Microsoft Copilot for Service and Copilot for Sales are now generally available.
The Copilots support employees in completing various tasks in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Service and Sales.
Yet, the Copilots also integrate with various third-party CRM solutions, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.
Across these platforms, the Copilot automates tasks to increase employee productivity and personalize customer conversations.
For instance, Service Copilot assists contact center teams by generating personalized customer replies via email, proactively serving agents with insights from knowledge bases, and summarizing contact center conversations.
There is also a free version that comes as a default within Dynamics 365 for Service and just offers the latter capability to give customers a taster of the Copilot’s benefits.
Meanwhile, Sales Copilot can also auto-generate email responses, which the sales rep may review, tweak, and send.
However, there are additional capabilities, too, such as the generation of pre-meeting customer briefs and customer opportunity sum-ups.
Further features stem from its tie-up with Teams and Outlook. For instance, via Teams, it can offer real-time suggested responses during sales meetings, and – in Outlook – it enables the auto-generation of customer communication and automatically updates CRM records.
When teasing the launch of Copilot for Sales in July during last year’s Microsoft Inspire event, Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO at Microsoft, said:
“Whether you’re responding in email or a Teams meeting, you get to stay in the flow with the customer and ground that activity of customer interaction with CRM.
“[You are] able to complete your task without having to go out of bounds to your system of record. That’s the dream we’ve been waiting for a long time.
I think every SaaS application category is going to be fundamentally rewired because of this capability.
The Service and Sales Copilots are now available for $50 per user/month. They come as part of a bundle with the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.
However, businesses that have already implemented Copilot for Microsoft 365 may add Service or Sales Copilot for an extra $20 per user/month.
The Business Impact of Copilots for CRM
When introducing Copilot for Sales, Nadella shared how Microsoft’s service and sales teams had successfully utilized their respective Copilots to unlock new efficiencies.
In the case of Copilot for Sales, 85 percent of the tech giant’s users reported they could now complete one or more tasks faster.
70 percent also noted that the Copilot had helped to improve their productivity.
Elsewhere, the innovation helped to reduce average handling time (AHT) by 12 percent – with 77 percent of contact center agents unwilling to relinquish the virtual assistant.
Much of the time savings stem from the auto-summarization feature, which streamlines an agent’s after contact work (ACW).
However, Microsoft also stressed the ability of Copilot to serve agents with insights in real-time – scattered throughout secure enterprise data and knowledge bases – has helped.
Indeed, navigating these does add precious seconds to every contact. Moreover, it frustrates agents, with Gartner recently reporting that 43 percent of agents are “overwhelmed” by the number of systems and tools they must use to do their jobs.
Early-adopter RSM managed to combat this issue with Copilot for Service – while leveraging Copilot Studio to customize its virtual assistant.
Sharing his team’s experience with the virtual assistant, Christian Hutter, Microsoft Practice Leader at RSM, stated:
“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.
Microsoft will hope that the launch of both Copilots helps more organizations achieve similar results and – ultimately – drives further interest in its Dynamics 365 CRM solutions.
Of late, this interest has stalled, with the tech juggernaut reporting weakening new business in the CRM and ERP spaces amid continued competition from the likes of Salesforce, Oracle, and SAP.
