Microsoft has released a series of innovations to improve CX design, analytics, and collaboration.
Many of these innovations support developers in their mission to build engaging digital customer experiences, with one of the most exciting enhancements made to Microsoft Power Apps.
Created to accelerate and simplify app development, the solution now includes the capability to develop code from pictures. As such, IT teams may quickly transform images, documents, and even hand-drawn sketches into practical software. Consequently, the possibility for developers to easily digitize paper forms and simplify cumbersome customer processes could very well exist.
Further additions that may bolster CX design include new OpenAPI services, a neural processing developer kit, and GitHub Copilot, which offers recommendations to enhance existing code.
However, the Microsoft Build event announcements covered many more arenas than nifty developer tools. Indeed, many new features aim to remove IT teams from business processes altogether. Its latest self-service BI feature is an excellent example.
As a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics, the technology giant is a well-established innovator within the field. Now, it is pushing the boundaries further with a feature that allows analysts to create data marts inside of Power BI, simplifying customer data analysis.
Discussing this further in a conversation with TechCrunch, Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Azure Data, said:
Today, if you’re a business user and you want a data mart, your normal course of action is to go talk to IT. Now, with Power BI data marts, we’ve made that into a self-service capability. So, you can select the data and there’s an entire workflow that makes it very easy, while ensuring… data governance and security are respected.
Further CX-related innovations come to the fore when delving into the Microsoft Teams updates. Most pertinent is its new Graph APIs that allow developers to embed Teams Chat and Channels into various applications.
As a result, users across the enterprise can extend cross-function communication without the need to access multiple tools, paving the way for collaboration that fuels CX transformation initiatives.
In its release plans, Microsoft also suggests that it will close the gap between its Teams solution and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, its CCaaS offering.
Indeed, on its website, Microsoft promises: “Enhancements to embedded Microsoft Teams include Dynamics 365 data integration, AI-suggested contacts, and AI-generated conversation summaries for agents.” These will come before September 2022.
Such a statement highlights the opportunity Microsoft wishes to seize by connecting its UCaaS and CCaaS solutions – a similar objective to rival Zoom, which recently also released a contact center solution.
Indeed, CCaaS seems to be the next battleground for large-scale CX vendors, especially as enterprise connectivity and total experience become significant CX megatrends.
