D I G I T A L T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

U S I N G D Y N A M I C S 3 6 5O F F I C E 3 6 5 A N D

O T H E R M I C R O S O F T S O L U T I O N S

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Over the years, PowerObjects has worked with several types of companies from a variety of industries, and helped them solve many business problems. When we have gone through the process of imple-menting Dynamics 365 for Sales, we have not only talked about pain points related specifically to cus-tomer engagement, sales pipeline, customer support, daily or weekly activities, marketing campaigns, and reporting needs, but also unearthed several other issues, limitations and shortcomings that not only prevent them from achieving growth and higher revenue but also limit their ability to ‘wow’ their customers as well as employees. Besides automating sales (tracking revenue, activities etc.), marketing (nurturing prospects and customers; tracking web traffic), customer service (providing support, an-swering questions), and other areas of a business, there are always many other (sometimes rudimenta-ry, sometimes complex) things that need to be addressed. See if any of these questions resonate with you:

• Is it possible to save an email attachment to SharePoint or OneDrive and share with others? • How can we make sure that our sales staff is listening to voicemails and returning calls? • Is there a way for our field staff to provide an estimate to customers when they are with them? o We want the ability to take photos when we are at a client site and store them in CRM or SharePoint. Is that possible?• We get a lot of messages on social media - how can we convert them to prospects or tickets?• We need to collaborate but what if we don’t have the budget to buy a

collaboration solution?• Some broader picture concerns you may have encountered are: • How can we make sure that our sales team’s pipeline is accurate? How can we ensure that they spend their time on real opportunities? • Everything is in emails, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents in multiple locations. We need something that will let us access all the important information and documents from a central location. We also want the ability to access information from mobile devices, some- times offline. • We don’t have any marketing solutions. The ones out there are way too expensive for us. • We want to provide an amazing experience to our customers but lack the tools and abilities to do so. • We want to grow our business, and want to enter newer markets. These are some of the questions and concerns almost every business deals with at some point in its lifecycle. In some cases, tackling such questions is no problem if the business has in-house skills and/or funds to build custom or mobile solutions. However, not every business has access to the right resourc-es or budget to build these much-needed solutions. Even if they did, each solution ends up becoming its own silo. Everything stays disconnected unless effort is made to integrate all of them together for a seamless flow of information. Not only is that additional expenditure but someone needs to now main-tain those integrations as well. This is where the Microsoft stack of solutions brings in convenience. It is a well-known fact that Of-fice 365 is the preferred suite of tools for many businesses. For a small monthly fee per user, the suite allows users to be productive by using “traditional” tools like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and make exchanging emails with internal employees and customers a breeze. What you may or may not know is that combining Office 365 with Dynamics 365 can enable you to also keep track of com-munication with customers and prospects, as well as automate all sorts of business processes. Using Dynamics 365 and other “accessory” technologies can also take care of your various mundane tasks (like the ones listed above). In this book, we will learn more about why it is important to embrace technology, and how Microsoft, thanks to its stack of several inexpensive tools and offerings including Dynamics 365 and Office 365, makes it easy for every business to not only achieve high productivity and growth but also makes life easier for everyone involved-employees, managers, customers, or any-one a business interacts with, optimize their business operations, as well as enable them to penetrate newer markets.

V E N K A T R A OB U S I N E S S D E V E L O P M E N T D I R E C T O R

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

T H E E S S E N T I A L S : W H A T D O E S A B U S I N E S S S T A R T W I T H ?Domain Name & Email AddressPhone SystemEmailOffice Suite

C R M S O L U T I O N : W H Y D O Y O U N E E D I T ,A N D H O W D O E S I T B E N E F I T Y O U R B U S I N E S S & C U S T O M E R SEngage with your Prospects & CustomersTrack CommunicationFollow Up TasksVerif ication and ValidationEverything at your Fingertips

S U P P O R T I N G S O L U T I O N S F O R D O C U M E N T M A N A G E M E N T , M O B I L I T Y , T A S K A U T O M A T I O NA N D S E L F S C H E D U L I N G & C O L L A B O R A T I O NDocument ManagementPlanning & CollaborationSelf SchedulingVideosPowerAppsMicrosoft Flow

W H Y I S D I G I T A L T R A N S F O R M A T I O N N E C E S S A R Y ?Engage CustomersEmpower EmployeesOptimize OperationsTransform Your Products

C O N C L U S I O N

K E E P I N G U P W I T H T E C H N O L O G Y

22 445

66 9 1212 13

14 14 14 16 18 18 19

23 23 24 24 25

COMBINING OFFICE 365 WITH DYNAMICS 365 CAN ENABLE YOU TO KEEP TRACK OF COMMUNICATION WITH CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS AS WELL AS AUTOMATE ALL SORTS OF BUSINESS PROCESSES.

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T H E E S S E N T I A L S : W H A T D O E S

A B U S I N E S S S T A R T W I T H ?

Let’s start with some basics. What are the most essential things a business must have to operate, and

how does Microsoft’s tools help a business get up and running in no time?

DOMAIN NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS

Every business must have a domain name for its website, and at least one email address to start inter-acting with prospects and new customers. Your web hosting company most likely provides an interface for email but it usually is extremely basic, and not at all user friendly. You would want something like Outlook to not only be up and running, you would also want to be much more efficient and quick when it comes to emails. a. With Microsoft Office 365, you can purchase, register, and immediately start using a custom domain. If you already own a domain, move your DNS settings and MX records to Microsoft for email and SharePoint site hosting. No need to pay for multiple services when Microsoft can do it all for you under one subscription service. i. To get started, go to the Office 365 for Business start page and select a subscription plan. During setup, you are able to search and buy a custom domain name. The reset of the backed work will automatically be programed and your email address will start working immediately.

ii. If you already own a domain, you will need to know your DNS, login, and password information so Microsoft can link to the domain on whichever registered service you purchased the domain with (i.e. Register.com, GoDaddy.com, etc.). iii. If you are already an Office 365 customer, go to the admin page, setup, domains to purchase a new domain or link to an existing domain. Exchange picks up those email

addresses, and gets you up and running immediately.

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“ C O M B I N I N G O F F I C E

3 6 5 W I T H D Y N A M -

I C S 3 6 5 C A N E N A B L E

Y O U T O A L S O K E E P

T R A C K O F C O M M U N I -

C A T I O N W I T H

C U S T O M E R S A N D

P R O S P E C T S , A S

W E L L A S A U T O M A T E

A L L S O R T S O F

B U S I N E S S

P R O C E S S E S . ”

4

EMAIL

Outlook is the de facto email client for many business users around the globe, and Office 365 can prepare you to be-come an email warrior in no time. But Outlook is not just for sending and receiving emails, and managing appointments and tasks. Outlook also has a plethora of light connectors that surface information from other systems. We will see later in this book how these connectors can provide you insights and abilities to be more productive, and engage in meaning-ful conversation with your clients. Are you working with someone who is a contact in your CRM? The Dynamics 365 app for Outlook will not only surface that person’s information in Outlook but let you track your emails against that person’s record in Dynamics 365. Interest-ed in knowing more about what they do? The LinkedIn connector can surface that person’s LinkedIn information in your email.

If you have FONKP (Fear of Not Knowing People) when you walk into meetings with prospects, these connectors can help!

5

PHONE SYSTEM

Every business needs a phone system for external (customers, vendors, etc.) and internal (employees) communication. Office 365 has several plans that includes Skype For Business to connect with people from within or outside your company via audio and video calls, and chat. Skype For Business also takes care of voicemails by not only emailing them to you but also transcribing them. For meetings where you need to do screen sharing sessions or present to a larger audience in a webi-nar format, Skype for Business is the go-to tool for many people.

OFFICE SUITE

The ever green, ever wonderful Word, Excel, and PowerPoint make creating documents, making presentations, and analyzing data a piece of cake. They are user friendly and intuitive, and a con-sistent user interface across all tools helps users become comfortable with them quickly. Microsoft Word can be used to prepare letters and/or flyers for customers. Using it especially saves a lot of time when you are preparing letters in larger volumes using a Mail Merge like pro-cess. Pricing information per product or service or customer can be easily stored in Excel. If you are just starting, you can keep a copy of your pricing sheets in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint and share with others as and when needed. Speaking of OneDrive, you can easily backup all your local files on to the cloud using OneDrive.

These Office 365 solutions, and their functions, can not only get you up and running but do a lot more than what you can expect from a “basic” solution. Having said that, are “The Essentials” enough? At what point in your business’ lifecycle do you think you would need a lot more than just these?

Tools like phones, email, and essential software for communication can get you up and running, and even sustain yourself for a decent period of time. However, at some point, you want your business to grow, make larger profits, and be known as a leader in your industry. For that to happen, there are several things every business needs to do in a creative and consistent manner, especially in today’s digital world dominated by the web, mobile devices, and social platforms.

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ENGAGE WITH YOUR PROSPECTS & CUSTOMERS

Prospects and customers have many expectations. They like to be educated about potential services or products they are buying. Nurturing them through various channels to educate them, providing them options, and helping them understand why your offerings are better than the competition’s is crucial. For such nurturing, well-planned and executed marketing campaigns are essential where you not only send material to your audience, but also track and report on who engages with your content the most. However, engagement should not stop after selling. In fact, that is when you should be taking it to the next level! You would want to keep them informed on newer products or services, and their benefits to retain their loyalty. You would also want to invite them to any event, conference or happy hour you are organizing. Essentially, to cre-ate a ‘wow’ factor, you would want to be in touch with your customers regularly, and make them feel appreciated. Dynamics 365 makes engagement with customers extremely easy. Gone are the days of sending bulk emails from your Outlook. In Dynamics 365, you can not only send newsletters to specific people, you can also nurture them through multiple channels — email, text messages, bulk email, and other popular channels. Once these campaigns are created, it can be executed to thousands of prospects and customers without doing anything manually. These campaigns also track who is engaging with your content, and score them accordingly. The higher the score, the more likely they are interested in your products or services. This type of insight helps you focus on the “hot” customers, and not blindly pursue everyone you come across. This helps your business spend valuable time on important customers and be more efficient.

An example of an automated drip campaign that sends various messages through multiple channels. This is set up, and executed in Dynamics 365 using PowerNurture.

“ I N D Y N A M I C S 3 6 5 , Y O U C A N

N O T O N L Y S E N D N E W S L E T T E R S

T O S P E C I F I C P E O P L E , Y O U C A N

A L S O N U R T U R E T H E M T H R O U G H

M U L T I P L E C H A N N E L S . . . ”

Bulk emails can be sent directly via Dynamics 365 using PowerMailChimp.

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ENGAGE WITH YOUR PROSPECTS & CUSTOMERS |continued|

When it comes to engagement on Social Media, Microsoft’s Social Engagement helps keep track of who is interacting with you on social media and why. Social Engagement is constantly “listening” to various social media channels. It not only shows you who is interacting with your business but also the sentiment they are expressing (positive, neutral, negative). A positive sentiment may relate to the person raving about your product or service, and a negative sentiment may be from frustration caused by missing shipment, lack of support, or any other negative experience with your business.

List of people interacting with you on social media:

8

Options for interacting with original poster.

Overall social media analytics

TRACK COMMUNICATION

Everyone within your organization is sending numerous emails, making several phone calls, and meeting prospects and customers in person on a regular basis. It is important to keep track of these activities to un-derstand what type of opportunities your staff is focusing on. Does meeting in person multiple times almost always helps sell? What emails have been exchanged with customers? Have we sent them the material they were looking for? Tracking activities is important not only to see how much effort is being put into selling but also to make sure everyone involved in selling is on the same page, and knows the history of communication with a specific customer. Dynamics 365 syncs emails, appointments, and tasks from individual users’ Outlook, and associates them with a specific customer. This helps achieve the “Customer 360” view in that everyone working with the customer has visibility into what actions have been taken via emails, appointments, tasks and other activities, and what has been promised in the future. This information can be used for reporting, as well to understand the most effective channels of communication with customers, and which team members spend time on what kind of activities.

As your business interacts with your customers on a regular basis regarding various pursuits and activities using various mediums, you need a place where all relevant information can be collated and housed. That is exactly what Dynamics 365 does. Its native, out of the box integrations with Outlook, Social Engagement, and various other solutions, ensure that everything about a customer, opportunity, support ticket, or anything else, is attached to them, and you get a true “Customer 360 degree” view.

Essentially, Social Engagement acts as an extension of Dynamics 365 in that it ensures you are 1) catering to your customer base on the social media platform, and 2) they receive all sorts of communication from your business – whether marketing materials or updates on their support tickets in a timely, and consistent manner.

10 11

As your business interacts with your customers on a regular basis regarding various pursuits and activities using various mediums, you need a place where all relevant information can be collated and housed. That is exactly what Dynamics 365 does. Its native, out of the box integrations with Outlook, Social Engagement, and various other solutions, ensure that everything about a customer, opportunity, support ticket, or anything else, is attached to them, and you get a true “Customer 360 degree” view.

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NOTES

If you are working with a prospect interested in your services, you would want to take notes! Notetaking is extremely important to ensure that you capture your prospect’s needs and requirements, and use that information to converse with them intelligently in subsequent conversations. Often, prospects like to share files with us — spreadsheets or documents they are working from, and photos, diagrams, and other similar documents that define their current state. On other oc-casions, your staff may be onsite with the prospect, and may want to take photos of their current state. For example, you do a ride along with a prospect who runs several stores in your city, and you have been asked to improve the way their store looks. You need a central place from where your staff can access all these notes and files, and come up with a plan of action. You have probably heard of OneNote, a great notetaking app available on computers, mobile phones, and tablets. OneN-ote creates Notebooks with various sections and pages, providing a very structured way of taking and organizing notes as well as different types of files. The beauty of OneNote is that it has a native integration with Dynamics 365. For every record in Dynamics 365 (think prospect or customer), there is a dedicated OneNote notebook. Every person working with a specific customer can take notes in the dedicated OneNote notebook on their individual devices, and those notes would sync back to Dynamics 365.

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FOLLOW UP TASKS

Like taking notes, follow up tasks work as great reminders to ensure your team members are complet-ing required tasks. Whether those tasks are created in Outlook or Dynamics 365, the two-way sync ensures the follow up tasks are available to users on all the devic-es they use.

VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION

When you are selling, providing services, or collaborating with other vendors and suppliers to accomplish projects for your clients, you would want to make sure you are sticking to protocols, and performing the right tasks in a timely manner to deliver high-quality products or services. For example, if you are a construction company, you want to make sure the dimensions of rooms/buildings you enter are correct, or you communicate to your suppliers in advance the specific types of construction material needed. Similarly, an engineering company may want to ensure the prototype they are building adheres to certain formulae and specifications, is going through required inspections, and that every-one on the design as well as sales team knows where the raw material is coming from, what iteration of the prototype they are on, and when the prototype is expected to be complete. Primarily, if your business needs to follow certain processes, adhere to compliance, or work with multiple parties, you would want to have a system in place to makes sure all the right things are being done, and delivered.

Dynamics 365’s extremely powerful and robust workflow engine, along with several in built components like business process flows and portable business logic, ensures all sorts of verification, validations, approvals, communication, and follow ups are taken care of in a timely and consistent manner. The entire process is automated which allows users to focus on specific tasks and responsibilities instead of spending time and energy on many emails, which can be cumber-some and frustrating at times.

EVERYTHING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

When you are interacting with customers or prospects, there are many things you need to be aware of. What is their current situation and their future needs? If they are a customer, what have we sold to them in the past? Have they had issues with us recently? This is the kind of information that cannot be garnered from just emails. This is where Dynamics 365 helps. With a “Customer 360” view of information about a customer or prospect, your team has full visibility into the entire history of that account.

There are also times when we forget to say important things in meetings. Enter as many notes as possible in Dynamics 365 to have an intelligent and meaningful conversation, and to highlight your business’s abilities!

In summary, even though the “basic” solutions, like phone, email, and office solutions are important, and can definitely help your business perform daily operations, they are very limited in their functionality. To successfully compete with other businesses, and grow and increase profits while doing so, every business needs to do a lot more than just the ba-sics. The selling landscape has seen a paradigm shift over the last decade or so, and it is not so easy to get customers if you don’t intend on ‘wowing’ them, and second, it is easy for customers to turn to a competing business when they don’t get attention from you. There are lots of moving parts to running a business, and a solution like Dynamics 365 can take care of automating manual processes, enabling you to communicate effectively with everyone, and overall, helping run your business like a well-oiled machine. Any business can easily double or triple in size without having to worry about spending time and effort on irritating and frustrating tasks (that can also be detrimental to your employees’ spirits!).

“ T H E R E A R E L O T S O F M O V I N G

P A R T S T O R U N N I N G A B U S I N E S S ,

A N D A S O L U T I O N L I K E D Y N A M I C S

3 6 5 C A N T A K E C A R E O F A U T O M A T -

I N G M A N U A L P R O C E S S E S , E N A B L I N G

Y O U T O C O M M U N I C A T E E F F E C T I V E -

L Y W I T H E V E R Y O N E , A N D O V E R A L L ,

H E L P I N G R U N Y O U R B U S I N E S S L I K E

A W E L L - O I L E D M A C H I N E . ”

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S U P P O R T I N G S O L U T I O N S F O R

D O C U M E N T M A N A G E M E N T ,

M O B I L I T Y , T A S K A U T O M A T I O N ,

A N D S E L F S C H E D U L I N G &

C O L L A B O R A T I O N

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

As you work with more customers, you are expected to maintain a lot of documents - from notes to contracts to de-sign documents to diagrams. We always hear from our customers that either they save client documents in folders on a network drive or they are just in their emails (GASP!), and they dig them out whenever those documents are needed. Dynamics 365 comes with an out of the integration with SharePoint (for public documents) and One Drive for Business (for private documents). If you choose to set up the SharePoint integration, for example, (which you must!) a folder gets created in SharePoint for every record you create in Dynamics 365. From then on, every time you have to associate doc-uments with a customer or a project, you just navigate to the record in Dynamics 365, and use the native integration to store documents in SharePoint where a folder with the customer’s name or project is automatically created.

PLANNING & COLLABORATION

Planner: Microsoft Planner is a great planning and organizing tool to cre-ate and organize tasks, categorize them in various buckets, and assign them to various team members depending on what plan the tasks belong to. The simple, and mini-mal interface makes tracking tasks extremely easy, and the drag and drop ability makes it easy to move tasks from one bucket to another and reassign.

“ W I T H M I C R O S O F T T E A M S ,

C O L L A B O R A T I O N A M O N G T E A M

M E M B E R S H A S N E V E R B E E N E A S Y .

T E A M S G I V E S T E A M M E M B E R S T H E

A B I L I T Y T O C O L L A B O R A T E ,

E X C H A N G E I D E A S , D I S C U S S I N

L E N G T H T A S K S T H E Y A R E W O R K I N G

O N , A N D N O T O N L Y E N S U R E T H A T

E V E R Y O N E H A S A C C E S S T O T H E

R I G H T I N F O R M A T I O N B U T A L S O

T H A T T A S K S A R E G E T T I N G

C O M P L E T E D . ”

image source: Microsoft

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YAMMER

If you are a bigger organization with multiple groups, teams, and depart-ments, Yammer enables discussions on a much bigger scale in a social net-working style. All discussions are kept in a central location, and accessible by anyone, any time, depending on your access level.

Yammer is best suited for discussions and getting input from various people across the entire organization or com-munity.

image source: Microsoft

SELF SCHEDULING

Many businesses offer services to their customers or prospects, such as providing them with the ability to book their own appointments. Bookings, another Microsoft solution included in the Office 365 suite, allows you to do exactly that. Bookings lets you create various types of appointments, set schedules and costs, and display them on a customizable web page where your customers can book appointments with your business. All events created on the Bookings calendar also sync to your Exchange/Outlook calendar. Book-ings also provides the ability to send automatic reminders to customers and staff. With just a few clicks, customers can also reschedule or cancel appoint-ments.

Thanks to the mobile app, you can also manage your bookings on the go!image source: Microsoft

image source: Microsoft

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VIDEOS

Stream isn’t just another place where you can upload videos for your employees. First, Stream is meant only for your or-ganization and the groups and users within. Stream transcribes every video uploaded so it is not only accessible for your employees with hearing impairment but it also has a smart search feature built in to make searching for relevant content quick and easy. If you have training videos, case studies, customer success stories, on demand webinars for internal con-sumption and other relevant videos, Stream can make video consumption easy and effective.

What’s even more amazing is that Stream videos play inline directly in Yammer and SharePoint. So, if your training vid-eos are in Stream, they can be a part of other training documentation housed in SharePoint or Yammer, and your users will be able to watch the content without having to leave either of those solutions. Moreover, Stream gives you statistics on who watched the videos and how often, to gauge the effectiveness of your material.

POWERAPPS

While out in the field, your staff may have very specific tasks to accomplish. Some of those tasks might be:

•Meet client. Gather information from them, and provide an estimate right there. (salesperson, field technician) • Go to several client sites, and take photos. Photos should also capture GPS coordinates of the location. (Site inspectors, property managers) • Client is ready to sign. Get their signature on mobile device.

PowerApps is a very powerful mobile app development solution that can create apps for your business for very specific needs. These apps are a breeze to build, and require no to minimal coding. The best part is that these apps interact with applications you already own – Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Excel,

OneDrive, Dropbox, and several other sources. You can surface information from any of your solutions, and your users would be able to add or modify from a PowerApps app.

MICROSOFT FLOW

In the sections above, we discussed many solutions your business can use to automate several of your business process-es, make interactions with customers and employees easy, and ensure content (either documents or videos) is available to everyone wherever they may be. However, as you grow and automate your processes, you will realize there is a need for systems to talk to each other. Why? Because not all users use the same solution for entering and accessing informa-tion. It is easier for managers to use one solution like Dynamics 365 as the hub. Tasks can be created in Dynamics 365 that can then be delegated to end users and created in their solution of choice. Additionally, there will also be several trivial but manual, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks that you would want to automate.

This is where Flow comes into the picture. Flow enables many systems to connect to perform numerous tasks such as:

1. Move information from one system to another (and another, and another!). 2. Move/copy files from one system to another. 3. Provide notification(s) when a specific task is created, edited, or completed. 4. Get reminders. 5. Automate collection of data from different sources. 6. Automate sharing information on social media.

Note: This is just a small list of activities you can perform with Flow. To see a list of available Flows, check out the templates available to get started (or create your own!).

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Let’s look at some examples to get a better understanding of automation with Flow.

MOVING ATTACHMENTS FROM EMAIL TO ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS OR SHAREPOINT

A common “pain point” we hear from our customers is whether there is a way to move attachments from emails to a shared folder when an email is received. Yes, there is a very easy way to do it – with a Flow! You can use one of the available templates or create your own to move attachments to a One-Drive for Business or SharePoint location. You can also set conditions where you extract attachments coming from specific senders, subject lines, etc.

CREATE AND ASSIGN PLANNER TASKS FROM DYNAMICS 365

Your users in marketing use Plan-ner to keep track of their daily and weekly activities. However, you, as a manager, like to use Dy-namics 365 because it gives you visibility into the broader set of tasks across all departments, and provides you with more elaborate reporting. In such scenarios, you can create tasks in Dynamics 365, and a Flow can replicate and as-sign those tasks to specific users in Planner automatically.

CREATE NEW RECORD IN DYNAMICS 365 WHEN A NEW CALENDAR EVENT IN OUTLOOK IS CREATED

We saw earlier that Bookings gives your customers the ability to self-schedule their appoint-ments with your business. These bookings also sync with individual users’ Outlook calendars. From a manager’s perspective, you would want all these appointments to be in Dynamics 365 so you know 1) which of your staff members are busy, and 2) be able to report on these appointments. For these reasons, you can create a Flow that creates an Appointment in Dynamics 365 when an event is created in the Outlook calendar.

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COLLECTING INFORMATION FROM SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATICALLY AND SHARING WITH TEAM

Let’s say your team is researching a certain topic for an assignment provided to them. Your team members would like to know what’s being posted on social media by others so they could use that information for their assignment. Instead of manually looking for that information, they can create a Flow that looks for certain hashtags on social media channels, and posts them on Microsoft Team.

TRANSLATE NON-ENGLISH EMAILS INTO ENGLISH

As you expand your business into international markets, it is likely you will receive emails written in native languages. A Flow, using Microsoft Translator, a cloud based translation service, can translate those emails for you in English.

This small set of examples shows how versatile Microsoft Flow is. Not only does it automate task creation, and minimize human interference, it also provides abilities (translation, for example) that are necessary for a business to expand and thrive in newer markets. Utilizing Flow intelligently can also ensure users have licenses to only the solutions they require, thus reducing licensing costs.

REPORTING

Flow helps us connect multiple solutions to keep information in sync. For the most part, you would want to keep all the information in Dynamics 365. However, in some cases, it is much easier for teams to maintain some Excel spreadsheets or use SharePoint lists to track their activities and goals. In other cases, you would want to report on information gathered by non-Microsoft solu-tions like Google Analytics, MailChimp, or Facebook.

Power BI can connect all these data sources together, create relationships amongst them, and present all information in one, consolidated report! Not only that, Power BI also creates interactive reports with very extensive drill down capabilities, so you could see how one thing affects another.

image source: Microsoft

W H Y I S D I G I T A L

T R A N S F O R M A T I O N N E C E S S A R Y ?

ENGAGE CUSTOMERS

Recent years have seen a huge shift in the way business is done. We live in a world dominated by con-nectivity through digital devices, be it mobile phones, tablets, or smart assistants. Our customers can access information very easily, and this easy access to information sets certain (high) expectations. They engage with us through social media, chatting with us, and sometimes submitting information on our websites, and when they do, they expect quick, personalized, and meaningful responses. It is likely that if you are not catering to your customers’ needs and requests in a “nontraditional” way, your competitor is. Customer like to be educated. They appreciate it when you go above and beyond to make their pur-chasing process much more personal, thus converting them into fans. That can only happen with more real-life interaction with them. Thus, it is time to engage customers in new, creative ways. Dynamics 365 gives you access to a lot of historic data that you can use to gain insights on customer expectations and buying trends. These insights can be gained not just by reporting on data in Dynamics 365 but by combining multiple sources (Dynamics 365, emails, excel data, others) and getting consoli-dated reporting in Power BI. These insights can in turn help you fine tune your marketing campaigns, as well as educate your sales team on future customer expectations.

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EMPOWER EMPLOYEES

The way we work and where we work has undergone a massive transformation. Many businesses today encourage their employees to work remotely so employees can avoid longer commutes. Remote work also allows businesses to own or lease less physical space, thus reducing operating costs. However, working remote also means that you need to provide your employees means to collaborate and com-municate seamlessly, and give them access to information wherever they may be - whether at home working, at the airport waiting for their flight, or driving to various customers for meetings. In order to be most efficient, and to have meaningful discussions with their clients, it is important that they have access to files, presentations, lists, and other important material all the time. Dynamics 365, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and OneNote all have mobile apps, and work offline, in most cases, if your team member does not have access to internet while they are talking to your customers. Since Skype for Business has a mobile app as well, your team members are always available to your customers to answer their question. Also, having access to various insights about your customers at their fingertips can help build a com-pany culture that is customer obsessed, which in turn, can lead to your employees making sure they convert your customers into raving fans. From a training perspective, you would want to invest in your employees’ skillsets on a regular basis, in addition to onboarding and training new employees. In addition to a Learning Management System (LMS), Office 365 solutions like Stream can help you upload relevant videos, and OneDrive for Business or SharePoint can house all sorts of documentation related to trainings. All in all, being open to providing teleworking, enabling employees to work from anywhere, providing the ability for means to collaborate and communicate, encouraging discussions within the organiza-tion in the form of groups, teams, and communities, and enabling employees to acquire new skills as and when necessary are some of the things that empower employees, and foster a customer obsessed culture.

OPTIMIZE OPERATIONS

Using technology, you can optimize your day-to-day operations. Using smart devices and low-cost sensors can ensure efficiency to a very large extent. For example, using smart devices in conference rooms can ensure lights, projectors, and other equipment are turned off after everyone leaves the room. Similarly, installing low cost sensors that monitor temperature, humidity, and noise levels, and presenting that information in easy to infer dashboards can help you understand your office’s environ-ment, and encourage your facility coordinator to make improvements to the office space on a continu-ous basis. If your business has equipment installed in remote areas, they can be monitored for issues with Micro-soft’s IoT solutions. Using connected devices and sensors, analytics are relayed to your team constant-ly that help you gain insights on your equipment. These connected devices can also predict when a machine will need a part replaced, and can either order the replacement part themselves or send your team members a notification. Operations do not only include your office space and equipment, it can also include the way your sales team deals with opportunities. Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft’s machine learning offering, can learn from your historic data in Dynamics 365. After going through past opportunities, Azure Machine Learning could predict the likelihood of your team winning an opportunity. The higher the likelihood, the more effort your sales team can put on that opportunity, thus alleviating wild goose chases, and enabling your sales team members to put effort where it is really required. As a matter of fact, an out of the box feature in Dynamics 365 uses machine learning to help your sales team up-sell and cross-sell products during their sales pursuits. (It uses Azure’s Recommendations API, and requires a quick set up in Azure and Dynamics 365.) To some, concepts like machine learning seem farfetched, but they are already available to make your business operations smarter, and efficient.

“ D Y N A M I C S 3 6 5 G I V E S Y O U

A C C E S S T O A L O T O F H I S T O R I C

D A T A T H A T Y O U C A N U S E T O G A I N

I N S I G H T S O N C U S T O M E R E X P E C T A -

T I O N S A N D B U Y I N G T R E N D S . T H E S E

I N S I G H T S C A N B E G A I N E D N O T J U S T

B Y R E P O R T I N G O N D A T A I N

D Y N A M I C S 3 6 5 B U T B Y C O M B I N I N G

M U L T I P L E S O U R C E S ( D Y N A M I C S 3 6 5 ,

E M A I L S , E X C E L D A T A , O T H E R S ) A N D

G E T T I N G C O N S O L I D A T E D

R E P O R T I N G I N P O W E R B I . ”

TRANSFORM YOUR PRODUCTS

As your business becomes more stable, efficient, productive, and successful in a digital world, be sure to have the insights and capabilities, and thus the confidence, needed to expand into newer markets. First off, use the data you collected over a period of time to find new opportunities in new or emerging markets. Be open to redesigning your products and offerings, based on what you find about needs and desires in the new market(s) you are eyeing. Offering transformed products and services to a new market may involve newer (read: digital) ways of selling them. Be sure to consider Azure for a new secure and scalable e-commerce solution. Want to provide a knowledge base, customer portal, and ability to open and track tickets? Dynamics 365 comes with a portal at no additional cost for providing localized content to your new customers! If you are entering an international market, know that you already have access to tools like Microsoft Translate to translate emails, documentation, and to post in local languages on social media. Translated emails, and other documents can be tracked in Dynamics 365 so everyone has access to that information.

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C O N C L U S I O N

Microsoft Dynamics 365, Office 365, and other solutions from the Microsoft stack provide you with the ability to run your business like an enterprise – like a well-oiled machine performing all sorts of tasks for you, and enables you to ‘wow’ your customers, and employees, optimize your business, and grow your business (and sustain that growth!). Here are some interesting facts about businesses using technology to enhance their operations:

1. Tech-savvy SMBs grew revenue 15% faster than SMBs using less advanced technology. (Source: The Boston Consulting Group) 2. Twice as many tech-savvy SMBs say they are innovative thanks to technology. (Source: The Boston Consulting Group) 3. 25 billion connected “things” will be in use in 2020. (Source: Gartner) 4. CEOs believe technology will transform their business more than any other global trend. (Source: PWC CEO Survey)

If you are looking to transform certain parts of your business (if not all of it), it is very likely a Microsoft solution (powered by Dynamics 365, Office 365, and other tools) is already available to you. Make sure to follow the blogs we have listed on the next page to make your journey from zero to hero successful!

K E E P I N G U P W I T H T E C H N O L O G Y

Solutions like Dynamics 365 and Office 365 continue to get new features on a regular basis, and to keep track of these features, you may want to keep an eye on all the information Microsoft and Power-Objects post on their blogs. Here is a small list of blogs and social media handles you will find helpful to keep up with technology, and to ensure you keep transforming your business at a regular pace! 1. PowerObjects Blog: The number one Dynamics 365 blog in the world! Be sure to subscribe to it to get information on everything Dynamics 365. Doesn’t matter if you are new to Dynam ics 365 or a veteran – there is content for everyone. Twitter: @powerobjects

2. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Team Blog: A great place to learn about new and updated features in Dynamics 365. Twitter: @MSFTDynamics365 3. Office 365 Blog: Learn about newly announced and released features in all Office 365 prod- ucts. Twitter: @Office365

4. Power BI Blog: Want to take reporting and business intelligence to the next level? The Power BI team constantly adds exciting features, and posts them here. You don’t want to miss out on all the fun if you are a data wizard. Twitter: @MSPowerBI

5. Microsoft Flow Blog: Automating mundane tasks is fun. What’s even more fun is making multiple systems talk to each other. The Flow team also keeps adding new features regularly, and this is a great place to keep track of all new and upcoming features. Twitter: @MicrosoftFlow 6. Power Apps Blog: Learn about updates, new features, and highlights from the PowerApps Community. Twitter: @PowerApps

7. Webinars – PowerObjects does multiple webinars a month. Webinars include information on new releases, tips and tricks, best practices, industry trends and several other exciting and informative topics.

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Here is an example of how a business can use Office 365, Dynamics 365, PowerApps, and Flow to suc-ceed in their digital transformation journey. Start at Prospect (the flag icon) to see how each solution can automate processes at various stages of your business.

ADDITIONAL READING:

1. The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Your Roadmap to Digital Transformation 2. Accelerating Digital Transformation With Technology” A Forrester Report 3. Modernizing Business Process with Cloud and AI 4. Crash course in Microsoft 365 Business

Note: These were also used as sources for some of the material in this eBook.

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