Efficient workload management is essential in customer service environments where diverse customer interactions flow through multiple channels. With advanced prioritization capabilities in Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations can provide tiered service levels based on customer value, respond to customer sentiment, and ensure adherence to SLAs. 

Why use advanced prioritization? 

Prioritization in Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Dynamics 365 Customer Service empowers organizations to: 

• Offer dynamically tiered service levels: Traditionally, SLA commitments in contact centers were enforced through entitlements and queue-specific configurations. With cross-queue prioritization, organizations can now centrally define and dynamically enforce service tiers based on real-time factors like customer value, sentiment, or business context. This approach makes it easier to configure, scale, and adjust prioritization rules across queues, reducing administrative overhead while improving consistency and responsiveness. 

• React to SLAs dynamically: Contact centers can use prioritization rules to meet time-sensitive commitments across queues. 

These capabilities extend across multiple configuration points, including our newest offering to prioritize work across contact center queues. 

Contact center level prioritization 

Contact center or “cross-queue” prioritization provides flexibility in routing and enhances business outcomes by: 

• Enabling channel-level priorities: Respond to voice calls first, then chat conversations, then cases. 

• Supporting business priorities: Prioritize refund queues over sales inquiry queues to align with organizational goals. 

The second type of prioritization occurs within a queue for added control over SLA commitment, urgency, sentiment and so on. 

Advanced prioritization business scenarios 

Example 1: Prioritize by customer channel

Consider a scenario where a customer service team prioritizes interactions across channels. The voice channel is the most urgent channel, followed by chat, and then case. The administrator sets the queue priority attribute to reflect these priorities, so agents receive phone calls immediately. 

Example 2: Prioritize by customer and inquiry type 

A company, Contoso Coffee, operates four queues: 

1. VIP Case Queue (Priority: 1) 

2. Premium Support Queue (Priority: 2) 

3. General Support Queue, prioritized by severity (Priority: 3) 

4. Billing Inquiries Queue (Priority: 4) 

Agents handle work items using the following process: 

• Agents handle VIP cases first to ensure top-tier customers receive white-glove support. 

• Once agents clear the VIP items, the system evaluates Premium Support cases next. 

• Within General Support, the system evaluate cases for severity and prioritizes high severity cases (such as service outages or urgent account issues) above routine queries. 

• In the Billing Inquiries queue, the system applies layered rules: 

• Cases involving overdue bills are flagged for immediate attention, as they often indicate payment barriers such as disputes, failed transactions, or missing billing information. 

• These cases take priority over in-SLA cases, which may involve scheduled payments, invoice copies, or non-urgent queries. 

With advanced prioritization capabilities in Customer Service and Contact Center, businesses can align routing decisions with customer and business priorities. Whether it’s assigning channel-level priorities or addressing specific business needs, these capabilities provide scalability and flexibility for modern customer service operations. 

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

For more details on prioritization options in unified routing and how to use them, read the documentation: Assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Learn  

The post Enhance customer service with advanced prioritization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Rolling out a new ERP or CRM system is a stressful transformation that can take months or even years to complete if you go it alone. The business process catalog for Dynamics 365 can help you deliver implementation projects faster and with less stress. The business process catalog is a critical component of the Success by Design framework, created by Microsoft to provide official guidance on everything you need, from functional configuration to implementation methodologies, helping companies deploy a Dynamics 365 solution with higher adoption rates and less risk in less time, at lower cost.

Process, meet product: The business process catalog for Dynamics 365

Among the challenges that most implementation projects face is connecting real-world processes to application functionality. Traditional application documentation is often very technical, describing how the system can be configured, but not necessarily how it should be to meet the needs of your business.

That’s where the business process catalog for Dynamics 365 comes in. The catalog helps organize software implementations in terms of end-to-end business processes, like “concept to market” and “inventory to deliver” instead of siloed technology formatting. Resources in the business process catalog include a complete process catalog with diagrams, scenarios, and best practices for how to configure each business process based on factors like industry and business model. And the business process catalog includes an Azure DevOps template to help organize implementation methodology in a process format, helping to ensure that every decision ultimately ties into an end-to-end process for a seamless and successful solution. This approach helps businesses connect what they do today with what they will be doing tomorrow and helps to ensure that the solution will be the right fit for the business.

The business process catalog provides workshop templates that help organizations and their implementation partners and customers structure their discovery conversations around business processes. These templates provide guidelines for involving the right stakeholders, agendas to keep discussions on track, and key questions to cover important topics. When used with process flow diagrams, customers can visualize standardized processes in business terms and identify differences with their own operations. This fit-to-standard approach saves time and money, while recognizing and capturing each organization’s unique needs through Dynamics 365’s extensible platform.

The business process catalog in action: Long View

To understand the real value of the business process catalog and using a business process approach to implementation, look at Long View, a professional services organization that recently replaced its aging legacy ERP solution with Dynamics 365. Long View worked with implementation partners RedCat Consulting Group and Team Bennett Consulting using the business process catalog and Success by Design, maximizing the use of out-of-the-box configurations to accelerate deployment and user adoption, and reduce project costs. The following are just some of the benefits Long View achieved using the business process catalog.

Eliminate customizations

The business process catalog allowed Long View to use best practices and out-of-the-box functionality, eliminating the need for 22 customizations that had been required in the old system. Minimizing customizations also reduces maintenance and risk during security and version updates, allowing Long View to adopt new capabilities quicker and enjoy constant support from Microsoft.

Speed up implementation

Using the business process catalog as a template, Long View and its partners RedCat Consulting Group and Team Bennett Consulting reduced the expected timeline of the discovery phase from two to three months to just six weeks. Later phases were accelerated as well by carrying over the initial processes structure and deliverables into each subsequent project activities.

Accelerate organization-wide adoption

Traditional implementations are often siloed by functional area: separating finance and sales, for example. Taking a process-centric approach, the Long View project team broke down departmental silos and redesigned processes more efficiently. The handoffs between departments in each process were clearly documented, and the design focused on delivering a successful end-to-end result instead of just looking at each team’s individual needs. The result is more usable solutions for everyone and overall productivity gains across the business.

Read more about how Long View uses Dynamics 365 to support its business in the case study.

Embracing a process-focused approach in an AI-powered world

In today’s rapidly evolving, AI-focused world, the importance of a process-focused approach to technology implementation cannot be overstated. Poorly designed processes can lead to inefficiencies, errors, and suboptimal outcomes when automated. An implementation methodology based on the business process catalog for Dynamics 365 helps to ensure the systematic and efficient integration of new technologies aligned with organizational goals. Without a deep comprehension of the underlying processes, attempts to implement Microsoft Copilot or agents may not yield the expected results.

By emphasizing well-designed business processes, organizations can better manage the complexities and potential risks associated with AI technologies. A structured business process approach allows for thorough planning, testing, and iteration, leading to more reliable and scalable solutions, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability and helping organizations to stay ahead in the competitive landscape. Ultimately, a process-focused approach not only enhances the effectiveness of technology implementation but also helps to ensure that the benefits of AI can be fully realized and sustained over time.

Set up for success with process-centric implementation

Taking a process-centered approach to Dynamics 365 implementation helps reduce risk, drives implementation success, and results in positive business outcomes. Together, Success by Design and the business process catalog provide up-to-date best practice guidance to allow organizations to go live with confidence and speed.

The business process catalog for Dynamics 365

Navigate and learn from the catalog.

Learn how

Not yet a Dynamics 365 customer? Talk to our sales team today.

The post Go live with confidence using Success by Design for Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Three AI service agents for Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center are now available in public preview: Case Management, Customer Intent, and Customer Knowledge Management agents. Collectively these agents learn to address emerging issues, uncover new knowledge, and automate manual processes to boost business efficiency and reduce costs.

With these autonomous agents, contact centers have the opportunity to improve their efficiency and enhance the customer experience. Agents can reveal valuable insights from seasoned customer service representatives using chat logs, call recordings, case notes, and other data sources. They can use these insights to improve self-service with automatically generated knowledge that evolves to meet potential customer issues.

Here is a quick overview of AI service agents:

Automate case management like never before

The Case Management Agent for Dynamics 365 Customer Service is designed to simplify and streamline your case management process. It also reduces handling time and improves customer satisfaction. The process of creating cases, updating details, following up with customers, and ensuring timely closures can be time-consuming and prone to errors. By automating these essential tasks, Case Management Agent reduces handling time and minimizes errors. It allows customer service representatives to focus on what matters most: solving complex customer issues. 

You can seamlessly configure the Case Management Agent with your choice of attributes to meet your business needs. It automates key tasks throughout the lifecycle of a case, from creation to closure. Whether you’re managing live chats or processing incoming emails, this agent handles the details, so you don’t have to. 

During customer conversations, the agent automatically creates a case, fills in relevant fields, and updates them as the conversation progresses. The agent tracks cases requiring attention, sends follow-ups, and even resolves cases autonomously when the customer issue is resolved.  

From managing high case volumes to reducing average handling time, this agent makes life easier for your team. 

Understand customer intent to provide elevated service

The Customer Intent Agent for Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses generative AI to analyze past interactions between customer service representatives and customers. Using this data, it creates an intent library that the agent uses to understand what the customer wants and provide tailored solutions to customer issues. While traditional chatbots and prompts require developers and support staff to update, the Customer Intent Agent updates itself continuously as it receives more data. You can use this agent in Dynamics 365 Contact Center for both self-service and service rep-assisted scenarios.  

Evergreen self-service 

Using the Customer Intent Agent, contact centers can enable their customers to self-serve in a transformative way. Instead of writing a specific menu of responses for each topic, contact center managers and IT professionals can let the Customer Intent Agent use past customer conversations across channels to determine how to answer a question. It uses case and conversation data to find appropriate follow-up questions to ask the customer to refine its understanding of the customer’s intent. 

Supercharged service reps 

When a conversation requires a service representative, the Customer Intent Agent provides valuable context and information so the service rep can give better assistance. It also helps service reps resolve issues in live chat and persistent chat with reduced handling times. Service reps have access to intent-based suggestions through the Ask a question tab in the Copilot help pane, and in the tab-to-complete suggestions in the conversation control. The intent agent uses the context of the conversation to display relevant intent attributes as questions for the service to ask the customer.

Build your organization’s knowledge with efficiency

The Customer Knowledge Management Agent for Dynamics 365 Customer Service helps your organization scale its knowledge with minimal effort from service reps. When admins configure knowledge management and knowledge sources, service reps can generate knowledge assets without spending time synthesizing case data to author them. 

Clear, current, and accurate knowledge is key for service representatives to best assist customers. Contact centers that use Copilot to inform their self-service systems and service reps rely on a well-maintained knowledge base. Creating and maintaining knowledge assets is a time-consuming process. Service reps don’t always have time to put their learnings from cases and conversations into a knowledge article. Furthermore, to maintain good knowledge hygiene, a subject matter expert should check each asset in the knowledge base on a regular basis to ensure relevance and accuracy. 

Organizations can use the Customer Knowledge Management Agent to autonomously create knowledge articles based on cases, conversations, emails, and notes. The agent also checks for existing assets with the same information in your knowledge base before creating a new one. Based on rules that administrators set, members of the organization can approve or reject these AI-generated knowledge assets. Admins can also decide whether to make this knowledge available for self-service in chatbots and IVRs. 

Learn more about AI service agents

You can start using all three AI service agents now in paid public preview. Copilot Studio message capacity is required. Get started with autonomous service agents here: Autonomous agents overview

The post Experience the future of customer service with AI agents appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft is introducing a powerful Exchange integration feature in Dynamics 365 Field Service, designed to seamlessly sync work order bookings with Outlook and Teams calendars. This feature lets technicians see their work assignments, personal appointments, and other work meetings in one place. 

How it works 

With this integration, work order bookings from Dynamics 365 Field Service will automatically appear on resources’ Outlook and Teams calendars, provided they are set up for syncing. The synchronization process is: 

• One-way sync from Dynamics 365 to Exchange. 

• Fast and efficient, with a maximum sync time of 15 minutes. 

• Seamless—technicians no longer need to switch between applications to track their schedules. 

Key benefits 

This feature provides significant advantages for organizations managing field operations: 

• Enhances workforce efficiency by allowing technicians to operate entirely within Outlook. 

• Reduces scheduling confusion, ensuring all work orders and personal commitments are visible in one calendar. 

• Supports a modern experience, enabling frontline workers to use the Microsoft ecosystem for a seamless workflow. 

Getting started: Setup and requirements 

To enable the Exchange integration, organizations must meet the following prerequisites: 

• You must have an Exchange admin role for your tenant and either a Dynamics 365 System Admin role or the delegated mailbox approver role in Dynamics 365. 

• Exchange Server and Field Service must be in the same tenant. 

Availability and early access 

The Exchange integration preview is available starting April 2024! It will be available more broadly in Release wave 2 2025. 

Organizations interested in the Exchange integration preview can sign up or leave their email for more information by signing up here today. You’ll need to provide: 

• Org IDs for the organizations opting into the feature early. 

• A contact email for coordination with the product team. 

The post Integrate Field Service bookings with Outlook and Teams  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.