What is Microsoft Dynamics 365?
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365?
Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based suite of business applications, that support you, your business and your team with everything from dealing with your customers to dealing with your back-office functions. They are designed to help businesses improve their operational efficiency, reduce complexity and control costs.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a part of the Microsoft Stack and works as modular ‘building block’ applications that work together. They can be configured or customised to meet your needs, and importantly, seamlessly integrates into the Microsoft systems you likely already use. If you’re using platforms like Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and beyond, you’ll find all of those built in and ready to go. All Microsoft products working seamlessly with each other. Every application we’ll be covering today can be integrated with each other and applications you already use, you can take one or all of these as needed. This has positive implications on your businesses ability to scale in a cost effective way.
What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 used for?
Most business applications will fall into one of two categories, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 has platforms for both areas. These two categories are
CRM (Customer Relationship Management), which covers all the front-facing activities that interact with your customers: customer service, selling, marketing, etc.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), which handles your back-office functions like managing finances, inventory, and supply chain and more of your operational functions.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be used to manage your business operations, ensuring efficiency and for your customer management and delivery, included marketing and sales activities.
Let’s take a look at specific platforms in a little more details
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement
With the CRM arm of the platform, applications are often grouped together and called “customer engagement.” Dynamics 365 includes applications for sales, service, and marketing.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales, previously known as Dynamics CRM, is the system for managing customer relationships: the organisations you work with, the people at those organisations, your pipeline from getting new leads through to opportunities, closing new business, and managing all related activities.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service
Customer service is at the core of managing your customers support. This includes case management, which may be service requests or ticketing systems, and managing them end-to-end using queues, automatic routing, escalation, service level agreements, and more. To support your staff, you can utilise a built-in knowledge base and agent scripts, and bring together messaging via all of your channels, with omnichannel support: email, phone, chat, WhatsApp, SMS, social media. You can even speed up the process with self-service through chatbots and a portal.
Connected to Customer Service is Field Service, which helps you dispatch skilled technicians into the field using work order management. It also supports proactive service using IoT devices, hardware and tools, mobile capabilities, etc. The seamless integration with Customer Service allows you to raise tickets that can become a work order when necessary and connect the people, workflows and customer service communication. Both apps include advanced scheduling features, so you can assign work by skill, geography, availability, or caseload.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (formerly Dynamics 365 Marketing)
If you’re looking for an advanced marketing application fully integrated with sales and service, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is a powerful solution. Its seamless integration with other Dynamics 365 apps means there’s no need to export or import data between platforms. Contacts from sales and service reside in the same Dataverse environment as marketing, along with their interests, actions, and behaviours. This enables real-time triggers—such as website visits or in-store check-ins—to initiate relevant communications via email, SMS, push notifications, and more.
The app also manages subscription preferences and consent in compliance with data privacy regulations. Within the platform, you can manage events, create marketing landing pages, and orchestrate complete customer journeys. For example, you can send an email, and if a customer makes a large purchase, automatically notify a key account manager, create a task, or transition the journey into the sales or service workflows. You can even automatically remove a contact from a marketing journey if a support case is opened, helping to avoid conflicting messages.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Part of the broader Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offering, the Data module is a customer data platform (CDP) that unifies customer data from across siloed systems to create a comprehensive 360-degree view of each customer—whether individuals or accounts. It enables advanced segmentation, including AI-powered smart segments, lookalike modeling, and predictive insights such as churn risk or lifetime value. This unified data can be activated directly within Dynamics 365 apps or exported for use in external platforms like social media, advertising networks, or third-party marketing tools. By centralising and enriching customer data, it empowers organisations to deliver more personalised, data-driven experiences across all touchpoints.
Dynamics 365 Customer Voice
How can you ensure you are listening to your customers and collecting feedback? Dynamics 365 Customer Voice is a built-in survey tool to capture feedback like customer satisfaction, sentiment analysis, NPS scoring, and more. It can be triggered by actions in sales or marketing apps, such as closing a service case. You can use this information to inform your key account managers and service representatives of important feedback when talking to each customer too.
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations
Within ERP functionality Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations helps manage your back-office functions: finance, supply chain, commerce, human resources, and project operations. This is a finance focused app that full end-to-end financial management, including general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, cost accounting, and project accounting. There are also supply Chain Management capabilities which cover your full supply chain, including inventory, production, distribution planning, and demand forecasting. Helping you make financially profitable supply based decisions
Dynamics 365 Commerce, Human Resources, and Project Operations
There are more offerings within the ERP ecosphere and these apps include Commerce for integrated e-commerce, Human Resources for managing employees, and Project Operations for project management. For small businesses, there’s Business Central, a fully contained app that offers finance and operations functionality along with sales and service, making it perfect for small to mid-sized businesses.
Mixed Reality and AI Applications, Including Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Dynamics 365 isn’t just about traditional business apps—it also includes some really exciting innovations in artificial intelligence and mixed reality.
Let’s start with Copilot, Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant. You might have already seen it in action across tools like Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams. But what’s really clever is how it’s also built into Dynamics 365. Unlike general AI tools, Copilot in Dynamics learns from your organisation’s own data—so it’s tailored to your business, and your information stays private and secure. It’s not used to train wider AI models.
In practice, this means Copilot can help your team in all sorts of ways. It can summarise meetings, speed up email writing, handle admin tasks like logging conversations or updating records, and even pick out key actions from Teams calls and add them to your diary. It’s like giving everyone on your team their own digital assistant—one that’s always on hand to help them work more efficiently.
On the mixed reality side, Dynamics 365 offers tools that bring a whole new dimension to how people work. For example, Remote Assist lets field engineers use a HoloLens headset to get live support from experts, wherever they are. Guides provides step-by-step holographic instructions, which is brilliant for training or complex tasks. Then there’s Connected Spaces, which gives you real-time insights into how people move through physical spaces—ideal for retail environments.
There are also AI-powered tools like Intelligent Order Management, which helps streamline supply chains and online sales, and Fraud Protection, which uses AI to spot and prevent suspicious activity like payment or refund fraud.
Dynamics 365 and the Full Microsoft Stack
As we spoke about at the start, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is part of the wider Microsoft stack, sitting alongside Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook and Teams, ensuring all your communication and collaboration tools work together. It’s also built on tools like GitHub for developers and the Power Platform for low-code extensibility: automation, custom apps, chatbots, reporting, and portals. All of this sits on Microsoft Azure, giving you unified identity and security management with a single login across Microsoft products.
You can find out more about the full Microsoft Stack and what we offer here
Supporting Your Growth with Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers a flexible, integrated suite of applications that can grow and evolve with your business. Whether you’re looking to improve customer relationships, streamline operations, enhance marketing efforts, or harness the power of AI and mixed reality, Dynamics 365 provides the tools to help you work smarter, not harder.
Because it’s part of the wider Microsoft ecosystem, it fits naturally into the tools your team already uses—making adoption easier and delivering value faster. And with modular apps, you can start where it makes the most sense for your business and scale as your needs grow.
If you’d like help understanding how Dynamics 365 could support your business goals—whether that’s improving efficiency, driving growth, or simply making life easier for your team—get in touch. We’d love to explore how we can support your journey and help you get the most out of your technology investment.
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