Jolma and her team began collaborating with Finance Engineering to come up with a vision for a new architecture. They designed a connected system with a unified helpdesk platform that would modernize app maintenance and support, and provide a more consistent user experience.<\/p>\n
Once the goal was clear, the team was able to quickly build the baseline solution.<\/p>\n
We realized that if we could build up Unifinance as a platform, we would have reusable enterprise capabilities that other teams could benefit from too. That\u2019s the beauty of building a platform versus a single solution.<\/p>\n
– Luciana Siciliano, Microsoft Finance director<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The cross-company team decided to use Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a technical foundation, adding customer feedback analysis through Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to help improve overall customer satisfaction (CSAT). They knew this solution could offer users a set of modules using a robust common architecture that would work across multiple Finance teams.<\/p>\n
Out of the active Microsoft Dynamics 365 helpdesk platforms, the team chose one of the most robust installations, known as One Finance, as a foundation. It was feature-rich and could accommodate most of the user requirements. They renamed the solution Unifinance to better fit its vision of unifying support across multiple business groups.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe realized that if we could build up Unifinance, we would have reusable enterprise capabilities that other teams could benefit from too,\u201d says Luciana Siciliano, a director in Microsoft Finance who collaborated with Jolma to sponsor the project from the business side. \u201cThat\u2019s the beauty of building a platform versus a single solution.\u201d<\/p>\nEmilie Hunt is an engineering director whose team is driving much of the Unifinance project. (Photo by Emilie Hunt)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe work fits nicely into a larger story that\u2019s unfolding across the company, says Emilie Hunt, an engineering director whose team is driving much of the Unifinance project.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe need for a unified approach fits into a larger digital transformation that\u2019s underway across the company,\u201d Hunt says. \u201cThis unified helpdesk platform aligns with our vision to lead the expansion of \u2018touchless\u2019 operations across the company.\u201d<\/p>\n
Demand for Unifinance increases with successful rollouts<\/strong><\/p>\nThree months after getting started, the Finance team turned the first complete business process live on the new unified helpdesk platform. The team brought on each group carefully while incorporating learnings from the previous rollouts.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter we added one program, we were continuously delivering,\u201d says Ramchander Vemula, a senior software engineer on the Microsoft Finance team. \u201cWe\u2019ve been giving training to other teams to familiarize them with the platform, collecting feedback, and adjusting the solution so all teams can use it to meet their needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jolma took the lead on communicating with the various stakeholders about this opportunity.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter we got leadership buy-in, we expanded our discussions to the other orgs within our team,\u201d she says. \u201cChange is scary, and every team was pretty comfortable with what they had.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jolma began holding weekly \u201coffice hours\u201d calls for team members to check in or share their feedback. The team provided demos of the system and how it would work. This is an area that Jolma feels could have gone better.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could have given more examples of what the change was going to look like for individual teams,\u201d she says. \u201cSomething that would have helped early on would have been to do more hands-on demos with the business groups.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as the benefits of the unified helpdesk platform became obvious, more and more teams wanted to come on board.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were initially planning to onboard only nine programs,\u201d Vemula says. \u201cThen we found out that teams wanted to migrate over 86 processes from Outlook distribution lists to this platform.\u201d<\/p>\n
The time to deploy new scenarios for finance app users has already been cut by 50 percent due to the efficiencies of the internal app support platform.<\/p>\n
With the new internal app support platform, 120 mailbox aliases that the One Finance team was handling have been combined into a single unified helpdesk experience for users. Now, each support agent has a maximum of three mailboxes to monitor.<\/p>\n
Better customer support and timely analytics<\/strong><\/p>\nMicrosoft Royalties and Content Ops (RCO) is a centralized service organization that provides business solutions for the management of global royalty and revenue sharing contracts. RCO internal app support, provided through a system called Roycare, was one of the first to begin using Unifinance.<\/p>\n
Unifinance helps RCO increase efficiencies and lower costs, providing fast service to global business partners and payees while delivering prompt and accurate payments.<\/p>\n
Another key user is Microsoft Procurement. This team launched a program called Employee Device Management to help employees have a positive experience with their devices and be more productive and engaged.<\/p>\n
Twelve pilot regions were selected and onboarded to Unifinance. The platform now helps them reduce operations costs around manual processes with a more mature CRM featuring artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation.<\/p>\n
Now additional capabilities like a Finance Digital Assistant (FDA) chatbot are seamlessly integrated with the Unifinance platform. This allows multiple Microsoft groups to use the FDA, like ProcureWeb and Travel.<\/p>\n
This chatbot is a great success. Today, it solves 60 percent of Finance-related support cases by providing self-service information to customers, preventing the need to open a support ticket.<\/p>\n
If a user still has to engage with an agent after interacting with the digital assistant, they can do it directly from this window. They don\u2019t need to know who they should contact or how to submit a ticket.<\/p>\n
Collecting user feedback is also faster now, with the team\u2019s implementation of Outlook Action Cards. These are appended to every email exchange with a support agent and sent at the close of the ticket.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis way, we collect both continuous feedback and information on the overall experience,\u201d Vemula says. \u201cThe user doesn\u2019t have to navigate anywhere else\u2014it\u2019s right within the Outlook message. We\u2019ve already seen a four-fold increase in feedback.\u201d<\/p>\nProcureWeb and the Finance Digital Assistant chatbot are integrated with Microsoft\u2019s finance app helpdesk solution, Unifinance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nUnifinance also provides a single portal combining past and current data.<\/p>\n
This data is used to provide insights to Finance Engineering, improving processes and overall customer satisfaction. This helps reveal patterns and commonly occurring scenarios so teams can quickly address issues and streamline business processes.<\/p>\n
Valuable information and insights are now more available across the organization, from a Predict Ticket dashboard to one on user feedback analysis. In fact, several teams have started to create tickets for each other using the new system.<\/p>\n
Next steps <\/strong>for Unifinance<\/strong><\/p>\nAs Finance teams continue onboarding to the Unifinance platform, Finance Engineering is deploying additional artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have an innovation mindset,\u201d says Conrad Wong, a principal software engineer for the Finance team. \u201cWe want to implement other scenarios that can save agents time and improve processes that can then be rolled out across all services.\u201d<\/p>\n
All that learning is making a difference.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time the machine learning models make a mistake, we have a process in place for the agents to fix it,\u201d Wong says. \u201cWe feed that back into our training process, creating a continuous improvement cycle. Dashboards also help us keep track of the models\u2019 performance over time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dhwani Kamdar is a senior program manager who manages the Unifinance portfolio on a day-to-day basis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe primary technical goal for the next few months is to advance the system\u2019s machine learning, automation, and data-driven capabilities,\u201d Kamdar says. \u201cWe\u2019ll do this while also onboarding the remaining teams on the platform.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team plans to gain faster insights on tickets by automating the recognition of user intent, says Jovalene Teo, senior program manager on Finance\u2019s Center of Innovation team.<\/p>\n
This can be part of a bigger picture of a customer support platform across the company. With the efficiencies gained, the whole package of what this platform brings is invaluable.<\/p>\n
– Kris Jolma, Microsoft group global process manager<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cText analytics will be the next major focus,\u201d Teo says. \u201cIt will let the system dynamically categorize tickets, drive deeper business insights, and have more chatbot automation, to further reduce operation costs and ticket volume. The unification of support systems facilitated the collection of big data that enabled these business benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n
This will keep reducing the volume of support tickets and help agents quickly find the right information when they do need to address a case. In fact, the learnings and efficiency gains derived from this project have the potential to transform the way other teams across Microsoft do internal app support.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis can be part of a bigger picture of a customer support platform across the company,\u201d Jolma says. \u201cWith the number of aliases decommissioned and the efficiencies gained, the whole package of what this platform brings is invaluable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Unifinance helpdesk has helped improve user experience by delivering a multi-channel experience, Hunt says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgents are empowered to solve cases faster and avoid escalations by having the right resources and data at exactly the point of need,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The next phase in this transformation is to gain deeper insights into the operations data to proactively address issues and avoid the need to raise helpdesk tickets in the first place.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will enable our engineers to rapidly deliver new capabilities and AI\/ML-powered experiences to all of our customers with increased business impact and efficiency,\u201d says Jane Zhang, a principal director of engineering whose team did much of the work on the project.<\/p>\n
Zhang says the project would not have been possible without all the different teams that pitched in to help. \u201cUnifinance showcases the cross-group partnerships we\u2019ve developed and co-developed with product teams,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Find out how Microsoft uses Dynamics 365 and machine learning to drive efficiencies in finance<\/a>.<\/p>\nDiscover how AI-powered chatbots cut the number of support tickets by more than 20 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft. Internal app support for Microsoft Finance had to be simplified. The experience employees, vendors, and partners had each time they sought help with one of the company\u2019s many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":6718,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[674],"class_list":["post-6715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Rebooting internal app support at Microsoft with Dynamics 365 - Inside Track Blog<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n