Microsoft Dynamics 365 has introduced a new feature and has revolutionized the way Bookmarks look like. They have enabled saving reports as bookmarks. If you want to personalize books to filter reports then you need to take a few easy steps.

Quantum Jump by Microsoft Dynamics 365

You must have a few dashboards which you visit regularly for various reasons to monitor charts, reports and any other visual breakdowns of your customer services for insights and KPIs; and I know you must be applying the same filters over and over.

You would be very happy to know that you can save all that effort and adjust report filters to surf effortlessly. All that struggle can be directed into one step “Save the filtered view as a bookmark”

After taking this step you can click the dashboards to open just the way you want.

Once you are successful in creating report bookmarks you can add necessary changes anytime to it.

• Just Selected Bookmarks and
• Go to Update Bookmark
• One-click and everything has been reset

Moreover, you can easily switch between several saved bookmarks; an easy way is to keep a separate folder for your bookmarks. You will be happy to know that these bookmarks are available for knowledge analytics reports and historical analysis reports.

More to this!

Microsoft intends to add more features such as bookmark groups, bookmark slideshows and much more. Stay tuned to us for more exciting news.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customers Service suite offers diversified customer care. In order to simplify and unify administration across the suite, Microsoft is going to introduce a new Customer Service admin center to replace the previously existing standalone administration experiences. This unified admin center brings together the management of the Customer Service Hub, Omnichannel admin center, and app profile manager. All these standalone experiences will expire in April 2023. Much needed information for the admin officers and IT professionals on how to benefit from this unified admin centered is being given beforehand.

Start using the unified admin center now

This unified admin center is much more efficient than the old standalone admin experiences it is replacing, as it provides the user with the opportunity of setting up and managing of channels, access to information containing articles, queues and routings, automation of record creation, agent experience profiles, insights, schedules, and more.

Here are just a few of the improvements in the new unified admin center:

• Experiences across the, Omnichannel admin center, Customer Service Hub and app profile manager have been consolidated through the unification of the admin center
• It also provides step by step guidance for setting up a channel
• A newly added search button has been added to enable the customers easily find administrator settings.
• A remade site-map is much more task friendly and adaptable to various sets of capabilities provisioned. For example, many features are automatically available with Omnichannel for Customer Service.
• There are overviewing pointers and headers which lead to deep links for managing features.
• Different capabilities are represented landing pages for every feature.

Deprecation of standalone admin experiences

Some of the standalone admin experiences to be discarded after the advent of Unified Customer Service in April 2023 are given below:

• Service management area in the Customer Service Hub
• Omnichannel admin center
• App profile manager

Starting in October 2022, the Omnichannel admin center along with the service management area in the Customer Service Hub will no longer be visible in and after October 2022. Although it will be optional for the user to bring them back, but use of new Customer Service admin is strongly recommended at the soonest.

April 2023 will be the end of the app profile manager enabling standalone experiences.

Action needed: Move to unified admin center now

Any organization using any of the previous standalone experiences are strongly recommended to shift themselves to this new development. The good thing is the app is automatically installed in all Customer Services Organizations and can be assessed on the Dynamics 365 app page.

Also, all the present setups will be available in the admin center of the Customers Services. In case of needing any customizations the user can migrate these tools to the new app.

To enable simple and unified communication between agents and customers, Dynamics Customers recently introduced Microsoft Dynamics Omnichannel for Customer Service which provides clients with a unified platform for customer data, channels for communication, and tools.

The idea of such an application as an Omnichannel Contact Center has emerged out of the Call Center. But it is an improvement on Call Center which is only used for making and taking phone calls while a Contact Center is multi-channeled. With the overall advancement and improvement in technology and change in customers’ attitudes the Contact Center has widened its range from only Voice and Email to many more features like web chat, SMS test messaging, and even Social Media.

Microsoft’s solution

Since Microsoft has added a Voice channel, it has become easier for it to offer an “all-in-one digital contact center solution“.  This enables businesses to use various built-in Artificial Intelligence tools across various channels. It involves the use and leveraging of these tools for intelligent routing, transcriptions, Virtual Agents, sentiment analysis, and similar case recommendations. There are various channels available for incorporation into the Microsoft Platform:

• Chat
• SMS
• Voice
• Microsoft Teams
• Social Media
• Email

Dynamics Omnichannel also shares some of the uniquely Microsoft features, for example, in-built integration with all 365 Microsoft applications. This enables the customers to easily integrate the entire Agents’ tools and that of the management tools. Other Microsoft products such as Power Apps and Portals, Azure Chat Bot, or Dynamics Customers can be easily integrated without much effort.

Microsoft Dataverse stores all the data using the open-source Common Data Model. This gives business access to hundreds of pre-built connectors and third-party applications. Moreover, it also makes reporting and pulling in data from all across Microsoft applications robust and easy.

Who is this for?

All the organizations and companies who have either already signed up for Microsoft Dynamics or are considering doing so can use Omnichannel for optimization and improvement of their setups.

With the introduction of Customer Service, Admin Center Microsoft Dynamics 365 has unified and simplified admiration across the Dynamics 365 Service suite. Microsoft is introducing new features for its user and will remove the customer service Hub, Omnichannel admin center, and app profile manager by the end of April 2023. They have taken this step to introduce a unified admin center for their users.

If you haven’t tried the new admin center do it today because you will find it very efficient to use. It provides everything you need in one place; you can manage your cases, knowledge articles, channels, queues, and routings. Furthermore, you can create automatic records, gain insights, schedule meetings, calendars, agent experience profiles, and many more.

Why you should prefer Customer Service Admin Center:

Everything including the Omnichannel Admin center, Application profile manager, and customer service hub is consolidated in one place.

There is a complete guide available for setting up a new channel.

The search feature is also there to find administrator settings.

With the help of a reorganized site map, you have now access to provisioned Omnichannel for Customer service.

Overview pages include an at-a-glance feature with links to manage all features.

Landing pages provide an overview of all the capabilities.

Deprecation of Standalone experience

As mentioned above, outdated features will be deprecated and Microsoft will end support of the following experience by the end of April 2023.

• Service management area in the Customer Service Hub
• Omnichannel admin center
• App profile manager

These above-mentioned features will be hidden automatically from October 2022. You still have the option to bring them back however, you should use the feature as soon as possible to get yourself acquainted with the changes; because all you need is to migrate to the new app and all the existing setup and information will appear automatically there.

In case of any help, you can contact Microsoft Support!

Dynamics 365 Customer Service focuses on promoting consumer engagement by facilitating users in meeting customer needs by offering prompt, tailored service. It may assist your business in engaging with consumers, motivating your workforce, and discovering new ways to add value. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service may help your business boost customer loyalty and revenue by allowing users to participate on their own terms, whether through self-help or staff support.

What is the purpose of Dynamics 365 for Customer Service?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is a feature-rich, customer-centric solution intended to give the greatest customer service experience practicable. Furthermore, because all of these solutions are built on top of Microsoft’s Data verse data architecture, they provide a unified approach to performance, allowing organizations to use exactly the capabilities they demand.

Furthermore, the AI-enabled agent experience, multiple-channel handling, and the deployment of the necessary productivity tools all contribute to a seamless and effective workflow for your workforce. Furthermore, clients may employ knowledge and insight to answer particular questions, and representatives are simply a Google search away if they want additional support.

What are the perks of using Dynamics 365 for Customer Service?

• Solution for self-service: Activate high-quality virtual agents for easy self-service solutions to provide continuous client care.
• Simple and rapid resolution: No matter how complex the problem, Dynamics 365 offers AI-powered chatbots for simple and quick redressal and resolution.
• Highly adaptable: Through a 360-degree perspective of your consumers, you can develop tailored customer interaction and communicate with them via their chosen channel.
• One platform for everyone: Switch between completed and unfinished chores with ease thanks to an integrated dashboard that is user-friendly and straightforward to use.
• Customer feedback: Using Dynamics 365’s CRM solution, create and distribute online surveys. Analyze and act on your consumers’ comments all at once.
• Keep track of performance: Real-time business insights are provided through performance metrics such as case volume, priority cases, average resolve time, active cases, and many more.
• Integration of Power Apps: You can improve Dynamics 365 Customer Service even further by connecting other Dynamics 365 products such as Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing. The integrated features of these power apps can assist you in providing exceptional customer service and other relevant sectors.

What are the Customer Service functionalities of D365?

Customer Service Center:

At its most basic, the Dynamics Customer Service Hub provides a consistent interface for team members to access all account and provider problem information.

Entitlements:

In Dynamics 365, entitlements dictate the amount of help offered to clients. Customer Support in D365 will compute the outstanding case/hours permitted depending on the requirements stated as long as the entitlement is active, allowing client service professionals to focus only on addressing issues.

Voice of the customer:

This feature provides customers with the most alternatives for swiftly and simply gathering feedback in your Dynamics 365 installation. Anyone may create inquiry forms using the simple drag-and-drop builder.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs):

If an SLA is established for a customer, the SLA information will display under a tab at the bottom of each case created for that consumer, along with continuing timings depending on the contract.

Knowledge Articles:

Managing knowledge articles with Dynamics 365 offers various benefits, including the ability to keep several versions of the same knowledge article. Users can also translate and share expertise with customers.

Service Activities and Scheduling in Dynamics 365:

Dealing with Customers Businesses may coordinate resources to help visitors by developing Service Activities with clients. Different source groupings may be defined, and certain personnel can be dispatched on visits based on their availability.

How do you put Dynamics 365 for Customer Service into action?

Because deployments necessitate a multi-tiered strategy to ensure that the system is implemented in conjunction with other related technologies. Here are the stages for implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

1. Needs assessment and implementation

The initial step is to meet with the management team and discuss your company’s basic software requirements.

2. Requirements analysis

The team begins the project after knowing the fundamental demands and then understands the precise criteria and specifications of the solutions you desire.

3. Solution design and development

Following analysis, the team works on developing features based on the needs of the company or modifying a feature from the current set of combinations offered by the Dynamics 365 platform.

4. Implementation of the solutions

Dynamics 365 for Customer Service is now available to help you establish top-tier customer service and communication for successful management.

Furthermore, the solution upgrades are sent out with regular check-ups, training, and testing to understand the solution’s efficacy. A company’s dependability may be determined by its customer service. Maintaining a good, long-term relationship with your customers is the key to an ever-expanding client base. Regular monitoring of all exchanges makes future difficulties easier to resolve, ensuring complete client satisfaction.

Customers want organisations to communicate with them to gather opinions on products and services, and process openness helps to establish consumer confidence. Two new capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service have been released in trial, allowing enterprises to solicit customer feedback and create thriving communities.

The first functionality, the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community Preview app, allows community managers and moderators to crowdsource portfolios of ideas and respond rapidly to community comments.

The New Community (preview) portal template provides the second capability, allowing enterprises to offer their consumers wonderful and interactive experiences when expressing proposals in community forums and collaborating to shape the future of the products they use by upvoting, discussing, sharing, and reporting ideas submitted in the community.

Check out the major public review portals for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Edge, which are now powered by Customer Service Community, to see demonstrations of these features in action.

Community managers and moderators’ abilities

The Community app for Dynamics 365 Customer Service gives community managers and moderators the tools they need to record and analyse ideas. They can be responsive and “close the loop” as members of the community provide feedback. Managers of communities can now:

• Colours, a custom header and footer, and easy connections to digital assets can all be customised to reflect their organisation’s brand.
• Users must agree to the terms of service and privacy policies.
• Create and administer discussion boards for ideas.
• Manage content, including moderation and merging of duplicate concepts.
• Respond to community input and update the status of ideas or requests.
• At the forum level, you can manage users and assign security roles.

To understand more about the features of the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community app, try it out in your sandbox first.

Users are immersed in a thriving community

The Modern Community (preview) portal template has all of the features users need to share fresh ideas and cooperate at scale. Users can do the following:

• Lists of ideas can be browsed, searched, filtered, and sorted.
• Submit new concepts. To avoid repetitions, this flow contains autosuggestion of existing concepts.
• Upvoting, commenting, sharing, and following ideas are all ways to collaborate and engage in a community.
• Report stuff that isn’t appropriate.
• Keep track of the status of the concepts they’re working on.

Steps to take next

Customer Service Community Preview is now live on the public cloud and ready to use. To discover how to install and use the Community app, consult the documentation.

• A brief video introduction about the community app and portal is also available.
• With our demo portal, you can get a feel for Community.
• Use the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community forum to ask our staff questions or to see what others have asked. Select Community from the Filters list in the form when submitting your question.
• Visit the Dynamics 365 customer service ideas forum to offer your thoughts and suggestions on how to improve the Community app.

Please feel free to contact the Customer Service Community staff via email as well.

Customer service management is one of the most crucial aspects of running a successful business. Customers are, after all, the fuel that keeps your business operating. Unsatisfied clients will almost certainly reduce your company’s sales and business, just as low-quality fuel might harm an engine.

“A satisfied customer may tell a friend, but a dissatisfied customer will tell the world.”

This is where Dynamics 365 comes in to save the day for your company. Dynamics 365’s Support Module helps you to organise and track customer service activity in your company.

You may use Dynamics 365 to:

• Track client issues using cases.
• Automate case assignments based on a variety of factors, including customer type, industry, and product type.
• With customised views and dashboards, you can easily manage cases by individual or team.
• In the knowledge base, share information.
• Make queues and assign cases to the appropriate channels.
• Service level agreements are used to create and track service levels (SLAs).
• Using entitlements, define service terms.
• Reports and dashboards can help you manage your performance and productivity.
• Make services and schedule them.

Management of Cases

Cases are incident-based services that Microsoft Dynamics 365 service management is meant to enable. A knowledge base is also included in Dynamics 365, which may be used to record guidance, answer client questions, and analyse information from previous events for future usage. You can view current and past incidents for that account by tracking new support incidents under the contact or account.

Agents can anticipate demands and personalise every engagement with a 360-degree picture of each customer’s journey.

Having a more linked picture across the firm will also improve collaboration within your customer care teams. Your team will have a complete picture of the support history, helping them to make smarter decisions and build stronger customer relationships.

Contracts

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can also monitor your sources, such as times and supplies. Consider using Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a multi-functional tool that incorporates resources from various Microsoft Dynamics CRM users, groups, facilities, and equipment.

Time and supply of available materials might be taken into account in your service activities. When you utilise Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you’ll never run out of inventory or be overbooked.

Scheduling

Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s built-in calendar capability while managing various resources.

• Within the service activity, reserving or requesting a time for a resource or piece of equipment is simple.
• With a centralised view of both service calendars and resource availability, you can effectively schedule and manage your team.
• To account for vacations or schedule changes, you can manage user work hours.
• Make it simple for your customer care staff to manage and set expectations with your clients by providing clarity across departments.

Analytics and Business Intelligence

• By utilising out-of-the-box service reporting, you can measure and track the effectiveness and efficiency of your service department.
• With customisable, built-in real-time dashboards, you can easily manage your data.
• Analyse your data and evaluate your individual, team, business unit, and organisational performance.

These are just a few of the customer service capabilities that make Dynamics 365 so useful! To learn more about how Dynamic Consultants Group and Dynamics 365 may help you improve your bottom line and develop your business, contact us.

With customer service and customer experience beginning to trump price and product as brand differentiators, significant investments have been made in enabling customers with new options to participate, provide feedback, and share their experiences in recent years.

Despite this, most employees are attempting to engage the empowered customer with the same siloed technology and stagnant knowledge repositories that they’ve been using (or not using) for years. As we move forward, this is creating a customer service and customer experience divide that will further separate leaders from laggards.

Think about the following data:  72% of consumers expect a customer care person to know their contact information, product information, and service history as soon as they engage with a brand for supported service, and 90 percent anticipate consistency and continuity across channels from a brand.

According to forrester research, just 36% of contact centres have adopted multichannel integrations to give consistent experiences; 70% of contact centres do not educate agents to support various channels, and 56% do not provide an agent-facing knowledge management solution. Furthermore, a third of Gen Y workers believe their home technology is superior to their workplace technology.

Microsoft has collaborated with Nucleus Research to create a customer service maturity guidebook, including agent empowerment as one of the pillars. Nucleus conducted interviews with roughly 40 brands (all of which are Microsoft customers) to assess the characteristics of customer service organisations at three levels of maturity: functional, tactical, and dynamic (which represents the most advanced or mature companies).

Companies with high customer service maturity, according to Nucleus, empower agents through technology and organisational structure, “both through offering predictive and prescriptive advice to agents within the application and expediting escalation processes.”

“Not only does this reduce resolution time, but it also allows companies to do more with their agencies (such as identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities),” says analyst Rebecca Wettemann, who cites increased agent productivity, speeded up time to productive output, and lower agent loss of customers as primary benefits.

10 Ways to Empower Customer Service Representatives

For all organisations endeavouring to inspire their agents and forge forwards in terms of customer service maturity. Here are ten suggestions that have proved effective for our clients as they progressed through the responsive, strategic, and dynamic stages of maturity:

1. Offer a scorecard for each agent’s productivity. Set standards and goals for agents, and provide weekly statistics that include customer satisfaction scores, tickets resolved, knowledgebase articles recommended, and so on.
2. Enhance your service replies and delivery by using agent feedback. Collect agent input to improve operations, efficiency, and a self-service centralised repository with solutions to the most commonly asked client questions.
3. Provide a central knowledge base for your agents. Allow all agents to access a single knowledgebase of product, service, and customer service information so that they can provide up-to-date, consistent responses and train more quickly.
4. In information pieces, include the optimal course of action. By developing and equipping agents with next best action information, you may increase agent productivity while lowering frustration and handling times.
5. Employees with different skills and responsibilities should be empowered. Allow employees to work on a variety of tasks to keep them motivated and avoid boredom (e.g. provide support one week, work on knowledgebase the next).
6. Encourage agents to collaborate in real time and share their knowledge. To assist in the resolution of trending issues, use community and/or social tools.
7. Collaborate with teams outside of customer service to foster a customer-centric mindset. To drive transformation, customer-focused culture, and processes, lead through customer service.
8. Create an agent service desk that combines all communication modes. Combine channels for omnichannel service delivery so that agents can effortlessly switch from one channel to the next while interacting with customers.
9. Through training and fair remuneration restrictions, empower employees to address problems and make decisions without escalation. Agents should be able to fix more difficult or escalated issues or pay compensation to irritated customers without waiting for clearance.
10. For tailored and contextual service, provide a 360-degree perspective of the customer. Agents can see client contact information, product history, sentiment analysis, and service history by giving them an expanded view of customer information or by creating a bespoke widget.

Request a Report

In this new guidebook study, learn about the characteristics of each level of customer service maturity, metrics-based customer success stories, and Nucleus Research’s thoughts and guidance on how to incrementally enhance customer service:

Build it and they will come, as any company or organisation that has deployed a customer self-service offering knows. Will they, however, be delighted when they arrive? When they go, are you satisfied?

Forrester estimates that needless service costs incurred as a result of channel escalation cost $22 million per year in the retail industry alone. It all adds up to the fact that companies and organisations lose a lot of money when customers can’t efficiently self-serve. McKinsey estimates that the cost of supported service is over 10 times that of self-service in an analysis of the relative costs of self-service and supported service.

But what distinguishes one customer self-service installation from the other? It all starts with a strong desire to succeed. Was/is the primary motivation to save money by deflecting calls and emails or reducing the need for employees? Or was it to improve internal (employee) and external (customer) procedures, efficiency, engagement, and contentment?

If it was the former, setting up the self-service offering would undoubtedly require more time, study, and money at first, but that extra time and investment pays off in the long term. According to Gartner Research, at least 80% of firms that do not plan their self-service implementations would incur greater customer support expenses and will not realise the savings and advantages planned by the end of the year.

“In fact, an insufficiency of a well-defined self-service tactic is likely to lead to siloed actions across channels and misaligned objectives across the business, resulting in reduced advantages, an incapability to meet customer needs, and an increase in customer churn,” says Helen Casewell, UX research manager for Microsoft and MyCustomer’s 2015 Self-Service Guide.

Rather than focusing on cost-cutting, the focus should be on understanding what customers want from self-service, making investments in knowledge contribution and monitoring, and then making it as simple as possible for customers to get to knowledge or resolution by removing unnecessary steps or roadblocks in the self-service process, while automating as much as possible behind the scenes.

Remarks “If you get the balance right, the result will be an optimised customer interaction process and decreased cost for the business at the same time,” said Jeremy Payne, international group marketing director at Enghouse Interactive, who was also interviewed for the self-service guide.

By prioritising the client over cost savings, the latter is nevertheless achieved, and usually more successfully.

In terms of self-service, where does your brand stand?

Take the survey and you’ll receive a report

Users use self-help on a company site more than any other customer care channel, according to Forrester Research. More than 90% of worldwide consumers now expect a brand or organisation to have a self-service option, according to Microsoft’s State of Multichannel Customer Service Report.

What is the gold standard for self-service options among customer service and business professionals? Take this poll in collaboration with industry analyst Esteban Kolsky to obtain a copy of a future study that will help your company benchmark and then lead the way in client self-service.

We’re always interested in hearing from you, and we’d love to hear from you. Please visit the dynamic 365 community, join the conversation, ask questions, and share your thoughts!