D365 Sales Insights: Notes Analysis

Last week I was working on a demo and adding some sample data into Dynamics 365. To be exact, I wanted to show the ability of using posts in the timeline and users tagging other users with a question or a comment. I tagged one of the fake accounts I have in there (Theresa Testing) and asked if she could help me with an opportunity. After a second I noticed that the text in the posts turned into a hyperlink, so I clicked on it, and when I did a suggesting notification popped up, asking if I wanted to create a task! Whoa! I had not seen this before! After I got over my first shock I decided to do some investigating and share my findings with you all.

I found out that this functionality is part of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights. There are several features that come with Sales Insights. Some of them are free like the Assistant, Auto Capture, and Email Engagement while other features require a Sales Insights license. I believe this functionality falls under the ‘advanced Sales Insights’ features, which means you need a Sales Insights license for it to work.

Ok… but how does it work and how do we turn it on?!

First of all, the only thing you have to do here, is exactly that, turn it on! Before you turn it on you have to make sure you have enabled Dynamics 365 Sales Insights. Here is the article on how to do that. After that’s done you can enable Notes Analysis: when you are in the Sales Hub app, navigate to the sales insights settings area. You will see Notes Analysis under Productivity intelligence on the left side of the screen. Click on it and you’ll be able to switch the button to ‘Notes analysis enabled’.
That’s it! There is nothing else to do, there is no configuration or setup required.

So how does it work?

I kinda feel like this one slipped through because I hadn’t seen this before (another reason I wanted to write this article). Note analysis will give users suggestions based on certain activity. (You would think this only works for notes because of the name (NOTES analysis) but this is not the case!) Each time a user creates a new Post, Appointment , Phone Call, Task or Note in Dynamics 365 the system analysis these activities and gives users smart suggestions based on the data in the activity/note/post. For example, when I created the post and asked Theresa to help me with the opportunity, Notes Analysis suggested to create a task, so the system is smart enough to understand what you’re trying to do. If you create a note with something like ‘I need to call the customer on March 17th at 5PM’ it will suggest to create an appointment. I’m sure I don’t have to explain the value of this time saver!
Keep in mind that it is possible for the system to give you more than one suggestion. For example I created a note ‘call Jenna to discuss the pricing of deal and schedule a meeting’, which prompted two different suggestions: one to create a meeting and another to create a phone call. If there are multiple suggestions an arrow will show up in the pop up, allowing the user to navigate to the next suggestion.

When you click the ‘Edit and Create’ button on the appointment suggestion, you’ll notice that the text of the note has been copied into the subject of the appointment. If I add a date and time to my note, you’ll notice that it will now automatically populate the date and time in the appointment. Unfortunately at this point it’s not smart enough to pull the contact into the appointment, and there is no way to tag the contact in a note.
Keep in mind that Notes Analysis isn’t just suggesting the creation of certain activities, it’s also able to suggest to create contacts, content requests and issue detection.

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