Copilot is coming to Microsoft Viva Sales

Copilot was integrated into Microsoft Viva Sales shortly after its initial release on Microsoft 365 last week.

The release of Copilot in Viva Sales offers sales reps new AI customer support via automated email responses, meeting summaries and personalized insights with further updates promised in the coming months.

Microsoft describes Copilot as “the world’s first AI Copilot” for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) for financial applications. The company says tens of thousands of customers have already used AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Copilot and the Microsoft Power Platform.

Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Platform, said, “Today’s debut of Microsoft 365 Copilot offers even more ways to unleash creativity, unlock productivity and develop next-level skills.

“For salespeople, Copilot’s seamless integration into Microsoft 365 and Viva Sales (as well as AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) is a powerful combination.

“It’s a new way to engage prospects and customers while freeing up time that was previously tied up in ‘busy work,’ such as compiling every email from scratch.”

“As we enter a new era for customer experience, we want to make sure salespeople feel empowered to focus on what’s important – deeper engagement with customers.”

Copilot’s capabilities in Viva Sales

AI-generated email responses have become widely available in Viva Sales, automating and assisting a range of tasks for salespeople.

To save time on meeting organization, email replies with suggested meeting times can now be automatically generated based on available times in their Outlook calendar.

If a vendor is not satisfied with an automatic response, it can be improved by adding new prompts to the previous suggestion.

Highlighted text areas in generated answers signify data sources that can be viewed by placing a cursor over them. As a result, agents get contextual and transparent information to help them understand sales data from the CRM, meetings and more.

Users can provide feedback via a thumbs-up and thumbs-down rating mechanism for AI-generated content. This will help Viva Sales refine its AI response technology and adapt to the needs of salespeople.

Copilot can also help salespeople by providing automatic summaries of meetings, which are otherwise time-consuming tasks for sales agents.

Meeting summaries are created using a mix of Viva Sales’ conversational intelligence, CRM data and GPT Copilot natural language processing (NLP).

To create meeting summaries, salespeople begin by drafting an email and opening Viva Sales.

They then need to retrieve follow-up content by selecting the appropriate meeting and then viewing the automated summary email, which includes the topics discussed, action items and relevant CRP data.

Finally, sellers simply need to add the recommendation to their email, make any edits and send it.

The key differentiator between Copilot’s meeting summarization technology in Viva Sales, compared to Teams, is its integration with CRM data and shifting context and tone to match customer interactions.

Users do not need to switch screens and can perform their operations from within Outlook.

Microsoft is offering a free 30-day trial of Viva Sales, and all customers with a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium license can use Viva Sales at no further cost.

Internet news sources recently suggested that Microsoft disbanded its Ethics &Society team during a recent purge of 10,000 jobs. The company maintains that it is committed to the responsible development of AI and has placed great emphasis on ethical considerations since the launch of Copilot.

source: uctoday