With the ongoing evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities it can be daunting trying to work out how they can be applied in the real world to support and transform your business, especially within financial services where compliance and risk mean that services like Chat GPT can be limited or blocked.
In this feature spotlight, we discuss how pre-built AI Insights can provide financial services with easy to use and compliant options to deliver the benefits that AI has to offer, without the risks.
Identifying the opportunities
The first challenge in successfully leveraging AI is to identify suitable processes or other opportunities that could provide benefits to your organisation, your team and you as an individual.
Some of the more common and obvious applications include prompting next best actions, reminding you of upcoming deadlines or identifying missed opportunities or operational patterns within volumes of data. But AI can also excel at helping to automate tasks, generating documentation or communication content or acting as a coach to support effective and efficient processes.
In some cases only you can identify the changes that will truly transform your business processes, sometimes a specialist with experience can help but often just having the right tools and capabilities embedded into your existing systems is the easiest way to benefit from AI.
Finding the right tools
Chat bots and services like Chat GPT, The New Bing and Google Bard are providing a step-change in conversational AI, but much of the time it is not obvious or practical to include them within your business process. There is a learning curve and skill set required to use them, they pose risks of providing inaccurate or unclear responses and can pose a data risk.
The alternative approach is to find compliant and approved technology that already has AI capabilities embedded that work using your existing data and integrate seamlessly within your business process. One such set of capabilities are those offered within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.
What Microsoft Dynamics 365 has to offer
Customer Insights
In a sector where having in-depth insight into your customers is crucial to both attract and retain them, manually inputting and analysing data is no longer a viable practice. With Customer Insights, you can combine the data stored across multiple sources to gain intelligent insight into your customers through trend analysis. Dynamics uses proactive machine learning to spot patterns in customer demographic (eg. geography, sector or individual role), behavioural, (eg. customer journey’s, channel use, persona patterns) and transactional (eg. website visits, orders, email interactions) which can be used to segment, score and target prospective customers.
With intelligent customer insights, each and every team member can utilise AI to improve their sales and customer service.
Relationship Analytics
As financial services organisations undergo the digital transformation process, customer centricity - or having a complete focus on meeting your customers’ needs - is essential. Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows businesses to better meet this goal with relationship insights, where the system will suggest AI-driven “next best” actions based on customer behaviour. This equips employees across departments with the tools they need to monitor and nurture customer relationships, with the help of a relationship health score based on unified data from D365 and various other sources, including LinkedIn.
For example, the system can perform a sentiment analysis of emails, meaning that it can detect opportunities that may be at risk based on the content of a customer email - if the tone is negative, it will flag the email and recommend “next best” actions based on previous conversations of a similar nature - meaning your team is better prepared to manage unhappy customers.
Sales insights
Dynamics 365 also offers AI insights into Sales that can help automate the sales process and promote business growth. The CRM system uses machine learning to prioritise leads with the highest likelihood to convert, and can even prompt salespeople to communicate, suggesting best actions based on previous data. Using embedded communication tracking, the CRM system ensures the sales team doesn't over-communicate, by prompting them when a customer has already been contacted, and they’re at risk of becoming overwhelmed or identify customers who are looking to be engaged but are not being serviced.
The system can even use AI to understand and evaluate sales conversations to decide which methods are most effective, and you can replicate these as a strategy that can be standardised across whole teams. This way, you can be sure that each member of the sales team is managing their customers in the same way, creating an efficient, consistent process for the sales department to follow.
Microsoft Vita Sales provides an even easier way of leveraging AI, by providing insights and coaching within Outlook, supported by both Outlook data but also data within Microsoft Dynamics and connectors to your own data sources available.
Power Platform and AI Builder
While pre-built capabilities can offer real transformational opportunities, sometimes they are not applicable to the specific and unique processes that differentiate your business. Whether it is generating or reviewing documents, running a standard set of tasks or onboarding processes, needing to complete regular check-lists or reports or managing complex approval processes, there are often processes that feel like they would benefit from automation and AI, but there is nothing ‘off the shelf’ to meet the need.
In these cases the wider capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform, such as Power Automate and AI Builder come into play. They provide a toolset to build your own low code / no code AI solutions with ease and still within a compliant and controlled framework.
With minimal effort, you can deliver new ways for people to interact with processes through Power Apps, new ways of supporting and automating business processes through Power Apps and new ways of analysing data, documents and images through AI Builder – all combined and configured in a way that is easy to maintain, develop and grow as your business needs evolve.
Transform and promote further growth
AI insights is just one of many features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM that is allowing financial services organisations to improve and grow their business.
Microsoft Dynamics AI insights facilitates a more collaborative, productive and efficient team, who have the insights they need to close deals, nurture customers and follow more structured and compliant processes. By using AI insights to automate simple tasks and equip your team with the tools they need to better service their customers, you build the foundation for digital transformation in your business.
