The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into business practices signals a significant move towards enhanced efficiency and innovation. Microsoft’s launch of its AI Copilot, utilizing the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4, is a notable advancement in this realm. Unlike traditional tools, AI Copilot is tailored for seamless integration across multiple business functions, reshaping AI’s role within corporate environments. Two applications included with Microsoft’s AI Copilot are Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service. Both offer a comprehensive solution delivering valuable insights to significantly improve businesses’ sales and service operations. As a leader in technological advancement, Microsoft’s rollout of AI Copilot underscores the company’s dedication to harnessing AI for impactful and transformative business solutions.

Understanding Copilot for Service

Copilot for Service collaborates with customer relationship management (CRM) and call or contact center applications, like Zendesk, Salesforce, or ServiceNow. It offers guidance to service professionals who are on the frontlines, interfacing with customers and handling their questions and problems. This program can be taught to extract answers from a company’s knowledge base or contact center and CRM application repositories. With this integration, AI facilitates easier discovery of information and solutions, customized to each customer that service teams deal with.

The use of generative AI in the customer service field is allowing employees to meet the high expectations of today’s customers. It does this by enabling them to provide quick, personalized service at each touchpoint in their journeys. With Microsoft Copilot for Service’s introduction, organizations can focus on strategies that increase customer satisfaction and build long-term loyalty.

Valuable AI features in Copilot for Service

Microsoft Copilot for Service adds a number of benefits to organizations using the platform, including:

• Connections to contact centers and CRM solutions that already exist

  Removing the need for expensive development or extensive system overhauls, organizations can quickly leverage all their data — comprising public web pages, SharePoint, help articles, and offline information — to initiate generative AI-powered discussions in a matter of minutes.

• Assistance with workflow management

  Microsoft Copilot for Service is an AI-powered tool streamlining employee onboarding and problem resolution, boosting efficiency, and automating manual tasks. This allows team members to concentrate on customer interactions. Integrated into the desktop or implemented directly into Teams, customer service representatives (CSRs) can use natural language to query Copilot for relevant answers, leveraging organizational knowledge that already exists. Included in Copilot for Microsoft 365 are enhancements for productivity in tools like Outlook and Teams. For instance, it can provide quick email thread summaries, draft emails, and facilitate meeting summaries with key conversation topics.
  
  Future enhancements will enrich email summaries, drafts, and meeting recaps with CRM data. This will allow agents to view and update CRM records directly and automate CRM tasks. Additionally, the technology will provide preemptive recommendations for knowledge asset creation and updates. This will benefit a wider set of CSRs and knowledge workers, speeding up customer issue resolution and providing a comprehensive overview of the customer from CRM systems, all within a cleaner workflow via Outlook and Teams.

• Customization to meet companies’ unique needs

  Copilot for Service offers greater flexibility through Microsoft Copilot Studio, allowing the addition of extra topics, automation of tasks and responsibilities, and supplementary customization for a uniquely customized application. Copilot for Service can expand to other platforms using over 1,100 templates and custom connectors, eliminating the necessity for costly IT integration efforts.

Copilot for Sales explained

Copilot for Sales represents an advancement of a program previously introduced for Dynamics 365, known as Sales Copilot. This updated version offers several enhancements, including connectivity with Microsoft Word.

With this tool, sellers can perform tasks such as instructing Copilot to generate meeting preparation notes in Microsoft Word, which will be automatically filled with customer details such as opportunity and account summaries and specific information about meeting participants such as names and titles, ongoing to-do items, highlights from past conversations, and email chains.

Additionally, Copilot for Sales is now integrated with Microsoft Teams, which has the ability to display key takeaways and follow-up items, conversation key performance indicators (KPIs), and sales-related keyword triggers.

A study recently released by Gartner shows that 70% of sellers are responsible for the management of more customers and accounts than the prior year. The research suggests that, in order to enhance sales effectiveness, the salespeople need to allow today’s technologies — such as generative AI, emotion AI, and digital humans — to alleviate some of their workload, thereby allowing them to strengthen their connections with buyers on a personal level so they can better understand their needs, motivations, and objections. Microsoft took these findings to work, creating an AI solution that meets these requirements. Copilot for Sales was designed to allow sales teams to boost productivity and close more deals.

Benefits available through AI in Copilot for Sales

Some of the immediate benefits of Microsoft Copilot for Sales includes:

• Creation of sales meeting preparation briefs in Word
• Condense emails and present pertinent buying intent and budget, authority, needs, and timing (BANT) analysis in Outlook
• Produce emails in Outlook containing relevant product, account, relationship, and opportunity data from their CRM systems and Microsoft Graph
• Integrate leads and modify CRM records directly from Outlook
• Access meeting preparation notes and live sales insights during calls in Teams
• Review sales meeting summaries in Teams, including conversation analysis, sales keywords and KPIs, and recommended follow-up tasks
• Establish collaborative deal rooms in Teams that sync with CRM data
• Create presentations in PowerPoint
• Develop plans and structure team data in OneNote

Microsoft will soon introduce a CRM integration that connects Copilot for Sales with the Microsoft Copilot experience, enabling sales teams to swiftly obtain insights on conversion rates, win rates, sales cycles, and pipeline status. The chat experience will allow sales professionals to utilize a natural language to catch up on customer interactions.

Some early adopters of Microsoft Copilot for Sales report that the application successfully reduces the necessity to switch between various interfaces, and some of the features immediately started saving team members valuable time each week.

How Citrin Cooperman can help enhance sales and service efforts

The integration of AI into business practices represents a significant shift towards enhanced efficiency and innovation. Citrin Cooperman’s Digital Services Practice has extensive experience helping businesses leverage Microsoft Copilot AI tools and implement customized solutions. To learn more about how your business can embrace AI to achieve its strategic objectives, reach out to your Citrin Cooperman advisor or Derek Nachimow at sales@citrincooperman.com.