Microsoft has won a five-year deal from Coca-Cola to supply business software, including its Teams chat app and tools for customer service agents.
Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey said last week: “We are investing in digital capabilities to strengthen consumer connections and piloting digital-enabled initiatives using fulfillment methods to capture online demand for at-home consumption.”
The companies did not disclose the financial size of the business software deal. The IT deal will include Dynamics 365, a suite of Microsoft tools that competes directly with Salesforce.com.
Coca-Cola said it will use Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 solutions to gain insights from data across the enterprise, enabling better view of the business, and providing enhanced customer and employee experiences.
Coca-Cola is also deploying Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the Power Platform and Microsoft Teams to all its employees, updating productivity with the enhanced security that runs across Azure and Microsoft 365 cloud services.
Coca-Cola is using Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, equipping employees with a single hub to connect and collaborate across chat, calling, meetings and documents.
Coca-Cola is leveraging Microsoft’s collaboration technologies to support the demand of a largely remote workforce. These technologies are enabling Coca-Cola to host many internal meetings on a global, regional and local scale.
Coca-Cola on April 21, 2020 held a virtual quarterly earnings meeting for employees using Microsoft 365 Live Events.
Microsoft has a stronghold in general-purpose business software such as email and word processing apps but has been working to win more customers for its specialized software such as apps used by customer service and sales employees, Reuters reported.
James Phillips, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s business applications group, said Coca-Cola will use Microsoft technology to pull together information several internal systems, using artificial intelligence to fetch data from them and answer questions.
Coke will offer the system internally to employees rather than making the employee understand that you need to go over here to request vacation time, over there to look at your last payroll slip, or to some other system to understand what educational courses may be available.
Barry Simpson, senior vice president and chief information and integrated services officer of Coca-Cola, said that Microsoft’s software would help the company by “replacing previously disparate and fragmented systems.”
Microsoft said Coca-Cola’s customer service agents plan to use system to help answer questions from the beverage maker’s customers, which include major retailers and grocers.
Microsoft will publish fiscal year 2020 third-quarter financial results on Wednesday, April 29, 2020.
C3.ai, an innovator in enterprise AI software for accelerating digital transformation, plans to collaborate with Microsoft to enhance C3.ai’s customer experience and elevate sales performance using intelligent cloud technology.
C3.ai deployed Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams in less than two weeks to help streamline sales operations, collaborate in real time, expand mobile capabilities to power remote selling and generate new business opportunities.
