Auto capture customer related activities with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

The enhanced auto capture capability in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is now in preview. Be one of the first to preview the improved ability to capture more data in less time.

Data is an important resource that sales organizations have. Bringing this data together uncovers actionable insights that are essential for organizations to make strategic decisions in achieving a 360-degree view of the customer and ensuring a high-quality customer experience.

To ensure customer relationship management data is high quality, sellers must log their engagements with customers. However, many sellers find the process of data entry tedious and time consuming. As a result, they may skip these steps altogether or not bring in the full picture, making it difficult for teammates and sales operations to keep track of ongoing engagements or perform pipeline analyses.

The new set of auto capture capabilities is aimed at further streamlining the process of data entry and ensuring its completeness by helping sellers easily log customer-related activities in Dynamics 365 Sales Insights. Auto capture surfaces suggestions to save relevant emails and meetings in a manner that is visible only to the seller and right where they need to log them in an account, opportunity, contact, or lead record.

The enhanced auto capture goes beyond activity capture of meetings and emails by also providing suggestions for creating new contacts.

These new auto capture capabilities not only relieve sellers from logging information manually, but also decrease the chances of key information falling through the cracks.

All in all, these new capabilities bring sales organizations one step closer to having a single source of truth for customer data. Bringing the data together provides the sales organization with:

  • A better understanding of deal status.
  • An improved data-driven experiences in other areas of Microsoft Dynamics 365.
  • The ability to leverage AI capabilities like the next best steps recommended by the sales assistant.
  • Analytics, such as the relationship health score.

The ultimate result? Sellers spend less time on data entry and use the AI-driven insights to build strong relationships with customers.

To understand the full capabilities included in Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights, visit our Business Applications release notes.

Continue reading to learn more about the enhancements made to the auto capture capabilities.

What’s new

As part of the 2019 release wave 2, we’ve released an enhanced version of auto capture to simplify and accelerate activity capture for sellers and improved setup experience for admins.

With premium auto capture, sellers can edit or dismiss activity suggestions and can easily create new contacts based on contacts that were mentioned in captured activities.

Furthermore, the new version incorporates more AI capabilities to improve the mapping of captured activities to the appropriate records and streamlined UI, making it easier for sellers to track activities and contacts.

Improved discoverability and quality of suggested activities in the appropriate records

These enhanced auto capture capabilities introduce an updated, improved UI showing activity suggestions at the top of the Timeline wall, so sellers can save, edit, or dismiss captured activities. We’ve also incorporated Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to improve the association between emails and meetings and corresponding Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales entities. That means more accurate suggestions right where a seller needs them.

Screenshot of improved UI showing activity suggestions at the top of the Timeline wall

List views for activities and contact suggestions

To make data entry more efficient and proactive, auto capture introduces new list views for captured activities and contacts. Sellers now have a single place where they can track multiple activities with a single click and create new contacts. These views accelerate data entry and offer a more complete, more accurate picture of customer-related activities.

Screenshot of new list views for captured activities and contacts

Notifications for new suggestions

Auto capture now surfaces in the assistant, notifying sellers with personalized insight cards when new suggestions for activities and contacts are available to explore and save to Dynamics 365 Sales.

Screenshot of Sales Activity Social Dashboard showing the assistant notifying sellers with personalized insight cards

Setup

Admins can enable auto capture capabilities without any preliminary work and choose if they want to turn on the feature for the entire organization or just for specific security roles. They can also choose the types of communication channels to capture—making sure auto capture meets the specific business needs of their organization.

To allow smooth onboarding, we removed some of the prerequisites so users can get suggestions to save emails, meetings, and contacts even if server-side sync is not configured in the organization. All that the sellers need to do is provide consent so the application can fetch emails and meetings from Outlook on their behalf.

Screenshot showing how admins can enable auto capture capabilities

A few next steps

We’re always looking for feedback and would like to hear from you.

Please head to the Dynamics 365 Community to engage with our experts, ask questions, and tell us what you think!