Omnichannel for Customer Service – New Dialer
When we make outbound telephone calls used Microsoft’s Omnichannel for customer service a new dialer is now available. I will highlight its features and explain how to enable it in this post. You can read about the new dialer experience here The old dialer worked fine but I admit it did have some limitations. My main frustration was around the way we were forced into entering the country code… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Languages
Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service supports multiple languages. In this post I will describe the options we have around channel language. I’m going to document this subject in the context of a phone call. (As this is probably the most common use case.) But you could obviously tailor these concepts to work with web chat and other conversation channels. Focusing on voice also allows me… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Agent Specific Capacity Profiles
Microsoft have recently released a change to capacity profiles within Unified Routing. As we can how have agent specific capacities. Meaning in Omnichannel for Customer Service one agent might be able to handle 3 conversations at once, while another agent in the same profile might be able to handle less. Why is this important? Well often in contact centers we might say that senior agents can… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel For Customer Service – Identify Customers
Within Microsoft’s Omnichannel for customer service we can automatically identify customers based on their phone number. (Or email for web chat!) But what logic is used and how can we customize it? In this post I will try to answer this question. Say you are an agent using the voice channel …. often contact or account record will be automatically linked to the conversation based on the… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG Birmingham – 2nd Speaker Announcement November 2023
Registrations are open for our next Dynamics 365 / Power Platform event in Birmingham. And this time I am very pleased to announce another amazing guest speaker. You can find more details and register on meetup.com here. Our next in-person meeting of the year will take place on Thursday 23rd November from 18:30 at the Wesleyan Building. Parking is available close by, at the B4 Car… Continue Reading Neil Parkhurst’s Article...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Complex Conversation Routing
Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service allows a single agent to handle conversations from multiple channels. Unified Routing is used to configure how those work items are distributed. This is a great feature but brings with it the opportunity for some complex routing requirements. In the post I will explain one such scenario. Possibly the easiest way to route things like webchats is to… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG Birmingham – Speaker Announcement 23rd November 2023
Registrations are open for our next Dynamics 365 / Power Platform event in Birmingham. And this time I am very pleased to announce a very special guest speaker. You can find more details and register on meetup.com here. Our next in-person meeting of the year will take place on Thursday 23rd November from 18:30 at the Wesleyan Building. Parking is available close by, at the B4 Car Park. Or… Continue Reading Neil Parkhurst’s...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Assignment Priorities
Within Omnichannel for Customer Service we use Unified Routing to assign conversations to agents. Out of the box we have several assignment methods including round robin, highest capacity and longest idle. We’ll typically assign work items in the order they arrive based on one of these methods. But what if you want to prioritize certain conversations? In this post I will explain how we can use… Continue Reading Neil...
Dynamics 365 Field Mappings to Quote, Order and Invoice
In Dynamics 365 it might be common to add custom fields to opportunity products, quotes lines, order lines and invoice lines. As we progress from an opportunity into a quote, or a quote into order etc, we’d want these custom fields to carry forward. But the relationship between these tables is (for some crazy reason) hidden. In this post I will explain how to resolve this challenge. I’m… Continue Reading Neil...
Birmingham D365 and Power Platform User Group – September 2023
Our next Dynamics 365 / Power Platform user group meeting is fast approaching! On 21st September, if you are in Birmingham why not come and join us? As always, our event will be free and open to all. Our next in-person meeting of the year will take place on Thursday 20th July from 18:30 at the Wesleyan Building. Parking is available close by at the B4 Car Park or it’s a short walk from… Continue Reading Neil...
Sales Sequences
Have you used the Sales Sequences feature of Dynamics 365? I hadn’t until recently, so in this post I will explain the concept. Sales Sequences can be useful if you have a defined process involving consecutive activities that collectively progress a lead, contact, account, or opportunity towards a positive outcome. They help ensure activities are completed in a timely and consistent… Continue Reading Neil Parkhurst’s...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Session Icons
I love finding small features I’ve previously missed! This post is about such a feature, the ability within the customer service workspace to have custom session icons. When using Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service agents will open sessions in the customer service workspace. Out of the box I think all conversation sessions have the same logo. It’s a generic chat / conversation icon…. Continue Reading...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Summaries
We have a new feature available in Omnichannel for Customer Service! We can now use co-pilot to generate conversation and case summaries. In this post I will review this new feature. Setup Before you can use summaries, they will need to be enabled. To enable and configure your “Summaries” settings, open the Customer Service Admin Center. Then within the productivity option you should find the… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – OTP
I recently read a post by Joe Gill around setting up one-time passwords (OTP) using a Power Virtual Agent. It got me thinking about other scenarios when we might want to use OTP. In this post I will explore how we might enable an OTP process within Omnichannel for Customer Service. You can read Joe’s original blog post here. My idea was for an agent to generate a one-time password. This… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG – Birmingham Event July 2023
I guess your mind might be focused on summer holidays right now! And I don’t blame you … but don’t forget that our next amazing free Dynamics 365 and Power Platform event will be in July. This face-to-face event in Birmingham will give you chance to meet with likeminded users, consultants, and developers. Additionally, you will witness some thought-provoking presentations. And if that wasn’t… Continue Reading...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Voice Greeting
First impressions count! Microsoft has recently added a new automated message to the voice channel within Omnichannel for Customer Service. In this post I will explain why I think this is a significant step …. I’m going to be honest here, I have never been 100% happy with the initial experience a customer has when a phone call connects with Omnichannel for Customer Service. The reason for… Continue Reading Neil...
Sending Dynamics 365 Emails from Queues
I recently had a small challenge, which I have decided to blog about just in case you face a similar issue. I had a requirement to send emails from a queue but when I created an email in my Dynamics 365 Sales Hub app I could only send emails from users. It will be a common requirement to send emails from queues. As most companies would prefer the emails to be from “info@” or “support@” etc…. Continue...
Customer Service Workspace – Enhanced Case Experience
We can now enable enhanced case forms within the Customer Service Workspace. (Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service app that supports multiple sessions / tabs.) In this blog post I will explain how to enable this new experience and explain some of its features. Enabling the new experience is simple enough. As an admin you just open your “Customer Service Admin Center”, locate the “Case… Continue...
Unified Routing – Preferred Agent Routing (and Agent Scripts)
When we are using Omnichannel for Customer Service we can use Unified Routing to assign conversations to a contact’s preferred agent. This is a useful approach to give a personalized experience to customers. But I’ve always had a concern about the amount of maintenance required to assign a preferred agent to each customer. In this post I will try and address that concern … The link to my… Continue Reading Neil...
Birmingham D365 & Power Platform User Group – 25th May 2023
I can’t believe it is almost May already! Summer is almost here …. We are busy planning the next Birmingham Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Group (D365PPUG). It’s going to be a great free evening of presentations in Birmingham. So I suggest you register ASAP. You can register here on meetup.com. Our next in-person meeting of the year will take place on Thursday 25th May from 18:30 at… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Real-time Analytics
Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service includes “loads” of reporting options. One of my favourite reports right now is the “real-time analytics” dashboard. In this post I will explain why and comment on how you can enable this feature. It might be worth considering that the real-time analytics dashboard is currently a preview feature. (As of April 2023!) And as a preview feature it maybe…...
Power Apps – Show Currency in Canvas App Gallery
I recently had a requirement to display a list of opportunities in a gallery in a canvas app screen. This was easy to achieve but my opportunities were in multiple currencies so how could I show money values with the correct currency symbol? In this post I will explain what I did. You might not know that money values in the Dataverse involve three columns. The first (as you’d expect) holds the… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel Voice – Phone Number Setup
In this post I will explain how I initially connected Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Omnichannel for Customer Service to Azure Communication Services and configured the voice channel. I’d already installed Dynamics 365 Omnichannel and enabled the voice channel. So now is time to end the related trial subscription and provision a phone number using Azure Communication Services! Maybe I am just slow,… Continue Reading Neil...
SLA – Recalculate on reactivation of cases
I have blogged a few times about capabilities around service level agreements (SLAs) within Dynamics 365 Customer Service! This time I plan to cover a specific requirement that frequently arises …. as we often need to understand the impact on our SLA when re-opening a resolved case. Obviously, we’d like to think our agents always fully resolve all issues on their first attempt! But in the… Continue Reading Neil...
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Birmingham – 22nd March 2023
I love Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform but I admit keeping up-to-date with all the latest developments can be a constant challenge. I’ve been very busy recently! So I haven’t given the next release enough attention. Meaning I am really looking forward to our next Birmingham user group …. we plan to focus on all the exciting features expected in the next release. If you are involved with… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – “internal” chat
I recently had a requirement for internal users to chat with agents in the contact center. Maybe (for example) sales app users would want to speak to agents staffing the helpdesk. Dynamics 365 does include Teams integrations which may be useful for this scenario! But what-if you wanted to apply the same routing logic for these internal users as your external customers. Then it might be useful… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Rejecting or missing notifications
When a conversation starts in Microsoft Omnichannel for Customer Service app the agent typically sees a notification including the ability to reject the call. Or if they miss the notification a wait timer will eventually hide the notification. That is great but what happens after the conversation is missed or rejected?? When a conversation is missed or the agent rejects the work item, it will… Continue Reading Neil...
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Birmingham – 25th Jan 2023
Christmas is done the New Year has started and so our attention is turning to our next free Dynamics 365 event in Birmingham! A key focus of which will be a timely presentation on developing your Power Platform and Dynamics 365 career. For details read on … All of us that work with Microsoft products already know how quickly the technology evolves. January is always a good time to consider… Continue Reading Neil...
Unified Routing – Effort Base Routing
Within Dynamics 365 we can now use effort-based routing to assign conversations or records to users. Meaning from Omnichannel for Customer Service we could route case records, web chat conversations and more to agents based on effort estimate models. I will describe this new feature in this post. Before I start, I guess I should suggest why this might be required! Often complex queries can… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Callbacks
The new direct callback feature found in Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service gives customers the ability to request a callback as soon as an agent becomes available. I will explore this new feature in this blog post. The concept of a callback is simple enough! If a customer is going to be in a queue for longer than a specified duration, then instead of them holding we will offer the… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Voicemail
A great new feature in Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service app relates to allowing customers to leave voicemails. In this blog post I will explore this new feature. Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service has included the voice channel for some time now! But the recently deployed 2022 Wave 2 release (aka October 2022) included a new feature to allow customers to leave voicemails… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Overflow (v2)
I have previously blogged about the overflow capabilities in Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service. But the recent 2022 Wave 2 release has given us some additional capabilities. So, in this blog post I will approach this subject again! You can read my previous blog post here. But that post is now largely replaced by the information I will provide here!! I am sure every contact centre… Continue Reading Neil...
Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Birmingham Event – 24th Nov
We are really excited to announce our next Birmingham based face to face event. This time we’ll meet on 24th November. This will be our last Dynamics 365 and Power Platform event of 2022, so don’t miss out. Hopefully you know that Power Pages has been launched as the 5th product making up the Power Platform. We intend to celebrate this by making Power Pages the focus of our event. And as if… Continue Reading Neil...
Field Service – Inspection Reporting
In previous posts I have explained how we can create inspections; in this post I will focus on how we gain access to the inspection data. (To support reporting). You can review my earlier post which gave an overview of inspections here. You may want to create dashboards (both standard Dynamics 365 dashboards and Power BI dashboards) to show inspection activity. Maybe you want to report on the… Continue Reading Neil...
Two Timelines on One Dynamics 365 Form
I noticed almost in passing a new feature in the October “Wave 2” release of Dynamics 365. This is the ability to add more than one timeline per form. In this post I will explore this feature and try and explain why I think this is cool! And along the way I will mention a few other timeline enhancements. You can see above that we have several maker enhancements which allow greater… Continue Reading Neil...
Field Service – Inspections Overview
The Dynamics 365 Field Service app gives us a cool feature to manage inspections. In this post I will give an overview of this feature. What are Field Service Inspections? The Field Service app of Dynamics 365 is aimed at engineers completing work onsite. A common requirement for field engineers is to complete inspections. Maybe this will be part of a preventative maintenance contract when… Continue Reading Neil...
Delete Dynamics 365 Data – Based on an import “Hack”!
I recently saw a “trick” with Dynamics 365 that I thought was quite cool. So, I decided to document it in a blog post. This must be a reasonably common scenario! Our sales team want to purge the system of some old contacts. They were given a spreadsheet listing all the existing data. And people marked the ones that needed to be deleted. Great! But how do I easily remove these contacts from our… Continue Reading Neil...
Unified Routing – Preferred Agent Routing
A new feature is coming to the Unified Routing feature found in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service app …. It will allow us to route work items to agents based on a contact having one or more preferred resources. I will describe this new feature in this post. The use case for this feature is that you may have one or more agents that frequently look after a particular agent. Meaning of… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG Birmingham – September 2022
At the Birmingham HQ of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform user group (D365PPUG) we are busy planning our next face to face event. If you haven’t registered yet I suggest you do so soon. You can register on meetup here … https://www.meetup.com/d365ppug/events/287568717/ Our next event will be on 8th September 2022, kicking off at 6:30pm. Not convinced yet! Maybe you have questions like… Continue Reading Neil...
Customer Service Workspace – Enhanced Interface
Microsoft’s Customer Service Workspace provides a user interface for Dynamics 365 tailored to scenarios often found in contract centres. Meaning agents can jump from conversation to conversation in sessions and use the productivity panel to quickly resolve customer queries. It is already a great interface! But Microsoft plan to enhance it with the 2022 Wave 2 release of Dynamics 365. In this… Continue Reading Neil...
Unified Routing – Sentiment Predictions
Within Microsoft’s Unified Routing for Dynamics 365 we can route work items using AI based sentiment predictions. Say you detect that a customer is really unhappy when starting a conversation in Omnichannel for Customer Service … with this feature you could route the customer to a specific queue possibly staffed by agents who are the most able to handle difficult conversations! I believe… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Search – Canvas App for Custom Search
Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service gives us many of the contact centre features we require out of the box. But in all projects “extra” requirements will surface that need a custom approach. In this blog post and video, I will discuss how we can customize the customer service workspace interface using canvas apps. In my projects I have often seen two requirements which need thought… Continue Reading...
Customer Service Workspace – Presence Issue
Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service is fantastic … but if like me you have had a problem with the agent presence in the Customer Service Workspace app just spinning and spinning you might have a problem to resolve! When we load the customer service workspace app the first thing that happens is the agent’s presence is set. Whilst this happens, we see spinning timer. But occasionally… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG Birmingham – Speaker Announcement June 22nd
Have you registered for our Dynamics 365 and Power Platform user group event on 22nd June in Birmingham? If not, I suggest you register ASAP. Our next Birmingham Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User Group meeting will be on Wednesday 26th Feb 2020 from 6:30 pm until 9:00 pm. Save this date in your diary! The Wesleyan has once again kindly agreed to host our event at Colmore Circus, Queensway,… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG Birmingham – Announcements
At the Birmingham division of “Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Group” (D365PPUG) we are busy planning our first to face to face event since before COVID changed everything. Plus, we have several changes to our user group and also things are evolving at a national level. Read on for details … Our next meeting will be on June 22nd. Like our previous meetings we are lucky to be able to… Continue Reading Neil...
Unified Routing – Custom Assignment Rules
Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service makes use of Unified Routing to allocate (assign) work items to agents. Typically, once a conversation or record is routed to a queue, we use either “Highest capacity” or “Round Robin” logic to assign work items to the next available agent. But we can also create custom assignment methods to handle more complex scenarios, in this post I will explain…...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Emergency Situations
I have recently been helping a company in Texas implement Microsoft’s new Omnichannel voice channel. They presented me with an “interesting” requirement … as call centers in Texas may be located in tornado alley! Meaning they might need to suddenly leave as a twister is due. This got me thinking as to be able to quickly alert customers that you have closed due to an emergency might be a… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – IVR BOT Skills Based Routing
In this blog post I hope to describe how you can setup an IVR BOT for Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service voice channel. And how the BOT can question the customer on their needs then trigger skills-based routing to ensure the best agent answers the query. I may also mention a few “tricks / tips” I have applied in my IVR BOT setup. There are several parts to this process … IVR BOT… Continue Reading Neil...
D365PPUG Birmingham Meeting – June 22nd 2022
AT LAST … we are back with a Dynamics 365 and Power Platform face to face event in Birmingham.Our next Birmingham Dynamics 365 & Power Platform User Group meeting will be on Wednesday 26th Feb 2020 from 6:30 pm until 9:00 pm. Save this date in your diary! The Wesleyan has once again kindly agreed to host our event at Colmore Circus, Queensway, Birmingham, B4 6AR. This is next to Snow Hill… Continue Reading Neil...
Omnichannel for Customer Service – Interruptible IVR BOTs
Within Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service app with the voice channel we can use a Power Virtual Agent as an IVR BOT. These are powerful, but I have found that as the BOT makes statements or asks questions customer can skip ahead. This can be useful but sometimes we want to ensure the customer hears certain messages in full. In this post I will explain how we can control when a BOT… Continue Reading Neil...