Is Your Sales Team Spending Too Much Time Processing Orders?5 min read
As your sales grow, you can find yourself facing an unexpected challenge.
As enquiry volumes grow, so does the admin that comes with them. Customer requests arrive by email, you need to check product details and availability, prepare quotes and sometimes go back and forth several times before an order is agreed.
Each step is simple enough on its own. Put them all together, though, and they can take up a lot of your sales team’s time.
This is where Microsoft’s Sales Order Agent in Dynamics 365 Business Central comes in. The AI agent is designed to help manage customer enquiries and support the whole journey from the first request through to creating the sales order.
What is the Sales Order Agent?
The Sales Order Agent is an AI-powered feature within Dynamics 365 Business Central that can help you handle sales quote and order requests received by email.
Once it’s set up, the agent keeps an eye on a designated mailbox and reviews incoming customer requests. It can identify customers, understand what products they need, check availability and prepare sales quotes for someone to review in Business Central.
Rather than sitting off to the side as a separate AI tool, the agent is built into the sales process. That means it can work with the information and workflows already in Business Central.
How Does an Email Become a Sales Quote?
Customer enquiries rarely arrive in a neat, consistent format. Some include detailed product information, while others might contain a short description, an attachment or a request that needs a bit more clarification.
When an email lands in the monitored mailbox, the agent looks at the message and any supported attachments, including PDFs and images. It then tries to identify the customer, find the products they’re asking for and pull together the details needed to create a quote.
It also checks whether the items are available and can prepare a quote based on what the customer has requested. Once that’s done, it drafts a reply with the quote attached as a PDF, ready for a team member to review.
One of the agent’s more interesting features is that it can work with product requests that are much less structured than a traditional order form. Customers often describe what they need instead of giving an item number. They might mention particular features, something they’ve bought before or use different wording from the product names in the ERP system.
To find the right products, the agent searches the information stored in Business Central, including item descriptions, references, attributes and related product data. It uses this information to match the request with the most relevant items in the catalogue.
This means good product data matters. You’re likely to get better results when your descriptions are clear and your item records are well maintained.
When information is missing, such as the quantity, or if the product description leaves room for interpretation, the agent can carry on the conversation with the customer by email and ask for the information it needs. Everything stays connected to the original enquiry, making it easier to build a clear picture of what the customer wants before the quote is finalised.
This keeps the sales process feeling natural while cutting down on the routine follow-up work for the sales team.
Where do People fit into the Process?
Bringing AI into your customer-facing processes naturally raises questions about who stays in control.
Microsoft has designed the Sales Order Agent to work alongside people throughout the process. Your team can check the agent’s work, review the documents it creates and approve messages before they go to customers. You can also see the steps the agent has taken, so it’s clear how each request has been handled and which actions it has suggested.
This gives you the benefits of automation while keeping your team involved and helping you maintain confidence in customer interactions.
How Could This Improve the Customer Experience?
From your customer’s point of view, speed matters. Waiting too long for product information, stock updates or a quote can slow down buying decisions and make the whole process feel harder than it needs to be.
By helping your sales team move through enquiries more quickly, the agent can support faster replies and a more consistent experience for your customers. Your salespeople can then spend more time on conversations that need commercial judgement, relationship building or specialist advice.
The Sales Order Agent could be especially useful if you deal with a steady flow of quote requests, order enquiries and questions about product availability.
If you work in wholesale, distribution, manufacturing or another product-led sector, you may already handle a high volume of similar transactional emails. These are exactly the kinds of enquiries the agent is designed to support.
As with any AI solution, good data makes a real difference. Accurate contact details, well-maintained product records and clear processes will help the agent work more effectively as part of your wider sales function.
Could This be the Next Evolution of Sales Administration?
The Sales Order Agent shows how AI is becoming part of everyday business processes.
By getting involved in the journey from customer enquiry to sales order, the agent shows how AI can help with day-to-day operational work that would usually take hours of manual effort. It brings customer conversations, product information and sales processes together in one experience inside Dynamics 365 Business Central.
If you’re looking to work more efficiently while keeping a clear view of what’s happening, the Sales Order Agent is a practical example of how AI could reshape your everyday operations, one customer enquiry at a time.
Join our webinar to see how AI in Dynamics 365 Business Central can support everyday processes and help your teams work more efficiently. Sign up here.