What’s New in 2021 Release Wave 2 | Dynamics 365 CE (CRM)

Microsoft has just released information regarding the 2021 Release Wave 2 for the Dynamics 365 line of applications. This release introduces functionality between October 2021 and March 2022.

Specific to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM solutions (otherwise known as CE), these regular updates in the spring and fall introduce functionality enhancement for Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Customer Insights, and Customer Voice.

While these releases introduce a plethora of new features, some of those I found particularly interesting within the commonly used areas of the system are detailed below.

If an organization is interested in exploring these features, or others available in this release, the team can choose to opt-in early to enable these features. If a team is interested in doing this, it is encouraged to do so in a non-production instance, validate, and then prepare for the production release. For information on enabling the early opt-in, please see this for additional information.

Marketing

The items detailed below are for Dynamics 365 Marketing, which is a separate application, not the standard marketing functionality within the core product.

SMS/Text Messaging

This release introduces the ability to send SMS/text messages with Twilio and TeleSign. The SMS/text functionality will be available in campaigns and customer service communications.

Power Automate Integration with Customer Journeys

Power Automate will be able to trigger a customer journey, as well as steps within a customer journey. Further functionality exists where Dynamics 365 Marketing will be able to leverage the actions and triggers available within Power Automate.

Sales

New KPIs and Manager Dashboards

A new manager dashboard presents the following data:

1. Number of active leads in the organization versus previous periods
2. Conversion ratio between leads and opportunities
3. Leads by source
4. Leads per sellers

Real-time seller KPIs allow the analysis of:

1. Number of qualified leads
2. Number of phone call activities
3. Number of appointment activities
4. Estimated value

Worklist and Workspace Improvement

The worklist interface has been modified to introduce usability enhancements including filter, and sorting, record filtering based on Activity ownership, and enhanced action recommendation for increased sales team efficiency in the sales cycle.

Lead Routing

Enables the routing of Leads to proper team members based on several Lead side dimensions, as well as team member attributes, and skills. Leads can further be routed based on round-robin, or load balancing.

Service

Agent Workspace Inbox View

Omnichannel for Customer Service introduces the new Inbox View to better manage long-term customer support scenarios with multiple communications.

AI-Suggested Keywords and Brief Descriptions for Knowledge Articles

When using Knowledge Articles, keywords assist with finding pertinent items aligning to a Case. This new feature takes the title, content, and other article text, and provides automatic suggestions for keywords.

If you have questions about the 2021 Release Wave 2 for the Dynamics 365, please get in touch with us.