This post was co-authored by Caroline Dent, Senior Solutions Consultant, Velrada.

Due to fierce competition and increasing customer expectations, many organizations are looking to transform their field service operations to increase customer satisfaction, drive greater efficiency, and ensure higher service effectiveness. Digital transformation for field service operations is often focused on providing modern tools for service dispatchers who manage customer requests and create and dispatch work orders. But what about the people on the frontlines—the service technicians in the field?

Consider a utility provider with field service technicians who may work in remote areas with low network coverage or sometimes brave challenging weather conditions to support customers experiencing outages. Like any other organization, that provider needs a solution that enables it to streamline field service operations as much as possible, not only for controlling costs but also for providing the best possible experience for its customers. But when bad weather hits, it also needs a solution that ensures its field support can be productive even in extreme conditions and from the most remote locations.

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, organizations with service technicians on the frontlines can help maximize productivity with AI-driven assistance and remote expert support in the flow of work. And specifically for service technicians on the frontlines, Dynamics 365 Field Service offers a comprehensive Field Service mobile app for Windows, iOS, and Android devices that provides a set of digital capabilities that extend far beyond the traditional scheduling and dispatching of work orders.

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Implementing Field Service to optimize operations

As a long-term Microsoft global partner, Velrada has emerged as a pioneering force in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to empower frontline workers. With a rich history of innovation and a strong commitment to business transformation, Velrada has consistently demonstrated its expertise in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service to help its customers optimize operations.

“The field service industry is undergoing a profound transformation, and at its forefront is the demand from our customers for innovative solutions that go beyond the scheduling and dispatching of jobs,”

David Conti, Product Director, Velrada

Let’s take a closer look at how organizations are empowering field service workers with more innovative solutions by deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Empowering technicians with real-time information for better service

A primary benefit of Dynamics 365 Field Service is the Field Service mobile app, available on Windows, Android, and iOS devices. Service technicians can see their workdays at a glance in Microsoft Teams, including their latest work orders. They simply click on a work order to launch the Field Service mobile app, so they can view and update work orders, customer assets, accounts, and more, no matter where they are working—even in areas with limited connectivity. This means that even during the worst weather events, workers can get real-time dispatch updates from service agents that keep them informed about the latest outages and ready to tackle challenges regardless of the weather conditions.

Using the Field Service mobile app can also help organizations like the utility provider equip field technicians with digital workstations right on their mobile devices, so they can conduct digital inspections, manage forms, and complete service checklists—everything they were previously required to do on paper, often at the end of a long work day.

Enabling efficient on-site assessments

Using the Field Service mobile app, technicians can conduct on-site assessments with unmatched efficiency. They can capture photos, record notes, provide customers with immediate estimates, and even get their sign-off by capturing their digital signature in the app. This accelerates decision-making and facilitates faster service delivery, a crucial advantage in remote and challenging locations.

Ensuring seamless inventory management

Technicians can also easily access up-to-date inventory information on their devices. This eliminates the need for cumbersome manual inventory checks and reduces delays caused by missing parts because technicians can ensure they’re well-equipped for their service calls before they leave the service center.

Prioritizing safety and compliance

The Field Service mobile app incorporates safety checklists and real-time reporting, helping to ensure compliance with safety regulations. This not only upholds safety standards but also improves the well-being of service technicians who often work under hazardous conditions, such as near high-voltage transformers or natural gas compressors.

Revolutionizing service with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and mixed reality

For many organizations, enabling service technicians on the frontlines with digital tools that help eliminate inefficient paper-based processes and ensure workers can be productive even in the most remote locations or extreme conditions is just the beginning. Conti says, “Our customers are constantly looking at ways to innovate, and our next step is to help them give technicians access to more than just transactional information by incorporating mixed reality on top of Field Service solutions.” Organizations using Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist on HoloLens, HoloLens 2, Android, or iOS devices to enable technicians to collaborate more efficiently by working together from different locations. This means service technicians can find and connect with technical experts working at other locations to share what they’re seeing, receive remote assistance, and quickly resolve customer issues. This is especially critical during outages that affect a large number of customers, but it can also help substantially reduce the need for on-site visits even for routine maintenance or smaller issues, resulting in improved first-time fix rates and elevated customer satisfaction. Using mixed reality in this way helps service technicians make well-informed, real-time decisions. In addition, Remote Assist call data can be securely stored in Microsoft Dataverse and accessed for future analytics on service performance.

In addition to Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Field Service can also be integrated with Dynamics 365 Guides to attach mixed reality guides to Field Service tasks. This makes tasks like equipment maintenance more precise as service technicians can use mixed reality to overlay digital instructions onto physical machinery, which helps them perform field inspections and review the areas that require maintenance. ensuring efficient upkeep and field inspections are enhanced through annotated issue documentation, improving accuracy and record-keeping. In addition, technicians can benefit from immersive training experiences, reducing onboarding time and accelerating skill development.

Overall, the integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, Dynamics 365 Guides, and tools like HoloLens helps to elevate field service operations by enabling them to optimize processes and deliver unparalleled customer experiences in today’s dynamic business environment. They can empower technicians with immersive training experiences, precise equipment maintenance guidance, and real-time remote assistance. Field inspections become more accurate, data-driven decisions become the norm, and customer interactions reach new heights.

Next steps

Learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you optimize your service operations and deliver exceptional service. And read how Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service can help you accelerate service delivery, boost technician productivity, and streamline work order management with next-generation AI.

The post Enable faster, more impactful frontline services with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Every contact center wants to maintain system health with minimal usability disruptions to offer a delightful and seamless customer experience. Now, contact center managers can use Application Insights to get details about customer conversations and solve problems more easily. 

Application Insights, an extension of Azure Monitor, provides greater visibility into conversation-based operational telemetry in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This helps contact center managers keep track of the application’s health across the full conversation lifecycle.  Metrics are available starting with initiation, virtual agent engagement, routing, and assignment, through to resolution. Application Insights tracks volumes, latency, scenario success, failures, and trends at scale. In addition to facilitating proactive system monitoring, it empowers developers and IT professionals to easily identify and diagnose problematic conversations. From there, they can self-remediate where applicable or get swift support.

Connect to Application Insights

This capability enables customers to establish connectivity between their Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment and Application Insights instance. Then they can subscribe to system telemetry for a core set of conversation lifecycle events across the channels they use. When these logs are available in Application Insights, users can combine them with additional data sets to build custom dashboards. 

Application Insights in action 

Contoso Clothing, a retail giant in apparel, has recently launched their online shopping experience. With the approaching holiday season, they anticipate high volumes. Their workforce is prepared to provide a satisfying customer service experience using Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Tim is a supervisor for Contoso Clothing’s customer service division. He is responsible for the management and optimum functioning of their live chat queues. On his monitoring dashboard, Tim notices a sharp increase in conversations in the backlog, leading to longer wait times. He can see that his customer service representatives are busy with ongoing conversations. This means they are unable to receive new chats, which is leading to long wait times and low customer satisfaction. The overall conversation volumes are well within Tim’s capability, and something doesn’t seem right to him.  
 
He highlights this to Kaylee, an IT professional on his team. Kaylee has recently enabled App Insights for Contoso Clothing’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment to access conversation telemetry. This has been helping her monitor operational health as well as troubleshoot issues in real time. Based on Tim’s observation, she pulls up telemetry for all live chat conversations from the last few hours. Each conversation contains business events logged along with associated success or failure, duration, and associated metadata in Application Insights. 

While looking through anomalies and failures, she notices a high number of ‘customer disconnected’ events being logged repeatedly. Tracing these conversations, Tim and Kaylee determine that multiple chat conversations being created for the same customer within a short span of time. They see that customers are having to reinitiate a chat every time they navigate away from their app and come back to continue the conversation.  

Tim realizes the need to give customers the option to reconnect to a previous chat session. Being a business admin himself, can enable this through the Customer Service admin center in a few clicks. Using Application Insights data, Kaylee can set up auto-alerts for this scenario in case the problem happens again. Over the next few days, Tim and Kaylee see live chat wait times go down and customer satisfaction improve. They not only proactively detected the problem early but were also self-equipped to take the necessary steps to fix it and meet their customers’ needs. 

Learn more

To learn more, refer to Conversation diagnostics in Azure Application Insights (preview) – Power Platform | Microsoft Learn 

The post Use Application Insights to diagnose conversations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The year 2023 has ushered in dramatic innovations in AI, particularly regarding how businesses interact with customers. Every day, more organizations are discovering how they can empower agents to provide faster, more personalized service using next-generation AI.  

We’re excited to announce three Microsoft Copilot features now generally available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service in October, along with the new summarization feature that was made generally available in September. Copilot provides real-time, AI-powered assistance to help customer support agents solve issues faster by relieving them from mundane tasks—such as searching and note-taking—and freeing their time for more high-value interactions with customers. Contact center managers can also use Copilot analytics to view Copilot usage and better understand how next-generation AI impacts the business. The following features are generally available to Dynamics 365 Customer Service users:

Copilot uses knowledge and web sources that your organization specifies, and your organizational and customer data are never used to train public models.

Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Copilot features are empowering marketing, sales, and customer service teams in new ways.

Read how

1. Ask Copilot a question

Whether they’re responding to customers using the phone, chat, or social media, agents can use Copilot to harness knowledge across the organization to provide quick, informative answers, similar to having an experienced coworker available to chat all day, every day. When an administrator enables the Copilot pane in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service workspace or custom apps, agents can use natural language to ask questions and find answers. Copilot searches all company resources that administrators have made available and returns an answer. Agents can check the sources that Copilot used to create a response, and they can rate responses as helpful or unhelpful. Contact center managers can then view agent feedback to see how their agents are interacting with Copilot and identify areas where sources may need to be removed or updated.

The ability to ask Copilot questions can save agents valuable time. Microsoft recently completed a study that evaluated the impact of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service on agent productivity for Microsoft Support agents providing customer care across the commercial business. They found that agents can quickly look up answers to high volume requests and avoid lengthy investigations of previously documented procedures. One of our lines of business with these characteristics has realized a 22 percent reduction in time to close cases using Copilot.

2. Create intelligent email responses

Agents who receive customer requests via email can spend valuable time researching and writing the perfect response. Now, agents can use Copilot to draft emails by selecting from predefined prompts that include common support activities such as “suggest a call,” “request more information,” “empathize with feedback,” or “resolve the customer’s problem.” Agents can also provide their own custom prompts for more complex issues. Copilot uses the context of the conversation along with case notes and the organization’s knowledge to produce a relevant, personalized email. The agent can edit and modify the text further, and then send the response to help resolve the issue quickly.  

3. Understand Copilot usage in your organization

It’s important for service managers to measure the impact and improvements as part of the change that generative AI-powered Copilot has on their operations and agent experience. Dynamics 365 Customer Service historical analytics reports provide a comprehensive view of Copilot-specific metrics and insights. Managers can see how often agents use Copilot to respond to customers, the number of agent/customer interactions that involved Copilot, the duration of conversations where Copilot plays a role, and more. They can also see the percentage of cases that agents resolved with the help of Copilot. Agents can also rate Copilot responses so managers have a better understanding of how Copilot is helping to improve customer service and the overall impact on their organization.

4. Summarize cases and conversations with Copilot

Generally available since September, the ability to summarize cases and complex, lengthy conversations using Copilot can save valuable time for agents across channels. Rather than spending hours to review notes as they wrap up a case, agents can create a case summary with a single click that highlights key information about the case, such as customer, case title, case type, subject, case description, product, and priority. In addition, agents can rely on Copilot to generate conversation summaries that capture key information such as the customer’s name, the issue or request, the steps taken so far, the case status, and any relevant facts or data. Summaries also highlight any sentiment expressed by the customer or the agent, plus action items or next steps. Generating conversation summaries on the fly is especially useful when an agent must hand off a call to another agent and quickly bring them up to speed while the customer is still on the line. This ability to connect customers with experts in complex, high-touch scenarios is helping to transform the customer service experience, reduce operational cost savings, and ensure happier customers.

Next-generation AI that is ready for enterprises

Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It also allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection.

AI solutions built responsibly

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society.

Learn more and try Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Learn more about how to elevate your service with AI and enable Copilot features for your support agents.

Try Dynamics 365 Customer Service for free.

The post Modernize customer support with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.