As self-service becomes the first stop in contact centers, AI agents now define the frontline customer experience. Modern customer interactions span voice, text, and visual channels, where meaning is shaped not only by what is said, but by how it’s said, when it’s said, and the context surrounding it.   

In customer service, this is even more pronounced-customers reaching out for support don’t just convey information. They convey intent, sentiment, urgency, and emotion, often simultaneously across modalities; a pause or interruption on a voice call signals frustration,  blurred document image leads to downstream reasoning failures, and flat or fragmented response erodes trust-even if the answer is correct In our previous blog post, we reflected on the evolution of contact centers from scripted interactions to AI-driven experiences. As contact center landscape continues to change, the way we evaluate AI agents must change with them. Traditional approaches fall short by focusing on isolated metrics or single modalities, rather than the end-to-end customer experience. 

Contact centers struggle to reliably assess whether their AI agents are improving over time or across architectures, channels, and deployments. While cloud services rely on absolute measures like availability, reliability and latency, AI agent evaluation today remains fragmented, relative, and modality specific. What would be useful is an absolute, normalized measure of end-to-end conversational quality- one that reflects how customers actually experience interactions and answers the fundamental question: Is this agent good at handling real customer conversations? 

Introducing the Multimodal Agent Score (MAS) 

MAS is built on the observation that every service interaction- whether human-to-human or human-to-agent- naturally progresses through three fundamental stages: (explored in more detail here: Measuring What Matters: Redefining Excellence for AI Agents in the Contact Center )

1. Understanding the input – accurately capturing and interpreting what the customer is saying, including intent, context, and signals such as urgency or emotion. 

2. Reasoning over that input – determining the appropriate actions, managing context across turns, and deciding how to resolve the issue responsibly. 

3. Responding effectively – delivering clear, natural, and confident resolution in the right tone and format. 

Multimodal Agent Score directly mirrors these stages. It is a weighted composite score (0-100) designed to assess end-to-end AI agent quality across modalities- voice, text, and visual- aligned to how real conversations naturally unfold.  

MAS Dimensions and Parameters 

Computing each MAS score:

MAS is computed as a weighted aggregation of three quality dimensions stated in the table above. 

where: 

• Qj represents one of the three quality dimensions: Agent Understanding Quality (AUQ), Agent Reasoning Quality (ARQ), Agent Response Quality (AReQ)  

• wj represent the costs or weights of each dimension 

• αj captures the a priori probability of the respective dimension  

Computing each MAS dimension: 

Computing each MAS dimension (AUQ, ARQ, AReQ) involves aggregating underlying parameters into a single weighted score. Raw measurements (such as interruption, intent determination, or tone stability) are first normalized into a 0–1 score before aggregating them at the dimension level. We apply a linear normalization function clipping each raw measurement at predefined thresholds suitable for the parameter being measured (for example, maximum allowed interruption or minimum required accuracy). This maintains the sensitivity of each parameter in the relevant effective range and avoids the negative impact of measurement outliers, making MAS an absolute measure of agent quality. 

MAS in Practice: Voice Agent Evaluation Example 

To ground MAS in real-world conditions, we evaluated ~2,000 synthetic voice conversations across two agent configurations using identical prompts and scenarios: 

• Agent-1: Chained voice agent using a three-stage ASR–LLM–TTS pipeline 

• Agent-2: Real-time voice agent using direct speech-to-speech architecture  

The evaluation dataset included noise, interruptions, accessibility effects, and vocal variability to simulate production environments.  

Shown below is a comparison of core MAS metrics, including dimension-level scores and the overall MAS score. 

Voice Evaluation Results (Excerpt) 

Key Observations  

MAS provides flexibility to surface quality insights at an aggregate level, while enabling deeper analysis at the individual parameter level. To better understand performance outliers and anomalous behaviors, we went beyond composite scores and analyzed agent quality at the individual parameter level. This deeper inspection allowed us to attribute observed degradations to specific factors: Example: 

1. Channel quality matters: Communication channels introduce multiple challenge such as latency, interruptions, compression and loss of information, penalizing recognition and response quality. 

2. Turn-taking quality is critical: Missed windows and interruptions strongly correlate with abandonment. 

3. Tone and coherence matter: Cleaner audio and uninterrupted responses lead to higher acknowledgement and perceived empathy. 

4. MAS reveals root causes: Differences in scores clearly distinguish understanding, reasoning, and response failures-something single metrics cannot do. 

Looking Forward 

We will continue to refine and evolve MAS as we validate it against real-world deployments and business outcomes. As the Dynamics 365 Contact Center team, we aim to establish MAS as our quality benchmark for evaluating AI agents across channels. Over time, we also intend to make MAS broadly available, extensible, and pluggable, enabling organizations to adapt it, to evaluate their contact center agents across modalities. For readers interested in the underlying methodology and mathematical foundations, a detailed research paper will be published separately. 

The post Evaluating AI Agents in Contact Centers: Introducing the Multi-modal Agents Score  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re thrilled to announce today the general availability of Teams Phone extensibility for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This milestone marks the next chapter in our commitment to modernizing customer engagements and empowering organizations to deliver exceptional experiences at scale. 

The lines separating the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) markets are vanishing fast. As organizations accelerate their shift to the cloud, the convergence of these platforms is essential for modern service delivery. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Teams Phone extensibility, organizations can lead this transformation. When they harness the power of AI, automation, and unified data, they deliver faster, smarter, and more resilient customer service. 

“By consolidating our telephony on one platform with Teams Phone and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we’re reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency. For example, our team is able to access customer data directly from Dynamics 365 without the need for additional integrations, and we’re able to simplify ongoing administration by standardizing on one phone system—all while taking advantage of Teams Phone enterprise features and its familiar management tools.” — Christopher Ehlo, Tech Lead, Sveriges Lärare 

Unified, seamless contact centers

Teams Phone extensibility for Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a cloud-native integration. It converges the front and back offices by bringing telephony into the heart of the contact center. In addition to unifying operations, it also simplifies telephony management, strengthens collaboration, and accelerates innovation. Now organizations can configure Teams Calling Plans, Direct Routing, or Operator Connect as their voice foundation. And they can do it within a single, unified CCaaS + UCaaS solution. This reduces silos and complexity, while extending the power of Microsoft’s collaboration and AI tools to every customer interaction. 

With Teams Phone extensibility for Dynamics 365 Contact Center organizations can: 

• Enable telephony for Dynamics 365 Contact Center users by utilizing existing Teams Phone licenses. 

• Take advantage of the extensive geographic reach of Teams Phone, with calling plans accessible in 36 countries, Operator Connect available in 96 countries, and Direct Routing offered worldwide. 

• Utilize the familiar Teams management interface and access additional Teams Phone features. 

According to a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting¹, organizations using Teams Phone extensibility with Dynamics 365 Contact Center could see projected ROI and benefits PV as high as 345% and $3.5M respectively by year 3. Download the full report to learn more.  

¹Projected benefits for a composite customer. New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center with Teams Phone extensibility, Forrester Consulting, Casey Sirotnak, Jonathan Lipsitz, August 2025 

Learn more

To get started, read the documentation: Configure Teams Phone in voice channel | Microsoft Learn 

The post Teams Phone extensibility for Dynamics 365 Contact Center generally available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Contact centers play a crucial role in delivering exceptional customer support and driving business growth. With the rise of digitalization and advanced technologies, AI and automation have become essential for streamlining operations, improving efficiency, and nurturing stronger customer relationships. 

Today during Enterprise Connect, we announced Teams Phone extensibility for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.  

Beginning next month, Dynamics 365 Contact Center customers will be able to leverage Teams Phone, along with all telephony options supported by Teams such as Teams Calling Plans, Direct Routing, and Operator Connect, and configure them as a single, integrated solution in Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Through Teams Phone extensibility for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we aim to deliver the following value adds: 

1. Simplified telephony management across Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), streamlining deployment, management, and billing of telephony infrastructure. 

2. Availability of advanced AI features in Dynamics 365 Contact Center to enhance contact center operations and deliver more efficient, intelligent customer interactions. 

3. Enhanced calling capabilities from Teams such as Enhanced 911, compliance recording, calling policies, configuration of dial plan, advanced troubleshooting tools are now available in Dynamics 365 Contact Center. 

4. Broader geographic availability of telephony via integration with Teams Calling Plans, Direct Routing, and Operator Connect. 

Teams Phone extensibility for Dynamics will be available in public preview starting April 2025, with general availability planned in summer 2025. Please stay tuned for a detailed blog post being released next month. 

Head over to the TechCommunity blog to learn more. 

The post Teams Phone extensibility for Dynamics 365 Contact Center  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The customer service world has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. With the rise of digitalization and advanced technologies, customers now expect seamless and personalized experiences across multiple channels. Automation and AI have become integral to customer support teams, enabling faster response times and more efficient issue resolution.  

Moreover, post-pandemic, remote work and virtual communication have become the norm, reshaping the way customer support teams operate and collaborate. Agents find themselves in silos, unable to seek immediate help from colleagues in neighboring cubicles like in traditional office settings. 

As businesses strive to meet the escalating demands of customers, contact center leaders must be strategic about agent productivity. They must enhance agent collaboration and efficiency, ensuring the delivery of high-quality customer service even in a dispersed working environment. 

We acknowledge customer service is a collective effort. Hence, by bringing together Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Teams, we aim to provide agents with a cohesive environment to get help from experts across the entire company to resolve complex customer issues which they might not have expertise on.  Both experts and agents can use their preferred tools; Dynamics 365 Customer Service for agents and Microsoft Teams for experts. Experts don’t have to be Dynamics users; a Teams license is all they need to participate and collaborate effectively. 

With the enhancements in this release wave, Teams collaboration features (embedded chat, swarming, and Teams meeting integration) are even more robust. Let’s dive into the details of these exciting advancements. 

Keep Teams chat participants informed of updated fields

Reduce overhead for agents by automatically updating all chat participants when an essential field on a connected record is updated. This time-saving feature helps keep everyone in the know without any manual effort. This allows agents to focus on what’s important and helping experts in the chat be aware of pertinent updates.

Send a bot event update in the connected Teams chat to inform participants of an updated field on the connected record. With the suite of Teams collaboration features, not only you can start a chat with the users who are connected with Dynamics 365 records, now you can keep them informed when the record changes, without any manual effort. For example, when the priority of a case changes, all the chat participants are notified. 

Dynamics links unfurled in Teams chat

Links to Dynamics 365 and Power Apps records are unfurled when pasted in Microsoft Teams chats and meetings. See the details of your business data in your Microsoft Teams chats and feel confident that the link you’re selecting is an authentic Power Apps link. Now, when you paste a Dynamics 365 Customer Service link into a Microsoft Teams chat, meeting, or channel, participants will see an adaptive card with more details about the shared link. Links to canvas apps will show the app name and record name. Model-driven app links to records show the entity type. The user pasting the link can delete the card in the message compose window before sending the message if they don’t want to send the link as a card. 

Timeline integration

When you start a connected chat or connect an existing chat to a record, you can see it as an activity on the connected record’s timeline. This makes it easy for agents to get the full case view by allowing them to see any chats related to the case or record directly on the timeline. 

If there is an agent hand-off, the next agent, who may not have been a part of the chat initially, can also see the conversation on the timeline. The next agent can directly join the discussion as a chat participant to see the entire chat exchange.  

To enable the feature, the admin can turn on the Join chat toggle in the Customer Service admin center app. This gives users with read and write privileges the ability to join a connected chat. 

Swarming enhancements

Customer support swarming helps agents connect with experts in their organization to solve cases faster. We made the following enhancements to swarming: 

• Guided admin setup: The guided, step-by-step setup makes it easy for admins to configure and onboard their agents. It significantly reduces the time for admins to configure swarming in their organizations, helping make the onboarding experience more efficient. Now agents can more quickly get the help they need from experts across the organization.
• Swarm form UI: Administrators can add a tab, section, or field to the swarm form and customize it as needed. The changes they make will promptly reflect in the agent workspace. The swarm creation form now comes with an advanced look and feel. With the visual indicator, agents can view the progress of swarm creation and see the steps completed and those remaining. 
• Auto resolve swarm: When a case is closed (that is, canceled or resolved), associated swarms are automatically resolved. 

With Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, collaborating with colleagues is easier than ever. Both agents and experts can stay informed about important case details without making a lot of manual updates and circling back. Try these features and more with the latest updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, read the documentation: Overview of collaboration in Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

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