Customers don’t just want fast service—they expect businesses to stay one step ahead. Today’s customers want companies to anticipate their needs before they even ask, for example: sending a reminder before a payment is late; giving a heads-up when a delivery is delayed, or following up after a dropped call. These aren’t just nice-to-haves—we believe that they’re the new standard for customer experience.

That’s why we’re announcing proactive engagement and conversational journeys with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, now available in public preview. With this solution, organizations can use custom-built AI agents and service representatives to proactively reach out across channels—like informing a customer about a canceled flight and guiding them to a resolution in the same conversation. Businesses can benefit from lower call volumes and support costs, while customers can get faster, more personalized experiences that drive satisfaction and brand loyalty. General availability is expected later this summer.

Of course, delivering proactive service at scale isn’t easy. Organizations can be under pressure to do more with less—fewer resources, tighter budgets, and higher customer expectations. Reaching out at the right time, with the right message, on the right channel takes orchestration, insight, and intelligent automation. That’s exactly what these new capabilities are designed to deliver: smarter, highly personalized engagement.

Proactive engagement

Create AI-driven proactive outbound experiences.

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The impact of AI on customer service

Looking ahead, the influence of AI on customer experience will only deepen. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 82% of leaders expect to expand their use of digital labor to boost workforce capacity in the next 12 to 18 months.

Our customers are already reaping the benefits of AI-powered digital teammates. Tourism and travel segments, for example, are using proactive engagement and conversational journeys to assist customers with travel planning—from bookings to itinerary guidance—with human reps available to further assist as needed.

Apollo Travel, a travel agency that fields more than 350,000 reservations annually across Scandinavia, is using proactive engagement to reduce inbound reservation calls.

“We’re always looking for ways to better serve our customers, and these new capabilities open up exciting opportunities to engage with them more proactively. We see clear potential for benefits on both sides—improving the experience for our customers while driving efficiency for our business.”

—Johnny Nilsson, Head of Group Power Platform Center of Excellence at Apollo Travel (part of DERTOUR Group)

Conversational journeys

Use AI to deliver customer experiences at scale.

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Other use cases demonstrate the broader value of this approach: shipping and delivery delays, appointment reminders, system outages, prescription refills, loyalty reward notifications, and service updates are all possible through AI agent-based outreach. The interactions feel natural and helpful, and if needed, seamlessly transition to a service representative for personalized support—turning a potential issue into a moment of brand loyalty. Customers can communicate naturally with the AI agent, which, based on that dialogue, will offer resolutions like transferring to a different flight or issuing a refund. Depending on your requirements, proactive engagement can then follow up with additional actions like a confirmation email or text message.

Because these repetitive, time-consuming tasks are now automated, reps can focus on more critical problems and delivering meaningful engagements to each customer. This helps build trust and ensure customers feel valued, while allowing service teams to focus on more complex, high-value interactions—helping to reduce operational costs and improve overall efficiency.

A typical scenario has three parts. The first part is a customer journey that tells the AI agent who to call, when to call, and how to process choices that the customer makes during the call. The second part is the AI agent, which can communicate with customers using natural language. The final part brings it all together, with authors managing the agent’s customer queues, phone numbers, and the like. If a customer asks, this is also where an agent would transfer the call to a service rep and then manage that call until resolution. The entire solution can be authored with no code (including the ability to design the AI agent using natural language), making it accessible to non-technical business users to define their customer experiences with ease. With integrated consent management and designated quiet times/days, compliance with customer preferences and regulatory requirements can be effortlessly maintained. Additionally, it offers the flexibility to respond to real-time events or schedule an outreach in advance.

Enabling proactive engagement

To enable the solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights-Journeys and Microsoft Copilot Studio are required. As you use the solution, please send your feedback to pefeedback@microsoft.com, and continue checking this blog for updates about this and other upcoming releases.

The post AI-powered proactive engagement and conversational journeys with Microsoft Dynamics 365 in public preview appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Delivering timely, high-quality support requires more than skilled customer service representatives. It demands smart, real-time task assignment aligned with representatives’ availability. Shift-based routing in Dynamics 365 Contact Center introduces a powerful enhancement to unified routing by assigning customer interactions based on service representatives’ scheduled shifts. This ensures that tasks are only routed to representatives who are scheduled to work—based on their workforce management shift bookings—improving both responsiveness and operational efficiency. 

Why availability matters 

Service representatives often follow structured shift plans where different time slots in the day are allocated to handling customer conversations, attending training, or taking breaks. In such dynamic settings, it is critical to assign conversations and records to representatives based on their shift schedules and avoid routing to off-duty representatives or those on a break, thereby reducing conversation rejections or transfers and customer wait times  

Shift-based routing directly addresses this challenge by integrating shift bookings into the assignment engine. This means work is routed only to representatives who are scheduled to work as per the defined shift activity type, and are eligible to handle it, based on clearly defined custom assignment rules.. 

How shift-based routing works 

Supervisors and planners define shift plans in Workforce Management. Each plan includes: 

• Activities: These are predefined time intervals categorized as either Assignable (e.g., customer support, handling chats) or Non-Assignable (e.g., breaks, training sessions). Activities serve as building blocks for scheduling. 

• Shift bookings: These are personalized schedules generated for each service representative, containing assigned activities from the shift plan. 

In short, activities are defined in the shift plan, and shift bookings are created for each service rep based on those activities. 

Unified routing then references these bookings to make smart assignment decisions: 

• Representatives are eligible for work only if they have a committed, assignable shift booking during that time. Representatives without any shift booking will not receive work through automated assignment. 

• Non-assignable bookings temporarily exclude the representative from receiving new tasks for the defined duration. 

• If a representative has overlapping bookings, eligibility depends on the shift activity types: 

• If all overlapping bookings are assignable, the representative is eligible to receive work. 

• If there is even one non-assignable booking, the representative is not eligible to receive work. They will not be considered for automatic assignment for the duration of non-assignable booking.

Example Scenarios 

Let’s say a representative has the following shift bookings: 

• 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM: Handle conversations (Assignable) 

• 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM : Lunch (Non-Assignable) 

• 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM: Training (Non-Assignable) 

• Conversations arriving between 9:00am and 12:30pm will be assigned to the representative if they meet the conditions defined in the custom assignment rules.Representative will not be considered for automatic assignment from 12:30pm to 1:00pm since they have overlapping bookings during this period, one of which is non-assignable (Lunch).  

• Conversations received between 1:00pm and 5:00pm, that overlap with the representative’s lunch or training period will not be assigned. This is because these timeslots are designated as non-assignable.  

Key benefits of shift-based routing

• Faster response times: Assign work only to representatives who are scheduled to work, reducing delays. 

• Better workload distribution: Avoid overloading eligible agents by accurately accounting for availability as per their defined shift bookings. 

• Enhanced service quality: Minimize conversation rejections or transfers due to routing misalignment. 

• Improved employee experience: Representatives receive work only during assigned support slots, promoting a healthier work rhythm. 

 Once configured, conversations and records are automatically assigned based on actual shift bookings instead of the work hour calendar schedule—providing a smarter, more accurate routing experience. 

Learn more 

To learn more, read the documentation: Configure routing based on external schedules (preview) | Microsoft Learn 

The post Improve contact center operations with shift-based routing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, providing exceptional customer service is more important than ever. One of the latest innovations in this field is intent-based routing, a capability that leverages generative AI to enhance customer interactions and streamline contact center operations. 

What is intent-based routing? 

Intent-based routing (IBR) is a generative AI-powered capability that routes customer queries based on real-time intent recognition and dynamic user group assignment.  It is enabled by the Customer Intent Agent, which autonomously discovers and manages customer intents by analyzing past interactions and builds an evolving intent library.  

Customer Intent Agent discovers and manages intents, while IBR uses those intents to route conversations, connecting customer needs to the right support resources with speed and precision. 

Once an intent and its group are identified, IBR routes the conversation to the appropriate user group based on the mapped intent group. Next, IBR assigns it to the best-suited support representative within the group, based on their capacity, presence, and other routing attributes. This enables faster, more accurate resolutions. By turning intent from a passive insight into an active, intelligent routing decision, IBR becomes the operational backbone of an intent-driven contact center. Subsequently, this results in better assisted and self-service experiences. 

Below is a simplified flow of IBR: 

Example of intent-based routing 

Let’s explore how Contoso Bank, a leading global financial institution, is leveraging IBR to transform its customer support operations. With services spanning 60 countries, Contoso Bank operates a massive contact center handling inquiries across various business lines and regions. 

To maximize the benefits of IBR, Contoso Bank implemented the feature for its retail banking line of business (LOB).  

• Using intent discovery to generate intents such as “Open a new savings bank account” and “Report lost debit or credit card” and grouping them into manageable clusters like “Account Management” and “Card Services,” the bank has optimized its routing process.  

• Using intuitive mappings of intent groups to user groups, Contoso ensures that queries pertaining to a certain intent group such as “Account Management” go to the correct user group, e.g., “Account Management America”, who are adept at handling the account related issues.  

• Within these user groups, the assignment engine allocates the work to representatives with the right expertise, significantly enhancing customer satisfaction while streamlining operations. 

Below is a sample of AI-generated intents, intent groups for Contoso’s Retail banking LOB, and the mapped user groups for each intent group:  

Benefits of intent-based routing 

As we can see from Contoso’s example, implementing intent-based routing in your contact center can offer numerous benefits: 

Enhanced precision and personalization 

The Customer Intent Agent continuously learns from historical data and emerging trends to identify and categorize intents. Hence, this ensures that customer queries go to the support representatives with the right expertise to handle them efficiently. The result? Fewer misroutes, faster resolutions, and happier customers. 

Dynamic intent discovery 

By analyzing conversations daily, the system dynamically generates new intents and organizes them into manageable intent groups. Therefore, this evolving library helps teams stay aligned with changing customer behavior and simplifies management. 

Streamlined routing configuration 

There’s no need for complex machine learning models or training data sets. IBR also reduces reliance on complex rule-based systems. Instead, admins simply map AI-generated intent groups to user groups—making configuration intuitive and maintenance light. 

Smarter workforce management and load handling 

User groups in IBR help organize support representatives by expertise, tasks, and business lines—streamlining scheduling, training, and performance tracking. This structure ensures the correct matching of customer intents with the right agents. Additionally, it enables supervisors to dynamically reassign or scale user groups in response to demand. As a result, contact centers experience better workload distribution, faster response times, and improved service quality. 

Scalable and adaptable 

You can configure IBR gradually, starting with specific workstreams. For this reason, its flexible design allows organizations to scale usage without disrupting existing operations. 

Flexible and future-ready 

Unlike static rule-based systems, IBR uses generative AI to continuously adapt to evolving customer and business needs. Consequently, this ensures that routing logic stays aligned with organizational changes—without requiring extensive reconfiguration. Its adaptability helps contact centers respond quickly to shifting priorities, while keeping operations agile and competitive. 

Learn more 

Now available in preview for chat and case channels, IBR is easy to adopt and scale whether you’re starting small or planning a broader rollout.  

Ready to transform your contact center? Explore the implementation guide for step-by-step setup instructions. 

The post Intent-based routing transforms customer support with AI appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are introducing an important update to streamline and modernize how email templates are created and edited. As of May 23, 2025, we are deprecating the legacy email template rich text editor and enhanced email template editor and moving to a single, modern email template editor for all users.

Change management can be challenging—especially when it involves tools you use every day. This update aims to simplify the experience by consolidating two editors into one, eliminating inconsistencies, and delivering a more streamlined and feature-rich email template editing experience.

What’s new?

• Unified editing experience: All templates will now be created and managed using a single, modern rich text email template editor, eliminating the need to switch between different editors.
• HTML support for customization: The new editor supports HTML editing, giving you the flexibility to design custom layouts, apply consistent branding, and style content exactly the way you need.
• Improved reliability: This unified modern rich text editor removes formatting issues. Additionally, it provides smoother previews and a more reliable experience at both creation and runtime.

What’s going away?

We are phasing out the drag-and-drop layout editor from the legacy tool. Existing templates will remain valid, but admins must review them after the change goes live to ensure the formatting displays correctly in the new rich text editor.

Will my existing email templates still work?

While there’s no change to how emails render when sent, you may need to adjust some formatting at the reviewing and editing stages.

What’s different about the new editor?

The new rich text editor offers a more modern and consistent experience. It now supports HTML editing, which means you can still use custom layouts and styles—just with better reliability.

Can I still use drag-and-drop to design my emails?

We are phasing out the drag-and-drop layout feature from the legacy rich text editor.

Do I need to recreate my templates in the new editor?

No. You can continue using your existing templates. When you open them for editing, they’ll now open in the modern editor automatically.

What changes should I make to existing email templates?

We strongly suggest incorporating these changes to email templates to prevent errors in formatting:

• Validate that appropriate width units have been added to the HTML format to help email templates render well at runtime
• Avoid nested table structures, which can lead to formatting errors.

What if I need help adjusting to the new editor?

We’ve updated our documentation and support resources to guide you through the transition. You can also reach out to your support contact for personalized help.

Learn more

To learn more, read the documentation: How to create an email template in model-driven apps – Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

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