Dinner by Dynamics: the ultimate meta demo

As a Specialist at Microsoft, I was sending out 100s of cold email and LinkedIn InMails with dismal response rates. I tried changing up the messaging, the channels, the time of day — you name it. Crickets. Using my experience in high-end hospitality as inspiration, I came up with the idea to put a spin on the traditional “Executive Dinner.”

Dinner by Dynamics was conceived as an immersive and entertaining dining experience orchestrated by the main Dynamics CRM applications: Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Customer Insights, and the Power Platform. Immersive in that, when we were showing product, the data was about the dinner, the attendees, and the supporting staff (see this explanation of a meta demo). Entertaining in that there were some exhibitionist wine & spirit displays you rarely see. And every aspect of the Dinner was coordinated, supported, or saved by Dynamics.

Watch this 90 second recap video from the second Dinner, and if you’re intrigued, keep reading…

https://youtu.be/hvdv8l5leEk

If you couldn’t tell from the video, Dinner by Dynamics was a high-end affair. The first Dinner, in San Francisco, was held at Tyler Florence’s Wayfare Tavern in the large private dining room. The second Dinner was held at the Michelin star Plumed Horse in Saratoga. A dinner at either establishment deserves to begin with bubbles.

Champagne Sabering with Remote Assist and HoloLens 2

Opening a bottle of Champagne the Napoleonic way –with a sword– is still rare to see at a restaurant, but most food and/or wine snobs have probably seen it done by now. Maybe they’ve even done it themselves. We went one step further to kick off the actual Dinner event. We asked for a volunteer to come to the head of the table and put on a HoloLens 2. At the time (Jan/Feb 2020), HoloLens 2s were still incredibly hard to come by. Even though the volunteers had never seen, let alone worn, the device, it’s amazing how fast you get used to it once you learn the main gestures. With an assistant on hand just to help the volunteer get situated with the HoloLens and ensure it was mirroring successfully to a Surface Hub 2S so the audience could see what they were seeing, I stepped out of the room (or out of the restaurant completely in one case) and connected with the guest via Remote Assist. I then took them step-by-step through successful sabrage every time.

Click the flic to refill your glass

Before we got too involved with the Dinner, we had some housekeeping items to cover, including a cool way to order “another round.” Flic makes these neat, little, Internet-connected buttons that integrate with all sorts of platforms like Apple Home Kit, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft’s Power Automate. The Field Service product team had some left over from an event, so they shipped me enough to use for my Dinners. Via Power Automate, we set them up so that a click of the flic would send a text message to the partner assistant to get that guest another glass of whatever it was they last drinking, and it would record it to a spreadsheet that was a data source for Customer Insights (more on that later).

Ideally, we’d have the flic integrate directly to the restaurant POS, but with rehearsal dinners and actual dinners at three different restaurants using three different POS systems, it was not worth the effort and the SMS approach was fine.

Dynamics Marketing

After the Champagne toast, it was time for an amuse bouche, and a discussion about how Dynamics Marketing was working hard before the Dinner started. It was used to invite C-level executives from Microsoft accounts throughout the Bay Area. Emails were sent out as part of a Customer Journey. Call downs were executed to follow-up. Event registrations, email reminders, and event check-ins were all handled by Marketing. We showed all the attendees the Journey they were in at that moment during the first course, as well as what would happen to them next, after the Dinner (spoiler alert: a survey).

Upselling food & wine with Sales

The use of Sales varied from Dinner to Dinner due to private event policy differences. For example, at Wayfare Tavern, all appetizers and wine had to be pre-ordered; at Plumed Horse, it was a set tasting menu, but we could order wine a la carte. So, at Wayfare Tavern we used Sales to sell more desserts and at Plumed Horse, we used it to sell more wine.

The Sales demo centered on Relationship Health, where attendees each saw their names on the screen next to an Opportunity. The Opportunity was the incremental revenue I could achieve by selling them more desserts or more wine (in reality, Microsoft was paying so it wasn’t a hard sell). At a glance, they could see how Sales Insights was classifying their relationship with me: Good, Neutral, or Poor. And what was the trend? Was it steady, improving, or declining? The analysis was all based on communication and activities I initiated prior to the event for the purpose of demonstrating Relationship Health. They also got insight into my relationship with my wife, my favorite bit to use when showing Relationship Health.

Menu questions with Power Virtual Agent

Because all the restaurants treated these Dinners as private events, entrée selections were required prior to the Dinner. However, we did show the value of Power Virtual Agents through a menu bot we created. We created topics for a few dozen of the questions most likely to be asked about a restaurant menu:

• What’s your most popular dish?
• What vegetarian options do you have?
• Where is the king salmon from?
• If I’m on the fill-in-the-blank diet, what should I order?
• What wine would you pair with the filet?

While we think we had every base covered with the bot, we hoped to be stumped with a question that the virtual agent couldn’t answer because that gave us an excuse to show the guests how easy it is to create a new topic, enter the answer, and re-publish the bot so that it’s live without having to wait for IT to get around to making tweaks to it.

Entrée-section with Power Apps

A proper tour of the Customer Engagement suite would not be complete without a demonstration of the power of the Power Platform. The Surface team loaned us Go tablets for the event, so we developed a custom app to inspect entrées as they were delivered to guests. The app would take a photo of the entrée, allow the guest to speak any feedback into the tablet’s microphone, and if it was determined there was an issue, it would automatically generate a Case within Customer Service. It’s a good thing we developed the app because, coincidentally, one guest at every Dinner accidentally received a rubber chicken that needed to be swapped out for the proper chicken entrée.

On-the-fly rescheduling with Field Service

Field Service was a natural fit for the Dinner due to all the various roles, skills, and tasks that needed to be accomplished to pull it off.

• Resources we had a host representing Microsoft (me) and the partner, my manager, a partner manager, the server, server assistant, Sommelier, and the Chef & kitchen staff, all with different roles to play at different times.
• Skills included Schmoozing (primarily for the managers in attendance), tending bar, running food, teaching sabrage, tonging Port, inspecting entrées, making coffee, and more.
• Work Orders were created for each of the distinct parts of the evening that, together, made up the three hour, five course meals. Greeting guests during the pre-Dinner cocktail half hour looked for resources with a knack for schmoozing.

The orchestration of these resources, skills, and work orders was illustrated on the Field Service Schedule Board. As part of the cheese course, the Sommelier was to come to our room and tong a bottle of vintage Port. If you’ve never seen Port tonging before, it involves red hot iron tongs to heat up the neck of the bottle, and then something that is freezing cold (a shave brush, a feather) to wipe the neck of the bottle where the heat was just applied. Thermal shock causes the glass to crack smoothly, and sometimes the top with the cork will pop right off, and sometimes you need to use a napkin to gently help it off. Either way, you have saved the bottle from the old cork crumbling or being pushed into the Port. Ironically, at every Dinner, the Sommelier was unavailable at the scheduled time to tong the Port, and the partner needed to find a resource that had the skills to tong Port. Luckily, such a resource existed in me, but only if I could get some help remembering the steps in the process…

Port Tonging with Guides

With Port Tonging now assigned to me, it was time to bring back the HoloLens 2 to show off Guides. Guides takes advantage of mixed reality for training purposes. Its capabilities really came to life with Port tonging:

• The core step-by-step guidance was perfect for tonging Port which involves a number of discrete steps, each with their own tools.
• Using an anchor on the table, Guides would highlight all the various tools required for Port tonging, including the tongs, camp stove, shave brush, funnel, decanter, and of course the bottle of Port.
• Hands-free guidance was essential because there are several steps in the process that require the tonger to use two hands.
• For steps where timing was important, we uploaded videos to act as timers.
• Most importantly, creating the Guide was really easy. Anyone could do it.

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Can’t spell Connected Field Service without Coffee Service

Actually, you can. This was a joke I was dying to make but apparently “coffee service” has an extra “F.” The team at RSM bought and disassembled a coffee machine, inserted a temperature sensor, and connected it to Dynamics so that temperature data was streamed into the Connected Field Service application. Guests could watch as the temperature rose after turning it on, and in the real world, could proactively service such a device should anomalies in the data appear.

Data & whiskey unification with Customer Insights

What better way to end a fantastic meal on a winter night than with a hot toddy-like cocktail? And the only thing better than a dinner with one fire stunt, is a dinner with two fire stunts! If you’re not familiar with the “Blue Blazer” cocktail, you’re not alone. There are so many reasons it’s not on a menu, including the fact that most bartenders don’t want to cause themselves bodily harm (the reason I’m wearing fireproof gloves in the photo below is because I gave myself 2nd degree burns with this stunt at a rehearsal dinner), you need a really high-proof whiskey to properly ignite (this is what we used), and the drink is really sweet if you follow the classic recipe.

Nevertheless, we persisted. The climax of a Blue Blazer is the mixing of the boiling water and the flaming whiskey by pouring it from tankard to tankard, the farther apart the better. For Dinner by Dynamics, the idea was to unify the whiskey + water while we were unifying the data in Microsoft’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) solution, Customer Insights. On the one hand, this event is not the best for truly showcasing the value of Customer Insights because all the data is in Dynamics (as opposed to bringing in customer data from other silos); on the other hand, it is still kinda cool to see the Timeline show all the interactions we had with a guest, from receipt and opening of the first invitation email to the case created in Customer Service by the Power App due to the rubber chicken. It also made for a logical recap of the entire evening.

Toothpick service by Daneson

A running gag through the night was that we were doing everything on a small budget. This had the benefit of being true, but at least to me, it also seemed silly coming from the most valuable company on the planet at the time (now it’s like top 3). I wanted everyone to take home some kind of souvenir, however small. So I turned to my favorite over-the-top affordable luxury gift: Daneson flavored toothpicks. I won’t go into everything that makes them great here — their website will tell the story better than I can. Needless to say, attendees were given their choice of Single Malt Scotch, Kentucky Straight Bourbon, or Mint-flavored toothpicks provided they promised not to use them at the table.

The second Dinner by Dynamics was held on February 6th, 2020, almost a month before the entire Bay Area locked down due to COVID-19. Whatever future events I hoped to hold would have to wait. And now, the product has come so far in a year, I might as well start a page one rewrite…

Video by Katherine Bacon at RSM.
Photos by David Dines. If you like the photos, click through the gallery below to see more from the event.

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