-data source segments dynamically.

 

Enhance engagements

Marketing technology requires substantial amounts of data to understand, orchestrate, and engage customers at scale and in real-time. The more data available, the higher the likelihood of intervening at the right time, in the right way, and prompting the next best action. The number of touchpoints per customer per journey is increasing. Capturing data across those touchpoints and making sure it is fed into the next customer interaction using advanced AI is vital.

 

Design end-to-end journeys

Customer journeys orchestrated by Dynamics 365 Marketing are based on real-time interactions across email, mobile, social media, custom channels, and in-person touchpoints. They reach customers in a personal way, encouraging greater understanding between organisations and customers to win customer confidence and loyalty.

 

Engage in real-time 

The next leap in customer journey effectiveness is the introduction of real-time responses to customer-triggered events. AI helps guide a journey to refine the message, offer, and delivery—and assists in conducting dynamic experimentation to determine the content that resonates best—all with unprecedented speed. When a company can rapidly adjust to triggering events that indicate a change in customer focus or signal a new activity, customers then know that they are valued.

 

Use analytics to monitor and measure success 

Activating digital selling and marketing makes it easier to collect data for sophisticated analytics. As part of your analytics process, ensure that your customer journey orchestration software offers a set of built-in analytics dashboards and cross-journey insights to improve journey effectiveness and achieve your business goals. In real-time, monitor your customer journeys and channel KPIs and guide evaluating performance metrics for messages and channels. Is a social channel effective for a specific interaction? Thoughtfully designed analytics capabilities can provide the answer.

 

Orchestrated customer journeys: essential to success 

Organisations must deliver personalised messages that customers can identify with explicitly or implicitly—the right message, at the right time, using the channel that customer prefers—to show that they understand and care about their customers. Strong, sustained growth is a constant requirement for every business. But in today’s world of uncertainties, organisations must not only reach new customers; they must strengthen existing relationships. Demonstrating a commitment to customers is now centre stage in forward-thinking organisations. Customer-led, real-time orchestrated customer journeys are the way to help existing customers progress from one-time engagements to repeat customers to fans of the company.

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Customer Engagement Trends

Customer Engagement Trends

AI & Data Analytics

Customer Engagement Trends

Brands are built on the success of their customer service. Instead of it being a responsive measure to deal with complaints, companies are learning to take personalised, empathetic customer care right to the heart of everything they do. This comes at the right time because customer expectations for hyper-personalised service from businesses continue to increase.

 

Winning the trust and loyalty of customers depends on how well businesses across every industry utilise their customer data and empower their teams to make every digital and physical engagement matter.

 

We are here to help you explore the art of customer service and engagement. We understand the importance of creating a more unified, intelligent data ecosystem to spark innovation across customer service teams. As your customers’ needs evolve, we can partner with you to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to delight.

 

Create outstanding experiences in the moments that matter

Gaining a customer for life happens when organisations make every interaction matter. Whether that is reacting efficiently to a customer query, complaint, or need, or proactively taking steps to offer a new product or service. The key is to personalise the experience. Better understand your customers to create personalised journeys and lasting brand loyalty.

 

Demand for this bespoke treatment has increased. Today’s expectations are for hyper-personalisation across all channels of engagement between the customer and organisation. This move towards an omnichannel model has increased the scope in which companies can reach customers in new ways.

 

Where should a business start in this vast landscape of customer touchpoints to craft a personalisation strategy that leads to customer delight and long-term loyalty? Let us examine this now.

 

Understand your customers

It takes 12 positive customer experiences to negate the poor impression left behind from a single unpleasant experience. There is no margin for error when it comes to delivering customer care. A crowded marketplace of competitors, coupled with the number of digital channels open to consumers to voice their opinions and experiences with brands (both positive and negative) means that a single missed opportunity to delight a customer can have a significant impact on your brand reputation.

 

Employees use data to personalise the experience of the customer. The goal is to make every customer feel that the service they are receiving is 100 percent customised to them. However, this is not always achievable due to time and budget constraints.

 

Instead, a crucial step is to analyse your own data estate. From your customer relationship management (CRM) system to social channels and customer engagement (CE) platforms. Integrating this data for analysis with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help to surface rich insight by creating a single customer view that generates individualised personas.

 

Predicting customer behaviours using these data-driven personas can allow businesses to segment their customers more effectively in order to better align customer treatment strategies.

 

Embrace omnichannel experiences

The ways that customers engage with your business continue to expand. This offers a huge opportunity to benefit from the increased customer data flowing into your business.

 

Unifying this data into a consolidated customer profile that can carry across any customer touchpoint is fundamental to business personalisation efforts. As a result, conversations are more targeted and relevant. Additionally, customer service agents gain a greater understanding of the events leading up to a customer interaction if this unified omnichannel profile is accessible and properly collated.

 

Make the most of innovation to personalise

AI adoption for customer service has been widespread. However, its full potential to drive personalisation lies beyond the simple Q&A functionality that has become a popular standard.

 

Conversational AI’s ability to learn about customer interests and preferences, and then re-engage with personalised product recommendations at key stages of the buying process has become a key personalisation capability for companies to adopt.

 

The more simplistic virtual assistant functionality also has its place. For example, where customers need to action more simple tasks, such as getting an update on an order status. These systems complement the more complex analytical use cases. AI should be thought of as augmenting existing processes that extend the consistency of your company identity.

 

Personalise – but do not overdo it

 

It can be a fine line to tread between providing a customer with bespoke service and appearing to be compromising their privacy. Location-based personalisation techniques such as offers/greetings sent to apps on consumers’ phones when they pass by a store can come off as invasive.

 

At the same time, be as transparent as possible when it comes to informing consumers about how and why their data is used. Regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) have helped created industry standards for this. However, companies can always look to bolster trust with their own in-house messaging and policy statements.

 

Do not lose the human touch

The capabilities of AI and data analytics are crucial to developing the insights necessary for understanding customers, building profiles, and offering bespoke offers and interactions.

 

However, businesses should not over-rely on these automated capabilities. The moments that matter are often those of one-on-one human connection. Take time to establish a comprehensive culture of communication that is agile to change. This is essential to empower your customer service agents with the empathetic skills they need to help find resolutions for customers that are personal and valued.

 

Personalise your customer’s experiences

The ways that personalisation will be felt across customer service will continue to evolve. Either from ongoing trends of increasing digital touchpoints or unexpected factors. Being agile to change is key.

 

We work with customers across industries to implement modular solutions that fit into existing customer service ecosystems to unlock new personalisation capabilities.

Why use Dynamics 365?

 

Align sales and marketing

Sales and marketing components can work together to help you better understand a customer’s needs and address those needs through the right marketing channels. Some of the ways these two functions can work together to help you are:

  • Connecting with buyers at the right time and through their preferred channels
  • Determining what types of messages to send to customers and when to deliver them.
  • Prioritising and nurturing the right leads, ensuring a smooth hand-off from marketing to sales.

 

Increase sales productivity

The right CRM software allows your sales team to find, prioritise the right leads, and deliver insights on when and where your sales teams engage with customers. These systems can work together to:

  • Predict future sales and budgets so you can plan accordingly.
  • Help your agents streamline the sales process—from initial contact to closing the deal.
  • Have client data centralised so that agents have access to real-time information and can deliver solutions quicker.
  • Offer your sales staff mobility options that work across browsers and devices.

 

Build better customer relationships

Bringing customer service and sales together helps you determine and predict your customers’ preferences and makes it easier for your buyers to interact and trust doing business with you. When these two solutions combine, they can help you:

  • Get insights into your customers’ journey so you can meet their expectations.
  • Provide mobile applications for your clients and staff no matter what device they are using.
  • Offer customers an easy-to-use, self-service portal so they can be in control of their data and quickly find answers to their questions.

 

Get an end-to-end view of your customers

Turn data into insights to keep your current customers happy or connect with new prospects. Other benefits include the ability to:

  • Track past customer sales and purchase history.
  • Offer benefits to loyal customers.
  • Identify future leads.

 

Use a common platform

CRM takes disparate customer relationship software functions and brings them all together for seamless management. Other common platform benefits are:

  • Customisable dashboards that offer up-to-date business intelligence.
  • Centralised customer data, whether it is on-premises or in the cloud.
  • Options that enable growth into other global markets.
  • Easy integration with other software solutions.

 

Get visibility into customers

The more you know your customer’s preferences, the more likely you are to gain their trust and, eventually, their loyalty. Giving your team visibility into what makes customers tick will give you the inside edge over the competition. Put the customer at the centre of your business with CRM software that helps you:

  • Create customised messages for customers according to their needs.
  • Set up prompts so agents (in the office and field) know how often a customer has been contacted and what information they have received.
  • Learn about how customers prefer to be contacted: social, email, text, or phone.

 

Offer customer portals

Online self-service portals put customers in control of their data, help them learn about product information, and let them track account activity. Companies have grown to realise that as vital as it is to provide their staff with an online company portal, offering it to clients makes it easier to engage with them as well. Here are three other reasons why customer portals for clients make sense:

  • Clients can create and review requests. Whether it is a request for support or order information, you can set up your client portal, so your customers get quick and easy answers. It also cuts down on the number of times that they have to reach out to you to troubleshoot issues.
  • Your customers take charge of their data. Put your customers in charge of updating their own information. Not only will their data be more accurate, but you will also be able to take client data management off your staff’s to-do list.
  • Automated contact. Contact form information used to be dumped into a database, waiting to be accessed by staff when they needed it. You can now automate contact forms for quick customer response, and to kick off nurture campaigns and workflows, too.

 

Marketing: Improve your customers’ journey

Generate multichannel marketing campaigns, nurture sales-ready leads, and align your sales and marketing teams with planning and tracking tools that integrate with your existing apps and services.

 

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What’s New In Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Breakfast Seminar

What’s New In Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Breakfast Seminar

Dynamics and Power Platform

What’s New In Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Breakfast Seminar

Due to lockdown restrictions, it has been two and a half years since we, The CRM Team, have been able to host an in-person event with customers and prospects. So, when the President announced that hard lockdown was finally over, our team was hard at work to ensure that we get back to live in-person events again.

 

On the17th of August, we hosted our customers and prospects for a ‘What’s New In Dynamics 365 and Power Platform’ Breakfast Seminar at the Microsoft SA offices, in Bryanston. Microsoft is innovating at a rapid pace, and our objective with this event was to bring our customers and prospects up to date with what is new and how it can unlock possibilities within their organisations.

 

This seminar was well-attended by our customers and prospects from various organisations. Upon arrival, they were well received with breakfast, before going into the auditorium where the programme was held.

 

Wynand Roos, the Managing Director of The CRM Team, took customers and prospects through What’s New In Dynamics 365. Roos discussed many fascinating topics in relation to Dynamics Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Customer Insights, and Customer Voice.

 

In Dynamics Marketing, Roos explained to the attendees how they can target customers based on real-time event-triggered customer journeys, how to elevate customer experiences, Dynamics Marketing: investment areas, data, and AI (artificial intelligence), and many more.

 

 

In Dynamics Sales, Roos touched on the roadblocks to selling, investment areas in Sales, forecasting and pipeline intelligence, conversation intelligence, sales accelerator, and process automation, engaging efficiently with customers, choosing the right engagement plan for customers and so much more.

 

Under the topic Dynamics Customer Service, Roos discussed the investment areas, visual customisation of Power BI embedded analytics, simplifying administration with the new Customer Service ​admin center application, teams integration, ​ engaging with customers in Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community​, and many more.

 

In Dynamics Customer Insights, Roos spoke through the investment areas, customer understanding, how to easily and quickly get insights and power your business processes, expanding semantic type support for activities and entities, and how to enable seamless data interoperability across ​Dynamics 365 applications.

 

The last topic Roos discussed under What’s New In Dynamics 365 was Dynamics Customer Voice, where he overviewed the investment areas on customer voice, allowing file upload option for external survey responders​, getting detailed email delivery status, and sharing and co-authoring surveys with your team in a seamless way.

 

After Wynand Roos’ presentation, we had Microsoft’s Technical Specialist, Michael O’Donovan who discussed What’s New in Microsoft Power Platform.

 

O’Donovan introduced our attendees to Power Apps, to empower everyone to create apps to solve business challenges. He touched on how to turn images and designs into apps, for example sketching a form and turning it into an app with Power Apps express design. O’Donovan went further to introduce the Creator Kit for Power Apps and Native Apps to the attendees.

He then went on to elaborate on how businesses can automate business processes across Power Process, using robotic process automation hosted machine. He touched on using Power Virtual Agents, to build intelligent bots for customers and employees in minutes and Power Pages to build engaging site experiences.

 

To end off the wonderful event, Mark James and Selby Bopape, The CRM Team’s Specialist Technical Trainer’s, discussed Change Management and User Adoption. The duo touched on 7 reasons why tech projects fail, The CRM Team’s adoption plan for user adoption, and the three phases in user adoption.

 

The event was a great success and attendees left with a wealth of new knowledge. We look forward to hosting more events like these in the future!

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Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team 

What Are Some Trends in Improving Financial Services?

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