Viva Sales: Suggested Email Replies

I am sure you’ve heard of Viva Sales, which was launched by Microsoft last year in October of 2022. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s definitely time you learned about it! Microsoft Viva Sales is an application that makes selling easier. It works with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams to automatically record and view information about customers in a customer relationship management (CRM) system (Currently Viva Sales works with Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Force). This saves sellers time because they don’t have to enter data manually or switch back to their CRM application. With the help of artificial intelligence and data from Microsoft 365, Viva Sales gives sellers important information about their customers. This helps sellers close deals faster. Viva Sales is designed to help sellers work better, save time, and sell more.
When Viva Sales first came out, it looked like some of the functionality offered in Viva Sales was already part of Dynamics 365 Sales. For example if we look at Viva Sales and the Outlook app for Dynamics 365 we saw a lot of similarities. At the beginning of February of this year, Microsoft announced some new features that I will share with you in this article. The first item I will share with you is the new suggested email replies in Viva Sales for Outlook.

Suggested email replies (preview)

Keep in mind this is still a preview feature, but it shouldn’t hurt trying this out for yourself! First, let me explain how this feature works. The new suggested email replies can help you save time when responding to common scenarios in emails from your CRM contacts. With input from the Microsoft Graph and the connected CRM (either Dynamics 365 Sales or Salesforce), Viva Sales uses GPT to generate a personalized email response. This means you don’t have to spend time writing a reply from scratch – Viva Sales does it for you. How cool is that!? Ok wait what does this mean? Where is AI getting the data from to generate a response? The suggested reply is based on the users’ input, recent emails and related information from Dynamics 365 or Sales Force.
If you have Viva Sales installed and updated to the latest version, and this preview feature turned on, you can see how it works in outlook: When you click on an email sent by a CRM contact in outlook, you should see a banner that reads: “Reply quickly and confidently with suggested email content’ on the top of the email and a button to ‘Try it now’, as you can see in the screenshot below

Honestly the banner never showed up for me, so I just clicked on the Viva Sales icon from within the email, which takes me to the same place. The Viva Sales pane will open on the right side of the screen on the highlights tab and you’ll can have Viva Sales create a draft reply. There are several response type categories available that you can pick from when using this feature. The different categories are:

• Reply to an inquiry
• Offer a discount
• Make a proposal
• Address a concern
• Suggest your own

NOTE: The ‘Suggest your own’ category is interesting as you can enter the type of email response you want and AI will take care of the rest!
Let’s say we received an email from a D365 contact asking for a similar quote we sent a year ago? In that case we’ll select the ‘Make a proposal’ email. You’ll see a message on top of the Viva Sales pane that reads: “Suggested content is AI generated—please make sure it’s accurate and appropriate.” When the reply has been drafted, you’ll also notice it shows the D365 record AI used to create the response!

From here the user can click on the ‘Copy text’ button and paste the suggested reply in the email. How easy was that! Now let’s talk about how you can enable the preview so you can try it out yourself!

Enable Suggested email replies (preview)

Let’s discuss prerequisites first. As I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to have Viva Sales installed, and the outlook-add in needs to be updated to version 10.0.0.11 or newer. (My version number is 1.0.0.11, so the 10.0.0.11 version mentioned by Microsoft might be a typo on their website.) An admin can do this by logging into the Microsoft Admin Center, navigating to ‘Settings’ and then going to ‘Integrated Apps’. Click on the installed Microsoft Viva Sales app and click on configuration. If there is an update pending, you should see it there. If you want to know what version Viva Sales for Outlook is on, you click on ‘addons‘ from this page. Open Viva Sales for Microsoft Outlook and you should see the version number as shown on the image below.

In order to enable the suggested email replies, you will have to enable this in the Viva Sales app in Microsoft teams. Yes, this means you will need to have Viva Sales for Microsoft Teams installed as well. You can access the app by opening Microsoft Teams and clicking on ‘Apps’ on the site map on the left side of Teams. Search for Viva Sales and click on the app to open it.
You’ll notice three tabs on the top of the Viva Sales App screen, make sure you click on ‘settings’. Under ‘Admin settings’ you’ll need to click on ‘Email’. Here you’ll notice the button to enable the suggested email replies feature. That’s it! Now you can test out the functionality I hope you’ll like it as much as I did! I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!