Microsoft named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer
Customer expectations continue to grow, with rising demand for seamless, connected, and personalized experiences across sales, marketing, and service. However, meeting these demands can be a complex and expensive undertaking, and legacy applications accessing siloed data cannot keep up. This is why we are seeing many organizations move from point solutions and fragmented application stacks. To further improve customer experiences and operational efficiency, organizations are also looking for ways to harness the transformative potential of generative AI.
The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management, Q1 2025
Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader
To help organizations accomplish these goals and deliver better business outcomes, Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings together a complete customer relationship management (CRM) platform driven by our latest advancements in generative AI. Today, we’re delighted to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Relationship Management, Q1 2025.
A unified platform for marketing, sales, and service
The industry and our customers recognize that we’re developing an integrated and autonomous CRM platform that reduces the complexity of meeting customer expectations and uses groundbreaking generative AI to transform sales and service experiences—for customers and employees alike.
Dynamics 365 CRM applications (consisting of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) are underpinned by a common data layer in Microsoft Dataverse, which reduces the integration burden and serves as the foundation for Microsoft’s generative AI leadership. Data from across sales, marketing, and service engagements fuels Microsoft Copilot and AI agents, allowing them to deliver more personalized and effective self-service experiences and automate tasks to assist human reps.
Investing in next-generation AI with Copilot and agents
We’re helping organizations improve customer experience and support reps to be more productive by infusing generative AI in the places where it will have the greatest impact in sales, marketing, and service journeys.
Copilot is fully integrated into Dynamics 365, allowing marketers to target the right prospects, empowering sellers to close more deals, offering customers engaging self-service interactions, and supporting service reps to accelerate issue resolution.
As part of our continuing investment in helping our customers achieve more with AI, we’ve recently augmented Copilot with AI agents. Copilot acts as the interface for AI, working as a personal AI assistant, with agents functioning like apps, automating common tasks or autonomously completing entire business processes.
Microsoft has announced 10 agents across the Dynamics 365 portfolio of business applications, including agents for sales qualification, deep research in sales, intent determination, knowledge management, and case management. These agents are designed to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and enhance decision-making by providing intelligent insights and recommendations. It’s also fast and easy for organizations to build their own agents using the generative AI and low-code tools in Microsoft Copilot Studio. With these tools, businesses can create custom agents tailored to their specific needs, allowing them to automate unique processes and improve overall efficiency.
A secure CRM platform built on responsible AI principles
Importantly, the AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 are developed with a steadfast commitment to trustworthy AI, guided by our responsible AI principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.
In addition, generative AI features in Dynamics 365 utilize Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which offers the highest levels of data privacy and security. By developing AI that is responsible and secure by design, we’re furthering our mission to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more.
First West Credit Union accelerates issue resolution
One of the organizations achieving more with Dynamics 365 is First West Credit Union. As one of Canada’s largest credit unions, it aims to forge authentic connections with its members, but this mission was hampered by a patchwork of legacy CRM platform deployments across different parts of the business.
With Dynamics 365, First West Credit Union now has a single platform to help it engage members more effectively while meeting federal regulatory requirements for complaints management. Because Dynamics 365 functionality mapped so closely to the needs of users and the business, First West Credit Union saw 100% adoption within seven weeks of launching the system. What’s more, member complaints are now being resolved well within the federally required timeline, with 87% resolved in 14 days or less, compared to 49% before the implementation.
“One of the key value points of the Dynamics 365 platform is that, need for need, the capabilities are there. We were able to map the functionality to the business needs very well, right out of the box. That really helped us fast-track this initiative.”
Darrell Jaggers, CIO and Chief Transformation Officer, First West Credit Union
Lexmark boosts sales and service efficiency and productivity
Another organization that emphasizes building strong customer relationships is Lexmark, a global leader in printing and imaging products, software, solutions, and services. However, a reliance on disparate legacy solutions meant tracking customer journeys was a complex and inefficient process.
By replacing Salesforce and Siebel solutions with Dynamics 365, Lexmark now has a unified CRM platform for delivering outstanding customer service and operational efficiency. By working more efficiently in Dynamics 365, Lexmark has increased order accuracy by 43% and boosted contact center productivity by 23%.
“We’ve been on the journey with Microsoft after moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales. We’re excited to be one of the first customers to use Sales Qualification Agent and look forward to the ability to scale our sales team with agents and provide an exceptional experience to our customers.”
Kyle Farmer, Vice President, Global Sales and Strategy, Lexmark
Learn more about Dynamics 365 CRM platforms
We’re excited to be recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ and we will continue to invest in creating a state-of-the-art-CRM platform, allowing our customers to constantly enhance experiences for their own customers and empower their employees to achieve more.
Learn more about:
- Dynamics 365
- Dynamics 365 Contact Center
- Dynamics 365 Sales
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about what you could achieve with Dynamics 365.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.
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