Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps organizations offer end-to-end customer support services across multiple channels to meet customer needs, wherever they may be. The app tracks customer issues through cases, manages performance and productivity in the workspace dashboard, tracks customer requests across channels, and provides customers with assisted and self-service through a variety of scenarios. With the upcoming 2021 Release Wave 2 updates, the app will see overall enhancements to AI insights, embedded analytics, collaboration tools, and bolstered case management abilities. 

Full notes are available to learn about all the upcoming Release Wave 2 feature enhancements for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, but here are some highlights users can expect with the fast-approaching update. 

Agent experience and productivity tools

Agent experience is the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Updates made to the workspace interface will improve satisfaction in service delivery by enabling agents to take customer requests from multiple channels at a time, interact across multiple apps without losing case context, and take advantage of enhanced productivity tools for long-lived, thorough conversations with customers with minimal heavy lifting on the agent’s end. 

The inbox view will be integrated with the Customer Service workspace and Omnichannel for Customer Service apps, which will allow agents to navigate between the two powerful applications for a more comprehensive view at cases and conversations with customers. This feature will also enhance customized views, filters, and sort capabilities across all channels in the inbox view so agents can better triage incoming requests and prioritize the most important cases. Improvements to the workspace usability will simplify default navigation views, access to productivity tools, and case forms enhanced with the option to reorder command buttons within the case entity ribbon. 

Agents who use Dynamics 365 Customer Service can look forward to new productivity enhancements that will allow them to easily collaborate with anyone within their organization, such as agents from other departments, supervisors, customer service peers, or support experts. Access to AI-driven insights will provide suggestions of agents who solved similar cases so relevant information is always within reach but requires little effort to access it. 

Using new, embedded Microsoft Teams functionality, agents can better collaborate in a sleek interface, as well as manage appointments and scheduling from within the Customer Service workspace. The embedded chat window also means that customer issues can be resolved using case information without ever leaving the conversation—and chats over Teams will be linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience. 

Case and knowledge base management

Cases are the core component of the customer issue resolution process, and agents can expect enhancements to case management tools and processes. Updates will enhance the organization of the workspace so agents can view and search for case subjects easier and faster, ultimately decreasing the time needed to resolve each case. Cases help businesses track customer issues by making use of available information for comprehensive case context, and all relevant support history and correspondence is accessible in a unified view, so agents are equipped with what they need for each customer interaction. 

Tweaks will be made to the organization of the subject tree hierarchy, which will allow agents to better navigate through the topics most relevant to their case. Better search capabilities to easier view results and move through the subject tree hierarchy interface, as well as new subject control features like the ability to search across parent and child entities. Agents can also look forward to improvements to the scheduling experience, as well as the ability to manage appointments, create and manage cases, and resolute issues from Internet of Things (IoT)-based alerts.  

Agents can expedite their troubleshooting process by utilizing knowledge articles that contain information to address a variety of issues commonly encountered by customers. Articles can be written to explain resolutions to common issues, specific product features, FAQs, or news and updates that agents should generally be aware of. Release Wave 2 will enhance AI capabilities that will trigger automatic suggestions of knowledge articles, as well as streamlining the process of creating and managing knowledge articles.  

The ability to use templates will simplify article creation, and AI-suggested descriptions, keywords, and titles can improve each article’s searchability and allow more agents to find relevant information for every type of case they may encounter. Knowledge articles can also be managed and updated with ease, so knowledge bases are well-maintained, relevant, and accurate. 

Omnichannel voice

Updates to Omnichannel for Customer Service will provide managers and supervisors with enhanced insights and analytics as well as overall feature updates. Call recordings will be stored natively in Dynamics 365 and will be tied to specific conversations, calls, and customers, while real-time call analytics will generate transcripts with AI-generated suggestions to offer solutions based on call sentiment analysis. Call intelligence features will include voice-specific metrics like talk-to-listen ratio, talking speed, and measured sentiment so supervisors can best understand how each call went and identify strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas of improvement.  

Managers and supervisors will also have enhanced embedded analytics using Power BI capabilities like metrics for the number of inbound calls, calls handled, abandon rates, average talk times, and the average speed to answer calls—across channels, queues, agents, and call topics. Omnichannel for Customer Service allows supervisors to listen in on phone conversations and join a conversation, if needed, review live transcripts, and monitor ongoing calls in queues which helps supervisors increase their likelihood of resolving customer issues, enforcing proper business practices, and identifying training opportunities. 

Timeline and unified routing features

The timeline feature is used across Dynamics 365 applications that allows users to capture important activities meetings and appointments, emails, tasks, emails, client notes, and more, to ensure that all interactions with the customer are tracked and visible with timestamps to provide context for each activity and customer interaction. Upcoming updates to the timeline interface will allow users to bring their own data to their timelines, so every crucial bit of information is accessible and accounted for.  

Dynamics 365 uses an intelligent, unified routing service, which utilizes a combination of AI models and set rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules consider customer-specified criteria, such as priority and auto-skills matching. Improvements to the routing service will use optimized AI capabilities to automatically classify, route, and assign work items, eliminating the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations. Improvements will be made to historical analytics within unified routing scenarios to give organizations a better overview of each channel’s performance so routing can be optimized to run at maximum efficiency and improve customer satisfaction with each experience.