Dynamics 365 Customer Service​ - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/product/dynamics-365-customer-service/ The future of agentic CRM and ERP Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:50:04 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/cropped-cropped-microsoft_logo_element.png Dynamics 365 Customer Service​ - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/product/dynamics-365-customer-service/ 32 32 .cloudblogs .cta-box>.link { font-size: 15px; font-weight: 600; display: inline-block; background: #008272; line-height: 1; text-transform: none; padding: 15px 20px; text-decoration: none; color: white; } .cloudblogs img { height: auto; } .cloudblogs img.alignright { float:right; } .cloudblogs img.alignleft { float:right; } .cloudblogs figcaption { padding: 9px; color: #737373; text-align: left; font-size: 13px; font-size: 1.3rem; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-center { text-align: center; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-left { padding: 20px 0; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-right { padding: 20px 0; text-align:right; } .cloudblogs .cta-box { margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 20px; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-image { position:relative; } .cloudblogs .cta-box.-image>.link { position: absolute; top: auto; left: 50%; -webkit-transform: translate(-50%,0); transform: translate(-50%,0); bottom: 0; } .cloudblogs table { width: 100%; } .cloudblogs table tr { border-bottom: 1px solid #eee; padding: 8px 0; } ]]> From Answers to Action: What’s New with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/15/service-agent-microsoft-365-copilot-customer-service/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/15/service-agent-microsoft-365-copilot-customer-service/#respond Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000 Service Agent extends Dynamics 365 Customer Service beyond traditional assistance by enabling AI-powered actions across cases, knowledge, email, and workflow management in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

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The new Copilot experience doesn’t just assist service professionals inside the CRM—it reasons and acts across the entire service workflow, wherever work happens. Here’s what changed, why it matters, and how you can adopt it quickly.

The shift from assisting to acting

The new Copilot experience in Microsoft 365 Copilot is a step towards unification across the Microsoft application ecosystem. It’s not only available in Dynamics 365, but in Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications. The context and chat history carries across applications, meeting teams in the flow of work. This is achieved through the introduction of a dedicated declarative agent designed for service: Service Agent.

This post goes one level deeper on the question we hear most from service leaders at frontier organizations beginning the adoption: How is Service Agent different from the Copilot capabilities we already have in Dynamics 365 Customer Service?

The short answer: Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot provides deeper case context, and supports actions across the whole resolution workflow. It builds on the existing Copilot foundation and operates across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 applications, grounded in both Microsoft 365 graph and Dataverse data.

Now Generally Available

What’s new in Copilot in Customer Service

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service excels at answering and summarizing inside the CRM—case summaries, knowledge-grounded replies, email drafting, and proactive insights that elevate each interaction. Service Agent keeps all of that and adds three things that change the model:

Service Agent acts across the entire service lifecycle—not just inside one app. At general availability, a robust MCP server purpose-built for service powers Service Agent, with 90+ new MCP tools and MCP apps. Together they let service professionals understand, find, act, communicate, and improve without leaving the conversation:

  • Case lifecycle: get, list, update, close, enrich, match, reassign, pick from queue, resolve-and-pick-next, and create cases from email.
  • Customer insights: account and contact summaries, detail views, and lookup search.
  • Knowledge: article search and detail, natural-language answers, draft articles, verbatim carousel, and category filtering.
  • Email & drafting: view/draft/send, AI draft, template recommend-apply-insert, tone adjustment, translation, KB insert, and signatures.
  • Case intelligence & next best action: case and conversation summaries, timeline highlights, suggested actions, follow-up cadence, and decision cards.
  • Quality & coaching: case/conversation evaluation, coaching tips, and resolution-dialog fill.
  • Prompt intelligence: Context-aware starter prompts, and a prompt gallery with bookmarks and chat history.
  • Work with files: file upload and image understanding, image generation, on-demand charts from service data, the ability to create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files
  • Plus Workforce management, SLA and queue monitoring, activities and notes, intent and human-in-the-loop signals, and platform/admin operations.

It’s built to be extended and governed. Service Agent adds individual tool enablement, dynamic role-based access to tools, bring-your-own MCP tools and Copilot Studio agents, and customization of the MCP app in chat experiences.

Comparison at a glance

 ExistingWhat’s New?
Primary modeAssists, answers, summarizesReasons and acts across the workflow
Where it livesInside the CRMInside the CRM, M365 apps such as Teams, Outlook, M365 Copilot standalone
GroundingDataverseDataverse + Microsoft Graph via Work IQ
ExtensibilityMicrosoft Copilot StudioMicrosoft Copilot Studio + BYO MCP tools/Copilot Studio agents, widget customization

How this benefits customers

  • Faster resolution with less switching. The context professionals need—spread across cases, knowledge, emails, and conversations—is brought into one place, so they reason and act without hopping between systems. The conversation also carries across multiple apps in the flow of work.
  • Stronger productivity and case hygiene. Routine actions (updating, closing, reassigning, follow-ups, notes) happen in the flow of the conversation, reducing post-interaction admin work and keeping records current.
  • Faster ramp for new team members. Knowledge context and likely intent surface automatically, so new joiners get up to speed faster—a benefit early evaluators called out directly.
  • Consistent, trusted answers. Synthesized, cited responses grounded in the systems teams already rely on, while respecting existing permissions.
  • Roll out at your own pace. Granular, reversible controls—per role, per app module, let teams adopt gradually and run side-by-side with existing experiences during the transition.

“What excites us about Service Agent is the move from reactive search to proactive intelligence. When teams can behind the day with the right context, dependencies and handoffs already surface, and act on that trusted context from one place, it changes how service work gets done.”

DP Indetkar, Senior Vice President | AI Engineering Lead, Emerging Technology, Northern Trust

Roadmap: where Service Agent is headed

We are exploring the following investment areas next.

  • Deeper app context and proactive experiences — richer awareness of service work across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 apps, with role-based proactive prompts, insights, and next steps surfaced where professionals are already working.
  • Stronger guardrails — expanded human-in-the-loop controls, approvals, and policy-aware execution for actions that carry customer, compliance, or operational risk.
  • Mobile support in Microsoft 365 Copilot — bringing Service Agent into the mobile Copilot experience so service professionals can review context, take action, and stay current while on the go.
  • More tools — continued expansion of the out-of-box MCP tool catalog, alongside richer bring-your-own MCP tools and Copilot Studio agent patterns for specialized service workflows.

How to get started

Service Agent is generally available now. Get started:

  1. Licensing. Customers need a Dynamics 365 Customer Service license (Enterprise or Premium edition) for access to case data, knowledge, and service workflows. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license unlocks the fully integrated experience—case context, Microsoft 365 data, and AI actions in one place. Premium tools are subject to Copilot Credit consumption.
  2. Provisioning. Admins provision Service Agent through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
  3. Roll out safely. Use the per-role, per-app-module, and per-queue controls to pilot with a team and run side-by-side with existing experiences before scaling.

Learn more

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Trust before you automate: introducing Shadow Mode in Case Management Agent http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/09/shadow-mode-case-management-agent/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/07/09/shadow-mode-case-management-agent/#respond Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/?p=202756 Shadow Mode in Case Management Agent lets you evaluate AI on live production cases, without taking any action.

The AI agent runs quietly alongside your human workflows. On real, incoming cases it observes, predicts, recommends, and simulates exactly what it would do if it were live. You see every recommendation, and the reasoning behind it, in real time. But nothing leaves the system : no record is updated, no customer is contacted, no status changes.

You get to watch your future automation work on today’s hardest cases, before you ever hand it the keys.

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Watch your AI work on real, live cases, predicting, recommending, and resolving, without it ever touching a customer, a record, or a workflow. This is how you prove automation before you turn it on.

The hardest question in enterprise AI

Every team exploring AI automation eventually hits the same wall. The technology is ready. The use cases are obvious. The productivity upside is enormous. And yet one question stops the rollout cold:

“How do we know the AI is making the right decisions?”

It’s a fair question, and the most important one. In live customer cases, a wrong call isn’t a small error; it can mean a misrouted escalation, premature closure, or a customer feeling unheard.

Meet Shadow Mode

Shadow Mode in Case Management Agent lets you evaluate AI on live production cases, without taking any action.

The AI agent runs quietly alongside your human workflows. On real, incoming cases it observes, predicts, recommends, and simulates exactly what it would do if it were live. You see every recommendation, and the reasoning behind it, in real time. But nothing leaves the system : no record is updated, no customer is contacted, no status changes.

In other words, you get to watch your future automation work—on today’s hardest cases, before you ever hand it the keys.

Don’t debate whether the AI is production-ready—run it against live cases in shadow mode and let real outcomes validate performance. It won’t impact production data; it only observes and evaluates behavior.

Shadow Mode Behavior: What Happens—and What Never Happens

Shadow Mode is built on a simple promise: full visibility and controlled execution.

While Shadow Mode is active, the agent will:

  • Run against live cases
  • Surface recommendations and predicted actions in real time
  • Show the reasoning behind every decision
  • Measure readiness before you enable autonomous execution

And while it does all of that, it will never:

  • Update a case record
  • Send a customer communication
  • Change a case status
  • Interrupt an existing workflow

That separation is the whole point. You evaluate AI under real-world conditions while keeping complete operational control.

Validate across the entire case lifecycle

Shadow Mode isn’t a narrow test. It spans every major capability of Case Management Agent, so you can build confidence end to end.

Case Enrichment — Is the AI predicting cases correctly?

See how accurately the agent predicts the attributes that route and prioritize work: category, priority, product, and your custom fields and metadata. Compare predicted values against actual outcomes, pinpoint where accuracy slips, and sharpen your field descriptions before enrichment goes live.

Case Resolution — Would the AI solve it the way you would?

Evaluate AI-generated resolutions on real cases without sending a thing. Inspect how the agent identifies intent, retrieves knowledge, recommends a resolution, drafts the customer response, and shows its supporting rationale and evidence.

Case Follow-Up and Closure — Does the AI know when to act, and when to wait?

Pressure-test the lifecycle decisions that are easiest to get wrong: follow-up timing, SLA-based reminders, closure eligibility, and whether a case is truly ready to wrap. Catch premature closures and missed follow-ups in the safety of Shadow Mode—not in your customers’ inboxes.

From experiment to production—with confidence

Most validation relies on historical data that never quite captures how messy real cases get. Shadow Mode flips that. It measures your AI against the genuine complexity and unpredictability of active customer interactions, which means the readiness signal you get is the one that actually matters.

The Result:

  • Real-world validation on live production data
  • Transparent, explainable decision-making you can defend to stakeholders
  • Side-by-side comparison with human actions
  • Continuous improvement through iterative testing
  • Less deployment risk, and a faster path to production

You move from “we think it’s ready” to “we’ve watched it perform” – and that’s the difference between hoping automation works and knowing it does.

Example: Shadow Mode evaluation for AI-generated case resolution

Start validating today

Don’t wait until production to learn how your AI will perform. Turn on Shadow Mode, let the agent work through live cases, and let the evidence build your confidence.

Get started in two steps

  • Go to Copilot Service admin center > Case settings > Case Management Agent
  • Activate Shadow Mode for the capability you want to validate.

The fastest way to trust automation is to watch it earn that trust. Shadow Mode is where it starts.

For step-by-step instructions: Enable Shadow mode in Case Management Agent

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Moving sales and service organizations forward with agentic CX and Microsoft 365 Copilot http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2026/07/07/moving-sales-and-service-organizations-forward-with-agentic-cx-and-microsoft-365-copilot/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/business-leader/2026/07/07/moving-sales-and-service-organizations-forward-with-agentic-cx-and-microsoft-365-copilot/#respond Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0000 Customer expectations have reset. Here’s how agentic AI across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 helps sales and service teams meet the new standard—right in the flow of work.

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Customer expectations have reset. Here’s how agentic AI across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 helps sales and service teams meet the new standard—right in the flow of work.

Setting a new standard for customer experience

The standard for customer experience has been rewritten. Agentic AI is expanding what’s possible, moving beyond assistance to help surface context, suggest next steps, and support organizations in delivering customer experiences that once felt out of reach. Customers may no longer compare your service to industry peers; they often compare your service to the best experience they’ve ever had. They also may expect businesses to anticipate needs, understand context instantly, and resolve issues with speed and precision. Meeting that standard falls to the people closest to the customer—your sellers and service teams—yet too much of their day is still spent searching across systems, piecing together information, and managing administrative work instead of building relationships and delivering value.

Agentic AI resets the equation. Rather than adding another tool to manage, it brings intelligence directly into the flow of work—helping teams use trusted data, surface relevant context, and move work forward with greater confidence, while freeing your people to do what only people can: build trust. While some vendors leave the experience for you to assemble, Microsoft delivers first-class experiences out of the box—ready on day one, and extensible by design as your needs evolve. And the estimated value is already proven: Organizations realize an average of $3.70 in return for every $1 they invest in generative AI (IDC, 2024).

That’s why we’re announcing a wave of agentic capabilities across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 built on a foundation of model context protocol (MCP) tools and MCP apps. Each one builds on the last—meeting teams in the flow of work, grounding them in trusted data, and scaling across how teams collaborate—so sales and service organizations can deliver the new standard of customer experience. Microsoft 365 Copilot is already powering this shift for Frontier Firms—organizations that put AI at the center of how they work—with adoption across much of the Fortune 500.

Handing your teams back the hours that build customer relationships

It starts in the flow of work. Sales Agent and Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot are now generally available, bringing AI into the apps your people already use every day—Dynamics 365, Copilot, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. Powered by Work IQ and grounded in Dynamics 365 data, these agents understand real work patterns and act on the same customer data your business runs on.

For sellers, every hour reclaimed from administrative work is an hour spent understanding the customer. Sales Agent gives sellers the right customer and deal context—wherever they work—so they spend less time hunting for information and more time advancing revenue. Built for the pace of modern selling, Sales Agent helps sellers get to the right customer and deal context faster—so they can walk into every conversation better prepared, capture what matters after the meeting, and keep momentum moving. By bringing together customer relationship management (CRM) insights and Work IQ in the flow of work, Sales Agent reduces the friction of switching between systems and piecing together information from scattered sources. Using natural language, sellers can pull up account summaries, review opportunity context, catch up on past meetings, and draft personalized emails grounded in sales data.

After conversations, they can capture key takeaways, objections, priorities, and follow-up commitments, then add those notes to CRM or update opportunity fields without breaking their flow. The potential payoff for organizations is tangible: stronger seller productivity, faster follow-through, and better CRM hygiene across the funnel. The result is a more connected sales experience that keeps sellers prepared, responsive, and focused on building relationships and driving customer outcomes. That focus translates into growth: sales organizations that put AI-enabled next best actions in front of sellers are 2.6x more likely to achieve commercial growth (Gartner, 2026).

“Sales Agent represents an important step in our broader agentic journey. It helps transform data into guidance at the moment of need, supporting better decisions and more meaningful customer engagement. For us, this is not just about efficiency—it’s about building a smarter, more connected sales organization.”

—Silvana Zafarana, Sandvik Coromant

For service teams, speed and context are the experience. Service Agent helps service professionals resolve issues faster—generating a concise case summary so they’re instantly up to speed, discovering next best actions, drafting a customer-ready email complete with resolution details, and updating records without ever leaving their flow. The result is faster, more personal resolutions that make customers feel known. And the trajectory is clear: Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, cutting operational costs by 30% (Gartner, 2025).

“What excites us about Service Agent is the move from reactive search to proactive intelligence. When teams can begin the day with the right context, dependencies and handoffs already surfaced, and act on that trusted context from one place, it changes how service work gets done.”

—DP Indetkar, Northern Trust

Grounding every interaction in the data you already trust

An agent is only as valuable as the data it has access to. That’s why we’re also announcing the general availability of Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft 365 Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service—bringing Copilot directly into the CRM, so the same Sales and Service agents operate consistently across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365.

For sales teams, this surfaces deal intelligence, automates CRM updates, and guides sellers toward their highest-value next action—all grounded in trusted Dynamics 365 Sales data.

For service teams, it delivers AI-assisted case resolution, knowledge-grounded responses, and proactive insights that elevate every customer interaction. The intelligence of Copilot and the depth of your CRM now work like one: no silos, no compromise, and the full customer context behind every response—so interactions build on the last, wherever work happens.

Turning individual productivity into organizational momentum

Great customer experiences are rarely the work of one person. The Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service plugins for Copilot Cowork extend agentic capabilities into collaborative, team-based work.

The Dynamics 365 Sales plugin for Cowork helps revenue teams orchestrate complex, multi-stakeholder deals—coordinating account research, meeting prep, and follow-ups as one connected workstream rather than a series of isolated tasks. The Dynamics 365 Customer Service plugin helps service professionals coordinate complex work across teams by bringing together customer context, Microsoft 365 signals, business data, and specialized tools in a single experience. Whether managing case reviews, customer health programs, escalations, or operational processes, teams stay aligned on priorities, handoffs, and next steps—so work can move faster and customers can get a more consistent experience.

Take the next step toward the new standard

Put it together and the path is clear. The same agentic foundation meets your people in the flow of work, grounds them in the data they already trust, and scales across the teams that shape every customer journey—shortening sales cycles, resolving issues faster, and giving your people back the time to focus on customers.

Just as important, these capabilities meet your teams where they already are—Copilot, Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365—helping speed adoption and time to value. The organizations that move now won’t simply keep pace with rising expectations; they’ll define what great customer experience looks like.

To learn more about how you can deliver agentic CRM experiences, check out our blogs here:


Sources: 

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Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 now provide a unified customer service experience http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/30/service-agent-general-availability/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/30/service-agent-general-availability/#respond Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:01:27 +0000 Service Agent is now generally available, helping customer service teams understand issues, find answers, and take action from one Copilot experience. Built on Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365, Service Agent unifies customer, case, and knowledge context while enabling AI-powered actions that improve productivity across the service workflow.

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With the General Availability of Service Agent and MCP tools in Microsoft 365 Copilot, service organizations continue to get the benefits of Copilot in customer service, now powered by the rich business context and grounded intelligence of both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. Whether they’re new in career or experienced customer service representatives, your employees get tools from Microsoft to help deliver a better support experience for your customers. With this release, we have added rich, interactive app-in-chat experiences, ensuring that customer service representatives do not need to solely rely on text-based conversational UX. Employees can investigate issues, navigate complex processes, and complete tasks without leaving the conversation. The result is a more connected, action-oriented experience that helps service professionals move from understanding to resolution faster in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and across Microsoft 365 apps.

“What excites us about Service Agent is the move from reactive search to proactive intelligence. When teams can begin the day with the right context, dependencies and handoffs already surfaced, and act on that trusted context from one place, it changes how service work gets done.”

— DP Indetkar, Northern Trust

From preview to general availability

When Microsoft released the public preview of Service Agent in March 2026, it introduced natural-language reasoning across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365. Service Agent prioritized cases, summarized interactions, and surfaced knowledge from Dataverse and SharePoint. Teams updated cases, added notes, and created child cases from one unified Copilot experience.

Those preview capabilities helped service teams ramp up faster, respond with more confidence, and keep case data current with less manual effort. By unifying context across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 through Work IQ—while respecting existing permissions—Service Agent made it easier to ask service questions naturally and get synthesized, cited answers in the flow of work.

With general availability, Service Agent moves from answering and summarizing to taking action across the entire service workflow. Service Agent is powered by a robust MCP server designed for service tasks, and delivers 70+ new MCP tools alongside 20+ core product enhancements that extend Service Agent into an action-capable agent for customer service teams. It provides both depth in out of box capability coverage, and the extensibility and customization layer for organization to tailor it to their unique needs.

Figure 1: Responsive, dynamically generated apps inline to the Copilot conversation

New capabilities across the service workflow

At General Availability, Service Agent expands across the service lifecycle with high-value capabilities that help service professionals understand issues, find answers, take action, and improve outcomes without leaving the conversation:

  • Case and customer context: Quickly summarize cases, conversations, accounts, contacts, timelines, and related service activity so agents can understand the full customer situation faster.
  • Knowledge and answer discovery: Search, synthesize, and draft from trusted knowledge sources across Dataverse, SharePoint, and Microsoft 365, with grounded answers that help agents respond confidently.
  • Service actions and follow-through: Update cases, create notes and activities, draft customer communications, recommend next best actions, and keep work moving from within the Copilot conversation.
  • Quality, coaching, and operations: Support consistent service outcomes with evaluation insights, coaching signals, SLA and queue visibility, workforce context, and supervisor-oriented monitoring.
  • Extensibility and admin control: Give organizations the flexibility to configure, govern, and extend Service Agent with role-based controls, custom MCP tools, environment configuration, and Microsoft 365 grounding.
  • In-chat experiences: persistent, auto-updating widgets; file upload and image understanding; image generation; on-demand charts from service data; the ability to create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files; and interactive apps-in-chat with grids, forms, and cards.

Why this matters for service teams

Great service depends on the right context at the right moment. But in many organizations, the information service professionals need is spread across case records, knowledge bases, emails, and conversations—and often locked inside a single app. Service Agent closes that gap by bringing the right context into Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in both Microsoft Graph and Dataverse through Work IQ, so professionals can reason and act wherever they work.

For service organizations, that can mean stronger agent productivity, faster resolution, more consistent knowledge use, and better case hygiene. For service professionals, it means less time searching across systems, less post-interaction admin work, and more time focused on customers. New team members ramp up faster because the knowledge context and likely intent surface automatically.

With general availability, service organizations can bring Service Agent to more teams and embed AI-powered support more consistently into everyday service work. And because it ships with granular, reversible controls—per role, per app module, and per queue—teams can roll out at their own pace and run side-by-side with existing experiences during the transition.

Available now

Now generally available, Service Agent is ready to help service organizations scale AI-powered service across their teams. Service professionals can use it to get fast, cited answers, review case and customer context, and take action across the service workflow—all in the flow of work across Dynamics 365, Teams, and Outlook.

To get started, customers need a Dynamics 365 Customer Service license (Enterprise or Premium edition) for access to case data, knowledge, and service workflows. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license unlocks the fully integrated experience—case context, Microsoft 365 data, and AI actions in one place. Admins can provision Service Agent through the Microsoft 365 admin center.

General availability is an important milestone for Service Agent—and an exciting next step in helping service teams resolve issues with more speed, clarity, and confidence. We can’t wait to see how organizations use Service Agent to show up prepared, stay grounded in customer context, and keep every case moving forward.

Get started with Service Agent now!

Enable Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Service Agent Overview

Overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Service MCP tools

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Optimize workforce operations across people and AI agents with Dynamics 365 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/22/workforce-engagement-management-dynamics-3/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/22/workforce-engagement-management-dynamics-3/#respond Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000 Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 helps service organizations plan, manage, and improve performance across customer service reps and AI agents. With forecasting, scheduling, real-time adherence, AI Agent Estimator, quality evaluation, governance, and coaching capabilities built into the service platform, teams can create a more connected and responsive operating model.

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Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 helps organizations plan and manage a combined human and AI workforce, operate in real time, and continuously improve service quality.

People and AI working together optimize customer service

Customer service organizations are no longer managing people alone — they’re orchestrating service reps and AI agents working side by side. As AI takes on more work, leaders need a new way to plan, monitor, and improve performance across both human and digital labor.

Today, Microsoft is announcing general availability of workforce engagement management (WEM) in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center designed specifically for this shift. It brings forecasting, scheduling, real-time operations, and quality management for both human and AI workforces into the service platform where the work happens.

This fundamentally resets how service operations are planned and managed.

Service leaders are under pressure to deliver exceptional customer experiences, respond to shifting demands, and raise quality standards. Yet many organizations still manage forecasting, scheduling, adherence, quality reviews, and coaching across disconnected tools and manual processes with legacy solutions that struggle to keep pace with modern service operations.

With workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365, organizations can run operations as a connected system. Built on the same data model as customer interactions and cases, workforce planning is grounded in actual service demand—not just historical volume—enabling more accurate forecasts, better staffing decisions, and more consistent service delivery. The result is a more precise, responsive operating model that helps organizations meet service levels, maintain quality, and scale AI, without adding complexity.

As an early adopter, we’ve worked closely with Microsoft to evaluate Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 against the rigor required in financial services. The platform’s ability to unify human and AI workforce planning, real-time operations, and quality management in one system is a clear differentiator. This supports our relationship-focused, customer and client-centric approach, while reinforcing our risk-disciplined operating model.”

— Jason Pope, EVP and Chief Technology Officer, Flagstar Bank

Plan with confidence

Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 starts with planning but in a fundamentally different way. Forecasts are built on real customer signals, including cases, conversations, and channel activity, rather than relying on disconnected inputs.

Figure 1: Predict demand with precision and turn forecasts into workforce-ready plans

Capacity planning translates demand into staffing needs, allowing supervisors to model service representative capacity against service-level goals, handle times, concurrency, and operational assumptions.

Figure 2: Translate demand forecasts into accurate staffing plans with confidence.

From there, scheduling aligns the right customer service reps to the right work, shifts, and activities. Because planning and execution share the same foundation, organizations can better match staffing to demand, reduce variability in service levels, and create more predictable workloads for employees.

Evolve the human and AI workforce plan with AI Agent Estimator

As AI agents take on a growing share of service interactions, workforce planning must evolve to reflect a blended workforce.

AI Agent Estimator provides the ability to forecast AI agent capacity and projected usage alongside human staffing. Planners can model how expected demand translates into both human effort and AI usage before those decisions impact operations or budgets.

This provides a more complete workforce plan, giving finance teams visibility into projected AI usage, operations leaders the ability to balance human and AI capacity, and IT teams a way to validate assumptions ahead of scale.

Operate in real time: adherence and shift-based routing

Planning alone is not enough in an environment where conditions shift throughout the day.

Real-time adherence provides visibility into how work is tracking against schedules, helping supervisors identify and respond to changes in agent activity, demand spikes, or service-level risk.

Shift-based routing connects workforce planning with service execution by aligning routing decisions to actual availability. Work is directed to customer service reps who are scheduled and ready, improving efficiency and reducing delays.

Together, these capabilities allow organizations to respond to demand as it happens, rather than reacting after service levels have already been impacted.

Figure 3: Track adherence in real time and keep workforce execution aligned to plan.

Move from manual spot checks to continuous quality improvement

Workforce engagement is not only about having enough people available. It is also helping with standards for empathy, compliance, resolution quality, and process execution.

Quality Evaluation Agent helps supervisors deliver more consistent, scalable quality oversight. Teams can define evaluation criteria, configure evaluation plans, and use AI-led assessment to evaluate customer interactions across cases and conversations, surfacing strengths, gaps, and coaching opportunities at scale. Because quality evaluation can use case context and operational data from Dataverse, it can assess service outcomes in the context of the customer record, not only the transcript.

Screen Recording adds another important signal: what happened on the screen while work was performed. For complex service interactions, quality depends not just on what was said, but on whether the rep followed the right steps across systems. Conversations, transcripts, and case notes explain what was said and documented, while screen context shows how the rep navigated systems, used knowledge, and completed the workflow.

Governance helps organizations turn policy expectations into consistent, explainable checks. Administrators can define policies in plain language and use them to evaluate whether customer communication is compliant, brand-safe, regionally appropriate, and aligned with company standards.

Coaching skills can convert quality signals into improvement plans by combining screen recording intelligence, governance outcomes, configured playbooks, evaluation rubrics, and gamification. Screen recording provides evidence of what happened, governance provides the policy signal, and playbooks define what should have happened.

The result is a closed-loop Quality Management model: capture screen and conversation context, evaluate with Quality Evaluation Agent and governance policies, coach with playbooks and improvement plans, motivate with gamification, and feed learning back into operations and workforce planning.

Figure 4: A closed loop that connects demand planning, workforce execution, quality signals and coaching.

Built on the Microsoft cloud and Dynamics 365 platform

Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 works out of the box, with the flexibility to extend through the broader Microsoft platform as needs grow, from Dataverse and Teams to Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Azure AI, and Microsoft security and compliance foundations.

That breadth matters because WEM is not a standalone system that organizations have to wire together themselves. It is part of the service platform where customer interactions, workforce plans, quality signals, AI-assisted workflows, and collaboration come together in one operating model.

Bringing these signals together creates a stronger operating model for supervisors, customer service reps, and service leaders.

Adopt workforce engagement management on your terms

Organizations are at different stages in their workforce management journey. Some are ready to move quickly to native WEM capabilities in Dynamics 365. Others have existing workforce management investments and need a practical path forward.

Adapters for solutions such as Verint, Calabrio, NICE, and Alvaria help customers connect those existing systems with Dynamics 365 service operations, reduce integration friction, and transition to more native workforce engagement management capabilities over time.

Customers should not have to choose between modernization and continuity. Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 is designed to support both.

The next phase: agentic workforce engagement management

Over the coming few months, our workforce engagement management MCP tooling will make core workforce actions available through agent-ready tools across Microsoft 365 surfaces such as Service Agent, Teams, Copilot, and mobile. This will allow supervisors and service reps to complete high-value WEM tasks—such as viewing schedules, checking leave balances, submitting time-off requests, managing shift swaps, clocking in and out, and acting on approvals—all through natural language prompts, without needing to navigate the full Dynamics365 application.

By separating the WEM business capability from the user experience surface, WEM MCP tools will create a reusable foundation for key WEM features for mobile access, Copilot experiences, Teams workflows, and future agentic scenarios.

A better way to run service operations

Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center brings planning, real-time operations, and quality management into the flow of service. The result is a more connected operating model for managing customer service reps and AI agents, with the flexibility to modernize over time.

Generally available today

Workforce engagement management in Dynamics 365 is generally available on June 30, 2026. It is included with Dynamics 365 Customer Service Enterprise and Premium SKUs, and available with Dynamics 365 Contact Center Voice + Digital SKU.

Next step: Learn more about workforce engagement management capabilities in Dynamics 365 on Microsoft Learn.


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Turning Copilot into a system of action with Dynamics 365 Sales and Service plug-ins in Copilot Cowork http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/16/copilot-cowork-dynamics-365/ http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/16/copilot-cowork-dynamics-365/#respond Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:18:49 +0000 Copilot Cowork is where people delegate multi-step, multi-source work and review it, drawing across records, knowledge, email, and meetings, and increasingly across Sales and Customer Service together. It meets users where they already work in Microsoft 365, and it keeps a person in the loop the whole way: grounded in your records, governed by your permissions, and gated by human approval before anything is written back.

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Today marks the general availability of Dynamics 365 Sales and Service plugins for Copilot Cowork.

Over the last few releases, my teams have built a rich family of agentic capabilities across Dynamics 365, with Copilot woven through Sales and Customer Service so sellers and agents get real value inside the apps they use every day.

Today, we’re extending that same intelligence into a new surface. With the general availability of Copilot Cowork, our Sales and Customer Service capabilities are now also generally available as the Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service plugins.

Cowork is where people delegate multi-step, multi-source work and review it, drawing across records, knowledge, email, and meetings, and increasingly across Sales and Customer Service together. It meets users where they already work in Microsoft 365, and it keeps a person in the loop the whole way: grounded in your records, governed by your permissions, and gated by human approval before anything is written back.

What we are shipping

When building this functionality, we did not start from a feature list. We started from the common jobs sellers and service teams actually do, ranked the candidate prompts by frequency, business impact, and how uniquely Microsoft’s data can answer them, and then ran each one through an evaluate, measure, and improve loop against the standard of an ideal expert response. Only prompts that cleared the bar shipped.

The result is a broad, quality-validated set of prompts that run on out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 data, useful with no custom configuration, across both workloads:

  • Sales use cases & data: account and deal preparation, expansion signals, deal-progression guidance, and manager visibility across the pipeline.
  • Customer service use cases & data: case triage, knowledge-grounded resolution drafting, escalation handoff, and supervisor visibility across the queue.

Every prompt takes action: it reads and analyzes, proposes a concrete next step, and routes anything that writes back through an approve, edit, or dismiss gate.

What it looks like in practice

A few requests teams can run today include:

  • Sales: “Prepare me for my meeting on this account” or “Where is this deal at risk?”
  • Service: “Provide case summary and suggest next steps” or “Draft a resolution for this case.”

The payoff shows up when one request spans both workloads. Ahead of a quarterly business review:

“Prep me for the Adatum QBR. Review any open service cases. Surface deal risks, competitive signals, and missing stakeholders. Perform the right CRM updates for each. Build the PowerPoint and share in email for my sales team to review.”

In one pass, Cowork reads the account’s open opportunities and service cases, assembles risks, signals, and stakeholder gaps, proposes the CRM updates for approval, and drafts the deck and email. Every write waits for a person.

See Charles Lamanna demo this Cowork scenario in the Cowork launch announcement.

How it works, and how it stays governed

Cowork does not access your database directly. It composes over a small set of governed Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugins Microsoft publishes for Dynamics 365, enforcing your existing identity and permission model on every call:

Plug-inWhat it brings to Cowork
Dynamics 365 SalesAccount, lead, opportunity, and competitor research; opportunity health and risk; drafting follow up communications..
Dynamics 365 Customer ServiceCase enrichment, next-step suggestions, customer-ready response drafting, and incident resolution.
Microsoft DataverseThe read, query, create, and update layer that applies approved writes.

What that means for IT:

  • Humans approve the writing and actions. Cowork proposes; it does not silently act. It surfaces record updates, drafted emails, and case resolutions for approve, edit, or dismiss.
  • Cowork grounds answers in source data and links them directly. When data is missing or ambiguous, the intended behavior is to say so, not to fabricate a value.
  • Your security model is enforced. Users can only reach data through Cowork that they can already access in the application.
  • Admins control enablement. They manage plug-ins centrally and keep them off until an administrator turns them on.

Get started

Copilot Cowork is generally available for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers worldwide today. The Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service plug-ins are managed like any other Microsoft 365 Copilot plug-in from the Microsoft 365 admin center. Admins deploy and scope the plug-ins; users connect their environment and sign in the first time they use one.

For prerequisites, licensing, and step-by-step setup, see the Microsoft Learn documentation:

I am proud of what these teams have built: capabilities that do the work our customers actually delegate, grounded in your data, governed by your controls, with your people in the loop. We would love your feedback as you put it to work.

The post Turning Copilot into a system of action with Dynamics 365 Sales and Service plug-ins in Copilot Cowork appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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Introducing Conversation Orchestration in Dynamics 365 Contact Center  http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/10/conversation-orchestration-dynamics-365-contact-center/ Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:00:00 +0000 Conversation orchestration in Dynamics 365 Contact Center enables real-time decisioning, dynamic prioritization, and intelligent automation across every customer interaction.

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Most contact center platforms still treat routing as the defining moment in a conversation. But the customer journey continues to evolve after that first decision. Intent changes. Wait times increase. Workforce availability shifts. Business priorities move. Each of these real-time signals shapes the experience. This creates an opportunity to manage the conversation lifecycle more effectively — not as a one-time routing event, but as a dynamic journey guided by live context from both the customer and the contact center. 

Contact centers are constantly balancing customer need with workforce capacity. ACD has always helped manage that balance, but when conditions change, service levels, satisfaction, and trust change with them. That balance cannot be set once and left alone. It has to be sensed and adjusted in real time. Otherwise, supervisors are forced to step in manually, often after the moment to act has passed. What contact centers need is not more static logic, but a system that can continuously sense, decide, and respond as the conversation unfolds.

Introducing conversation orchestration in Dynamics 365 Contact Center

In April we introduced conversation orchestration, a new tool within Service Operations Agent. It extends traditional routing by enabling the contact center to respond dynamically as conditions change. It allows administrators to define business policies in natural language using a model of events, conditions, and actions.

Conversation orchestration continuously monitors signals across the conversation lifecycle, evaluates them against the configured playbook, and triggers the appropriate response. The result is a more adaptive operating model that helps contact centers manage change in real time and deliver more consistent customer outcomes. We will continue to expand conversation orchestration over time by adding capabilities — each one targeting a specific, high-impact contact center use case. The first two are available today. 

Policies written in natural language. Executed at scale. 

The hardest part of building intelligent contact center behavior has never been the technology. It has been the configuration. Rule trees that take weeks to build, require IT to modify, and break in ways that are invisible until a customer notices. The expertise of your best operations leader, locked inside a configuration file that nobody else can read or change. 

Conversation orchestration replaces that with playbooks — natural-language instructions that define what should happen at each stage of the conversation journey. An admin does not configure a rule. They write an intention: 

“If a premium customer is waiting in the queue and no support reps are available, increase their priority over time.”

“If a premium customer is waiting in the queue unassigned, immediately offer a callback.”

That is the entire instruction. Conversation orchestration handles the rest: reading the conversation context in real time, evaluating the conditions against customer attributes from CRM, executing the action, and doing it with consistency that no manual process can match. 

Guided templates make common scenarios fast to configure. Built-in validation catches conflicts before anything goes live. What used to require a specialist and a change management process can now be authored, validated, and published by an operations admin in minutes. 

This is the difference between a system that routes and a system that orchestrates. 

The first set of capabilities: available now in Public Preview

We are launching conversation orchestration with first set of capabilities in public preview. They are not arbitrary starting points. They address the two most universal failures in contact center queue management — the ones that affect nearly every enterprise contact center, every single day.

Dynamic prioritization 

Priority set at queue entry and never revisited is one of the most quietly damaging problems in contact center operations. A customer waiting ten minutes is competing for the same representative as someone who just arrived. A conversation transferred mid-journey — carrying all the context of what came before it — resets to the destination queue’s default priority as if it had just called in. 

Dynamic prioritization fixes this by keeping priority evaluation alive throughout the conversation. As wait time accumulates, as transfers occur, as customer tier is confirmed from CRM — the priority score adjusts automatically. High-value customers and long-waiting callers move forward without anyone monitoring the queue manually. Conversation orchestration does what the best supervisor would do, but for every conversation simultaneously. 

Overflow based on customer service availability 

When no customer service representatives are available, the standard contact center response is silence. The customer waits. Maybe a representative comes online. Maybe they do not. Overflow rules exist in some systems, but they wait for a fixed timer to expire before doing anything — which means every customer experiences the same minimum wait regardless of whether help is actually coming. 

Overflow based on customer service representative availability acts the moment it is needed. As soon as a conversation enters a queue with no eligible representatives — accounting for skills, capacity, and assignment logic — the overflow playbook fires. And the action it takes is not the same for every customer. Context variables determine the outcome: one segment transfers to a backup team, another receives a callback offer, a third gets a graceful closing message. Every customer gets a response. None of them wait in silence. 

Try It Today 

These two capabilities are the first step in a broader orchestration platform. We will be enabling more scenarios enabling you to automate the contact center behavior.

Conversation orchestration is available now in public preview for voice and live chat channels in Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Access it through Copilot Service admin center under Get started > Contact Center Agents > Service Operations Agent(preview) > conversation orchestration (Preview).

Start with a template, configure your first playbook, and see what it means for a contact center to stay with every conversation — not just route it. 

Learn more 

The post Introducing Conversation Orchestration in Dynamics 365 Contact Center  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

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Modernize IVR with AI Voice in Dynamics 365 Contact Center http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/05/modernize-ivr-ai-voice-dynamics-365-contact-center/ Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:54:13 +0000 For years, contact centers have relied on traditional IVR scripted workflows to manage customer conversations. While effective for predictable tasks, these solutions become brittle as interactions grow more complex or multi‑step. Every change—whether updating policies, adding new intents, or refining flows—requires manual reconfiguration. This makes IVRs expensive and time‑consuming to maintain at scale.

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For years, contact centers have relied on traditional IVR scripted workflows to manage customer conversations. While effective for predictable tasks, these solutions become brittle as interactions grow more complex or multi‑step. Every change—whether updating policies, adding new intents, or refining flows—requires manual reconfiguration. This makes IVRs expensive and time‑consuming to maintain at scale. At the same time, many new standalone AI voice solutions swing too far in the other direction. They offer flexibility but struggling to deliver the control, reliability, and consistency enterprises require.

With Customer Assist Agent in Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Microsoft introduces a new model: a GenAI‑driven solution that owns the customer interaction end‑to‑end, evolving traditional IVR into something far more capable. Rather than forcing a choice, it combines structured voice processing with generative reasoning. This enables both precise, controlled workflows and natural, conversational interactions within the same experience.

Managed in Microsoft Copilot Studio and natively integrated into Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Customer Assist Agent unifies AI, workflows, and enterprise data into a single solution.

Evolving IVR

Traditional IVR systems were built for structured intents and predictable outcomes. They rely on deterministic pipelines that decompose conversations into a sequence of predefined steps. They convert speech to text, classifying intent, selecting a dialog path, and then generating a response.

This approach works well for simple, single‑intent scenarios. Because each step follows a predefined flow, the system cannot understand the interaction as a whole. It struggles to adapt in real time when conversations deviate, whether through interruptions, topic changes, or multiple intents expressed at once.

As interactions become more complex, this model breaks down. Dialog trees grow exponentially, maintenance becomes increasingly costly, and even small changes require reauthoring and testing across multiple paths. The experience feels constrained and unnatural. It often fails to resolve customer needs in a single interaction, leading to unnecessary escalation to a human representative.

Customer Assist Agent takes a different approach. Rather than replacing IVR, it absorbs it into a more intelligent solution. Customer Assist Agent listens continuously, reasons in the moment, and responds naturally. It also preserves the enterprise requirements IVR has always delivered: reliability, compliance, predictability, and scale. Customers can speak naturally, interrupt freely, and express multiple intents without resetting the interaction or navigating menus.

Modernizing voice does not mean abandoning enterprise‑grade capabilities. Customer Assist Agent includes support for DTMF input and fallback, silence detection and speech tuning, latency signaling, secure transfers to agents, and multi‑language interactions without pre‑routing. These capabilities are foundational for delivering voice at scale and ensure that GenAI enhances reliability rather than undermining it.

At the same time, conversations are no longer constrained by language. Customer Assist Agent with speech‑to‑speech (direct, real‑time audio interaction with the model) supports multi‑language interactions with dynamic language switching, allowing customers to move naturally between languages within a single conversation.

One Solution Across Self-Service and Assisted Service

Customer interactions do not follow clean boundaries between automation and customer service representative support. Solutions need to adapt as fluidly as customers do. Customer Assist Agent provides continuity across the journey.

The same solution can resolve requests autonomously. It can recognize when a human is required and transfer with full context to Dynamics 365 Contact Center. It continues assisting the representative in real time. Equally important, this approach enables incremental modernization. Organizations can preserve deterministic IVR flows where they already perform well, particularly in compliance‑sensitive or mission‑critical scenarios. The solution introduces generative voice capabilities where they deliver the greatest impact on containment, handle time, and customer satisfaction. Voice becomes a solution that continuously improves instead of one that must be redesigned in a single, monolithic upgrade.

For example, a customer calls and says, “My bill is higher than expected. I traveled last month, upgraded my phone mid‑cycle, and I don’t recognize one of the charges.”

  • Rather than forcing that conversation into separate, predefined paths, Customer Assist Agent treats it as a single interaction.
  • Multiple intents are identified within the same exchange and managed together. This allows the system to reason across them and determine how to proceed.
  • Relevant account and billing data is retrieved dynamically. The conversation progresses naturally by addressing each aspect in context, without requiring the customer to repeat or navigate separate flows.  As the conversation evolves, the system maintains a unified view of the interaction, preserving intent, history and intermediate outcomes.
  • If human assistance is required, the interaction is handed off with full context to Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This way, the representative picks up exactly where the conversation left off.
  • Throughout the process, the system remains engaged. It supports the representative in real time, with context, suggested actions and next steps. This way, the interaction continues without repetition or rework.

To the customer, it feels like one continuous conversation.

Deterministic and Generative — Used Together

Customer Assist Agent combines deterministic control and generative intelligence, using each where it performs best.

Deterministic logic remains essential in moments where outcomes must be precise, repeatable, and auditable.

  • Scenarios such as identity verification, payments and refunds, eligibility checks, regulatory disclosures, and the enforcement of hard business rules demand exact behavior every time.
  • In these cases, structured flows provide the necessary guardrails, ensuring accuracy, compliance, and confidence—while allowing generative intelligence to operate around them rather than in place of them.

Generative reasoning is applied when conversations are dynamic, ambiguous, or evolve over time, particularly in scenarios such as:

  • Troubleshooting issues where the problem is not clearly defined upfront
  • Gathering and correlating multiple pieces of information across turns
  • Handling interruptions, corrections, or shifts in topic mid‑conversation
  • Managing multi‑intent requests without forcing the caller down rigid paths

For example, a customer might say, “I ordered shoes last week—where are they? Actually, just cancel them.”

Rather than treating these as separate interactions, Customer Assist Agent identifies both intents and determines how to handle them in sequence. It first retrieves the relevant order details with generative reasoning, then executes the cancellation using structured, deterministic logic, and confirms the outcome—all within the same conversation.

This illustrates how generative reasoning and deterministic execution work together: the system interprets the request holistically, decides how to proceed, and applies the appropriate approach at each step. The interaction continues fluidly, without requiring the customer to restart, navigate separate flows, or repeat information.

From Answers to Outcomes

Customer Assist Agent doesn’t just respond, it acts.  Through secure, governed connections to enterprise systems including MCP-based tooling and enterprise workflows it can check status, modify accounts, trigger workflows and record outcomes.  Voice becomes a resolution engine, not just a channel.

Because Customer Assist Agent is integrated into Dynamics 365 Contact Center, these actions are connected directly to customer data, case management, and operational systems — ensuring every interaction is both contextual and actionable.

Accuracy That Improves Over Time

High‑quality voice experiences depend on accuracy, and accuracy is no longer static . With Customer Assist Agent, precision improves continuously as the system learns from real customer interactions, evaluates outcomes, and refines its behavior over time. Each conversation becomes an opportunity to identify gaps, adjust responses, and improve how intents are understood and resolved.

Critically, this optimization is not limited to specialists or data science teams. Because Customer Assist Agent is authored and managed in Microsoft Copilot Studio, business users can directly influence performance, tuning behavior, improving accuracy, and optimizing experiences using governed tooling and real operational feedback. Voice intelligence evolves in production, driven by the people closest to the customer experience rather than cycles of retraining and redevelopment.

To support this, Microsoft introduced Model Assessment Score (MAS), a standardized way to measure and track AI agent performance across real interactions. MAS provides a consistent framework for evaluating quality, identifying areas for improvement, and driving continuous optimization.

In practice, MAS enables teams to run structured evaluations and experiments—for example, comparing the performance of different models on the same set of interactions, or testing alternative prompting strategies to improve response quality.  By measuring outcomes consistently, teams can make informed decisions about what works, iterate quickly, and continuously improve performance in a controlled and observable way.

You can learn more about how MAS works in this blog:
http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/02/04/ai-agent-performance-measurement/

A New Model for Customer Interaction

Create a Customer Assist Agent in Dynamics 365 Contact Center with Microsoft CoPilot Studio using your existing business policies, data, and tools, then experiment to understand what’s possible.  By testing real scenarios, trying different approaches, and observing how the system responds, teams can quickly build intuition for where generative reasoning adds value and where deterministic control remains essential.

Once you have that foundation, identify a high-value voice scenario where conversations are common, involve some variability, and benefit from more flexible handling than traditional IVR can provide. These are often interactions that sit between simple automation and full human support—where improving containment or reducing handling time can deliver immediate impact without introducing unnecessary risk.

Next use Microsoft Copilot Studio to refine your agent. Define how generative reasoning and deterministic logic work together, connect the agent to the data and actions required to resolve real customer requests, and establish governance and guardrails appropriate for your business. Copilot Studio provides a single place to design, test, and manage voice agents using enterprise‑ready tooling.

Then, deploy alongside your existing IVR and agent workflows. Customer Assist Agent operates in both fully agentic and hybrid environments. It keeps deterministic flows where precision matters and adds generative capabilities where flexibility improves outcomes. This allows teams to modernize incrementally and confidently.

Finally, measure, learn, and refine in production. Use real interaction data and evaluation signals to identify gaps, tune behavior, and continuously improve accuracy and resolution rates. With Copilot Studio, drive optimization by business teams and operators closest to the customer experience, not long retraining cycles.

Voice is the front door to the contact center. With Customer Assist Agent and Copilot Studio, that door can finally understand intent, adapt in real time, and improve with every conversation.

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Try Email Classification in Dynamics 365 Customer Service http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/06/03/email-classification-dynamics-365-case-quality/ Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000 Email classification in Dynamics 365 ensures only meaningful customer emails become cases. Reduce noise, improve triage, and boost service productivity.

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Email Classification adds intelligent context to enhance Automatic Record Creation (ARC) and enable a smarter service flow. As emails arrive, classification evaluates content and context upfront before any case is created. It identifies real customer issues early while filtering out irrelevant messages.

This signal feeds into Automatic Record Creation rules, ensuring only meaningful emails become cases while filtering non-actionable messages. Service representatives and agents then focus on relevant cases, enriching, routing, and resolving true customer issues. This creates a cleaner queue and boosts productivity by eliminating time spent on unnecessary case handling.

That early decision point is exactly where Email Classification adds value. Now generally available in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, it uses AI to evaluate each email before a case is created. This helps teams focus only on issues that truly need attention. Previously, the system created a case for every email sent to a monitored mailbox, started an SLA, and assigned a service representative.

Empower service managers with intelligent email triage

Email Classification gives Customer Service teams precise control over how incoming mail is processed from the moment it arrives:

  • Define categories such as Billing, Technical Support, or Marketing to match how your organization actually receives email

Create cases only when needed — prevent categories like Marketing or Notifications from generating cases, eliminating unnecessary SLA pressure

Use email category in ARC to create cases only when needed

Email Classification works best when paired with Automatic Record Creation (ARC) rules. Use the assigned category as a condition in ARC, so cases are created only for emails that genuinely require one and everything else is filtered out before it reaches a queue.

Set up Email Classification

Configuration takes place in the Customer Service admin center under Email settings:

  1. Define your categories — each needs a name and description to help the AI classify accurately
  2. Set scope conditions to control which incoming emails are evaluated
  3. Enable classification — every email that meets your conditions is automatically analyzed and tagged before any case logic runs

Before going live, simulation mode lets you test classification accuracy against your own historical emails so you can validate categories, refine descriptions, and deploy with confidence.

Once enabled, service representatives see only the cases that belong in their queue — routed to the right people, free of noise — and can focus their time where it has the greatest impact on customer outcomes.

Get started today

Ready to reduce queue noise and reclaim service representative capacity? Enable Email Classification in your Customer Service admin center and start with simulation mode to validate your categories. For step‑by‑step guidance, read the documentation:

Configure email classification in Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

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Unlocking safer customer communications with Data Sensitivity Labels in Email http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/dynamics-365/blog/it-professional/2026/05/19/unlocking-safer-customer-communications-with-data-sensitivity-labels-in-email/ Tue, 19 May 2026 15:26:27 +0000 Data Sensitivity Labels for Emails bring classification and protection directly into customer service workflows, so service representatives can work confidently without slowing down.

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In regulated, data‑intensive industries, email is both a critical customer channel and one of the easiest ways sensitive information to leak — a single forward, distribution list, or broad recipient line can expose confidential data in seconds. Service teams need to move fast and keep strong controls in place.

Data Sensitivity Labels for Emails bring classification and protection directly into customer service workflows, so service representatives can work confidently without slowing down.

What they are

Data Sensitivity Labels classify outbound customer emails by the sensitivity of their content and apply the appropriate protection before sending. They’re powered by Microsoft Purview and align with your existing labels — Public, Confidential, Highly Confidential — so every email follows established security and compliance policies automatically.

How it works

A customer emails support to update banking details or share identity documents. As the service representative drafts the reply, Dynamics 365 surfaces the available Purview labels, making it easy to classify the email and apply the right protection before it goes out.

Once a label is applied (manually or automatically):

  • The email is protected using the organization’s security settings
  • External forwarding and unauthorized access are restricted
  • The experience stays seamless for both the rep and the customer

Every sensitive interaction is governed by policy — not manual judgment.

Key capabilities

  • Purviewbacked labels — reuses sensitivity labels already managed in Microsoft Purview
  • Incontext guidance — labels are applied directly during email composition
  • Consistent protection — encryption and access rules are enforced automatically
  • Enterprisegrade compliance — supports regulatory requirements across financial services, healthcare, and other regulated industries

The road ahead

This is a step toward compliance‑by‑default customer service, where data protection is embedded into the workflow rather than enforced after the fact. With Data Sensitivity Labels for Emails, organizations don’t have to choose between speed and safety. They get both.

Learn more

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