Next in my blog series I wanted to talk about a component that sits slightly outside the Dynamics 365 stack, but something that I am starting to incorporate more and more into customer demonstrations. This is component is Viva Sales!
Background
Microsoft Viva Sales is a what Microsoft have coined as a "seller experience application" that will use Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to capture, access, and register data into Dynamics 365.
One of its main aims to eliminate manual data entry and gives users more time to focus on selling. It does this by enriching the data we hold for customers and pair that with data from Microsoft 365 and then use the power of AI to present more relevant customer data to the user.
The initial release of the application places it alongside the long standing D365 Outlook Add-In for Dynamics 365 and provides a lot of the same basic functionality.
Configuration
There isn't much to do from a deployment perspective, but you may need assistance from your global administrator in order to enable the feature.
Above are 3 different approaches to deployment and information on how each is completed and the prerequisites in terms of security/permissions.
Ok, that's the boring stuff out of the way, now to how the tools actually works the user experience we should expect.
Once deployed the end user will see a new ribbon option within both Outlook and Teams, (assuming the app has been deployed for both)
Upon selecting the option, a pane will appear to the right hand side of the Outlook (in the below example) asking the user to connect and log into the Dynamics 365 instance they wish to work with.
We will ignore the fact that you can also connect to Salesforce.........Boooooooo!!!!!!!!!
Viva in Outlook
Once connected users can interact with Viva Sales from a number of components within Outlook, i.e emails, appointments and tasks.
The information pane for a brand new email/contact will allow us to directly commit the contact information into Dynamics. From here we can then further edit the record, make updates without ever setting into Dynamics properly.
There are also two key identifiers for the contacts we create via Viva Sales and this very much drives the information we see in relation to them. These identifiers are "Contact", i..e a standard contact we work or "Sales Contact", i.e. someone we are engaging with in a sales capacity.
Moving between the People and Dynamics 365 tabs we are now able to perform a lot of the same functionality as the Dynamics 365 Outlook Add-In, such as update details, track emails, and see Account Info.
And of course as a tracked email, we now see the standard "tracked" icon on the email in our inbox.
If we now assume we move over into Dynamics and now create a lead, or opportunity linked to this particular contact we now see that rich data presented back into Outlook in the Viva Sales information pane.
As shown below I have created a basic opportunity against this tracked contact and I know get full visibility of that in Outlook when engaging with a tracked email, or replying to an existing thread.
But the Viva Sales component now provides a much more user friendly and intuitive way of presenting data in relation to a contact, so I have full visibility of tracked activities, opportunity info and account data. The user also has the ability to click through to these related records at any stage, using "Open in Dynamics" link.
Viva in Teams
There is also some limited functionality coming to Teams and this all related to Teams Meeting. When creating a Teams Meeting either in Outlook or Teams
To the right of the ribbon above, you can see a Viva Sales option and this will mean we get rich analytics, call recordings, analysis once the meeting has taken place and closed off.
As shown above, from a different interaction we now have the ability to analyse the calls, check for keyword mentions, listen back or even gauge sentiment
Some additional functionality around collaborative working also exists in Teams, as shown below we can easily tag contacts in a Teams chat to direct colleagues to records.
Overall Viva Sales is an excellent addition to the ever growing family of products we can now use with Dynamics 365 and of course Viva is an entire product in its own right having features which cover insights, learning, and activity management.
Hope you all enjoyed this post on the Viva Sales. I will continue this series with some additional content specifically related to D365 Sales and how they work with other aspects of the Power Platform. Take Care, Speak Soon!
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