Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service are now generally available

Microsoft is dedicated to helping organizations transform the way people work using secure, enterprise-grade AI capabilities, no matter which business applications teams depend on. Starting today, you can seamlessly integrate role-specific Copilot capabilities into Microsoft 365 applications and popular customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center systems for sales and customer service professionals.  

Now generally available, Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service bring together the power of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions to streamline business processes, automate repetitive tasks, and unlock creativity. Both provide flexibility to integrate with your existing contact center and CRM systems, such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, to get more done with less effort.

Transform sales productivity with Copilot for Sales

Sellers today face more challenges than ever. A recent survey revealed that 79% of sellers are supporting more customers and accounts than the previous year.¹ Gartner® research recommends that to drive better sales impact, “sellers must relinquish some control over customer interactions and give AI-powered technology—generative AI, emotion AI and digital humans—more responsibility to execute core selling activities…Let salespeople focus on where they excel: engaging buyers on a human level to understand their needs, motivations and objections, and ultimately validate that a purchase is right for them.”²

At Microsoft, we have been working hard to deliver an AI solution that would address these needs. Last fall, we announced our vision for Copilot for Sales, an AI assistant designed for sales teams to maximize productivity and close more deals. We’re excited to announce that Copilot for Sales is now generally available. Copilot for Sales builds on Copilot for Microsoft 365, enhancing it with connectivity to CRM platforms like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce Sales Cloud to bring sales-specific insights and recommendations to apps like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Word.

Today, Copilot for Sales helps sellers and sales managers:

• Generate sales meeting preparation briefs in Word.
• Summarize emails and surface relevant buying intent and budget, authority, need, timing (BANT) analysis in Outlook.
• Generate emails in Outlook with relevant product, account, relationship, and opportunity information from their CRM system and Microsoft Graph.
• Add leads and update CRM records directly from Outlook.
• View meeting preparation notes and real-time sales insights during calls in Teams.
• View sales meeting summaries in Teams with conversation analysis, sales keywords and KPIs, and suggested tasks.
• Create collaborative deal rooms in Teams that sync with CRM data.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is also included in Copilot for Sales, providing sellers with additional productivity enhancements, like:

• Generate presentations in PowerPoint.
• Generate plans and organize team information in OneNote.
• Ask questions in natural language to catch up on customer interactions using Microsoft Copilot’s chat experience.

Late this month, Copilot for Sales will also bring CRM connectivity to the Microsoft Copilot chat experience, allowing sellers and sales managers to get quick insights on conversion and win rate, sales cycle, and pipeline. Later this year, we plan to enhance Copilot experiences in Microsoft PowerPoint and OneNote as well, tailoring them to address seller-specific needs with CRM connectivity.

Early adopter customers of Copilot for Sales are already seeing an impact in their sales organizations. Avanade employees have been previewing Copilot for Sales capabilities like updating Dynamics 365 Sales records from Outlook, summarizing email threads, generating email drafts, and summarizing meetings with conversation intelligence. These AI capabilities have helped Avanade employees show their clients that they are top of mind, while helping them work more productively.

When we interviewed Copilot for Sales users at Avanade, they reported that Copilot minimizes the need to jump between different interfaces, and the email summary feature saves them 30 to 60 minutes per week. And the impact goes beyond just time savings; Copilot for Sales is improving the quality of sellers’ interactions with their customers as well.

“When our sellers can reduce the time spent on sifting through multiple channels to find what matters with Copilot for Sales, we can be more focused so that we can deliver with clients and drive our business strategy faster.”

—Jennifer Ferrara, Global Business Lead, Avanade

Read more about Avanade’s adoption of Copilot for Sales.

Transform the agent experience with Copilot for Service

In December 2023, we introduced Copilot for Service—the next step in our journey to help organizations realize the benefits of generative AI by extending their existing investments in CRM and contact center solutions. We are excited to announce that Copilot for Service is now generally available.

Often, an organization’s knowledge is distributed across disparate systems—customer records and case histories in one or multiple CRM systems, along with information scattered across knowledge base articles, public websites, offline files, and more. As a result, agents are tasked with navigating multiple apps to not only access critical insights, but also then manage their engagement with customers, collaborate with internal teams, and take action. According to Gartner, “43 percent of (customer service) reps reported they were overwhelmed by the number of systems and tools needed to complete work.”³

Copilot for Service unlocks an organization’s trusted knowledge to accelerate onboarding and case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work. Without costly development time, organizations can simply point to their data and, in a few minutes, unlock generative AI-powered conversations across their knowledge bases. And for agents, they can tap into this knowledge with a copilot embedded directly in their desktop software of choice such as Salesforce, as well as the other tools they already use every day like Outlook and Teams.

Today, Copilot for Service can help organizations:  

• Enable generative AI-powered conversations across all of their data with simplified point-and-click access to public websites, SharePoint, knowledge base articles, and offline files.
• Access knowledge sources with pre-built integrations for Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.
• Embed a copilot in agent desktops from Salesforce and other channels to support agents where they work.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is also included in Copilot for Service. We will introduce additional features in Microsoft 365 apps beginning later this month that will integrate data from CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Salesforce Service Cloud including:

• In Outlook, use Copilot to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and schedule meetings informed by case summaries and other relevant information from CRM records.
• In Teams, use Copilot to browse and update CRM records during a meeting, as well as recap meetings, suggest follow-up action items, and create tasks that can all be saved to CRM systems directly from Teams.
• In the Microsoft Copilot chat experience, use Copilot to ask questions over cases and contacts, as well as summarize cases—all from CRM data.

We’re thrilled to see the initial impact that our early adopter customers and partners are having with Copilot for Service. RSM, the leading provider of assurance, tax, and consulting services for the middle market, is equipping agents with the information they need to support customers without changing applications or searching through hundreds of knowledge articles.

“Six months ago, we launched a pilot focused on leveraging Microsoft Copilot for Service and Microsoft Copilot Studio, which provides a framework to build AI-enabled business processes. We have been working to execute against use cases for our own business with a focus on practical AI, and we are thrilled to now be in a position to bring this productivity enhancing technology to help clients implement AI for their businesses.”

—Christian Hutter, RSM’s Microsoft practice leader

Take the next step

Both Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service are available now for $50 per user/month, which includes the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license. If you already have Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can purchase Copilot for Sales or Copilot for Service for an additional $20 per user/month.

Learn more about Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service.

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Sources:

1. Microsoft. “Sellers’ attitudes about AI.” June 2023. An Ipsos study commissioned by Microsoft. Study included 700 participants who use professional CRM systems at organizations of at least 300 people. Industries include Financial Services, Professional Services, Manufacturing, Retail, Technology, and Healthcare.

2. Gartner Article, Focus Your Sellers on the Critical Art of Being Human, September 2023, https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/focus-your-sellers-on-the-critical-art-of-being-human
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

3. Gartner Ebook, Gartner for Customer Service The Connected Rep Deliver better customer service by enabling reps with technology, 2023, https://www.gartner.com/en/customer-service-support/trends/the-customer-service-customer-rep