May 15, 2023 | By admin

Learn all about the latest features and additions to Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Microsoft’s latest release plan.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is Microsoft’s all-in-one CRM solution for your service team. The cloud solution can help you optimise end-to-end customer experiences by managing queries, providing proactive case management and delivering powerful insights. We’ve explored the highlights of Microsoft’s April 2023 release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Service to show the clear business value of investing in a robust customer service platform. 

Enhanced agent experiences 

Agents are often faced with searching through documents to find responses to share with customers. AI-suggested agent prompts basing its response on the context and history of the conversation. These responses are personalised and the models use natural language processing technology to act uniquely to each organisation.  

To simplify gathering and sharing conversational context, AI-generated conversation auto-summarisation means that customer issues and the resolutions attempted can be shared quickly.  

Here comes Copilot 

Customer service agents are critical for maintaining customer loyalty, but they often face pressure to resolve multiple customer cases quickly, leading to burnout and decreased customer satisfaction. This causes staff turnover issues and drives up recruitment costs. 

Now available in preview, Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a range of next-generation capabilities that can expedite resolving customer issues and increase satisfaction scores. Copilot provides customer service agents with 24/7 assistance to help them find resources to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently and automate time-consuming tasks. This allows agents to focus on delivering high-quality service to their customers, as well as speeding up the agent onboarding process. Copilot’s many capabilities within Dynamics 365 Customer Service include: 

Improved active conversation form 

Previously known as customer summary, the active conversation form has been enhanced to provide configurable controls to display customer and case details. This means agents can multitask on multiple cases and customer conversations at the same time and can move between cases without losing sight of context. Even better, agents can now upload multiple attachments and take quick notes with the enhanced case form capability without interrupting the case creation flow or switching between tabs.  

Levelled up layouts 

To avoid spending time on repetitive and recurring emails to a high number of customers – Dynamics 365 Customer Service’s new template designer allows users to create consistent, preformatted emails that can be customised to fit the context. These are responsive to screen sizes and elements like images, text, buttons and dividers can be added to really grab the recipient’s attention. 

Internally, the Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace app has a fresh new layout for the site map, sessions and tabs – improving the user experience of the platform. Dynamics 365 Customer Services users with out-of-the-box omnichannel security roles also now have access to innovations within the workspace app in the latest release.  

Figure 1: Dynamics 365 workspace app

Simplified case management 

The new release plan has a number of exciting new features to simplify case management and make your agents’ jobs easier. New colour-coded priority icons and case statuses mean that high-priority cases can be made immediately identifiable. 

Another useful feature to assist agents in case management is the ability to add or remove articles to the agents favourite list to refer back to. These can be ones that cover a common customer issue, and save valuable time on searching for articles. 

Forecast agent demand 

It is crucial that customer service managers can accurately forecast the demand for customer service agents to ensure this is met – preventing customer dissatisfaction from longer wait times – and no unnecessary costs are spent on overstaffing. The latest release gives customer service agent forecasts at a granular level of 15-minute intervals, aiding customer service managers in building appropriately staffed schedules for voice and digital channels. This means management has insight into: 

  • Daily forecast conversation volumes 
  • Automatically detected seasonality using historic traffic insights 
  • Forecasted agent demand  
  • A visualisation of daily, weekly and monthly forecasts for up to 6 months 
  • Slice volume and agent forecasts by any combination of channels and queues. 

Enable improved supervisor experiences 

With the latest release plan, supervisors can customise the visualisation of their omnichannel real-time analytics dashboards. This means that unique reporting needs specific to each organisation can be applied and rearranged on the out-of-the-box report layout that monitors contact centres in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.  

Figure 2: Customise the visualisation of analytics dashboards

To deal with rapid increases of incoming customer interactions, extended call lengths or customer service agent absences, contact centre management can now benefit from full visibility of overall support performance via near real-time reporting. Key capabilities of this are: 

  • A summary report to visualise the volume or customer interactions and service levels 
  • Agent reports to show agent capacity and their status for the last 24 hours 
  • Voice reports to provide voice-specific metrics from the last 24 hours 
  • Conversation lists to show insights on current ongoing conversations 
  • Visual customisation and personalisation of reporting dashboards. 

To continually improve performance and outcomes, supervisors can now use out-of-the-box real-time reports with selected filters that detail key metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These can be saved as bookmarks for ease of access, and allow for greater user personalisation within Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Solve complex cases with support swarming 

Dynamics 365 Customer Service already holds customer support swarming capabilities to deal with complex cases. This means the expertise of co-workers outside of your Dynamics 365 Customer Service team can be applied to complex cases to provide a collaborative solution. 

With the latest release, this feature has been enhanced to improve both the admin and agent experience. Admins can now benefit from a guided setup detailing how to configure swarming for their organisation, creating a more efficient onboarding experience. Enhanced swarm creation forms mean that agents can use visual indicators to understand the progress of swarm creation, allowing them to plan ahead. To further boost agent productivity, agents no longer have to manually type the swarm title – instead, this is prepopulated with the case title to save time. 

Benefit from Teams integration 

Agents can now see a full 360 case view of any chats related to a case or record directly on the timeline using Microsoft Teams integration. This provides an overview of who connected to the chat and when, and who the last person to interact on the chat was. By providing this insight, any agent changes mean the new agent can see the conversation history, giving a seamless customer service experience without customers having to repeat themselves. 

Teams integration also gives customers who are connected to a Dynamics 365 record an overview of any case priority or record changes that may impact their case, as shown below:

Figure 3: Overview of case priority or record changes.

Unified routing 

Over half of customers will terminate a relationship after a poor customer service experience, meaning it is critical to meet their needs accurately and quickly. Using machine learning, cases can be assigned to the best-suited agent based on their area of support expertise – this is called unified routing.  

In the latest release plan, unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service has been enhanced to: 

Looking forward  

Telefónica Tech can help empower your teams by streamlining data and providing them with the unified technology they need to deliver seamless, personalised customer experiences using Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Get in touch with our team of Dynamics experts today for more information.