Recently, while attending a Microsoft Event, we discussed “Customer Zero”, a term that I hadn’t used before.

Customer Zero | noun (1)

/ˈkʌs.tə.mər ˈzɪə.rəʊ/

“The practice of a company using its own products before market release to ensure optimum quality for customers”

It immediately made sense: We promote all these tools, implement them in so many companies, and answer questions, but this always starts with us — how we find the benefits that we then pass on to our customers.

What lessons have we learned ourselves that we can pass on to other businesses?

Here are our reflections on how we at Intelogy, as a Microsoft Partner, have made use of Copilot for our business, and how you can do the same.

1) Meeting notes – a revelation

Where possible, all meetings are now recorded in Teams, with our trusty Copilot taking notes throughout. These notes are then automatically summarised, with handy bulleted lists, and task outputs. We then take these notes, along with the recording, and then share them (often in a shared Teams channel or externally shared team) for ongoing reference throughout the duration of the project.

This is often the most popular “quick win” feature for people. Nobody likes spending time delving through their notes to summarise, worried that they’ve missed something. I don’t know how much time this has saved us all but it’s a significant amount!

This feature is available directly within the meeting in Teams. You can click the Copilot icon while the meeting is in progress to ask questions, or wait for it to automatically provide you with a full recap once the meeting ends.

With this feature, you can:

2) Meeting preparation – who am I meeting with?

We regularly meet with new customers, and there’s always that first call where you have the initial small talk to start the ball rolling.

Before these meetings, I often ask Copilot to tell me anything it can about the people I’ll be talking to. This then gives me a great breakdown of each person and some general information about them.

It’s sometimes extremely handy for finding a bit of common ground with which to break the ice.

3) Replacing search experiences

In the vast majority of cases, when our customers delve into the world of SharePoint, one of the first needs they have is better policy/procedure management, and a more intuitive method for staff to access the information they need.

After implementing the appropriate information architecture and lifecycle processes, the end users make use of a PnP Search interface that we apply to the site. It’s great for providing that familiar “shopping basket” experience to find content.

However, the appetite is now starting to shift towards using Copilot Agents. We ourselves now use Copilot to ask – using conversational English – about anything from expense allowances to company benefits.

Copilot focuses on the area needed and provides an excellent response, linking to the relevant pages and documents, as well as highlighting contacts to approach for more information.

This can then easily be added to Microsoft Teams so that staff have a quick and easy way to access information through a friendly chat bot.

I’ve seen a lot of excitement for experiences like this, especially given how quickly it can be set up.

4) Coding for non-coders in SharePoint

Often on SharePoint projects we see a need to carry out custom formatting in lists or document libraries, and this requires JSON. I don’t know the first thing about this language, and I know our development teams are often very busy.

Using Copilot, I clearly write my need (for example, “write me some JSON that will format a SharePoint Document library so that all rows where the Value column is greater than £50,000 are highlighted in yellow”), and voila – it’s there!

I simply copy that into my library’s view formatting section and it works. Simple!

Recently, I took this a step further by asking Copilot to write some script that would populate a description column with a hyperlink, which would then display the contents of that column (often several paragraphs – which would look messy in a SharePoint view) in a pop-out.

I didn’t even know if it was possible, yet Copilot had it working for me in seconds. All I had to then do was play with the width and height parameters to get it looking how I wanted.

Conclusion: Our journey to success

Our journey began with an initial pilot, using a small bank of licences. We created a central forum, a resources site (in SharePoint, of course), and promoted the great materials available on Viva Learning in the Copilot Academy.

We then encouraged open feedback and sharing of use cases and ideas going forward. We re-assigned licences on a regular basis to other staff, who were able to make use of past knowledge.

This was also a good test of the success of the tool by measuring the resistance of pilot members to give up their licence!

We now have all staff onboard with Copilot, using it every day. Everyone has their own take on what makes it great, and how it’s made their lives easier. Through simple re-writes of paragraphs when you’re hit with writers’ block, to time saved with Excel formulae or code, it’s made a big impact to us all. I for one couldn’t imagine being without it.

Moving forward, we’re integrating it with our line of business systems to further enhance our access to key information rapidly, and improve both efficiency and quality across the board. This will also bring greater layers of automation, and far more streamlined business practices.

There are lots of new and exciting features coming for Copilot, and we’re actively working with our customers to raise awareness of the value they will bring, and to incorporate them into their AI strategies and Adoption & Change Management programmes.

Oh, and just for the record, I didn’t use Copilot to write this blog! 😆