Support agents often have to manage complex and lengthy conversations and cases. These require a lot of time and attention to understand and resolve. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to quickly get the gist of what’s going on without having to read through every single message or all the information linked to a case? 

Now agents can use Copilot to ramp up fast. Copilot summarization automatically generates concise and informative summaries of conversations and cases in simple, intuitive natural language. Agents can read these summaries in seconds and get up to speed on the most important details. 

Conversation summarization

Conversation summarization is available for any digital messaging or voice conversation that involves a virtual agent handoff to live support, an agent consult, or conversation wrap-up notes. You can also request a conversation summary on demand at any time during the conversation. 

A conversation summary will capture the 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. It will also highlight any sentiment expressed by the customer or the agent, plus action items or next steps.

Case summarization 

Case summarization is available in a single click, right on the case form. It captures highlights from key case fields such as Customer, Case title, Case type, Subject, Case Description, Product, and Priority. It also considers linked timeline records such as notes, emails and conversation summaries when the conversation summary feature is enabled. Case summaries can help support agents catch up on who has worked on the case so far. They can also see what has happened in previous communications, and any issues that have been addressed to date. This information helps agents quickly determine the best next steps.  

A case summary is valuable during case collaborations, transfers, and final resolutions when support agents are documenting what occurred throughout the case lifecycle. They are especially valuable in accelerating the administrative tasks surrounding multiday or long running cases. 

Extensibility and customization

Copilot summarization is flexible and adaptable to your organization’s needs and preferences. You can customize and extend the feature in various ways. 

With conversation summary, administrators can specify which actions trigger a conversation summary in the Customer Service admin center. For example, you can enable conversation summary only for handoffs and consults, or only for conversation wrap-ups, or for all three. 

With case summary, administrators can add the case summary card to any form that uses the case entity in Power Apps. This makes it easy to extend the functionality to any customized application that support teams use. 

Copilot summarization is a powerful tool that can help you accelerate your support processes and improve customer satisfaction. By providing agents with quick access to the most relevant information, Copilot helps save time, reduce errors, and enhance communication. Try it today and see how it can transform your support experience. 

Plan for future updates

We plan to update Copilot experiences monthly with features and enhancements. The AI models and prompts will be updated regularly behind the scenes, and you’ll see the quality of Copilot’s responses improve over time. The following features are already on our roadmap:  

• Out-of-box analytics. These reports will give supervisors insight into how their agents are using Copilot and its impact on their tracked support metrics.  
• SharePoint support for Copilot knowledge. Organizations who have their support content outside of Dynamics today can easily connect to a SharePoint content source. 

AI solutions built responsibly 

Enterprise grade data privacy at its core. Azure OpenAI offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Copilot is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection. 

Responsible AI by design. 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

For more information on extending the case summary, see Configure Copilot features for custom case forms and custom apps | Microsoft Learn 

The post Accelerate support ramp-ups, handoffs, and wrap-ups with Copilot summarization  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Hello to the Project Service Automation (PSA) Community!

Back in November 2022 we announced the availability of the second phase of Project Service Automation to Project Operations upgrade, making it possible to upgrade projects with up to 500 tasks.  If all projects in your environment contain 500 tasks or less, we strongly encourage you to start your upgrade process as soon as possible so you can take advantage of many new Project Operations features such as: 

• Integration with Project for the Web with many new advanced scheduling features

• Project Budgeting and Time-phased forecasting  
• Date Effective price overrides 
• Revision and Activation on Quotes   
• Material usage recording in projects and tasks 
• Subcontract Management 

• Advances and Retained-based contracts 
• Contract not-to-exceed 
• Task based billing 
• Multi-customer contracts 

Learn more

Curious to know details about the upgrade process? Please check this link and learn more about it! 
 
Want to learn more about Project Operations? Check this link and navigate to our detailed documentation! 

Want to try Project Operations? Click here and sign up for a 30 days trial! 

Thank you

The Microsoft Project Operations Product Team 

The post Upgrade Project Service Automation to Project Operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In Resource Scheduling Optimization, dispatchers can lock existing scheduled bookings to Resource, Time or Time Range, or Resource and Time based on their scheduling scenarios.

What are locked options and why are they needed?

Once a booking is created, a lock can be set on the Scheduling Lock Options field in the Resource Scheduling Optimization tab of the Bookable Resource Booking record.

There are 4 options:

• Lock to ‘Time Range’. A repair work order is scheduled for tomorrow and a confirmation sent to customer stating that a technician will be arriving between 9am to 12pm in the morning. In case if this repair work order needed to be rescheduled as part of rescheduling or re-optimization process, RSO will need to make sure estimated arrival time for this booking still between 9am to 12pm but may move this booking to other resource if needed in order to optimize global scheduling results.

• Lock to ‘Resource’. Sometimes, certain technicians manage work order requests for specific service accounts, in this case, dispatchers can configure technician as ‘Must choose from’ resource on Resource Requirement record before requirement gets fulfilled, or if the booking already created lock the booking to this resource. RSO will make sure to keep this booking assigned to the same resource but may move to another time in order to optimize global scheduling results.

• Lock to ‘Time’, similar like Lock to ‘Time Range’, instead of keeping the booking within a time window, RSO will make sure to keep the estimated arrival time for this booking at exact time but may move this booking to another resource if needed in order to optimize global scheduling results.

• Lock to ‘Resource and Time’: Sometimes, there are specific commitments with customers, which requires booking time or assigned technician to not change, with this lock option, RSO will NOT change this booking at all, it may recalculate estimated travel time based on prior booking changes.

How did RSO handle locked bookings before?

Before this changes, RSO administrators could select and rank ‘Locked booking’ objective on optimization goal, RSO will try to include locked bookings and optimize together with other bookings. When there are too many locked bookings in optimization scope, it reduces the flexibility of RSO system to generate optimal results. To improve global optimization results, RSO may decide to NOT include some locked bookings in the new proposed schedule, and since RSO will not delete locked bookings either, these locked bookings will be treated as ‘Ignored’. Dispatchers will end up seeing overlapping bookings on schedule board, or technician gets double booked which causes confusions and disruption.

For example, there are two requirements, Repair work (1 hour) and Install boiler (8 hours). We have one resource (Jeff) that works 8 hours per day. If you book repair work (1 hour) to the resource Jeff and lock that booking to Jeff, when RSO runs with the objective of maximizing total working hours, RSO decides to ignore the booking for Repair work (1 hour) and create another booking for Install boiler (8 hours) to maximize the total working hours. Since Repair work (1 hour) gets ignored from the final schedule and not being deleted, Jeff ends up being double booked.

Improved logic for locked bookings

With the improved logic for locked bookings shipped along RSO 3.4.0.8, RSO will ALWAYS include locked bookings in the new proposed schedules, and schedule other bookings around.

In the previous example for Jeff, RSO will make sure that booking for Repair work (1 hour) remains on the schedule, won’t create booking for Install boiler (8 hours) to avoid overlapping.

Excessive use of lock constraints may result in poor optimization of the final schedule. For example: Jeff has low utilization as there isn’t any other requirement can fit into the remaining hours.

Booking lock options should be used wisely to maximize Resource Scheduling Optimization results and minimize interference with other Resource Scheduling Optimization objectives.

Will RSO still respect locked bookings when locked bookings violate scheduling constraints?

Sometimes, dispatchers may lock a booking explicitly without being aware that the locked booking potentially violates certain scheduling constraints.

E,g: skill matching, a booking gets assigned to a technician who does not have the required skill. 

In this case, RSO will still respect locked bookings and make sure this locked booking is in the final schedule, as RSO respects user decision of the ‘locked booking’.  RSO shows a prompt: “Locked booking is infeasible, has invalid match of resource skill” to let the user decide in case they would like to correct manually and explicitly.

These are some of the new enhancements to allow efficiency in resource scheduling. Do review the detailed documentation on Universal Resource Scheduling for Dynamics 365 Field Service overview – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn for further information.

The post Maximizing efficiency in Resource Scheduling: Prioritizing Locked Bookings appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.