This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA released two Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on January 24, 2023.These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the newly released ICS advisories for technical details and mitigations:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The past couple years have been challenging for many customer service organizations. Meeting customers’ rising expectations and adapting to their evolving needs within a volatile economic landscape has been a herculean effort. Businesses are investing more in measuring the impact of their customer service, and the investment is paying dividends. In fact, it’s becoming more about the total customer experience and transforming the business models to create effortless experiences for both customers as well as employees. By 2026, Gartner predicts that 60 percent of large enterprises will use total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels.1 This growing acknowledgment is a positive indicator that service is finally recognized as a core business value driver as support teams became pivotal in retaining customer loyalty and winning new customers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
But are service organizations ready to face challenges and equipped to provide this level of service at scale? Customer service leaders are turning to modernizing technology and digitization, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, to provide high-quality customer service experiences.
Modern customer service means showing up for your customers on the channel of their choice. Customers increasingly expect companies to offer a robust service experience right in their favorite channel. With each social channel representing diverse customer segments, engaging across these channels offers countless opportunities to deliver excellent service.
The Omnichannel for Customer Service add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers a wide variety of social engagement options for customers to engage on their preferred channel. Now with 2022 release wave 2, we’ve added Apple Messages for Business to our list of social messaging apps. This rich messaging can be used to generate interactive content and experiences that all take place within the messages application. And remember, when you enable agents to respond using the customer’s channel of choice, it drives brand engagement, creates a positive experience, and builds customer loyalty.
When engaging on social, always remember that you are not interacting with just one customer issue, but a wider audience that may not have context around a customer’s challenge. With an increasing number of eyes on you, it’s crucial to respond with precision, empathy, and quality.
Intelligent self-service empowers customers to conveniently secure answers when and how they want, and this online, anytime support option is growing in popularity with customers. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers are likely to search for an answer to an issue within a knowledge base, online community, or portal before reaching out to a customer support agent. These critical self-service capabilities free up your agents to focus on high-priority, complex issues, and drive customer satisfaction.
AI-powered chatbots are leading the charge in intelligent self service. Bots serve as the first point of contact for customers, alleviate customer frustrations from long wait times, and provide around-the-clock, immediate online support.
With the right service solution, bots can be deployed as conversational interactive voice responses (IVRs) equipped with natural language processing. A direct benefit of this intelligent, human-like conversation experience, paired with around-the-clock availability, is increased resolution speed. A quick response to a problem can be the difference in keeping a customer or having them pivot to a competitor.
AI and machine learning advancements continue to make bots even more powerful and more efficient in understanding and conversing with customers. The use of bots in customer service is likely to expand as the technology becomes more and more democratized.
Customers want businesses to quickly recognize them as individuals and tailor their customer support experiences. Personalization isn’t only about knowing your customers and their histories, it means being able to understand and accordingly respond to their sentiment in real time. The ideal solution creates interactions based on each customer’s profile, which uses their current and past interactions and user data to customize the experience. It can be as simple as greeting a customer by their name and pulling up their order automatically by an email address or phone number, or it can mean taking the first step and implementing proactive customer care.
This trend in personalizing customer service demonstrates the value of the relationship to the customer, enhancing CSAT and strengthening loyalty, while significantly impacting the company’s bottom line.
Learn how AI is helping customer service leaders drive higher customer satisfaction scores.
With agents working from more places than ever, they need new ways to find experts who can help them solve customer challenges. The right data at the right time is key to empowering agents to meet customers’ needs quickly and accurately. However, as omnichannel customer profiles grow, agents need tools that proactively surface insights that matter in the moment.
Advancements in AI technology, especially natural language understanding, enable real-time analysis of conversations and the ability to surface real-time insights and knowledge. Agents can be alerted to similar cases and successful resolution steps, along with knowledge suggestions customized for the current context. All of these capabilities help agents solve customer issues more quickly, improving resolution rates and customer satisfaction.
Many customer service leaders are making it a priority to transform their departments from cost centers to growth centers. At the same time, they face continuous pressure to keep costs down.
Unifying tools onto a single, cloud-based platform reduces redundancy and enables cost flexibility to meet changing business conditions. If that platform has an open architecture and no-code/low-code development capabilities, the time and cost of development can be dramatically reducedputting innovation within reach across the organization.
These are just a few of the trends in customer service, but one thing is for sure: customer service is evolving rapidly. The real challenge is being able to serve customers wherever they are and making sure every customer interaction is captured and available in a single profile for the support agent to use in resolving customer issues.
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Microsoft is listening. We’re continually adapting and innovating to provide service leaders with the tools you need to consistently deliver exceptional customer service. We continue to invest in features like self-service, bots, social engagement, and agent productivity tools that bring value to you, your customer service organization, and most of all, to your customers. Our goal is to build intuitive, sophisticated, easy-to-use tools that enhance your service delivery and empower your service representatives to exceed customer and organizational expectations.
Our service product roadmap is filled with new features and innovations that will take your service experience to the next level, differentiate your brand, and ultimately help you rise as a leader in your industry.
Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and check out Apple Messages for Business.
End notes
1Gartner webinar, The Total Experience Strategy for Better Retail Digital Interactions. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
2180+ Social Media Marketing Stats You Can’t Ignore (2023), Dreamgrow.com.
3The state of customer care in 2022 and beyond, McKinsey, 2022.
4 Gartner Press Release, Gartner Predicts Chatbots Will Become a Primary Customer Service Channel Within Five Years, July 27, 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
5Consumers expect personalization, reveals report, Retail Customer Experience.
6New Epsilon research indicates 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences, Epsilon Research.
7The state of customer care in 2022 and beyond, McKinsey, 2022.
The post 5 customer service trends to watch in 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article was originally posted by the FTC. See the original article here.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article was originally posted by the FTC. See the original article here.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The idea on this blog post came from an issue opened by an user on the Windows Containers GitHub Repo. I thought the problem faced by the user should be common enough that others might be interested in a solution.
Get-Credential cmdlet pop-up
If you use PowerShell, you most likely came across the Get-Credential cmdlet at some point. It’s extremely useful for situations on which you want to set a username and password to be used in a script, variable, etc.. However, the way Get-Credential works is by providing a pop-up window for you to enter the credentials:
On a traditional Windows environment, this is totally fine as the pop-up window shows up, you enter the username and password, and save the information. However, on a Windows container there’s no place to display the pop-up window:
As you can see on the image above, the command hangs waiting for the confirmation, but nothing happens as the pop-up is not being displayed. Even typing CRTL+C doesn’t work. In my case, I had to close the PowerShell window, which left the container in an exited state.
Changing the Get-Credential behavior
To work around this issue, you can change the PowerShell policy to accept credential input from the console session. Here’s the script for that workaround:
$key = "HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoftPowerShell1ShellIds"
Set-ItemProperty -Path $key -Name ConsolePrompting -Value $trueThe next time you use the Get-Credential cmdlet, it will ask for the username and password on the console session:
On the example above, I simply entered the username and password for the Get-Credential cmdlet. You could, obviously, save that on a variable for later use.
While this workaround solves the problem of not being able to use the Get-Credential cmdlet on Windows containers, it’s obviously not ideal. The information from the product team is that they are looking into making this the default option for Windows containers in the future – although, no timelines are available at this moment.
I hope this is useful to you! Let us know in the comments!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA has added one new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and poses a significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: To view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.
Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a living list of known CVEs that carry significant risk to the federal enterprise. BOD 22-01 requires FCEB agencies to remediate identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect FCEB networks against active threats. See the BOD 22-01 Fact Sheet for more information.
Although BOD 22-01 only applies to FCEB agencies, CISA strongly urges all organizations to reduce their exposure to cyberattacks by prioritizing timely remediation of Catalog vulnerabilities as part of their vulnerability management practice. CISA will continue to add vulnerabilities to the Catalog that meet the specified criteria.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In some situations, we saw that our customers are trying to export their database to a blob storage that is behind a firewall, currently this operation is not supported Export a database to a BACPAC file – Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance | Microsoft Learn
Exporting a database we need to review some considerations in terms of storage:
Exporting a BACPAC file to Azure premium storage using the methods discussed in this article is not supported.
Storage behind a firewall is currently not supported.
Immutable storage is currently not supported.
Storage file name or the input value for StorageURI should be fewer than 128 characters long and cannot end with ‘.’ and cannot contain special characters like a space character or ‘,*,%,&,:,,/,?’.
Trying to perform this operation you may received an error message: Database export error Failed to export the database: . ErrorCode: undefined ErrorMessage: undefined-
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We used to have situations where our customer needs to export 2 TB of data using SQLPackage in Azure SQL Database. Exporting this amount of data might take time and following we would like to share with you some best practices for this specific scenario.
Enjoy!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Cisco released a security advisory for a vulnerability affecting Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME). A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause a denial-of-service condition. For updates addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the Cisco Security Advisories page.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the advisories and apply the necessary updates.
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