On June 4, 2024, we introduced the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer engagement: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Microsoft Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. This standalone Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution enables customers to maximize their current investments by connecting to preferred customer relationship management systems (CRMs) or custom apps.  

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

A complete solution for contact centers

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Today, we are excited to announce that Dynamics 365 Contact Center is generally available, offering a complete but fully-composable solution for contact centers. Organizations will benefit from new native capabilities such as generative AI, technology from Nuance, and much more all built from the ground-up to power mission-critical service operations with extensive scale and reliability on the hyperscale cloud platform of Azure.    

Key benefits of Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Dynamics 365 Contact Center key capabilities include: 

Effortless self-service 

• Customers have the freedom to engage in their channel of choice across voice, SMS, chat, email, and social media apps.
• Sophisticated pre-integrated copilots for digital channels drive context-aware, personalized conversations for rich self-service experiences. 
• Provide a frictionless conversational interactive voice response (IVR) experience in real time through natural, human-like interactions. 

Accelerated human-assisted service 

• Intelligent unified routing steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent best suited to help, enhancing service quality and minimizing wasted effort. 
• Agents gain a 360-degree view of customers and AI tools for real-time sentiment analysis, translation, transcription, and more to help streamline service. 
• Let Copilot automate repetitive agent tasks such as conversation summary, drafting emails, suggested responses, and knowledge search. 

Operational efficiency 

• Generative AI based real-time reporting allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels including their workforce. 
• Maximize Copilot by connecting it to an organization’s existing data and business applications using more than 1,200 pre-built connectors that eliminate the need for expensive IT integration. 
• Empower employee helpdesk and human resources functions using Microsoft Teams as a secure, integrated engagement channel. 

Dynamics 365 Contact Center customer stories

We’re thrilled to see the initial impact that our early adopter customers and partners are having with Dynamics 365 Contact Center:  

“With Lenovo’s Premier Support Plus and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’ve established a transformational partnership that strives for customer satisfaction, alongside operational excellence”

Lishuang Xu, Executive Director, Customer Engagement Center, Lenovo.  

“Sales and marketing thrive on smooth customer interactions. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center, early adoption means we’re ahead, modernizing our approach with AI for increasing effectiveness and improving customer satisfaction”

Ian Au-Yeung, Chief Revenue Officer, Synoptek 

“With Dynamics 365 Contact Center powered by Copilot, we see tremendous potential for significant enhancement in contact center staff productivity, ensuring quicker and precise responses that elevate our customer service and affirm our leadership in the insurance industry.”

Ritu Thakur, Head of Group Operations, AIA Group   

Take the next step 

Available now for $110 per user/month, Dynamics 365 Contact Center includes digital and voice channels as well as individual channel options for purchase.¹   

Additionally, we are introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium—a new offer combining Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise with Dynamics 365 Contact Center for customers seeking to consolidate on an integrated, generative AI-powered contact center and CRM service solution that delivers personalized customer journeys. Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium is available now for $195 per user/month.² Customers with existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise licenses adopting Dynamics 365 Contact Center will have the ability to move to Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium. 

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Contact Center. 

^1,2 Pricing is accurate as of June 2024. For additional pricing information, see here.

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center is now generally available  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we are thrilled to announce the latest milestone in our journey towards modernizing customer service: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first contact center solution that delivers generative AI to every customer engagement channel. With general availability on July 1, this standalone Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution enables customers to maximize their current investments by connecting to preferred customer relationship management systems (CRMs) or custom apps.

Modernizing service experiences with generative AI

Customer service expectations are higher than ever. It’s not only frustrating for customers to deal with long wait times, being transferred to the wrong agent or having to repeat themselves multiple times — it’s detrimental to business. When people have poor customer service experiences, over half of them end up spending less or decide to take their business elsewhere (Qualtrics).

Generative AI is transforming customer service and revolutionizing the way contact centers operate — from delivering rich experiences across digital and voice channels that enable customers to resolve their own needs, to equipping agents with relevant context within the flow of work, and ultimately unifying operations to drive efficiency and reduce costs.

We have experienced the transformational impact of generative AI firsthand with Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support (CSS) team, one of the largest customer service organizations in the world. Before the support team migrated to Microsoft’s own tools, CSS was previously using 16 different systems and over 500 individual tools — slowing down service, hindering collaboration and producing inefficient workflows. With Copilot as part of the solution, the CSS team achieved a 12 percent decrease in average handle time for chat engagements and 13 percent decrease in agents requiring peer assistance to resolve an incident. And more broadly, CSS has seen a 31 percent increase in first call resolution and a 20 percent reduction in missed routes.

Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Applying learnings and insights from our own Copilot usage, coupled with multi-year investments in voice and digital channels, Dynamics 365 Contact Center infuses generative AI throughout the contact center workflow — spanning the channels of communication, self-service, intelligent routing, agent-assisted service and operations to help contact centers solve problems faster, empower agents and reduce costs.

Additionally, Dynamics 365 Contact Center is built natively on the Microsoft cloud to deliver extensive scalability and reliability across voice, digital channels and routing while at the same time allowing organizations to retain their existing investments in CRM or custom apps.

Key Dynamics 365 Contact Center capabilities include:

• Next-generation self-service: With sophisticated pre-integrated Copilots for digital and voice channels that drive context-aware, personalized conversations, contact centers can deploy rich self-service experiences. Combining the best of interactive voice response (IVR) technology from Nuance and Microsoft Copilot Studio’s no-code/low-code designer, contact centers can provide customers with engaging, individualized experiences powered by generative AI.
• Accelerated human-assisted service: Across every channel, intelligent unified routing steers incoming requests that require a human touch to the agent best suited to help, enhancing service quality and efficiency. When a customer reaches an agent, Dynamics 365 Contact Center gives the agent a 360-degree view of the customer with generative AI — for example, real-time conversation tools like sentiment analysis, translation, conversation summary, transcription and more are included to help improve service, along with others that automate repetitive tasks for agents such as case summary, draft an email, suggested response and the ability for Copilot to answer agent questions grounded on your trusted knowledge sources.
• Operational efficiency: Contact center efficiency depends just as much on what happens behind the scenes as it does on customer and agent experiences. We’ve built a solution that helps service teams detect issues early, improve critical KPIs and adapt quickly. With generative AI-based, real-time reporting, Dynamics 365 Contact Center allows service leaders to optimize contact center operations across all support channels, including their workforce.

Here’s what customers are saying:

• “At 1-800-Flowers.com, we pride ourselves on exceptional service and continually raising the bar. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re creating a best-in-class solution that furthers our mission and helps inspire people to give more, connect more, and build more and better relationships.” — Arnie Leap, CIO, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.
• “MSC has always been known for the personal service that we give to our customers; Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps us elevate that customer-centric approach.”— Fabio Catassi, CIO, Mediterranean Shipping Company
• “For our support teams, efficient problem-solving and smooth customer interactions are key to delivering exceptional service. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and by leveraging its AI capabilities, we see a future where our support teams will deliver that level of service every day.”— Stephen Currie, Vice President Support Operations, Synoptek

If you’re attending Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas, join me for my main stage panel on Thursday, June 6. Be sure to also stop by the Microsoft booth (#151) during the event to see Dynamics 365 Contact Center in action.

Stay tuned for the general availability of Dynamics 365 Contact Center on July 1.

The post Announcing Dynamics 365 Contact Center – a Copilot-first cloud contact center to transform service experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of new and enhanced experiences in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service as part of our 2024 release wave 1 cadence. This release focuses on extending Microsoft Copilot capabilities by infusing generative AI into customer, agent, and supervisor experiences. We’re also enhancing voice, messaging, and email channels to provide a unified, omnichannel experience.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations improve every aspect of contact center operations. We’re continuing to invest in generative AI to help contact centers create seamless self-service options for common questions. Plus, it helps every agent become a super-agent when it comes to more complex, high-touch issues.

Copilot and AI innovation in Customer Service

Since we announced Copilot capabilities a year ago, organizations have been realizing the benefits of generative AI in the contact center. Copilot answers agents’ questions, drafts email, provides case and conversation summaries, and automates time-consuming tasks. We’ve enhanced the email drafting capability further by including a contextual inline email editor, making it even easier for agents to deliver personalized service.

Also in this release, we’re enabling agents to generate AI-powered timeline highlights to get an overview of key activities like emails, notes, appointments, tasks, phone calls, and conversations. This minimizes the amount of clicking and scrolling an agent must do to get caught up on case and customer details.

Organizations can extend Copilot capabilities with prompt plug-ins in public preview this month. With plug-ins, agents can generate a summary of their customers, products, cases, or any other entities in Microsoft Dataverse without having to switch tabs or log in to a separate app.

Generative AI in external apps with Microsoft Copilot for Service

In February, we introduced Microsoft Copilot for Service, which enables organizations to use Copilot capabilities with their existing customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as Salesforce, and other productivity apps like Microsoft Teams and Outlook. It helps organizations by making their knowledge more accessible. This speeds up training and problem-solving, making work easier for agents.

In Teams, agents can save time by accessing a customer’s CRM records during a meeting. Agents can update the case and contact details, and link to open CRM records from Teams.

In Outlook, Copilot for Service can draft personalized, contextual customer service emails based on predefined intents, or agents can provide their own custom intents. Copilot can also help agents catch up on email quickly by generating summaries of long email conversations and display summaries of all the activities and information of a case. They can then save the summary to the CRM system and access it later.

Preparing for meetings is easier for agents because Copilot for Service provides the case summary associated with the meeting, along with access to view and edit CRM records. Furthermore, Copilot for Service can recommend CRM updates to agents based on information it finds in Outlook, such as contacts, emails, meetings, and summaries.

Voice channel enhancements in Customer Service

The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service help organizations provide support to customers across multiple channels, including email, voice, text message, chat, and social media. This release brings several voice channel enhancements and certifications.

With enhancements to outbound dialing, agents can easily search for a customer in the outbound dialer and open the customer record right from the call history. They can now test the microphone and speakers before and during calls. Agents can also rate the call quality using a five-star rating system with the ability to describe issues with lower quality calls. We’re also enhancing customer trust, compliance, and security with sensitive data masking in data storage, during interactive voice response (IVR) sessions, and agent sessions.

IVR enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Omnichannel add-on help customers self-serve before they must speak with an agent. In addition to improved speech recognition accuracy, these new voice features enable organizations to set prompts on silence, control timeouts, enable barge-in at any step, and suppress noise. The result is a smooth, contextual experience for customers.

Customers in Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) Moderate can now access features from the voice channel. In addition, we’re submitting Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certifications for the components of the omnichannel stack in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This high-level certification for government clouds will ensure the security of newly integrated features.

Workforce management

Intelligent forecasting with Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces an AI-powered forecasting feature designed to predict service volumes and agent demands effectively. By analyzing historical data and trends, this intelligent model provides accurate predictions for up to six months into the future. Organizations can use this capability to optimize resource allocation, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction, thanks to daily and intraday forecasts for cases and conversations.

Forecasting is tailored to the unique needs of front-office and back-office operations. It distinguishes between direct customer interactions (conversations) and internal processing (cases), offering flexibility in forecasting for different service channels. This allows organizations to plan resources efficiently, ensuring optimal service levels and agent availability for both immediate and future service demands.

Operational metrics such as service level, shrinkage, and concurrency are considered in forecasting agent demand, aligning capacity with operational constraints. The model’s auto-detection of seasonality and holidays further refines accuracy, enabling businesses to adapt to service demand variations. User-friendly charts and the ability to slice forecast data by channels and queues provide valuable insights, while the export functionality enhances usability and integration with other tools.

Email enhancements

An intuitive agent experience is key to connecting with customers. Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a robust agent desktop with generative AI, collaboration tools, and productivity features in a customizable workspace.

Agents now have a more efficient way to search for customers. They can use any part of the customer’s name to quickly find the right recipient. Email addresses are displayed alongside recipient names, making it easier for agents to identify and select the correct contact. Additionally, agents can see if recipients have set an out-of-office status, so they can adjust their communication accordingly.

The enhanced email attachment experience allows agents to quickly drag and drop attachments in emails. It also includes a reminder system that prompts agents if they mention an attachment in the email but forget to include it. These capabilities help agents save time and increase productivity when handling email communications.

To benefit the support organization, we’re also introducing the ability to create multiple cases from emails. The feature allows for automatic case creation for all mailboxes that receive an email, ensuring full visibility into customer issues. It enables teams to respond independently to customer issues, without case transfers, leading to quicker first responses and improved handling times. By avoiding case transfer delays, teams can more quickly meet service level agreements.

Next-generation AI that’s ready for enterprises

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We’re putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Empower agents to resolve issues quickly using generative AI and automation.

Try it for free

Learn more and try Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Learn more about how to elevate your service with AI and enable Copilot features for your support agents.

The post AI-powered innovations enhance customer service with 2024 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Most organizations find it’s no longer good enough to just measure successful service engagements solely on whether a customer issue is resolved. Instead, they aim to deliver personalized, fast service experiences at every touchpoint through all engagement channels. The best way to do this is by building long-term customer loyalty and transforming operations with modern, AI-enhanced capabilities across all service processes and interactions. That’s why we are continuously enhancing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to empower our customers and help them differentiate their service organizations. Today, we’re happy to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024 attaining top scores possible in the business intelligence, process management, and collaboration criteria.

Investing in AI and a unified platform for modernizing customer service 

More and more, service agents feel increased pressure to provide smart, fast, and customized answers when presented with customer issues. But finding information and experts to quickly resolve an issue can present its own challenges. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 62% of people spend too much time scouring for information during their workday. For service organizations, agents who must scramble to find information can mean both slower time to resolution for individual cases and a lower number of cases addressed per day overall. The agent experience is the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The key to improving satisfaction in service delivery is enabling agents to take customer requests from any channel, handle multiple sessions at a time, interact with multiple apps without losing context, and enhance their workflow with productivity tools. Our answer is to provide a solution that helps service organizations harness the power of data, AI, automation, and collaboration to help agents focus on resolving customer issues quickly. Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps service organizations unlock trusted knowledge to accelerate onboarding and case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work.  

More recently, we’ve brought Microsoft Copilot into Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Without costly development time, organizations can simply point to their data and, in a few minutes, unlock generative AI-powered conversations across their knowledge bases and other sources. Agents can use Copilot to respond to incoming email, factoring in other relevant customer data to produce a personalized, accurate, and editable reply. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. In addition, service agents are empowered with additional AI experiences and automation to help fuel collaboration and productivity for delivering world-class customer service at scale. We recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for our own Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high-volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22% reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.  

At Microsoft, we strive to enable our customers to empower their customers to engage on their terms, at their optimal times, and on their channels of choice. We believe we have earned our position as a Leader by developing a customer service solution that enables agents to focus on delivering more cutting-edge service experiences by harnessing available data and using the power of generative AI to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences; maximize their productivity; and optimize service operations. And with our comprehensive service platform that includes automation, knowledge management, collaboration, and more, service organizations can streamline case management, enable more personalized service, and get a clear, 360-degree view into how their service organization is performing. As Forrester points out in its report, “Microsoft’s vision is broader than just customer service, and it’s firmly grounded in three principles: Engagement must be personalized via AI; customer service must be highly collaborative; and outcomes must drive improvements. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service actualizes this vision.” 

Building on next-generation AI that’s enterprise ready 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, so our customers can rest assured that it offers data privacy and protection. Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage, enabling organizations to control access to their data, and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities.  

Creating responsible AI solutions 

Most importantly, we are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. 

The Forrester Wave™

Microsoft is a Leader in the The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024.

Read the report

Learn more about customer service 

We’re excited to be recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative customer service platform capabilities to help our customers continuously improve their own customer service offerings. 

Learn more about: 

• Dynamics 365 
• Dynamics 365 Customer Service 
• Microsoft Copilot for Service 

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investment, and consider trying Dynamics 365 Customer Service for free by visiting. 

The post Microsoft is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Customer Service Solutions, Q1 2024  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Over the past six months we’ve outlined our vision for the evolution of Microsoft’s portfolio targeting customer service and related markets, beginning with the introduction of Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 as the world’s first Copilot for both CRM and ERP, and more recently reaching the general availability of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. In this blog, we will discuss the opportunity for organizations to delight their customers with generative AI-powered service experiences and explain some of the new innovations we’re announcing to make it a reality. 

Generative AI is transforming customer service 

Customers expect fast, personalized service at every touchpoint. Effective customer service strategies not only delight customers, but also build long-term loyalty, create efficiencies and ultimately grow the business. The stakes are high, yet access to relevant data and the right technology tools continues to be the greatest barrier for agents seeking to resolve customer issues. 

Generative AI is transforming customer service by boosting agent productivity and unlocking organizational efficiency. For example, Microsoft’s Customer Service and Support (CSS) team—one of the largest customer service organizations in the world—has been using Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service for the past six months. We recently shared findings demonstrating how generative AI has impacted the way our CSS agents work to resolve support cases, as well as their efficiency in customer engagements and overall productivity in areas like reducing average case handling time by 12 percent, increasing the ability for agents to independently resolve cases (13 percent of cases in one support business), and more. 

Introducing Microsoft Copilot for Service 

Today we’re taking the next step in our journey to help organizations deliver compelling service experiences by modernizing their existing contact centers with generative AI—introducing Microsoft Copilot for Service. Copilot for Service synthesizes vast amounts of data already available from an organization’s trusted knowledge sources to provide relevant, timely guidance to agents in their flow of work. Copilot for Service provides flexibility for organizations to quickly begin realizing the benefits of generative AI by extending their existing investments in CRM and contact center solutions—including Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow and more.   

Connect to existing contact center and CRM solutions  

Without costly development time or rip and replace efforts, organizations can simply point to their data—such as public websites, SharePoint, knowledgebase articles, and offline files—and in a few minutes unlock generative AI-powered conversations across all of their data. Copilot for Service reduces time to production with out-of-the-box integrations for Dynamics 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk. 

Assist agents in the flow of work 

Copilot for Service accelerates agent onboarding and case resolution, improves efficiency, and automates tasks to help free agents to focus on customers. Embedded in their desktop of choice or deployed in Teams, agents can simply ask the generative AI-powered Copilot questions in natural language to receive relevant answers that leverage existing contact center knowledge to enhance agent productivity and customer satisfaction.  

Since Copilot for Microsoft 365 is included in Copilot for Service, organizations will also benefit more broadly from productivity enhancements in the tools agents already use every day, such as Outlook and Teams. For example, Copilot can quickly bring agents up to speed on email threads within Outlook by providing summaries, as well as accelerate responses to customers by providing draft emails. In Teams, agents can stay on top of meetings with customers or subject matter experts by viewing AI-powered meeting recaps with summaries of key discussion points, sentiment, and next steps. Furthermore, agents can use Copilot to get the latest account and case information from CRM systems. 

In the future, Copilot for Service will make agents even more productive by enriching email summaries, email drafts, and meeting recaps with CRM data. It will not only provide them the ability to view/update CRM records directly in Outlook and Teams in their flow of work, but also automate CRM tasks such as case wrap ups, meeting scheduling, adding new contacts, and task follow up—all with a single click based on context from emails, knowledge sources, and previous customer communications, comparable to the agent assist capabilities that are part of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Copilot for Service will also make proactive recommendations for creating new or updating existing knowledge assets by curating information across email threads, cases, Teams chats and more. These updated knowledge bases will in turn benefit an organization’s broad set of agents as they seek to accelerate the resolution of customer issues, as well as knowledge workers in other roles by providing a full 360 degree view of the customer (inclusive of cases, recent activities, knowledge sources, and other information) from the CRM systems—all in their flow of work via Outlook and Teams.  

Customize and extend to meet your needs 

Copilot for Service enables extensibility with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Add additional topics, automate actions and workflows, and further customize for a uniquely tailored solution. Additionally, Copilot for Service can be extended to other systems with more than 1,100 pre-built and custom connectors that eliminate the need for expensive IT integration work. 

Copilot for Service availability and pricing 

Microsoft Copilot for Service is currently available in public preview. Visit the Copilot for Service webpage to learn more and sign up for the preview. General availability is targeted for the first quarter of 2024. Pricing will be $50 USD per user/month. 

Learn more about Copilot for Microsoft 365 licensing requirements. 

For Dynamics 365 customers, comparable agent assist capabilities are included in Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise. Learn more about Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.  

Learn more 

Watch content from Microsoft Ignite to learn more: 

• Becoming an AI-Powered Organization with Microsoft Copilot 
• Transforming service organizations with generative AI 

The post Announcing Microsoft Copilot for Service  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The world has changed rapidly since generative AI first attracted mainstream popularity in late 2022. Standing behind our company mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, Microsoft made a once-in-a-generation strategic shift by introducing generative AI capabilities that we refer to as Copilot, designed to revolutionize every Microsoft Cloud experience. From empowering knowledge workers and transforming business processes to enabling anyone to create low-code and no-code solutions, we’re delivering Copilot capabilities that work alongside you, embedded in applications that millions of people use every day. One area we are truly excited about is how the customer service experience will be transformed by this new era of Copilot experiences.

Successful service engagements are no longer measured solely on whether a customer issue is resolved. The latest benchmark for service organizations is based on delivering personalized, fast service experiences at every touchpoint through all engagement channels. The most successful service organizations differentiate themselves by building long-term customer loyalty and transforming operations with modern, AI-enhanced capabilities across all service processes and interactions. These differentiators are what continue to propel Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center

Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader

Read the report

It is with great pride that Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center. We believe this placement recognizes Microsoft’s continued rapid pace of innovation and our customers’ success using our service as well as our broader end-to-end CRM (customer relationship management) solutions and cloud functionality.  

Gartner defines CRM customer engagement center (CRM-CEC) as a cohesive set of software built around core case management tools used to provide customer service and support by engaging with customers, while intelligently orchestrating the processes, data, systems, and resources of an organization. CRM-CEC applications also offer workflow management capabilities and may be used as a system of record for customer interactions.

What is customer service modernization?

By harnessing the power of data, AI, automation, and collaboration, customer service modernization enables service organizations to deliver an end-to-end, flexible service platform for transforming operations, driving greater efficiency, and generating outcome-based value for customers. Service agents are empowered with AI Copilot experiences and automation to help fuel collaboration and productivity for delivering world-class customer service at scale. That way, their customers can engage in their terms, at their optimal times, and on their channels of choice.

Lufthansa Cargo manages record-breaking growth with a “360-degree view of the customer”

Take, for example, Lufthansa Cargo, one of the world’s leading companies in airfreight transportation. The company transports shipments to nearly 300 destinations in more than 100 countries with speed, efficiency, and care. Experiencing record-breaking growth and with ambitious innovation goals on the horizon, the organization needed a more advanced and centralized way to manage its customer service and sales information.  

An aging system had left Lufthansa Cargo with siloed information, duplicated data, and limited functionality. The organization embarked on a CRM migration project with a clear goal in mind: to replace their outdated system with something more streamlined, efficient, and accessible. They built a new CRM platform powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to pull all their information and communication channels into a single location.

With the new solution, sales and customer service teams have centralized access to all customer information and their related shipments, as well as proactive suggestions that empower them to provide standout sales and service to customers.  

Xiaomi improves its customer service and post-sales supply chain management

Another great example of customer service transformation is Xiaomi, a China-based electronics company that manufactures mobile phones, tablets, and smart home devices sold in more than 100 markets. As Xiaomi expanded into overseas markets, it used siloed service tools and channels instead of an integrated service platform. This created challenges with providing consistent customer service experience across countries.  

As Xiaomi experienced rapid growth and expansion, its self-developed, fragmented customer service system struggled to keep up with the massive demand for human resources and time. The system’s third-party apps were completely independent of one another, so users were required to communicate information via phone and instant messaging. Customer service teams received customer requests from different channels, queried information in different systems, and then returned to the corresponding channel system for feedback. 

To address these challenges, Xiaomi decided to build a unified CRM platform on Dynamics 365 Customer Service to support multi-language capabilities, compliance, and unified management levels. The new system covers 34 countries and supports 19 languages and provides a unified workbench for multiple communication channels (online, email, social media) and for financial processes, data integration, and security authentication. 

The bottom line

Microsoft is continuously evolving to meet the customers where they are with a generative AI-powered platform that leverages the conversational and transactional data generated by an all-in-one customer engagement solution. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help you transform your service organization with differentiated, best-in-class service experiences that offer enhanced productivity and collaboration to help agents increase their efficiency. That way, agents can focus on delivering more cutting-edge service experiences by harnessing available data and using the power of generative AI to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences, maximize their productivity, and optimize service operations. And with our comprehensive service platform that includes automation, knowledge management, collaboration, and more, you can streamline case management, enable more personalized service, and get a clear, 360-degree view into how your service organization is performing. 

We’re excited to be positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to bringing you a comprehensive, flexible, and secure platform for providing efficient and effective customer service engagements. You can depend on the multidimensional capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service to empower you to provide seamless, end-to-end experiences within a single solution built on the Microsoft Cloud to deliver consistent, connected support across channels. 

Next steps

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365 Customer Service
• Dynamics 365 AI

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, Pri Rathnayake, Wynn White, Drew Kraus, 1 November 2023.

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved 

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from this link. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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The year 2023 has ushered in dramatic innovations in AI, particularly regarding how businesses interact with customers. Every day, more organizations are discovering how they can empower agents to provide faster, more personalized service using next-generation AI.  

We’re excited to announce three Microsoft Copilot features now generally available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service in October, along with the new summarization feature that was made generally available in September. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view Copilot usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. The following features are generally available to Dynamics 365 Customer Service users:

Copilot uses knowledge and web sources that your organization specifies, and your organizational and customer data are never used to train public models.

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.

Read how

1. Ask Copilot a question

Whether they’re responding to customers using the phone, chat, or social media, agents can use Copilot to harness knowledge across the organization to provide quick, informative answers, similar to having an experienced coworker available to chat all day, every day. When an administrator enables the Copilot pane in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace or custom apps, agents can use natural language to ask questions and find answers. Copilot searches all company resources that administrators have made available and returns an answer. Agents can check the sources that Copilot used to create a response, and they can rate responses as helpful or unhelpful. Contact center managers can then view agent feedback to see how their agents are interacting with Copilot and identify areas where sources may need to be removed or updated.

The ability to ask Copilot questions can save agents valuable time. Microsoft recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22 percent reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.

2. Create intelligent email responses

Agents who receive customer requests via email can spend valuable time researching and writing the perfect response. Now, agents can use Copilot to draft emails by selecting from predefined prompts that include common support activities such as “suggest a call,” “request more information,” “empathize with feedback,” or “resolve the customer’s problem.” Agents can also provide their own custom prompts for more complex issues. Copilot uses the context of the conversation along with case notes and the organization’s knowledge to produce a relevant, personalized email. The agent can edit and modify the text further, and then send the response to help resolve the issue quickly.  

3. Understand Copilot usage in your organization

It’s important for service managers to measure the impact and improvements as part of the change that generative AI-powered Copilot has on their operations and agent experience. Dynamics 365 Customer Service historical analytics reports provide a comprehensive view of Copilot-specific metrics and insights. Managers can see how often agents use Copilot to respond to customers, the number of agent/customer interactions that involved Copilot, the duration of conversations where Copilot plays a role, and more. They can also see the percentage of cases that agents resolved with the help of Copilot. Agents can also rate Copilot responses so managers have a better understanding of how Copilot is helping to improve customer service and the overall impact on their organization.

4. Summarize cases and conversations with Copilot

Generally available since September, the ability to summarize cases and complex, lengthy conversations using Copilot can save valuable time for agents across channels. Rather than spending hours to review notes as they wrap up a case, agents can create a case summary with a single click that highlights key information about the case, such as customer, case title, case type, subject, case description, product, and priority. In addition, agents can rely on Copilot to generate conversation summaries that capture key information such as the customer’s name, the issue or request, the steps taken so far, the case status, and any relevant facts or data. Summaries also highlight any sentiment expressed by the customer or the agent, plus action items or next steps. Generating conversation summaries on the fly is especially useful when an agent must hand off a call to another agent and quickly bring them up to speed while the customer is still on the line. This ability to connect customers with experts in complex, high-touch scenarios is helping to transform the customer service experience, reduce operational cost savings, and ensure happier customers.

Next-generation AI that is ready for enterprises

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Learn more and try Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Learn more about how to elevate your service with AI and enable Copilot features for your support agents.

Try Dynamics 365 Customer Service for free.

The post Modernize customer support with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re entering the era of next-generation AI that is driving new levels of productivity and efficiency, unleashing new innovations in the customer service space. AI is profoundly changing how customers engage with businesses and how agents provide exceptional service to them.

From a service perspective, customers expect fast, accurate answers to their questions, and personalized help when they contact a business. Meanwhile, businesses are under pressure to provide exceptional customer service with fewer resources. Legacy ways of integrating multiple-point solutions for customer service do not work. The time to embark on a digital transformation journey is now. Choosing the right AI-powered customer service solution for that journey, empowering customer service agents with AI, and reducing costs has never been more important. 

We’re excited to launch Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which provides agents with real-time AI-powered assistance, developed in alignment with our responsible AI principles and standards. Copilot helps agents resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks so they can focus on delivering high-quality service to their customers. In a nutshell, Copilot can help every agent to become your best agent.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Preview next-generation AI capabilities

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With just a click of a button, Copilot empowers any agent to obtain the most relevant answer to any complex question that a customer may have and deliver a tailored response to the customer in real time using chat messages and emails. Copilot is available to agents as part of their natural flow of solving problems using Customer Service workspace. It’s like having an expert at your fingertips, always ready to assist. 

Let’s take a closer look at the ways Copilot revolutionizes customer service and enables agents to deliver fast and relevant resolutions to customer problems.

Make every customer service agent a superagent

Today, when agents get a question from a customer that they can’t answer immediately, they typically search multiple internal knowledge sources or try to find an internal expert to consult with. The amount of time it takes to read through search results, find the right solution, compose a response back to the customer, and resolve the case is often lengthy.

Now, agents can chat with the next-generation AI-powered Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service right within Customer Service workspace. Copilot can diagnose customer problems, use the organization’s internal knowledge and vast amounts of data from trusted websites, and supply the agent with an appropriate solution to give to the customer.

Copilot analyzes customer data to identify patterns, anticipate customer needs, and make suggestions to the agent on how to best handle each interaction. With this powerful tool at their disposal, agents can handle more queries in less time, increasing efficiency and improving the overall customer experience. Since agents are always in the loop every step of the way, they are in full control of using AI to drive their productivity. Agents can verify the responses, check the resources, and personalize the message to match the customer’s specific needs to ensure their satisfaction and optimal experience.

Answer customer questions fast across channels 

In today’s fragmented contact center solution space, agents are often inundated with multiple messages on different channels of engagement. They are overwhelmed by multitasking and context switching, often wondering how they can keep up with overflowing incoming requests.

With omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, customer service agents get a streamlined view of incoming chats from a variety of channels (such as Apple Messages for Business, Google Business Messaging, text messages, and WhatsApp) integrated with case management. Agents can now use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, which intelligently parses information from the conversation and contextualizes it with organizational and customer data. Furthermore, Copilot keeps track of historical interactions, and uses all of that information to recommend a tailored, helpful answer that agents can review before they respond. Customers get the best service, regardless of their choice of channel.

Send expertly crafted customer service emails 

For agents who receive questions via email, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help create relevant and personalized email responses in seconds. Copilot provides agents with predefined prompts based on what the agent is trying to do, such as “suggest a call”, “request more information”, “empathize with feedback”, or “resolve the customer’s problem.” Agents can also provide their own custom prompt for more complex issues. 

Normally, agents may spend many minutes or hours researching and composing a detailed email with all the necessary information. With Copilot, agents get a composed email response in an instant that they can review and send. This model drives unparalleled productivity for the agent and delivers personalized service for the customer.  

Enrich self-service with AI-powered conversational assistance

Dynamics 365 Customer Service now offers a powerful conversational experience with Power Virtual Agents, boosted by next-generation AI capabilities. Customers can get relevant answers to their questions immediately from intelligent conversational bots that use trusted websites and internal data. Enterprises also have the choice of using Nuance as an on-ramp for their digital transformation journey. Nuance announced new AI capabilities in Nuance Mix. Dynamics 365 Customer Service, together with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Power Platform, Nuance, and Microsoft Azure, deliver truly transformative experiences for both agents and customers through the contact center.

Next-generation AI that is ready for enterprises

Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Try Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Sign up for the limited preview of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This preview is available for instances in North America using the English – US language. Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot on the Dynamics 365 AI webpage.

Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

On April 4, discover innovations across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform at a digital event.

Read more about the event

The post Revolutionize customer service with next-generation AI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, I am excited to announce the general availability of the first-party voice channel for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. With the addition of the voice channel, built on the same planet-scale platform as Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365 Customer Service expands to become the all-in-one digital contact center solution. Organizations can now provide consistent and personalized service to customers across all channels with one data-driven, AI-infused, end-to-end solution with no integration required.

Let’s take a closer look at the four key areas that help our customers deliver world-class service.

Personalized calls, connected across channels

Service leaders know that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase from companies that provide more personalized experiences.¹ But for many contact centers, ensuring a continuous, personalized experience across all channels is difficult to achieve. Multiple tools and disconnected data silos prevent agents from having a complete view of the customer journey. But no more.

No matter how your customers connect with you, now you can deliver a consistent, intelligent, and personalized service experience. With the addition of the voice channel, Dynamics 365 Customer Service out-of-the-box enables:

• A consistent, 360-degree view of the customer across all channels, allowing agents to quickly understand the full customer journey so customers never have to repeat themselves.
• An intelligent, conversational Power Virtual Agent that can be used as an interactive voice response (IVR) for the voice channel and versatile enough to be used as a chatbot for SMS, live chat, and social messaging channels.
• AI-based routing of incoming calls to the best skilled agent, consistent with all other channels.
• Increased collaboration with other agents and subject matter experts globally using embedded Microsoft Teams to resolve issues faster.

AI at each step of the call

AI is infused throughout our first-party voice channel to enrich the customer and agent experience by automating routine tasks and offering insights and recommendations to increase the agent’s focus on the customer.

• Real-time transcription eliminates the need for agents to take notes. Now the agent can refer back to what the customer has said without having to ask the customer to repeat information.
• Live sentiment analysis provides a pulse on customer emotions throughout the call so agents can deliver a more empathetic experience.
• Proactive, AI-driven recommendations for similar cases and knowledge articles help agents resolve customer issues faster.
• Real-time translation of transcripts gives agents assisting customers in different regions and across multiple languages added confidence of seeing the conversation in their native language.

“In the past, we were looking at many different pieces of information to try to put together the true story of our customer and how we can work with them in a better way. Here, AI will help us with the intelligence and analytics and really be able to secure that we’re providing the ultimate customer experience.”—Brian Davis, Head of Sales Operations, Sandvik Coromant

Figure 1: Agents can view a real-time call transcript, see the customer’s details, recent cases, and suggested knowledge articles and similar cases to help resolve customer issues more quickly.

Unified insights across all customer interactions

Dynamics 365 Customer Service breaks down traditional data silos between channels with a single, secure data platform, elegantly connecting customer conversations across all channels. This end-to-end view of customers and their journey generates rich and instant insights out-of-the-box.

• Advanced AI analyzes all conversations including messaging and voice and identifies emerging issues, helping service organizations pinpoint opportunities for improving the delivery of customer care.
• Rich KPIs and insights that span live chat, social messaging, and voice all in one place to provide a holistic view of the contact center.

Figure 2: View actionable insights and key performance metrics across channels and drill in for deeper analysis.

Easy to start, easy to scale

Getting started with the new voice channel is painless. In just a few clicks, you can be up and running with a phone number and a conversational Power Virtual Agent which will allow you to start making and receiving calls right away. When we asked Brian Davis, Head of Sales Operations at Sandvik Coromant, to tell us how his team felt about getting started with the voice channel preview, he said, “It’s easy to connect. It’s easy to get on board and it’s easy for our team members to use so I’m really excited for the future with this solution.”

I’d love for you to try it out as well by signing up for a free trial here. And, as you begin to scale the voice channel out across your organization, you can do so with confidence knowing that the voice channel is built on the same secure planet-scale communications platform that powers Microsoft Teams today.

Figure 3: In just a few clicks, you can experience the voice channel. Getting started is that easy.

The all-in-one digital contact center solution

With the new voice channel, we are delivering an all-in-one digital contact center solution that brings together contact center channels, unified communications, leading AI, and customer service capabilities together into a single, SaaS solution, built on the Microsoft cloud.

And, when it comes to your business, you have a choice. We continue to support integrations with key partners such as Five9, Genesys, NICE, Solgari, Tenfold, Vonage and others who are building connectors to enable their voice solutions within Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Whether the goal is a single, one-stop Microsoft solution or to deploy a partner-developed experience between telephone providers and customer service, Dynamics 365 continues to innovate to help our customers differentiate themselves by delivering world-class customer care and earn customers for life.

Learn more

• Don’t miss my breakout session #234 Introducing the Voice Channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service on November 3 at 11:30 AM PT—view recording.
• Visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Service overview.
• Step into a 30-day free trial at dynamics.com.
• Listen to what our partners are saying:



¹– “50 Stats Showing The Power Of Personalization,” Blake Morgan, Forbes

The post Introducing voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today we’re announcing new capabilities to help customer and field service teams deliver more consistent and engaging experiences, from the call center to on-site visits. The new features for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service provide the agility to adapt to changing customer needs, as well as streamline agent and technician workspaces, so they can resolve issues faster.

Let’s look at what’s new in this release. Be sure to review the full release notes for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service

In our journey to help optimize support delivery and increase agent productivity, the following features are now generally available:

• Unified routing with modernized assignment capabilities leveraging custom rules and machine learning models to automate and scale work classification and assignment for large support organizations.
• Federated knowledge search to enable organizations to streamline and centralize the growth of their support knowledge base through other Dynamics 365 organizations, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Graph connectors.
• Embedded insights dashboards, which highlight important KPI insights for support summary KPIs, agent performance, support topic activity, and knowledge to alert supervisors to direct actions they can take to optimize support delivery every day.
• AI-powered suggestions to help agents resolve customer issues faster, and we’ve expanded these capabilities to support non-English languages.
• Streamlined, simplified set up for omnichannel through a new administrative experience.

Intelligent work classification and assignment with unified routing

Many people are involved in monitoring support queues to ensure incoming customer requests are properly classified in the right queues and assigned to available agents. This time-consuming activity can slow customer issue resolution and impact customer satisfaction. With unified routing, organizations can author custom rules, create and apply machine learning models to analyze incoming customer requests, and automatically classify the issue to better match the best available agent. Corresponding assignment rules can also be created with custom rules to analyze the classified issues and choose the best available agent to handle the issue based on the agent’s skills, spoken language, product expertise, or other attributes. Unified routing eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution. Agents can resolve issues faster when their strongest skills are being leveraged. This ensures customer issues are handled as quickly as possible by the best available agent resulting in increased customer satisfaction and customer retention.

Expanding your knowledge base with federated knowledge search and knowledge insights

Knowledge is something that most organizations have developed over time and it often resides in many different tools. This can make centralizing knowledge and making it easily accessible through a single interface costly and challenging. With federated knowledge search, organizations using Dynamics 365 Customer Service can enable agents to retrieve search results within multiple Microsoft Dataverse environments, SharePoint sites, and Microsoft Graph connectors through a single search interface in the agent productivity pane. Agents can deliver faster, more comprehensive service, knowing they have all the knowledge at their fingertips without having to browse disparate sets of information.

Knowledge insights dashboards also help supervisors discover the topics agents are searching for most that lack sufficient knowledge article support. Supervisors can then take action to increase and improve the knowledge base for those topics.

Read additional details about how you can increase agent efficiency with knowledge management enhancements from the 2021 release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Optimizing service delivery with insights

Analyzing support reports and deriving actionable insights can consume much of the supervisor’s time, reducing the amount of time to coach agents to support customers. With the latest insights dashboards, supervisors can quickly see what insights require action to drive improvement in customer sentiment, satisfaction, and speed of support delivery.

The embedded summary dashboard surfaces key insights, showing supervisors what’s driving the trend in customer satisfaction, channel volumes, queue volumes, handle time, and other KPIs. Also surfaced are support topics to watch based on key KPIs that may require automation through virtual agents or additional knowledge articles to help agents indicate product-related issues.

Agent dashboards provide deep agent analytics and important KPIs like active cases, resolved cases, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and customer sentiment. Supervisors can drill down to specific agents to determine what action is needed, such as reducing or increasing their capacity, adjusting their skills and queue assignments, providing additional training, or coaching them on soft skills to improve customer sentiment.

Topic dashboards show how AI-generated support topics are impacting KPIs and provide the ability to drill into individual topics and acts, such as adding knowledge articles or automating the topic to a Microsoft Power Virtual Agents bot through a seamless authoring flow.

And finally, conversation insights help supervisors monitor customer issues across channels in a single dashboard where they can optimize support delivery by tracking metrics, such as wait time, abandoned conversations, and time to resolution, either at the ecosystem view or by channel.

Increasing agent productivity with improvements to smart assistance

In traditional contact centers, agents spend time searching for similar cases and knowledge articles that are relevant to the current issue they are working on. This delays resolution time and can cause decreased customer satisfaction. AI-driven suggestions help agents share the best-suited information by using the current case or conversation context and scanning thousands of cases and articles to suggest those that are the most relevant. We’re expanding AI-powered suggestions to now support non-English languages such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and Japanese.

Streamlining setup and configuration in omnichannel

Our new administrator experience for omnichannel makes configuring channels, such as adding Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys, and configuring unified routing streamlined and easy. You can also experiment with live chat through a demo and test out your own configuration changes without having to implement them in an environment.

Check out what’s coming up

Microsoft Teams continues to provide powerful collaboration capabilities for businesses across organizational boundaries. In June, we will be releasing Teams integrated into Customer Service Hub for agents to be able to seamlessly reach out to other colleagues and subject matter experts for advice and assistance while helping customers from the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Hub agent experience. Agents can easily associate chats to records and visually differentiate Teams chats for faster discoverability.

In August, our first-party voice solution built on Azure Communication Services will be generally available. We are excited to offer a truly all-in-one experience with our first-party voice channel. Learn more about how the new voice channel streamlines omnichannel customer experiences.

Dynamics 365 Field Service

As we continue to enable customers to transform their service experience, the following features are now generally available:

• Technician tracking enables customers to more effectively plan around their service visits.
• Streamlined onboarding experience for faster time-to-value and ability to use Dynamics 365 Field Service in productive environments.
• Empowering technicians with knowledge management in Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile, capturing ad-hoc inspections, and inspections in multiple languages.
• Enabling dispatchers with enhanced scheduling experience, including a map, and weekly and monthly views. Plus, view appointments from other sources included in the scheduling experience.

Technician tracking for greater appointment accuracy

With the ability to view the technician’s location on a map, customers can plan around the visit and be ready when the technician arrives. This can decrease overall service delivery time and eliminate trips that might otherwise be canceled, and increase customer satisfaction with the efficient use of their time.

Streamlining setup for Dynamics 365 Field Service administrators

To ensure field service app administrators can quickly get started with Dynamics 365 Field Service, we’re introducing a simplified experience. From this improved getting started experience, you can provision your frontline workers, service accounts, and create and schedule work orders. Additionally, we provide inline access to our Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation, release plans, community, and ideas forum in the event you want to learn more, view upcoming feature work, or submit product ideas.

Empowering technicians with enhanced knowledge and inspections

Knowledge management is now embedded in the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app to better service assets and resolve issues even without the internet. By embedding knowledge management into field service processes in the mobile app, technicians can more reliably resolve work orders and install assets the first time, reducing costs by avoiding follow-up visits. Technicians can also author and link knowledge articles to work orders, enabling knowledge sharing to help other technicians with the same issue on future visits.

Capturing inspections while on the job is essential for many field service technician scenarios. In some situations, the inspection is required when the work order is created. However, in other situations, technicians need the option to do an “ad-hoc” inspection for a customer which was not specified in the work order. Technicians can now select and complete an inspection from the list of inspections relating to a customer asset, regardless of whether it is specified on a work order. In addition, inspections are now available to be viewed and completed based on the preferred language of the technician.

Enabling dispatchers with a rich scheduling experience

Having a single view with all relevant information is key for dispatchers to safeguard that customer commitments are being met while ensuring technicians are scheduled effectively. The new scheduling experience (introduced during last year’s release wave 2) has been enhanced to now include a map view that shows work and technicians by location. The experience now also includes multi-day scheduling for work which spans across multiple days.

Another challenge for dispatchers is having visibility into other appointments, such as those on a technician’s Microsoft Outlook calendar, which needs to be considered when determining availability. In addition to typical bookings, the scheduling experience now provides visibility into appointments from other calendars.

These enhancements enable the dispatcher to have a comprehensive scheduling view and ensure optimal scheduling in a single experience.

Check out what’s in preview and what’s coming up

Be sure to enable “preview” on your organization and check out the portal for customers to manage appointment scheduling. When organizations are solely responsible for scheduling field service visits, customers often must wait for contact centers to reach out to schedule and update them on their field service appointments. This process can cause frustration, decrease customer satisfaction, and increase back-office overhead.

To empower customers with flexibility and transparency to schedule, adjust, and monitor their field service visits, we’re introducing a self-service portal. Through the portal, customers can schedule their service appointments, view upcoming appointments, receive reminders, and track their technician’s location while en route to the visit. Giving customers the ability to manage their service appointments can help reduce scheduling errors and rescheduling of appointments. This has the added benefit of reducing your organization’s back-office costs by decreasing scheduling call volume and freeing up team members to focus on delivering quality service.

In June, we’ll launch the preview of embedded Teams collaboration, which allows users to collaborate within the Microsoft Dynamics 365 workspace and link conversations to work orders. With this embedded functionality, all stakeholders involved in the service process can collaborate through Teams with full context. Dispatchers, asset managers, and other field service stakeholders can link existing Teams conversations or initiate new conversations, such as informing the scheduled technician of added information about the service. If your organization allows for Teams collaboration with customers, they can collaborate on work orders, too.

We are honored to continue supporting you on your journey to deliver amazing service and earn customers for life. We look forward to continued engagement and your feedback on these new features and continuing to deliver the capabilities you need to enable great service delivery in your organization.

Learn more

• Read more about the April 2021 release wave 1, and how Dynamics 365 Customer Service transforms the contact center and the new Dynamics 365 Field Service customer empowering features.
• Review the October 2020 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Field Service.
• Sign up for a free trial of Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

The post Introducing new capabilities to transform customer service and field service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.