Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce

Given the sudden disruptions of Covid-19, retailers need to carefully consider the role of each shopping channel. Unless stores offer consumers a safe way to shop, store traffic, will slow down significantly. Furthermore, retailers must also keep up with the increase in demand for their online shopping channels and look for ways to retain customers and optimise the customer experience.

According to McKinsey, retailers will need to deliver a 20-30% improvement in productivity to compensate for the channel and consumer shifts. The Covid-19 crisis has certainly escalated the case for change in the retail industry.

As such, forward-thinking retailers will pursue an omnichannel approach and adopt modern tools and insights to close the gap between online and offline channels and to capture their consumers in a way that works for them. This article focuses on the unified purchase features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Microsoft’s latest e-commerce solution for retailers.

Engaging and intelligent digital storefronts with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce

Connected e-commerce platform – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce allows you to seamlessly integrate your existing online stores as well as create additional features and branded eCommerce sites through available design templates.

Content management system with digital asset management – Manage your content assets with built-in content management and digital asset management capabilities. The platform offers customer-centric data and management tools that serve retailers across channels.

Deliver a seamless customer contact experience

Call centre – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce helps to empower agents to seamlessly aid customers’ information, sales, and support needs across multiple channels. The platform gives agents complete visibility into the latest product and promotion information, including up-to-date availability and stock locations.

Exceptional sales delivery experience

Point of sale system – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce has Point-of-Sale (POS) capabilities to provide robust, easy-to-use and deploy functionality to enable in-store employees to provide a frictionless shopping experience to your customers.

Seamless stock taking – Dynamics 365 Commerce enables you to easily enter counts manually or use Internet of Things (IoT) or radio-frequency identification (RFID) to perform automatic counts. Seamlessly alert agents to variance through inventory analysis, allowing them to research issues or hold recounts to reconcile variance and ensure stock is correct.

Streamlined daily tasks – Enable seamless transactions across channels and integration with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 for effective collaboration across your organisation.

Personalised shopping experience

Strengthened clienteling – It’s important to empower your employees to provide outstanding client services. Dynamics 365 Commerce strengthens clienteling by surfacing cross-channel customer history and product comparisons within Point of Sale (POS) devices. Employees also get a complete view of customer information, including purchase history across all channels, wish lists and loyalty memberships.

Customer engagement insights – Get a 360-degree view of your customer by adding Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Connect physical and digital storefronts into a single view of transactions, observational data, and behavioural data.

Intelligent product recommendations – Retailers always wish for better cross-sell and upsell opportunities for their employees. Dynamics 365 Commerce uses machine learning and AI to provide retailers with automatic suggestions.

Frictionless shopping across online and offline channels

In-store and digital shopping experiences – As shoppers move from one channel to the next, they expect a seamless experience. Dynamics 365 Commerce delivers frictionless engagement across physical and digital channels with a single retail platform, allowing customers to purchase when, how, and where they want on any device.

Meaningful engagements – With Dynamics 365 Commerce, you can manage marketing efforts and promotions at every touchpoint (social, mobile, web, with chatbots and in catalogues). Additionally, the platform lets customers view their information and offers, including loyalty points, purchase history, and wish lists, on all channels.

Next-level e-commerce platform – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce uses machine learning and AI-driven search capabilities to help convert browsing into buying.