More and more customers are using process orchestration between their front-office and back-office business applications. Low-code and no-code tools are proliferating. Fusion teamsin which pro developers, IT admins, and citizen developers collaborate to build softwareare popular. It’s no wonder the job of administering these applications has become a growing challenge. We’re making that job a little easier by bringing the management of Finance and Operations apps and other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps into a single experience for the first time.

While other Dynamics 365 apps are managed in the Power Platform admin center, today admins must manage Finance and Operations apps in a dedicated portal called Lifecycle Services. Over the next several release waves, we’re making Finance and Operations apps available to be installed and managed in the Power Platform admin center.

Manage Dynamics 365 applications all in one place

Today, every instance of a Finance and Operations application is considered an environment. Customers are entitled to a sandbox and a production environment when they purchase licenses for Finance, Supply Chain Management, Commerce, or Project Operations, and they deploy these environments in Lifecycle Services.

In the Power Platform admin center, you have more flexibility. A single environment can govern many Dynamics 365 apps, such as Marketing, Sales, and Field Service, as well as hosting Power Automate flows and Power Apps. The improvement we’re introducing is that Finance and Operations apps can be installed in the Power Platform environment model like any other Dynamics 365 application.

Giving Finance and Operations admins more choices

Administrators have differing needs based on the applications their company uses. If you don’t need Power Platform capabilities, you can continue to use Lifecycle Services to manage your Finance and Operations environments and apps. In the future, we’ll provide a way to migrate environments from Lifecycle Services to the admin center, should you choose to do so.

If you want to manage all your Dynamics 365 apps in a single environment and admin center, the new capability is available for Project Operations trials. Project Operations environments come with dual-write, business events, and virtual entity support, drastically reducing setup time. We’re adding support for Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce trials, and will support sandbox and production environments in the future as well. Eventually, customers will be able to choose the Power Platform admin center for all their administration and governance needs.

Next steps

Sign up for a Project Operations trial and give us your feedback!

The post Manage Finance and Operations apps in the Power Platform admin center appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Imagine your eagerly awaited brand-new speakers finally arriveand they don’t work. The first thing you do is call customer support, expecting a quick response. You hear crickets instead. How likely are you to buy from that company again? According to a recent study, two-thirds of shoppers would stop doing business with a brand after just two to three poor customer service experiences. Organizations let customers go unattended at their peril. Use of a fallback queue to catch misrouted queries is imperative.

One fallback queue for multiple divisions is a customer service nightmare

Businesses use fallback queues to make sure no customer query falls into a crack. For organizations with multiple divisions, however, managing a fallback queue becomes a tedious task if only one queue is used for this purpose.

In this scenario, supervisors must be hyper-vigilant for any work that’s sent to the fallback queue. Agents in different divisions who are assigned to a monolithic queue may receive cases that they aren’t proficient in solving. They may also lack access to data outside of their division that they need to resolve a case.

Introducing workstream-level fallback queues in unified routing

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is introducing an enhancement in unified routing to address these issues: workstream-level fallback queues.

Workstreams group the same type of customer queries. We’ve also seen businesses using workstreams to differentiate between their internal groups or divisions. Organizations can now create different fallback queues for each of their workstreams in the unified routing settings. Whenever the routing system can’t identify the queue to which an incoming work item should go, it routes the query to a workstream-level fallback queue.

Administrators can create a new fallback queue or choose an existing queue to use as a fallback. They can assign a fallback queue to a different workstream at any time. Admins can assign agents to fallback queues according to their business requirements.

Managing fallback queues is easy with Power Automate

It isn’t enough to have a fallback queue for each workstream, however. Businesses also need to monitor their routing systems so that the fallback queues themselves don’t become a customer query graveyard. Organizations can use a Power Automate workflow to notify internal stakeholders, like supervisors and administrators, whenever a work item is routed to a fallback queue. Here’s how:

Send an email when a work item is routed to a workstream-level fallback queue

When a query is routed to a queue, the queue is associated with the work item in the Conversations table. We’ll use that action to trigger our flow. In the same action, we’ll determine whether the associated queue is a fallback queue by matching its ID. That’s Step 1 in the screenshot below.

Steps 2 and 3 get the name of the workstream and the “friendly” name of the fallback queue. The friendly name will be more helpful than the queue ID when we include it in the email that we send in Step 4.

Step 1: When a work item is routed to a queue, determine whether the queue is a fallback queue

1. Open your fallback queue in the Customer Service admin center.
2. In the URL, find the string that starts with “queueRecordId”%3A” and ends with “%2C and copy everything between the quotation marks. This is the queue ID.
   For example, if the URL contains “queueRecordId”%3A”5ee5b674-7eb9-ec11-983f-0022483d69c5″%2C, the queue ID is 5ee5b674-7eb9-ec11-983f-0022483d69c5.

3. In Power Automate, create an automated cloud flow. Select the Microsoft Dataverse trigger When a row is added, modified or deleted.
4. Set Change type to Modified, Table name to Conversations, and Scope to Organization.
5. In Select columns, enter the following string: msdyn_cdsqueueid
6. In Filter rows, enter the following string, replacing {queue ID} with the ID you found in step 1: _msdyn_cdsqueueid_value eq {queue ID}

Step 2: Find the name of the workstream that’s associated with the conversation

1. Insert a new step. Select Microsoft Dataverse as the connector and Get a row by Workstream as the action.
2. Set Table name to Work Streams.
3. In Row ID, select the dynamic content Work stream (Value).

Step 3: Find the name of the queue that’s associated with the workstream

1. Insert a new step. Select Microsoft Dataverse as the connector and Get a row by Queue as the action.
2. Set Table name to Queues.
3. In Row ID, select the dynamic content Queue (Value).

Step 4: Send an email

1. Insert a new step. Select Office 365 Outlook as the connector and Send an email (V2) as the action.
2. In To, enter the address or addresses to notify when a work item is routed to the fallback queue.
3. Enter the subject and body of the email.
   In our example, we’ve included both the IDs and the names of the workstream and fallback queue using dynamic text that was collected in the preceding steps.

Save and test your flow.

Here’s the entire flow. Numbered steps in red arrows correspond to the steps provided earlier.

It’s been our constant goal in unified routing to provide customers with robust and flexible routing solutions. Fallback queue enhancement not only gives freedom to businesses in terms of distributing their incoming workload. It also makes it easier for supervisors to monitor and manage their organization’s fallback queues.

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

References

What Customer Service Leaders Should Be Prioritizing in 2022

Next steps

Read the fallback queue documentation.

The post Workstream fallback queues ensure no customer goes unattended appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.