listening to our customers and keeping a focus on the horizon, Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to provide you with the ability to differentiate your brand by consistently delivering exceptional customer service. Our vision is clear: to help you earn customers for life. Each new feature helps solve business challenges, empowering every manager and agent alike with the tools necessary to succeed. Every day we work to further our commitment to helping you deliver proactive, personalized customer experiences that increase loyalty, enhance engagement, and retain your customers.
Extending communication channels
In keeping with our promise, we continue to make enhancements to the omnichannel experience within Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Today we offer an array of engagement channels including live chat, email, virtual agents, Facebook Messenger, and short message service (SMS), and the list of channels continues to grow quickly in the coming months (see what’s on the way by checking out our release notes). With the supported channels today, customers can pick and choose which channel or combination of channels to use when contacting customer service. It’s the ease and convenience of moving from channel to channel while engaging customer service and never having to repeat the same information twice that creates a stellar omnichannel experience.
As customer expectations rise, we continue to innovate by providing more and better ways for you to connect with your customers and provide a personalized experience that earns customers for life. To this end, we’re sharing the following list of features that became generally available in December:
- Facebook Messenger.Allow customers to connect with you asynchronously through a channel they’re already familiar with. With the deployment of Facebook Messenger, organizations give customers the control to communicate when and where they want.
- Proactive chat. Organizations can invite online customers to chat based on custom criteria such as specific browsing patterns on the website and control the chat experience using personalized trigger messages and rules. When the customer accepts the invitation, the agent receives a notification and starts conversing.
- Microsoft Power Virtual Agents integration. Organizations can automate routine conversations by routing incoming chat requests to AI-powered virtual agents created with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. Organizations can enable seamless escalation of conversations from the Virtual Agent to a human agent while providing complete conversation context to human agents.
Customers can reach support through Facebook Messenger while agents handle conversations through the same, common conversation experience across all channels.
Modernizing agent productivity
Expanding and unifying channel communications within our omnichannel experience is just the beginning. We’re also focused on increasing operational efficiencies and agent productivity for KPIs such as increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) and lower average handling time.
The following time-saving, productivity-enhancing features also became generally available in January:
- Agent scripts. Organizations can save time and ensure continuity by configuring scripts that provide step-by-step guidance to agents. Steps can be configured and automated based on session types, for example, chat or phone calls.
- Smart assist. Build and deploy a chatbot that provides real-time recommendations to agents during a conversation based on contextual queues to help agents resolve cases faster.
- Skills-based routing. Improve the efficiency of automatic work distribution by directly routing conversations to the right agent based on their individual skills and proficiencies.
- Empower agents to identify and automate repetitive tasks with a single click. Add macros to agent scripts, smart assist, or other productivity features to automate tasks like resolving a case after updating a field, assigning it to a different user after capturing notes or sending an acknowledgment email with contextual data from the session.
Agents leverage productivity tools such as Smart Assist to recommend supporting content, agent scripts with macros to guide conversations and automate complex tasks, self service to understand the customer’s support portal journey, and customer sentiment analysis trending in real-time.
Deepening the customer connection
Customers expect a seamless experience across every touchpoint. Understanding who your customer is, where they’ve been and where they’re going in the customer journey, and how they feel at any point in time adds to each interaction, building a rich, positive customer experience.
To that end, the following features became generally available in January:
- Self-service history. Agents can view the customer’s real-time navigation history to better understand the customer’s online journey prior to reaching out for assisted support and where to guide the customer next.
- Sentiment analysis. The ability to understand how the customer is feeling through sentiment indicators in ongoing messaging sessions provides supervisors and agents the opportunity to act on that data to ensure a positive customer experience. Multi-language sentiment scoring is enabled by default with more than 40 languages scored. We’ve also included updates to icons and accessibility.
The journey ahead
Microsoft is listening, and we’re continually adapting and innovating to provide you with the tools you need to consistently deliver exceptional customer service. We continue to invest in features that bring value to you, your customer service organization, and most of all, to your customers. We’re striving to build intuitive, sophisticated, easy-to-use tools that enhance your service delivery and empower your service representatives to exceed customer and organizational expectations.
Stay tuned over the coming months as we continue to enhance and deliver upon our customer service roadmap, filled with new features and innovations that will help improve your customer experience, differentiate your brand, and ultimately maintain that competitive edge.
