As the world started unwinding from the pandemic, Sarah joined thousands of travelers in booking flights for a long-planned vacation. Realizing she forgot to add her food preferences, she immediately opened a chat on the airline portal. After a long wait, the virtual agent told her to try again later. All the human support agents were busy. She returned after a few hours and started another chat, but she was too late. The chat service had ended for the day. Super upset and frustrated, she left the chat giving the lowest rating.

Busy queues often lead to lower CSAT

Service delivery organizations dread scenarios like Sarah’s, where the customer must wait a long time in the queue, abandons the attempt with a low satisfaction rating, orworst of allboth. Managing workloads effectively during periods of peak demand is a frequent problem for all businesses. Service organizations face the additional challenge of support requests that arrive outside of business hours. Companies are looking for ways to enhance their customers’ experience to drive higher CSAT. Efficient queue overflow management is an essential part.

Introducing queue overflow management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service

With queue overflow management, businesses can proactively manage overflow when callers are experiencing abnormally long wait times or a queue has many unassigned work items.

Corrective actions are specific to service channels or modalities. During peak demand, organizations can transfer calls to a different queue or to voicemail or offer to call the customer back later. Similarly, conversations and records can be transferred from an overflowing queue to a different queue.

How to set up queue overflow management

In the Customer Service admin center, select Queues > Advanced queues. Select Set overflow conditions in the Overflow management tile.

Then define the conditions that will determine whether the queue is overflowing and what action to take if it is.

Overflow evaluation happens before a work item is added to the queue. You can think of it as a sort of “pre-queueing” step.

How queue overflow management would make Sarah a happy customer

Let’s return to our excited traveler Sarah to learn how queue overflow management would help the airline avoid a dissatisfied customer. She’s bought her tickets and initiated a chat to add a meal preference to her reservation. The airline now has two queues for customer chats. With customers already holding in one, queue overflow management automatically routes Sarah to the other, where there’s no wait.

Investigate queue overflow events with routing diagnostics

Dynamics 365 Customer Service captures information about queue overflow events in routing diagnostics. Admins can use the information to understand failure scenarios and plan their business workflows accordingly.

Prepare better to serve better

It’s hard to predict peak demand events. Queue overflow management can help. Admins and supervisors are better prepared for contingencies, and customers like Sarah get a faster resolution to their issues.

Learn more

To find out more about queue overflow management in Customer Service, read the documentation: Manage overflow of work items in queues

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.

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Skill-based routing automatically assigns the agents with the right skills to work on customer support requests. With skill-based routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, your call center can reduce the number of queues it operates, improve agents’ productivity, and increase customers’ satisfaction.

To get the most out of skill-based routing, it should be easy to onboard your agents with the right set of skills, proficiencies, and queues. It should be just as easy to modify your workforce configuration to keep up with the ever-changing demands on your call center. With the October 2022 release, Dynamics 365 Customer Service introduces a new skills hub and an enhanced user management experience that helps you onboard and manage the agents in your workforce more efficiently than ever before.

One-stop skill-based routing in the new skills hub

Let’s look at a common scenario. Morgon is the call center administrator for Contoso Enterprises, a global e-commerce company. Morgon has observed a surge in service requests around “Returns” in the North American region. Customers are facing long wait times because of it. In response, Morgon wants to make two changes to his workforce.

First, he wants to boost the “Returns” skill and support the additional requests using agents who have lower proficiency in handling returns but can provide timely support. Second, he wants to move some agents from the Latin American queue to the North American queue to assist with the additional demand.

Previously, Morgon would have had to visit separate admin centers to accomplish these tasks. Now he can do everything in one place: the skills hub.

Skills, skill types, proficiency scales, and intelligent skill finder models are all important parts of skill-based routing. The new skills hub is the one-stop place to manage these attributes across your entire call center.

Here’s what you’ll find in the new skills hub:

• An overview of all the skills you’ve configured in your call center and the number of users associated with each one
• A single seamless flow to create a skill, add agents to it, and assign the agents’ proficiency in the skill
• A simple way to add or remove multiple agents from a skill in just a few steps
• An out-of-box proficiency scale to help you start using skill-based routing in as few steps as possible
• An intuitive experience to create or modify proficiency scales

Enhanced user management

Along with skills, Customer Service uses queues and capacity profiles to efficiently route work requests to the agents best suited to handle them. With enhanced user management, you can easily view how your agents are configured across these attributes. Managing the attributes for multiple agents takes just a few simple steps.

Here are some highlights of the new user management experience:

• A page that lists the skills, proficiency scales, queues, and capacity profiles of all agents in your organization
• Search functionality to find agents with specific skills or other attributes
• The ability to update the attributes of multiple agents at once
• One place to manage skills, proficiencies, queues, and capacity profiles of users

You can even enable agents to participate in swarming requests as part of the collaboration features in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

With the new skills hub and enhanced user management, call center administrators can now quickly configure their workforce and make changes on the fly to keep up with customers’ varying demands.

The skills hub and enhanced user management are available as a public preview in the Dynamics 365 Customer Service admin center for all organizations.

Next steps

To learn about the new features and try out their capabilities, read the documentation:

• Skill-based routing in Omnichannel for Customer Service | Microsoft Learn
• Set up skills and assign agents | Microsoft Learn
• Overview of user management | Microsoft Learn
• Overview of unified routing | Microsoft Learn

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 Skill-based routing and one-stop user management help you keep up with customer service demands appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Accounts Payable teams around the globe spend hours processing invoices that come from different channelsfax, mail, email, handwritten, and electronic data interchange (EDI). The sheer volume of invoices is a difficult burden to overcomeand the number grows exponentially with the number of office locations. Resource-strained finance teams must manually transfer invoice details to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This error-prone process increases finance cycle times, delays closing the books, and prevents timely financial statements. Misplaced invoices and delayed payments cost organizations thousands in lost vendor discounts. Wouldn’t it be great if all that manual work could be automated? With the new invoice capture feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, it can.

Invoice capture automates the entire AP invoice-to-pay process using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With invoice capture, employees scan invoices as they arrive, OCR extracts critical data, and the system matches invoices with purchase orders, identifies exceptions and data errors, and updates financial records. Employees can quickly route coded invoices for approval through workflows that follow rules based on the invoice data and amount.

Invoice capture helps control spending and reduce paperwork

Invoice capture delivers the following benefits:

• Spend control: Automated processing and better audit trails deliver more real-time visibility into spend and better reporting, which results in faster responses to time-sensitive vendor inquiries. This can help your business avoid late bill payments, take advantage of time-based discounts, and accelerate approvals.
• Faster cycle times: Freeing your AP teams from manual data entry reduces errors, trims weeks from the payment cycle, and allows the team to focus on more strategic tasks like improving vendor relationships, optimizing sourcing contracts, and negotiating deeper discounts.
• Paperless AP: Say goodbye to filing cabinets, lost invoices, and printer jams. With a fully digitized process, not only do you reduce your carbon footprint and printing costs, but documents are more secure.

Key capabilities of invoice capture

• Invoice data extraction from multiple channels: Invoice capture offers flexible configuration settings that allow you to automate invoice processingregardless of how invoices come across your desk, whether they’re faxed, EDI, or even handwrittenand consolidate them centrally for approvals.
• Empowered by AI Builder and Azure Form Recognizer: Invoice capture contains a prebuilt AI model powered by Microsoft AI Builder and Azure Form Recognizer, which can process most invoice formats from all over the world without extra model training effort. The Microsoft AI Builder continuously improves the model.
• Custom AI model for invoice processing: When business complexity prevents the prebuilt model from recognizing an invoice format, invoice capture provides a way to build custom models to supplement the prebuilt model.
• Intelligent and flexible business rule engine: Sometimes the AP team needs more information to make the right decision than the basic details on the invoice. It’s often helpful to have information from the supply chain or bank account details, for instance. Using an intelligent business rule engine, you can define derivations and validation rules to accommodate the complexity of your vendor invoice processing. This helps to streamline the accounts payable automation and relieves the AP team from repetitive work, allowing them to focus on more value-added tasks.

Next steps

Take the first step by downloading our public preview of invoice capture from Microsoft AppSource. Check out the documentation to get started. Then tell us what you think!

The post Automate your Accounts Payable process with invoice capture appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are excited to announce that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can now display product names and descriptions in your users’ preferred languages. Supply Chain Management already offered a localized user interface (UI) but showed product information in the system language. We have now made it possible to show localized product information throughout the UI. This has long been one of the most requested capabilities from customers using our Dynamics 365 Application Ideas portal.

You might already have your product information available in multiple languages for use in printed documents. If you do, you’re ready to take advantage of this new feature. All you have to do is turn it on.

Localized product information avoids frustration and lost time

There are many scenarios where local users find it difficult to understand product names and descriptions in the system language. This affects many roles, from sales and purchasing agents to machine operators on the shop floor. Misunderstandings can lead to frustration, lost time, and, in the worst case, can even lead users to create transactions using the wrong products.

Imagine an international organization that uses English as its system language. At the plant in Stockholm, where workers use Swedish as their preferred language, all UI elements are shown in Swedishbut product names and descriptions have always been shown in English. Now they can be shown in Swedish, too.

Before: The following screenshot shows how the production floor execution interface used to appear at the Stockholm factory. As you can see, the UI is in Swedish, but the product name in English.

After: The user interface is still in Swedish, and the product name is now in Swedish, too!

Learn more

Localized product information is a public preview feature.

For more information, check out the video introduction, Dynamics 365 release plan article, and technical documentation for this feature.

The post New localized product information improves productivity and order accuracy appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Expectations for executives leading their companies’ customer experience (CX) efforts seem to grow every day. From driving sustainable growth, to aligning your teams and integrating your technology, to empowering employees to do their best work, there’s more on your plate than ever. Meanwhile, customer expectations can feel like a moving target that only goes up. Buyers today are digital first, becoming more informed, more comfortable switching between channels, more likely to ignore anything that doesn’t feel authentic, and they expect businesses to follow their lead.

To stay relevant to customers, many leaders are rethinking their approach to CX at every touchpoint. Relying on customer relationship management (CRM) to drive sales simply won’t cut it anymore. You need to connect customer insights and data across your organizationsales, marketing, and serviceto meet customers where they are and capitalize on every opportunity.

That’s why I’m excited to invite you to Customer Experience Reimagined, a digital event on October 26. Learn about the latest trends shaping CX todayand tomorrowwith Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. He’ll share his perspective about what CX leaders are facing, how they energize employees by simplifying fragmented and complicated systems, and what it means to be a digitally connected enterprise with unified, enriched data.

Hear insights straight from the experts

Customer Experience Reimagined will give you a window into what other CX leaders are thinking, with strategies to help your business adapt to a changing landscape. Learn about the evolution of CRM, along with critical technologies and skills from leaders who are shaping their customer experience strategy:

• Constellation Research Founder and CEO Ray Wangauthor of Everybody Wants To Rule The World: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giantswill join Constellation Research Vice President and Principal AnalystLiz Miller to discuss the importance of AI, analytics, and automation for shifting from real time to “right time” personalized experiences.
• Accenture Senior Managing Director John Bolze will share insights from a new report by Accenture, The Human Paradox, including how 95 percent of C-suite executives say customers are changing faster than businesses are able to adapt. John will talk about why overcoming this crisis of relevancy requires shifting from a customer-centric strategy to a life-centric strategy.
• Valencia Club de Ftbol (CF) Director of Innovation in charge of Digital, Business Intelligence/Analytics, and Fan Experience Franco Segarra will discuss how to create more meaningful fan experiences, increase attendance, and improve game day experiences with a data-centric approach.
• Eika Director of Business Applications Atle Riksfjord, Northrop & Johnson Director of Technology and Intelligence Keith Perfect, and AccentureSong Global Lead Social & Emerging Channels and author of Human-Driven Experience: The Battle for Trust in the Digital AgeRobert Harles will lead a roundtable discussion on how to kick-start your CX transformation and guide your company to deliver more personalized, intentional, and relevant experiences.

Learn key lessons from Microsoft’s modern marketing transformation

Get the inside story of our own CX transformation from Stephanie Ferguson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Global Demand Center, as she shares the vision for our Commercial Customer Platform to meet the changing expectations of customers in the business-to-business (B2B) space. Stephanie will show how we help our marketers and sellers around the globe engage our customers with greater relevancy, clarity, and purpose.

You’ll also hear our technology vision from Charles Lamanna, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications and Platform, along with Lori Lamkin, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing. They’ll talk about how we’re helping companies connect data from hundreds of business applications and deliver AI-enabled insights to sellers and service agents with automated tools that give them more time to spend with customers. The Microsoft Customer Experience Platform combined with the new seller experience application Microsoft Viva Sales helps companies unify and automate, so they can scale their customer experience investments to get customers to “yes” faster.

See what’s shaping CX todayand tomorrow

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear strategies for elevating your customer experience and uncover new ways to sustain business growth, no matter what the future brings. Register for Customer Experience Reimagined today to join us on Wednesday, October 26, 2022, 9:00-10:30 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7).   

Customer Experience Reimagined

Evolve your CRM to personalize and connect customer journeys

Register here

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