CRM Trends for 2019

As a consultancy company we need to keep up with the latest trends and developments in our sector. Therefore we encourage our consultants to take part in various events that are organized by, for example, Microsoft.

Last week we attended Dynamics 365 Saturday and Microsoft Tech Summit.

What is Dynamics 365 Saturday ?

Dynamics 365 Saturday is a global event organized by the Microsoft Dynamics Community MVP’s and is targeted at Dynamics 365 consultants and developers. The goal is to share knowledge and promote best practices. On the 24th of November it was time for Brussels to host this event.

What is Microsoft Tech Summit Brussels ?

Tech Summit Brussels is part of the Tech Summit roadshow organized by Microsoft. It showcases the Microsoft cloud platform as a whole and provides insights in what the platform can do for you. It has 3 tracks on its schedule (IT Management, Data and Artificial Intelligence and Development) where Microsofts top engineers provide insights into the newest technologies.

Key takeaways from these events.

Although these events were targeted at a different audience, the key takeaways are kind of the same. Below you can find our findings.

You should take a look at the Power Platform.

Microsoft is investing heavily in making this platform as easy as can be. It is targeted at business users to automate their processes without the help of IT. The platform is become more and more mature and your business user can really benefit from using it.

Are you already using Artificial Intelligence?

You should. Because it is there and it’s very easy to use. Microsoft provides a set of cognitive services which you can easily integrate into your existing business processes. Dynamics 365 is the ideal platform to make use of these services and empower your sales or customer service processes.

 

DevOps: shorten your development lifecycle by automating your releases.

A lot of buzz was created around this topic. Speed up your development whilst maintaining the code quality ? This can only be done if the human factor is reduced to a minimum.
Fixing a ‘small’ bug in production ?
Not before we can assure it is not affecting any other processes.
You mean we need to retest all of our processes in the preproduction environment ?
Of course ! Luckily the DevOps can automate the testing of these processes. When all of these tests succeed, your release is automatically created for production.

The future is serverless !

What do you mean ? No more servers to run our applications ? That is not entirely correct. Your applications will always need some kind of hardware server to run on. The fact is, you won’t have to worry about that anymore.
The Microsoft Azure platform provides you services where don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure. It scales up and down as it needs to. You can deploy and run your code with no worries.

Rethink the way you are servicing your customers

Customers want to be serviced across all platforms. They want their questions resolved as soon as possible. Chats bots and intelligent customer portals can help you to achieve these goals. Maximize the potential of your service desk using AI for routing cases and adding valuable information.

Any questions ? Please contact us !