If you’re a service agent or a seller, you’ll enjoy the latest enhancement to Customer Insights – Journeys. Imagine a scenario where your communication team has sent a real-time journey email to a customer. The email may contain personalised information about a case or perhaps an opportunity, and you need to know what the recipient precisely received. How does one go about seeing that?
As part of the April update within the 2024 Release Wave 1, Microsoft has delivered a useful feature that provides complete visibility of the email content each recipient receives in the timeline. This benefit is another step in aligning marketing and communication teams with sales and customer service departments.
Referencing accurate communications quickly and effectively will help sales precisely understand the received content. For instance, imagine a scenario where a marketing email has confirmed the purchase of a customer insurance policy. The email in the timeline will present exactly what the contact sees, including email design, personalised information and dynamic content. We can point to an additional example of a service agent who needs to look up a real-time email that references specific case information.
Let’s explore what this looks like in practice.
Email Clarity for Service Agents
As a service agent, you can understand exactly what the contact has received. All dynamic content, such as information related to a case, such as ticket ID, description, or status, is processed. Your service teams will no longer need to second-guess or go back and forth with the marketing team to uncover what was sent.
Because this is a model-driven app, it can be accessed quickly by navigating to the contact and using the standard form view. The agent can then select the relevant email that was delivered from Customer Insights and click the expand icon to reveal the thumbnail of the email. The agent can click the thumbnail expand icon, which reveals a window that presents the full email contents. We believe this process to be intuitive and fast. Agents will likely be able to solve issues quicker and support the alignment between communication and service teams.
Quickly reference the recipient email with accuracy and efficiency.
In the Loop: Providing Sales Teams with Email Visibility
Microsoft has regularly discussed its strategy to support organisations in aligning marketing and sales teams. Sellers typically do not have the time and resources to go back and forth to find what their prospects are receiving, but it’s important they can freely access communications. Previously, the timeline would only reference the email with a timestamp. But with the latest enhancement, they can keep informed by viewing the email precisely. For example, the marketing team may have sent an email regarding a new service, and the seller can now accurately see what the contact has received. The seller doesn’t need to replicate the same information. They can also reference the email in a future call, supporting preparations.
This should support the sales process, save time, and improve the overall customer experience. It helps prevent knowledge gaps across the organisational when engaging with customers and keeps sales and marketing on the same page.
Sellers will see the full content of the email, including dynamic content, personalisation and design.
Video Demonstration: Personalised Emails in the Timeline for Dynamics 365 and Power Apps
Video Transcript
It’s always helpful for sellers and service agents to see what marketing emails a customer has received to ensure alignment between teams and start conversations with relevant information, but this is of limited value if team members can’t see a precise copy of these messages. For example, here we can see an email has been sent, but this version on the contact timeline is missing the personalised detail that the recipient would have received, including a name and a case reference.
A recent enhancement for Dynamics Customer Insights – Journeys, formerly Dynamics Marketing, overcomes this issue to improve visibility by enabling everyone to easily see an exact copy of each marketing email delivered to a contact or lead. Let’s switch to a different app and take a look.
We’re now on the same record in Dynamics Customer Service. Upon opening the email, the full message is now shown, including all the personalised details for this contact as well as enhancing visibility to help everyone improve customer experiences. Having access to the exact marketing emails that are sent is also beneficial from a compliance and auditing standpoint.
In addition to these types of basic personalisation, marketing teams can also use Customer Insights to apply conditional rules in email templates that dynamically adjust the content based on what’s known about a recipient. This allows marketers to change the text and images that are delivered to different recipients in the audience by using data to increase relevance and boost engagement.
However, just as we saw earlier, these advanced personalisations weren’t visible in lead or contact timelines which only reflected the default content from an email template. To avoid back and forth with marketing teams and remove uncertainty the timeline in Dynamics and Power Apps now displays emails that also reflect conditional message rules to show an exact copy of the emails delivered to each recipient. Here, you can see a copy of the email sent to this contact featuring all the personalised content which includes those conditional rules.
Now, we’ll switch to another contact who was part of the same audience. They were sent a message using the same template and here the timeline entry accurately shows a different version of the content, which was triggered by our conditional rules. These are just some of the ways in which the new timeline email referencing feature helps teams stay in the loop and better understand what information is shared with customers.
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Smooth Operations: Simple and Speedy Email Referencing
Dynamics 365’s enhanced email timeline referencing reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to fostering collaboration and synergy across sales, marketing, and service departments. By bridging communication gaps and providing actionable insights, this update enables organisations to deliver more personalised and responsive customer experiences, driving long-term success and growth.
Access to this enhancement requires some administration, if you are in need of support configuring your solution to take advantage of new enhancements like the quick email timeline reference, contact ServerSys today.
