Any call center that uses unified routing to manage and assign incoming support requests is going to notice gains in efficiency. The core routing capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service use skill matching and priority to help determine assignments. However, bringing intelligence to the challenge of efficient routing can move you closer to world-class service.

With the unified routing release in April of 2021, we introduced intelligent skill finder as the first capability related to intelligent work classification. It empowers organizations to identify which skills are required by the agent to address an incoming work item. AI models are trained to understand the skills required to address customer inquiries, and then a match is made to agent skills, helping to assign the calls to agents. In this new release, we’re adding two more capabilities to intelligent work classification: customer sentiment identification and effort estimation for routing. These capabilities will enable organizations to harness state-of-the-art AI to improve customer satisfaction and reduce resolution times.

Understanding customer needs with sentiment identification

Matching agents to calls based on skills is a basic capability in unified routing. What if you could also gauge customer sentiment based on keywords, and then route calls to agents best able to handle those various emotions?

Let’s better understand this with a scenario. Imagine Contoso Coffee is operating a support center and has implemented unified routing. They recently had a high volume of unhappy customers, and they brainstormed about how best to use their existing staff to address these concerns. Contoso Coffee realizes that customer sentiment could be used as a signal to influence call routing; some agents are better at managing unhappy customers. Contoso decides to adopt sentiment prediction in unified routing. They take a few simple steps:

1. Contoso’s admin opts into the feature and tries it out using the Dry Run tool, where the admin can test phrases specific to their organization and view the sentiment prediction.
2. The admin set up a skill for managing work items predicted to include low (unhappy) sentiment, and that skill is assigned to their agents who have the right training to handle it.
3. The admin configured a rule to predict sentiment, and it attaches the low sentiment management skill to work items when sentiment is low.
4. The dry run option is used to start testing out the rule, with work items assigned based on the score.
5. Now, once the rule is in production, new work items predicted to have low sentiment have a higher priority to be matched to agents with the appropriate management skillset.

As a result, Contoso Coffee was able to address the spike in unhappy customers, leveraging their agents to maintain customer satisfaction.

Learn more about using customer sentiment in classification in this short video introduction:

Read more in the documentation about using sentiment prediction-based model in work classification.

Estimate effort to increase assignment efficiency

A key contributor to an effective contact center is understanding how long it will take to address support requests. Organizations do not have a simple way to understand how much time it will take agents to address incoming work items. Effort estimation replaces manual processes with the use of AI. This intelligence interprets the issue and uses historical support data to generate a work estimate.

Highlights of this capability include:

• For training, a business admin can specify which work items to train on and define effort for their organization.
• Use the dry run experience to test out the model on customer data and view real effort estimations prior to integrating into the routing process.
• Add it to existing routing capabilities such as route to queue rules.
• Review diagnostics for insight into how the work item was routed using effort estimations.
• Train multiple custom models based on individual customer data.

Learn more about effort-based routing in this short video introduction:

Read more in the documentation about using the effort estimation model in unified routing.

Matching required skills to agents

In any contact center, each agent will have a different set of skills to offer, and organizations should use those skills appropriately to best address customer requests. To maximize agent potential, it is critical for any organization to understand the skills required to address a work item and identify the agent that is best suited to address it. Intelligent skill finder takes the guesswork out of this by using AI to predict the skills required to address an incoming work item, and then matching those required skills to corresponding agents.

Highlights of this capability include:

• For training, a business admin can specify which work items to train.
• Use it with skill-based routing.
• Models can improve over time based on the agent feedback loop.
• Review diagnostics for insight into how the work item was routed using skill predictions.
• Train multiple custom models based on individual customer data.

Next steps

Visit the Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community Forum to share your thoughts.

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.

The post Use intelligence to transform routing of service delivery requests appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Marketing professionals go to great lengths to understand customers. Detailed personas are written to identify the motivations, interests, and buying patterns of prospects and customers. But all too often, these personasand their resulting customer journeysare informed by data points important to the organization, not the customer. You cannot claim to be customer-centric, customer-first, or customer-obsessed if all the data you track is company-centric.

You may be thinking your organization is ahead of the customer journey curve here. After all, you’re already tracking customer-centric metrics such as net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, and customer effort score. But take a second look. These key performance indicators (KPIs) still ultimately measure benchmarks important to the organization, not the customer.

Go beyond KPIs with customer performance indicators

Nobody is arguing that an organization shouldn’t have a robust set of KPIs focused on measuring the fulfillment of important company objectives. But your toolbox of performance indicators doesn’t have to end thereand neither do the possibilities for the customer journey. Rather, take things to a whole new level by also measuring the fulfillment of customers’ objectives and optimizing the journey with the help of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Customer performance indicators (CPIs) quantify and measure outcomes that are desired by customers. These outcomes could include time savings, cost savings, convenience, flexibility, a sense of security, or any number of other outcomes customers deem valuable in the context of your product or service. There’s no cookie-cutter set of CPIs; they will vary widely across industries, organizations, products, and regions.

Consider the scenario of a retailer whose shoppers especially value speed. Acknowledging their shoppers’ priorities along with the need to balance services with expectations, the retailer tracks customers’ wait-time for curbside pick-up. They discover that wait times occasionally go beyond customer expectations. In response, the retailer implements a new feature that sends a flash promotional offer to high-value customers, when they are on their way during busy periods, for a complimentary drink redeemable from the in-store bar when they switch to in-store pickup. It’s a personalized gesture that acknowledges the retailer fell short of expectations but is trying to do its best to make it up to the customer. By optimizing the metrics that reflect what is important to the customer, the retailer can positively impact a whole host of KPIs, from customer satisfaction and customer loyalty to sales revenueand more.

Where KPIs end and customer performance indicators begin

There is a strong correlation between CPIs and KPIs. As illustrated by our retailer example, meeting the objective of a CPI is likely to boost associated KPIs. In fact, CPIs have been identified as powerful predictors of growth. Similarly, declining CPIs are likely to drag down associated KPIs.

CPIs also uncover insights about KPIs. Take customer satisfaction as an example. A high customer satisfaction score (a common KPI) indicates that an organization is doing something well. And while that’s critical information, this KPI on its own may not be able to provide visibility into what that something is. Or whether that something is even important to the customer. But a set of CPIs designed to measure desired customer outcomes such as personalized touches or chat availability can identify where the strongest correlations lie between what is important to the customer and what is important to the company.

CPIs and KPIs have a lot in common. They both measure performance, they both demonstrate progress toward an intended result, and they both impact the bottom line. For this reason, they can be difficult to distinguish from one another.

In the following table, we identify a few common KPIs. Alongside each KPI, we list one or more CPIs that could be used to enhance the understanding or performance of the associated KPI.

Find your customer performance indicators

What outcomes do your customers value? When you have the answer to that question, you can focus on delivering those outcomes. Every CPI identified, quantified, and measured brings new discoveries, new opportunities, and new levers to pull. Every CPI optimized is one more personalization you can bring to the customer journey, from brand voice and quote delivery to product bundling and customer service availability.

In short, it’s not enough to measure what’s important to your organizationnot if you want to optimize the customer journey and exceed customer expectations. You must also measure what’s important to your customers.

Learn how Dynamics 365 Marketing helps your organization optimize the CPIs that lead to elevated experiences.

The post The most important customer experience metrics (that you’re not tracking yet) appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.