December 9, 2021 | By admin

Several new features are coming to  Dynamics 365 Customer Service adding new functionality to the platform.  

Microsoft has announced new functionality for Dynamics 365 Customer Service as part of release wave 2. In this article we will provide an overview of the features you should expect to see over the coming months and how you can make the most of them.  

The new features focus on the delivery of an integrated customer experience by including new integrations with Microsoft Teams, changes to knowledge management, external data in timelines and more. 

Teams Integrations 

These new features will provide agents with the ability to stay within Dynamics 365 while collaborating with customers and other team members both using chat features and teams calls. 

  • Case handlers will be able to create and join Microsoft Teams meetings from within Dynamics 365 
  • During these calls case handlers will be able to edit Dynamics 365 records within a Microsoft Teams conversation, allowing conversation participants the ability to edit records during calls 
  • Further integrations with Microsoft Teams and Dynamics will allow for Notes and Tasks to be added to a records timeline from a Microsoft Teams message as well as sharing records through messages to allow for quick record summaries to be sent through chats or channels 
  • Teams chats can be linked directly to a case, allowing service issues to be resolved over Teams and a log of this activity will be stored in the case record. 

Agent Experience 

These updates seek to improve the experience for representatives using Customer Service, providing additional functionality that enables them to handle multiple channels and sessions. 

  • The agent workspace inbox view aims to streamline the process of engaging with customers for organisations, making use of Omnichannel and the Customer Service Workspace by providing agents with customised views, filters, and sort capabilities across the multiple channels of contact you may have 
  • The side panel available in the Customer Service workspace and Omnichannel will now be available by default, whereas before it had to be enabled by an administrator. This feature provides agents with smart suggestions to help them resolve issues quickly, such as any related cases or knowledge articles that are relevant to the issue. 

Community 

Currently, Customer Service can offer a self-service portal for end-users to log cases and view knowledge articles. With this release wave, a new Portal called Community will become available which will provide end-users with a place to provide feedback and engage with the company through forums, blogs and ideas. 

End users will have several Community capabilities out of the box such as: 

  • Posting ideas, browsing existing ideas, upvote ideas and comment 
  • Administrators will be able to use out-of-the-box features to brand the Community Portal and manage the content posted to the community. 

Timeline 

The timeline will see an update in the new release wave that will allow for custom data to be tracked and visible to users. The timeline will now allow for data from outside the dataverse to be displayed, there will be a new virtual data model which allows administrators to bring this data into the timeline, with the full timeline capability. 

Omnichannel Voice  

Omnichannel Voice will extend the current Omnichannel offering to include a voice channel using the same technology used for teams calls, which will bring Voice together with the available SMS and Digital Messaging within Omnichannel. 

  • Call intelligence will provide analytics that allows users to drill deeper into a particular call and obtain information on sentiment, talking speed and the talk to listen to ratio alongside a transcript of the call. While these calls are live, the transcript and sentiment will be available to view 
  • Call recordings can be stored within Dynamics, relating to the appropriate records 
  • Outbound calls can be made directly from Dynamics 365 Customer Service without the need for third-party integration with the capability of supervision, just like any other interaction in Omnichannel 
  • Supervisor monitoring for voice calls will be available, which will allow managers to monitor ongoing calls, view the transcript and sentiment of these calls while they are in progress and where necessary, listen in and take over the call. 

These new features and more for Dynamics 365 Customer Service will be released between October 2021 and March 2022. 

If you would like to learn more about these upcoming features, get in touch and our team will be happy to help your organisation transition through and harness the power of these planned changes.