This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, contact centers need real-time analytics to provide top-notch customer support under pressure. One of the biggest challenges contact center managers face is the ability to react quickly to unexpected events. These events may include spikes in the volume of incoming customer interactions, longer call lengths, and agent absences.
To address these challenges, we are excited to introduce Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel. This powerful tool provides contact center managers with real-time visibility into overall support performance. They can monitor key operational metrics, make course corrections at the right time, and keep service levels high.
Monitor customer interactions with real-time analytics
Contact centers need to manage multiple channels, including voice, chat, and social media. With real-time analytics, supervisors can monitor the volume of interactions and wait times across all channels in real-time, providing them with the information they need to make informed decisions. The auto-refresh capability ensures that supervisors have up-to-date information at their fingertips.
Maximize agent utilization
Agent allocation is crucial in managing customer interactions efficiently. With real-time analytics, supervisors can track the current available capacity of agents and monitor what each agent is currently working on. Supervisors can drill down and see detailed metrics for each agent. As a result, this capability helps supervisors make informed decisions about how to allocate resources, ensuring that the right agents are handling the right interactions at the right time.
Proactively monitor customer-agent interactions
Customer sentiment is a crucial factor in providing high-quality service. With the ongoing conversation report, supervisors can proactively monitor customer-agent interactions using real-time sentiment signals. This allows them to identify any issues in real time and provide immediate guidance to agents. Contact center supervisors can ensure that agents are providing the best possible service, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.
Take immediate actions
Contact center managers often need to perform actions such as overriding agent status or assigning customer interactions to agents when they experience sudden spike in volume. With real-time analytics, supervisors can do the following:
Assign, transfer and force close actions directly from ongoing conversation report.
Override agent status to route the customer conversation to the agents.
Customize Reports
Analyzing data is essential in identifying areas for improvement. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel, supervisors can pause and resume data refresh to analyze the data at their own pace. Additionally, they can personalize out-of-the-box reports by saving filters, allowing them to focus on the data that is most relevant to them, and gain actionable insights.
Try real-time analytics for omnichannel today
Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel empowers contact center managers with real-time visibility into support performance, so they can make data-driven decisions and ensure high-quality customer service. With its powerful features such as real-time monitoring, agent utilization tracking, proactive monitoring of customer-agent interactions and customizable reporting, contact centers can effectively address unexpected events, optimize resources, and enhance overall customer experience. Enable Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel and stay ahead of the game in today’s fast-paced business environment.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We realize that a clear Windows client roadmap update helps consumers and organizations with planning their Windows release activities.
Today we’ll provide a brief update on the latest version of Windows 10, as well as share more on the time frame for the next Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release of Windows 11.
Windows 10 support lifecycle
As documented on the Windows 10 Enterprise and Education and Windows 10 Home and Pro lifecycle pages, Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. The current version, 22H2, will be the final version of Windows 10, and all editions will remain in support with monthly security update releases though that date. Existing LTSC releases will continue to receive updates beyond that date based on their specific lifecycles.
Recommendation
We highly encourage you to transition to Windows 11 now as there won’t be any additional Windows 10 feature updates.
If you and/or your organization must remain on Windows 10 for now, please update to Windows 10, version 22H2 to continue receiving monthly security update releases through October 14, 2025. See how you can quickly do this via a servicing enablement package in How to get the Windows 10 2022 Update.
The final end of support date for Windows 10 does not change with this announcement; these dates can be found on the Windows 10 Lifecycle page.
Windows 11 LTSC
It’s important for organizations to have adequate time to plan for adopting Windows 11. Today we’re announcing that the next Windows LTSC releases will be available in the second half of 2024:
Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC
Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC
We’ll provide more details as we get closer to availability.
Recommendation
If you’re waiting for a Windows 11 LTSC release, you can begin planning and testing your applications and hardware on the current GA channel release, Windows 11, version 22H2. Check out App confidence: Optimize app validation with Test Base for more tips on how to test your applications.
Stay informed
In the future, we will add more information here and to the Windows release health page, which offers information about the General Availability Channel and LTSC under release information for appropriate versions.
The Windows release health page lists release information for different versions of Windows.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, we’re excited to announce we’re removing the waitlist and adding an expanded set of features to the Microsoft Designer preview. With new AI technology at the core, Microsoft Designer simplifies the creative journey by helping you get started quickly, augment creative workflows, and overcome creative roadblocks.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Discover how Dynamics 365 helps customer experience leaders do more with less
Leaders of organizations in every region and industry are cautiously navigating business decisions of 2023. The recent economic turbulence has forced companies to evaluate their internal processes, tools, and enterprise software to optimize for efficiency. Conversely, customer experience (CX) leaders see 2023 as the year of opportunity. By strengthening their customer experience strategy with technology, CX leaders can retain their most valuable customers, acquire new customers, and look to surpass their competitors. The good news is that you don’t need more to do this. You can do more with less, utilizing the power of AI to optimize experiences for your sellers, marketers, and data analysts so they can deliver better experiences for your customers.
CX leaders know that the first step to any great customer experience is understanding your customer. They need a customer data platform that can do more for them, making sense of their data, offering recommendations, and serving up valuable insights. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unifies and enriches first-party and third-party data to truly understand your customer and predict their intent. It does this while maintaining privacy and compliance with customer consent. Out-of-the-box AI guides data wranglers with the next best action and also can provide predictions for customer lifetime value, so you can determine how to best invest in your customers.
Business Finland utilized Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to gain greater data insights, resulting in the ability to support thousands of Finnish companies through the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing its export sales by 20 percent, and allowing the Finnish government to fund topics and initiatives that align with its strategic goals.
With the latest Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, data analysts and marketers can engage directly with customer data using simple, natural language. This saves time for data analysts, allowing them to type the query in their own words instead of identifying the query in SQL. This capability democratizes access to insights, allowing marketers to use their customer data platform (CDP) to ask questions using everyday language and receive answers fast, without needing to know SQL programming. With simple prompts, marketers can explore, understand, and predict customer preferences and needs in near real time, reducing the reliance on the analytics team to provide them with the customer insights they need.
Engage your customer
Customers today expect personalized experiences, but your marketers don’t have the time or resources to tailor every interaction with every customer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can do more with less by using AI to orchestrate personalized journeys across every customer touchpoint. In addition to customer journeys, Dynamics 365 offers email marketing, lead scoring, marketing pages, and social posting, allowing you to seamlessly connect your marketing and sales processes. Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics, an aviation parts supplier, is using Dynamics 365 Marketing to automate the follow-up process for completed repairs, tying this activity into product campaigns, and communicating more effectively with customers.
With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can eliminate the time-consuming process of manually building customer segments for email campaigns, utilizing the query assist feature that allows them to describe their targeted segment in natural language. When they are ready to craft their email content, marketers can harness the Copilot feature, content ideas, to generate content by providing a few prompts. They can also tailor the tone to meet the needs of their audience. With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can spend less time on copywriting and audience segmentation, and more time on strategic marketing efforts.
Deliver for your customer
You’ve moved your customer down the funnel, understanding and predicting their intent, personalizing experiences with communications and offers, and now they’re ready to purchase. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with your customers, take actions based on insights, and close deals faster. You can use Dynamics 365 Sales to keep track of your accounts and contacts, nurture your sales from lead to order, and create sales collateral. Sales managers can use AI to make their sales teams stronger by monitoring conversations with customers using conversation intelligence and providing coaching and feedback to sellers, or by creating step-by-step guidance for next best steps with sequences.
DP World shortened sales cycles enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater retention with Dynamics 365 Sales.
With Copilot in Microsoft Viva Sales, part of Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can save time with generated email content suggestions, which includes data that is relevant to the customer, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. In addition, they can generate an email response that proposes a meeting date and time based on availability of their Outlook calendar. These new capabilities help sellers automate and expedite administrative work so they can focus on what matters mostmaking meaningful connections and building trust with their customers and prospects.
Learn how to do more with less
With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Marketing, and Sales, you can connect your teams across all business processes to ensure your customer is always at the center. This ensures they have a personalized, seamless experience, from consideration to purchase. To learn more or take a guided tour, please visit our connected sales and marketing solution page. To learn more about Dynamics 365 Copilot, read the announcement blog from Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications, Emily He.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server, you can configure high availability with automatic failover within a region. The high availability solution is designed to ensure that committed data is never lost because of failures and that the database won’t be a single point of failure in your software architecture.
Within a region, there are three potential options to consider, as shown in the following table:
Option (Mode)
Committed SLA
Non-HA
99.9%
Same Zone HA
99.95%
Zone Redundant HA (ZHRA)*
99.99%
*ZRHA is only available in regions that support availability zones. For the latest list of Azure regions, in the Azure Database for MySQL documentation, see Azure regions.
In addition to the ‘in-region’ modes listed above, there’s also an option to design for protection of database services across Azure regions. One common pattern we’ve seen with several customers is the need for maximum in-region availability along with a cross region disaster recovery capability. This manifests itself as ZRHA in the primary region and a Read Replica in another region, preferably the paired region, as illustrated in the following diagram:
With ZRHA, failover between the Primary and Standby servers is automatically managed by the Azure platform, and importantly, the service endpoint name does not change. On the other hand, the manual process associated with a regional failover does introduce a change to the service endpoint name. Some customers have expressed an interest in being able to perform a regional failover without later having to update the associated application connection strings.
In this post, I’ll explain how to address this requirement and provide a regional failover that requires no application connection string changes.
For our purposes, we’ll use the following simplified architecture diagram as a starting point:
In this illustration, there’s a single Primary server located in Australia East and a Replica is hosted in Australia Southeast. With this setup, it’s important to understand some implementation details, especially around networking and guidance:
Each server is deployed using the Private Access option.
Each server is registered to the same Azure Private DNS Zone, in this case, myflex.private.mysql.database.azure.com.
Each server is on separate a VNet, and the two VNets are peered with each other.
Each VNet is linked to the Private DNS zone.
The server name, IP address, server type, and region for the two servers I created are shown in the following table:
When configured properly, the Private DNS Zone (should appear as shown in the following image:
It’s possible to resolve these DNS names from within either VNet. For example, the Linux shell shows the following detail for a Linux VM, which happens to be on the Australia East VNet, and it can resolve the both the service name and the private DNS zone name of each of the servers.
Note: This Linux VM is being used simply to host the ‘nslookup’ and ‘mysql’ binaries that we are using in this article:
In addition to name resolution and courtesy of our VNet peering, I can also connect to both databases using either the service name or the private DNS name. Running the command-line application ‘mysql’, I’ll connect to the primary server using both DNS names as shown in the following image:
And next, I’ll use ‘mysql’ again to connect to both DNS names for the replica server:
To recap, we have set up a primary server in one region and replica service in another region using the Private Access networking, standard VNET peering, and Private DNS Zone features. I then verified that I could connect to both databases using the service name, or the name allocated by the Private DNS zone. The remaining question, however, is how to failover to the replica database, for example in a DR drill, and allow my application to connect to the promoted replica without making any changes to the application configuration? The answer, it turns out, is pretty simple…
In addition to typical DNS record types of ‘A’ Address and ‘PTR’ Pointer, ‘CNAME’ is another useful record type that I can use as an “alias” to effectively point to another DNS entry. Next, I’ll demonstrate how to configure a ‘CNAME’ record to point to either of the databases in our set up.
For this example, I’ll create a CNAME record with value ‘prod’ that points at the ‘A’ record for the Primary server. Inside the Private DNS Zone you can add a new record by choosing ‘+ Record Set’. Then you can add a CNAME record like so:
While the default TTL is 1 hour, I’ve reduced this to 30 seconds to limit DNS clients and applications from caching an answer for too long, which can have a significant impart during or after a failover. After I’ve added the CNAME record, the DNS zone looks like this:
Notice that the new ‘prod’ name points to the ‘A’ record for the primary server.
Now, I’ll verify that I can use the CNAME record to connect to the primary database:
Cool! That’s just DNS doing its thing with the CNAME record type.
It is also possible to edit the CNAME DNS record to point it to the replica:
After saving the updated CNAME, when I connect to ‘prod’, it is now connecting to the replica, which is in READ-ONLY mode. I can verify this by trying a write operation, such as creating a table:
Sure enough, the CNAME ‘prod’ now points to the replica, as expected.
Given what I’ve shown so far, it’s clear the using the flexibility of Azure Private DNS and CNAME records is ideal for this use case.
The last step in this process is to perform the failover and complete the testing.
In the Azure portal, navigate to the Replication blade of either the Replica server or the Standby server, and then ‘Promote’ the Replica:
After selecting Promote, the following window appears:
When the newly promoted Replica server is available, I want to verify two things, that the:
CNAME record points to the Replica (now Primary)
Database is writeable
From an application perspective (the application is the mysql client in this article), we haven’t had to make any changes to connect to our database regardless of which region is hosting the workload. This method can be easily integrated within DR procedures or failover testing. Making use of the Azure CLI to semi-automate these changes is also possible and could possibly reduce the likelihood of human errors associated with changing DNS records. However, DNS changes are, in general, less risky than making application configuration changes.
If you have any feedback or questions about the information provided above, please leave a comment below or email us at AskAzureDBforMySQL@service.microsoft.com. Thank you!
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