View: Curate an end-to-end digital buying experience with AI-generated customer insights
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Curate an end-to-end digital buying experience with AI-generated customer insights
Learn how to curate an end-to-end digital buying experience with AI insights. Subscribe now!
Social Asset A: Deepen and engage customers with AI
Microsoft Analytics and AI accelerates digital transformation that deepens engagement, predicts outcomes and automates operations. Subscribe now!
Allstate transforms the customer experience with Azure AI
This video showcases how Allstate is transforming customer support with artificial intelligence. With Azure Cognitive Services, Allstate is capturing insights from customer calls to enable a more seamless customer experience.
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
How Starbucks is using AI to improve the customer experience
At Microsoft's Build conference, Starbucks showed how artificial intelligence is helping them better predict what customers may be in the mood for by considering such factors such as weather, location, and user preferences.
Why Promoting Healthier Workplace Habits Will Boost Your Business
Too many existing workplace environments lack adequate value when it comes to mental health and physical fitness, according to Sam Corcos in his Entrepreneur article, "Why Promoting Healthier Workplace Habits Will Boost Your Business." Corcos acknowledges, "we're living in a fast-paced era with higher stress levels than ever," so it's crucial you show your employees you care about their health and well-being.
Half of millennials and 75% of Gen Zers have left a job for mental health reasons, according to a recent study by Mind Share Partners, Qualtrics and SAP. Combine this high exit rate with the fact that according to the Centers for Disease Control, depression reduces cognitive performance one-third of the time—and you have a petri dish of too many unnecessarily-high unhealthy work environments.
"To help your employees mitigate these health risks and improve mental clarity and motivation, become part of the solution," writes Corcos. An example of what you can do? Improve the nutritional quality of the food and drink offered in the building. Vending machines and office parties with snacks and drinks high in sugar not only provide an eventual crash in energy levels and mental clarity after consumption, but they also contribute to long term health problems.
Instead, Dr. Casey Means suggests offering glucose-stabilizing snacks such as nuts, seeds, berries, sliced veggies, hummus, olive tapenade, bean dips, nut butters, grain-free nut-based crackers, roasted seaweed and roasted chickpeas. She says that, "these types of snacks tend to generate less of a glucose spike, thereby helping employees maintain energy levels and mental clarity while also providing their brains and bodies with health-promoting nutrients."
At the same time, encourage employees to monitor their glucose levels and corresponding daily energy and mental sharpness, as well as overall physical and mental health.
Corcos includes other solutions to a healthier workplace, so be sure to read the entire article. Ultimately, the modern workplace needs to value the physical and mental health of its employees.
Leveraging Tech to Improve Customer Experience: 11 Smart Techniques
The importance of customer experience has taken off in recent years. As competition becomes the norm in many digital and application spaces, the interaction that the consumer has with a company becomes more important. CX is vital in helping a company retain its customers and grow its customer base through organic referrals.
Luckily, technology offers several ways for businesses to improve their customer experience. In this article, 11 members of the Forbes Technology Council explain some techniques businesses can use to improve their customers' experience.
Social Asset C: Largest and most trusted
Microsoft 365 guards your data as a valuable asset. With security built-in, not bolted on, integration and deployment are simplified. Subscribe now to learn more.
Get started with Power Apps - Learn
Ready to create your first app? Learn the basics of Microsoft Power Apps and how you can make your business more efficient. Explore the different technologies and easily build an app:
Ste. Michelle Wine Estates ensure business continuity with Dynamics 365
In this video, see how Ste. Michelle Wine Estates continues to prioritise the safety and well-being of its employees and customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company has taken numerous precautions to minimise risk and has transformed business processes to serve its customers during these difficult times. Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions help this company stay in touch with employees, maintain facilities, meet new business requirements, and more.
Teams quick start guide
Whether you are new to Teams and need to learn the basics or you are using Teams and want a handy reference, this Quick Start Guide for Teams is a must-have-close-by-tool.
It includes start up necessities, such as buttons, tabs and channels, but also includes the how-to tasks you need to know only when you're ready to do them: start an impromptu meeting, make video and audio calls, share a file, add apps, and search for stuff, for example.
Keep this guide handy and share it with other users!
Rebalancing supply & demand in healthcare
Doctorlink is the UK's leading health and symptom assessment platform, providing 24/7 access to healthcare for over 10 million NHS patients. During COVID-19 Doctorlink provided essential services to GP's to protect both the public and doctors. Through its clinical decision algorithm, Doctorlink is transforming the industry. Technology for GP's to offer virtual visits. The platform, built on Azure, helps people engage in their health and wellbeing, guiding them to the right care, leading to better outcomes and driving prevention.
Security Solution Overview
With data growing increasingly valuable and harder to protect, Microsoft provides security solutions across identity and access management, information protection, threat protection and security management. Harness integrated, comprehensive security with Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection, Azure Security, and Azure Sentinel to identify and repel more threats than ever before and safeguard your organisation, without sacrificing productivity.
Social Asset 3: Subscribe now!
Discover how you can build agile business processes and transform your organisation.
Monday, April 26, 2021
4 reasons small businesses should innovate with Power Apps
This infographic demonstrates how Microsoft Power Apps can help businesses empower their workforce, save money building apps, simplify the development process, and scale quickly without compromising quality or security. Learn more:
View: 4 reasons small businesses should innovate with Power Apps
Grant Thornton closes new opportunities faster with Dynamics 365 Sales Insights and AI
To best serve its clients, Grant Thornton must tie its extensive knowledge of macro-level economic and industry trends to the micro-level business needs, motivations, and challenges faced by individual executives within its client base. The global accounting and consulting firm does this by using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Azure, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to "connect the macro with the micro" and deliver that information quickly and accurately to geographically distributed team members. They also use Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to understand the health of client relationships and where new opportunities may lie, take actions based on those insights, close new opportunities faster, and win more deals.
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Privacy, security, and compliance are prioritized in Microsoft Teams
Now more than ever, people need to know their virtual conversations are private and secure. Microsoft is committed to giving users transparency over the collection, use, and distribution of their data. No tracking for participant attention or multitasking during Teams meetings. No unfettered government access to data, and no ads linked to data. Microsoft even offers transparency reports on the Transparency Hub, detailing how it responded to third-party requests for data.
"We are committed to providing products, information, and controls that you let choose how your data is collected and used," stated President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith. Knowing that your organization can experience enterprise-grade communication and collaboration while at the same time be protected, secure, and compliant—that allows you do your work with confidence.
View: Privacy, security, and compliance are prioritized in Microsoft Teams
How Low-Code Platforms Let Developers Drive Business Innovation
Watch this webinar to learn how low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Apps empower all developers to unleash innovation and drive growth. Discover how to engage and leverage your team in a pro developer scarcity climate. Microsoft and Forrester Research speakers lead the discussion. Sign up here.
Selling successful process
Today, success is about quality over quantity, replacing the days of cold calling and cut-and-pasting of boilerplate email copy. This infographic provides 3 key themes to each part of a successful sales process.
The Workforce of the Future eBook
New levels of connectivity and advanced technologies like AI enable businesses to process more data on a larger scale. AI plays one of the biggest roles—in terms of disruption and resulting opportunity—for our industry and our workforce. As we look to a future powered by a partnership between computers and humans, we must address these challenges head on: How will AI impact employment and jobs? How do we ensure that AI is designed, used, and governed responsibly? Explore answers to these questions and more in this valuable eBook.
Microsoft pivots to digital selling to reach more customers
This blog post details how Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 to keep up with digital sales. As more customers move to digital buying, the volume of leads generated has grown exponentially. To keep up, Microsoft Digital Sales turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights to scale for increased demand, engage customers remotely and increase seller productivity.
Overcoming misconceptions about open source
Driving adoption of open-source DevOps becomes easier after addressing four common myths. Myths like open source isn't secure, or open source isn't enterprise-grade. For debunking these and more, this infographic has the answers.
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
The Role of AI and People Analytics in Developing the Leaders of Tomorrow
While investment in digital business solutions continues to increase, employees remain the lifeblood of every enterprise. This article from Forbes covers key ways AI and analytics help organizations hire the right people and train them for success.
Low-code drives business transformation
This infographic shows how Microsoft Power Apps uses low code to help you save money and time for your business. See why Forrester named Microsoft a leader in low-code development platforms, and discover the benefits of Power Apps here.
ROI Azure Synapse
This infographic shows how @Microsoft Azure Synapse brings Big Data and Data Warehousing together in a single service to provide limitless analytics.
Security Azure Infographic
Securely harness the power of the cloud with Azure Advanced Threat Protection. This infographic outlines how your organisation can trust Azure Advanced Threat Protection as it provides real-time security at enterprise scale, detect threats quickly and allows your business to stay focused on what's important.
The value of low-code: turn your bright ideas into brilliant apps
This video is a quick introduction to low-code capabilities and how Microsoft Power Apps uses this technology to empower businesses to create innovative apps. Discover how to reduce inefficiencies and solve business challenges by quickly and easily creating custom applications.
The great enabler: revolutionising IT at PayPoint
Entire story is how they've moved to the cloud in order to streamline services, allow people to make payments online. They brought E5 for security. PayPoint are a market-leading omnichannel payments and services provider, offering point of sale capabilities in over 35,000 retailers across the UK. They help people to control their household finances, make essential payments and access in-store services, like parcel collections and drop-offs. Paypoint are transforming their products and services through digital enablement, powered by Azure and accelerated into the market due to COVID-19.
NSW: Affording a device in every hand
Business.com named Microsoft Teams the best video conferencing service in 2020: "What truly makes this service appealing is its integration with other Microsoft Office applications. If you already use Word, Excel and Outlook, integrating Teams into your workflow is a simple process. Considering everything you get access to, this is one of the most affordable video conferencing services we found in our research." Businesses don't need a chat feature or other stand-alone services—they need to be able to perform their tasks while having access to their files—they need integration. This is what Teams provides, and at an affordable price.
View this video and see how integration and affordability enabled the education department in New South Wales to put a device in every pair of hands.
The leading South African law firm steps up digital innovation to build the legal practice of tomorrow
With over 150 years of history and experience in the legal market, Webber Wentzel has become one of South Africa's most prominent law firms, operating at the forefront of legal services and home to the country's longest-standing pro bono practices. The firm aims to act as a beacon of innovation for the industry. In this video, see how Webber Wentzel has taken advantage of the capabilities of Office 365 to create a more efficient and collaborative workplace for its teams, while facilitating and securing client interactions.
Alaska Airlines makes shopping easier
A great online shopping experience begins with great software. Alaska Airlines is using microservices, Microsoft Azure, and Windows Server Containers with Docker to launch new e-commerce features faster - in minutes versus days. Travelers get new offers sooner, which translates to happier customers and higher revenues. By running its e-commerce engine in Azure in hybrid fashion, Alaska can also scale more easily and cost-effectively, ensuring its sites run at the optimum point of performance and cost.
ComAP: digital transformation of sales
The Czech company ComAp makes control units for diesel, gas, dual fuel, and other kinds of power generators for clients all over the world. Its devices can be found in hospitals, banks and data centres. Since its foundation in 1991, ComAp has put emphasis on readiness in providing services to its customers. The effort to be always there for its customers has become one of the company's essential values. For ComAp, digitalisation of sales with Microsoft has enabled global consolidation and consistency throughout its offices.
Monday, April 19, 2021
Romanian healthcare provider improves customer experience and business operations with Microsoft
Regina Maria is a leading provider of healthcare services in Romania. Microsoft equips them with technology to optimize business processes and maintain a high level of patient care. Microsoft Teams unifies their communication applications into a single system, allowing them to reduce the approval process time and increase speed and rate of response to customer feedback. With Microsoft tools, Regina Maria's database is 20% more accurate and complaint management is 50% faster.
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
Microsoft Transforms its Sales Practices
As software customers become better informed through their own online research, sellers must adapt their sales practices to engage with them at the right time and with the right insights to deliver value. By adopting a relationship sales approach that encompasses social listening, customer research, and innovative technology, the Inside Sales team at Microsoft has undergone a digital transformation that drives better interactions and establishes a model from which both partners and customers benefit.
Spotlight on 'Teams as a Platform' at Virtual Microsoft Build 2020
At Microsoft's annual Build developer conference, there were several updates announced for Microsoft Teams. According to veteran participant and Forbes contributor Patrick Moorhead, the integration of Teams with Microsoft Power Platform "was the biggest story out of the conference this year, as it turns Teams into essentially a full-blown platform. With the lack of developers globally, I think this combination could enable some very powerful capabilities."
Power BI is also getting further integrated into Teams, notes Moorhead. Users will be able to import and share reports, or merely charts from reports, from the new 'Share to Teams' button in the Power BI portal. "Additionally, when a chart is shared to a Teams conversation it will now include a rich thumbnail preview, and an adaptive card that Microsoft says will enable users to take action on said chart," writes Moorhead.
There's lots more to take note of for the improvements around Microsoft Teams and its far-reaching capabilities. Read Moorhead's entire article, "Spotlight on 'Teams as a Platform' at Virtual Microsoft Build 2020" for an overview of these developments.
Social Asset 5: Subscribe now
Stay in the loop on all things DevOps. For tips, tricks, and news on Microsoft DevOps with GitHub, Design Visual Studio, Azure, and more - subscribe now!
9 tips for meeting with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams enables you to host and participate in more productive meetings and invite anyone on the planet to join you. This makes Teams a perfect solution where you can communicate and meet with anyone inside or outside your organisation - even if they are not a Teams user. This blog offers nine tips to having more productive meetings with attendees in and outside your organisation.
Social Asset C: Increase sales with AI-prioritised activities and cadences
Increase sales and adjust to fluctuations in demand by scaling sales resources and arming digital sellers with training/skilling and next best action enablement tools. Learn how Microsoft makes it possible. Subscribe now.
View: Social Asset C: Increase sales with AI-prioritised activities and cadences
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
How to build autonomous systems with AI
This video is a powerful example of how autonomous systems can be aligned to intelligently perform routine tasks. Toyota Material Handling partnered with Microsoft using AirSim (an open source simulation platform originally developed to teach drones or robots to learn in high fidelity simulated environments) to train a forklift on tasks like picking up a pallet. This video illustrates the vision for a future warehouse with pre-trained, intelligent forklifts assisting people in everyday activities.
Building the AI-Powered Organization
The business world is rapidly changing. It is estimated that AI will add $13 trillion to the global economy over the next decade-and yet from thousands of executives surveyed, only 8% of firms are adopting core practices that fully support implementation. Businesses arrive at progress slowly, reflecting a failure to rewire within the organization. This article from Harvard Business Review demonstrates how companies can make a successful shift to utilizing AI and setting themselves up for success.
H&R Block delivers with Azure DevOps and Microsoft
With recent changes in the tax industry, H&R Block made plans to stay ahead, providing seamless multichannel experiences and unifying its disparate data sources to better serve its customers. By moving its various workloads to Microsoft SQL Server 2017 and Microsoft Azure and using Azure data services, the tax provider has been able to enhance service delivery, scale to meet its peaks in demand, and accelerate innovation. Watch this video for the story.
How American Express and Microsoft can help merchants battle fraud
This article chronicles how Microsoft partnered with American Express to improve the accuracy of fraud protection for online retailers. American Express joined forces with Microsoft to enable merchants and card issuers to share information about risk exposure while incorporating information in detailed evaluations.
Saving Money with Microsoft Teams
Teams helps companies improve access to information and free up workers to focus on higher-value activities, thus reducing operating costs, accelerating time-to-market, and fostering greater innovation.
Benefits of Microsoft Teams
Teamwork. Collaboration. Communication. Applications. These words sum up the modern workplace—and they also describe Microsoft Teams. Office 365 apps are built-in for easy access to SharePoint, OneNote, Power BI, Planner, and more.
Look at this flyer for details and advanced features of Teams' capabilities for chat, collaboration, meetings, and calling.
Ste. Michelle Wine Estates crafts luxury customer experiences with Dynamics 365 Commerce
Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, one of the largest premium wine companies in the United States, prides itself on superior consumer experiences. To unify its consumer data and provide opportunities for innovation, Ste. Michelle is deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce across all its wine brands. The company is already seeing better mobile experiences, and it expects that by enhancing its omnichannel commerce platform, Ste. Michelle will increase sales and conversion rates, attract new business and boost loyalty among existing consumers.
Learn with Visual Studio Remote Office Hours | Visual Studio Blog
A new live broadcast directly from the Visual Studio team (my garage to be exact) is now streaming near you every Thursday morning. It's about everything Visual Studio and you get rare insights into the inner workings of features, processes, and the people that make it all happen.
Ciacci Piccolomini d'Aragona winery creates a perfect blend of tradition and technology with Microsoft Teams
Teams provides virtual solutions in response to an unexpected crisis.
For three generations, the Bianchini family has been creating exceptional wines on their idyllic estate, maintaining the traditions of a historic estate while staying one step ahead of the latest developments in the world of wine. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic and trade shows postponed and international travel impossible, everything changed. The Ciacci winery responded by turning to Microsoft Teams. To keep the business thriving, it moved quickly to replace in-person gatherings with virtual wine tastings using Teams meetings. Family members also used Teams to work together and connect with partners and suppliers, making the adjustment a perfect balance of tradition and technology.
Monday, April 12, 2021
2 Types of Artificial Intelligence
Bring the future into your business today with AI. Explore two types: Pre-Built and Custom Built. Pre-Built AI has cognitive services - deep learning cognitive capabilities ready to use (vision, speech, knowledge, translation, etc.), whereas Custom Built AI uses machine learning capabilities to analyze data to build and an artificial neural network to address specific problems not covered by Cognitive Services.
Fortnum and Mason delivers memorable customer experiences with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Fortnum and Mason delivers memorable customer experiences with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
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Microsoft Analytics and AI spark innovation and enable endless opportunities for using your data to foster growth. Subscribe now!
Turn prospects into engaged customers
Today's B2B buyers have high expectations, and those expectations will not be met if B2B buyers are accustomed to sophisticated consumer interactions in their personal lives. Executive B2B buyers are not impressed by marketing driven by large, relatively impersonal data analysis that leads to inconsistent and conflicting interactions or sales outreach that doesn't cater specifically to their needs at the right time. This blog recommends taking a new approach that unifies relationship data across the full customer lifecycle.
Digital collaboration is key to success in the modern workplace
What is Microsoft Teams? It's a collaboration hub—a place to conduct 1:1 and group chat and to engage in powerful online meetings. It has Enterprise calling and voice with built-in Office 365 apps. Teams' versatility is stronger than ever, while maintaining enterprise-grade security and compliance that customers rely on. App integration is also built in—and there's a steady increase in organizations utilizing apps with the tool. There's a reason it's the fastest growing business application in Microsoft history.
Subscribe now to learn how digital collaboration powered by Microsoft Teams is the answer to modern workplace needs this year.
View: Digital collaboration is key to success in the modern workplace
Themes for sales success
This infographic provides 4 key themes for sales success, including building and strengthening relationships with key prospects and engaging with the whole buying committee. It also notes that success is all about scale and cross-platform is key.
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Disruption Defined: Maersk navigates data to move goods globally
Welcome to the fourth industrial revolution where we're now experiencing the digital age. This revolution is transforming all industries, including shipping and logistics. Maersk, the integrated transport and logistics giant, has transformed their business using digital strategies. In the past, shipment delays were caused by hiccups in a supply chain, since those chains must move large amounts of data. Since Maersk's switch to harnessing data digitally, they've reinvented how global supply chain management is done.
Future Generali uses Microsoft AI to Deepen Customer Engagements
Future Generali India Life Insurance Co. Ltd. adopted the use of REVA, a chatbot built on the Microsoft Bot Framework, which plays a key role in driving insightful conversations with its customers. In this video, see how the company has already seen an increase in the customer satisfaction rate by 91%, which won them the Microsoft and CNBC TV18 #AIForAll award for leveraging AI for enhancing customer engagement.
Managing cybersecurity like a business risk
This powerful thought leadership article highlights the threat of data breaches and cyberattacks, while advocating for organizations to rethink their approach to cybersecurity. Microsoft urges businesses to view data transformation and threat analytics/modeling as growth opportunities while approaching security as a core philosophy.
Cincinnati Children's makes tough times easier
Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center is well known for excellent care and its commitment to the well-being of the families it serves. To reduce strain for parents and make their lives easier, the hospital created the Caren mobile app using Microsoft Azure and Azure services. Parents turn to Caren for help navigating the hospital, getting answers to their questions, and entertaining their children. Using the app lets parents focus more on their families and less on stressful details.
Engaging at scale
This infographic represents successful companies' consensus about which sales tools are most effective in enabling their sales teams to engage at scale with target accounts.
NSW: Large-scale education
Teams was built to work closely with Office 365—so the fact one in five corporate employees use an Office 365 cloud service means that they are prime for a smooth deployment of Teams.
About two-thirds of Teams users are interacting with files inside the app—the number of organizations integrating apps with Teams is also rising. Again, with remote work increasing, users are finding the integration features of Microsoft Teams increasingly helpful.
In this video, you'll see how the second largest educational organization in the world deployed Microsoft Teams seamlessly—without restrictions by some of the scale issues it faces.
Customer centricity: A key priority across all lines of business
Customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020. Get ahead of the competition now by personalising your organisation's customer experience strategy. Read the Customer Centricity e-book to learn how to unify your siloed marketing, sales and service data into a single, intelligent 360-degree customer view by adopting a customer data platform.
View: Customer centricity: A key priority across all lines of business
The DevOps Imperative: Keep Up Or Get Lost
When the software industry is moving faster than ever, security testing must keep up. The only way to sustain a high release cadence is to progress through the software development life cycle (SDLC) the right way the first time.
McCann & MullenLowe - Microsoft Teams Case Study
When bringing two companies together through acquisitions, you are often bringing in a different culture, with different technology. This can often make it difficult to collaborate efficiently. Sharing files and streamlining communication is a common problem. Two of the leading agency networks, McCann and MullenLowe, needed help to create a single platform which enabled their employees to work together through close collaboration. Microsoft Teams provided the solution they were looking for.
Monday, April 5, 2021
Why Microsoft?
When it comes to risk analytics workloads, Microsoft has you covered. This infographic highlights five benefits in an easy to comprehend visual. Microsoft delivers the ability to meet enterprise requirements, expertise on the latest Azure features, and a network of highly experienced data scientists to address financial service challenges. Additionally, Microsoft Premier Support ensures full adaptability and accommodates hybrid configurations.
Worldwide logistics provider connects the dots, boosts ROI with Dynamics 365 Marketing
How does a global company connect its salespeople to customers in an efficient yet personal way? Rotterdam-based Broekman Logistics decided to add the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing app to the company's existing Dynamics 365 Sales app to make it even easier and more efficient to find and develop high-quality leads and nurture customer relationships. As a result, Broekman Logistics not only increased its sales, but also gained valuable insights that it uses to sharpen sales management. The real engine behind global logistics? It's all about a smooth collaboration between sales and marketing.
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