Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, and Teams are set to automatically load data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRMs using a product launched by the Redmond-based software and cloud giant today.
Dubbed Viva Sales, the product is built on the employee experience platform Microsoft Viva — launched last year — and is designed to let sales teams tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications to allow data to be captured as a customer record in the CRM system.
Currently available on preview, the product syncs with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamic CRM out of the box, but customers of Oracle and SAP CRM product will have to wait for sufficient customer demand before Microsoft integrates the system with their sales software, Emily He, Microsoft corporate VP for business applications marketing, told The Register.
Viva Sales can also recommend next steps to progress a customer through the sales funnel, prioritize work and next steps, and enable sellers to access full history and customer interaction materials.
She said: “Sellers only spent about 30 percent of their time of selling and they spend about 30 percent of the time on administrative tasks, including entering data into CRM manually. So that’s a huge problem.
“The other thing is now that people are spending more time in their productivity tools and collaboration tools, they are creating a lot of customer data that’s not being captured in the CRM system. Viva sales is a new seller experience application that lets sellers use Office 365 and teams to automatically capture access to register data into a CRM system.”
She said that customer or sales prospect contact information would need to be entered into Outlook, and the contact details would need to be synced with CRM system for it to work.
“Usually a seller would have to log into their CRM system and manually enter the forecast information or what’s happening in the account. But if you can automatically save the data under this new contact information, then all your emails and your documents and your call transcripts get saved. And that becomes a new source of customer information that really was never part of the CRM system,” He said.
Viva Sales can also transcribe recordings of calls in Teams and use sentiment analysis to offer a summary of the call. “That’s the kind of data usually the sellers want to sync with their CRM system,” she added.
Viva Sales will be included as part of Dynamics 365 sales and will be available as a separate product. ®