Customer service managers are constantly searching for more efficient ways to streamline management of incoming service requests, and the backbone of any customer service center operation is routing and assigning cases efficiently. Connecting customers to the agent most qualified to resolve their issue is a foundational element of improving customer satisfaction.

Organizations typically use queue-based routing, directing customers to the relevant queue to resolve their request. A work item rarely arrives in the queue with all the information required to route it to the best-suited agent, which can result in misroutes and longer response and resolution times. To address this, an organization must create custom logic to update work items or manually add classification data to incoming cases.

With traditional queue-based routing, assigning cases requires organizations to create custom workflows that periodically move work from queues to their agents. Or some organizations have dedicated staff who try to manually distribute work across their agents equally and fairly. Both approaches require continuous queue supervision. Tracking the lifecycle of a work item through the system, either in custom workflows or manual human decisions, is inefficient and error prone.

The unified routing capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Service transforms routing and assignment for your organization by leveraging rules and machine learning models to automatically find the best-suited agent for new work items, and then prioritizing and assigning the work to your agents based on skills, current workloads, the type of customer, priority, urgency, and more.

Unified routing is truly omnichannel. It can route service requests on all channels, ensuring that work items are handled consistently and giving you a unified view of workforce utilization across multiple channels. Most importantly, it lets you continue to serve your customers wherever their preferred channels happen to be.

Work classification and assignment

The unified routing capability reimagines the routing pipeline into two broad stages: classification and assignment. During the classification phase, organizations create rules and machine learning models to embellish incoming work items with details such as skills, issue severity, relevant support center location, and language. During the assignment phase, work items are prioritized and assigned to agents based on the nature of the work, stage of the customer journey, agent skills, and the current state of the agent workforce in terms of shift, availability, and workload.

For every work item that gets routed, the two stages are tracked in diagnostics, helping organizations minimize misroutes and achieve more efficient work distribution.

Six benefits of unified routing

1. Drive higher satisfaction by assigning customers to the appropriate agent.

One of the most common customer pain points is waiting for a long time to reach an agent, only to find out that the agent is unable to solve their issue, so they are transferred to a different agent. Unified routing evaluates the static characteristics of the workforce, such as skills and working hours, as well as the dynamic characteristics of real-time capacity, to assign incoming service requests from all channels to the best-suited agent. It achieves this goal by matching the aspects of incoming work (for example, answers to pre-chat questions, virtual agent interactions, customer journey context, or required skills) to the attributes of the agents (for example, their skills, proficiency, or location).

Read more about the assignment stage.

2. Achieve higher employee engagement with omnichannel work distribution.

Unified routing provides an automatic work distribution service, minimizing the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution. Agents today are expected to multitask (working with case records, email messages, chat, digital messages, or voice). Agents work on tasks and cases, respond to emails, engage with customers on chats and digital messages, and pick up phone calls. Unified routing provides real-time presence and enhanced capacity management for the work assigned to these “blended” agents on all channels. It ensures that the agents are not burdened with a workload beyond their capacity and working hours.

Read more about capacity management.

3. Boost contact center performance with skills-based routing.

Traditional queue-based routing solutions do not scale up to the needs of delivering personalized customer service for enterprises with diverse product lines and a global customer base. With skills-based routing, customer service managers can consolidate queues to minimize supervision. Work items are assigned to agents in the same queue based on their skills and proficiency. Connecting customers with agents who can solve specific issues boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty. Agents also benefit because they work on issues that they are skilled at resolving, and therefore they have higher engagement.

The efficiency of such a system depends upon how well the skills needed to fulfill the incoming service request are identified. With an intelligent skill finder, machine learning models identify the skills needed to fulfill incoming work items.

Read more about the intelligent skill finder and skills-based routing.

4. Attain higher service levels with work prioritization.

With unified routing, you can ensure that work is assigned in order of defined priorities. For example, you can author rules to prioritize service requests for premium customers.

Read more about work prioritization and how prioritization rulesets work.

5. Improve routing precision with multi-stage classification.

The customer of today interacts on multiple platforms. Service requests may originate from a social media post, a direct message, or an email. To ensure that the work is assigned to the most appropriate agent, work items must include the right details. Organizations can use unified routing to streamline the classification, such as identifying the incident category, calculating its severity and priority, identifying the best support center from the customer location, and identifying related records.

Read more about work classification rulesets.

6. Enhance operational efficiency with insights from unified routing diagnostics.

Unified routing provides detailed diagnostic traces for each work assignment. You can look at how a certain work item was classified, how it was routed to a certain queue, and how it was prioritized and assigned. You get insights into why certain work items are taking longer to assign or getting assigned incorrectly.

Read more about diagnostics for unified routing.

Next steps

With the 2021 release wave 1, take advantage of the benefits of unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Check out the system requirements and availability in your region. Also, read more in the documentation:

• Manage record routing, such as for cases, emails, or tasks, from Customer Service Hub, administration experience.
• Manage unified routing for all channels, including chat, digital messaging and records.
• If you’re already using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, use the unified routing migration application to migrate your messaging workstreams.

This post is the first in a series of deep dives that will help you implement and use unified routing at your organization. Check back frequently for updates.

The post Increase customer satisfaction and agent productivity with unified routing appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We have seen a breakthrough year for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. Across industries and around the world, we’re seeing companies leveraging Dynamics 365 to create impact faster, break down barriers, adapt to a rapidly changing environment, and innovate across their business. Dynamics 365 continues to grow quickly, with 45 percent revenue growth in Q3.

And Microsoft Power Platform is becoming the next-generation business process automation and productivity suite for domain experts in all functions. Microsoft Power Platform is being used by nearly 16 million monthly active users, up 97 percent year over year, which highlights how anyone can automate a workflow, create an app, build a virtual agent, or analyze data. Just like Office revolutionized productivity gains for knowledge workers, Microsoft Power Platform will do the same for domain experts.

We’ve seen organizations demonstrate incredible agility in the face of rapid change, and we’ve seen how they can rise above to realize their full potential. But at the end of the day, organizations don’t rise to challenges people do. That’s why we’re investing heavily in the people who bring Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to life for our customers.

Across our business, we’re looking for new team members who are passionate about enabling transformation for organizations in every industry and around the world. Visit our Business Applications careers site to learn how you can contribute to the transformation we’re seeing in the world today.

Rising to the challenge of a new reality

Over the past year, we have seen so many examples of agility, resilience, and innovation. At Microsoft Business Applications Summit earlier this month, we showcased a few of them along with new features and capabilities that are part of the 2021 release wave. Check out the event keynote, “Enabling innovation everywhere with Microsoft Business Applications”, for some highlights.

For example, beauty giant L’Oreal developed a new solution to install, upgrade, troubleshoot, and audit complex machinery even as global travel restrictions took effect, using Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and HoloLens 2. Not only does this solution put experts in the room without physically needing them on-site, but it will help them meet their long-term goals around sustainability and reducing their carbon footprint.

In retail, Patagonia used Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams to stay connected with customers and deliver a seamless customer experience even as they closed retail stores, and later, introduced new curbside pickup options. And consumer goods company Campari is unifying their fragmented data landscape with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, allowing them to support end-to-end customer journeys across the organization, faster and smarter than ever.

We’re also seeing Microsoft Power Platform drive incredible results, with Walgreens Boots Alliance reducing in-store audit times by 75 percent by empowering frontline workers with Microsoft Teams and the Asset Protection mobile app, built with Power Apps. With Power Apps and the entire Microsoft Power Platform portfolio, Walgreens says they’ve reduced time to market for a new app by 50 to 80 percent putting useful solutions in the hands of employees quicker.

Be part of this growing business

We’re continuing to invest in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, with continual product innovation, new partner skilling and certification programs, a new Microsoft-empowered community experience, and of course, people.

The incredible momentum of this business means our team is growing, too. In markets around the world, we’re looking for people who want to make a difference and take their career to the next level by helping global organizations achieve their potential with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. If you’re interested in joining our team, we’re hiring across a wealth of disciplines, from engineering to technical sales, in markets across the globe. Visit our website to explore career opportunities in business applications.

The post Accelerating business transformation with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Identity authentication is a crucial part of any fraud protection and access management service. That is why Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and Microsoft Azure Active Directory work well together to provide customers a comprehensive authentication seamless access experience. In this blog of our fraud trend series, we explore how proper authentication prevents fraud and loss before it happens by blocking unauthorized or illegitimate access to the information and services provided. Check out our previous blogs in this series where we explore fraud in the food service industry, holiday fraud, and account takeover.

While most places still have some degree of lockdown in place, people must rely on online services more than ever before, from streaming and ordering takeout to mobile banking and remote connection. Today users have to manage more accounts than ever before. Each of these online services can be compromised and their identity stolen. While total combined fraud losses climbed to $56 billion in 2020, identity fraud scams accounted for $43 billion of that cost, according to Business Wire. Businesses need to have a way of protecting their users even when their identity has been compromised.

A good identity and access management (IAM) protects users, a great IAM does it without being seen. Customers today already must deal with too many MFA, 2FA, CAPTCHA, and other hurdles to prove their identity. While these are important tools to differentiate humans from bots, they can also be a pain to deal with. That is why leading IAM companies are working to stay ahead of the competition by enabling inclusive security with Azure Active Directory and Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

These capabilities will help you protect your users without burdening users

• Device fingerprinting. Our first line of defense, before users attempt an account creation or login event. Using device telemetry and attributes from online actions we can identify the device that is being used to a high degree of accuracy. This information includes hardware information, browser information, geographic information, and the Internet Protocol (IP) address.
• Risk assessment. Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection uses AI models to generate risk assessment scores for account creation and account login events. Merchants can apply this score in conjunction with the rules they’ve configured to approve, challenge, reject, or review these account creation and account login attempts based on custom business needs.
• Bot detection. An advanced adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) quickly generates a score that is mapped to the probability that a bot is initiating the event. This helps detect automated attempts to use compromised credentials or brute force DDOS attacks.
• Velocities. The frequency of events from a user or entity (such as a credit card) might indicate suspicious activity and potential fraud. For example, after fraudsters try a few individual orders, they often use a single credit card to quickly place many orders from a single IP address or device. They might also use many different credit cards to quickly place many orders. Velocity checks help you identify these types of event patterns. By defining velocities, you can watch incoming events for these types of patterns and use rules to define thresholds beyond which you want to treat the patterns as suspicious.
• External calls. External calls let you ingest data from APIs outside Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection. This enables you to use your own or a partner’s authentication and verification service and use that data to make informed decisions in real time. For example, third-party address and phone verification services, or your own custom scoring models, might provide critical input that helps determine the risk level for some events.
• Azure Active Directory External Identities. Your customers can use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to your services. Customize your user experience with your brand so that it blends seamlessly with your web and mobile applications. Explore common use cases for External Identities.
• Risk-based Authentication. Most users have a normal behavior that can be tracked. When they fall outside of this norm, it could be risky to allow them to successfully sign in. Instead, you may want to block that user or ask them to perform a multi-factor authentication. Azure Active Directory B2C risk-based authentication will only challenge login attempts that are over your risk threshold while allowing normal logins to proceed unhampered.

Next steps

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection and other capabilities including how purchase protection helps protect your revenue by improving the acceptance rate of e-commerce transactions and how loss prevention helps protect revenue by identifying anomalies on returns and discounts. Check out our e-book “Protecting Customers, Revenue, and Reputation from Online Fraud” for a more in-depth look at Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection.

The post Fraud trends part 4: balancing identity authentication with user experience appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

All businesses operate in a competitive environment and customer experience (CX) is top of mind as we rise to today’s challenges of finding ways to differentiate, delivering on business goals and meeting increasing customer demands. Customers expect great experiences from the companies they interact with and companies that deliver superior experiences build strong bonds with their customers and perform better.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is the secret weapon that will help you elevate your CX game across every department of your company, whether it’s marketing being tasked with driving growth, or the sales department optimizing in-store and online sales, or the customer service department driving retention, upsell and personalized care. With AI-assistance, business users can build event-based journeys that reach customers across multiple touchpoints, growing relationships from prospects, through sales and support.

Today marks a monumental event for Dynamics 365 Marketing: the much-anticipated real-time customer journey orchestration features are making their preview debut! Rich new features empower customer experience focused organizations to:

• Engage customers in real time.
  • With features such as event-based customer journeys, custom event triggers, and SMS and push notifications, organizations can design, predict, and deliver content across the right channels in the moment of interaction, enabling hyper-personalized customer experiences.
• Win customers and earn loyalty faster.
  • Integrations with Dynamics 365 apps make real-time customer journeys a truly end-to-end experience.
• Personalize customer experiences with AI.
  • Turn insights into relevant action with AI-driven recommendations for content, channels, segmentation, and analytics.
  • Customer Insights segment and profile integration allows organizations to build deep 1:1 personalization.
• Grow with a unified, adaptable platform.
  • Easily customize and connect with tools you already use.
  • Efficiently manage compliance requirements and accessibility guidelines.

Some of Dynamics 365 Marketing’s standout features are listed below. To read about all of the new features, check out the real-time customer journey orchestration user guide or see a demo of the real-time marketing features in action from Microsoft Ignite 2021.

1. Real-time, event-based customer journey orchestration

Looking for a better way to engage your audience over pre-defined segment-based marketing campaigns? Look to moments-based interactions that allow you to react to customers’ actions in real time with highly personalized content for each individual customer. These moments-based customer-led journeys are easy to create with our new intuitive customer journey designer which is infused with AI-powered capabilities throughout. You can orchestrate holistic end-to-end experiences for your customers that engage other connected departments in your company such as customer service, sales, commerce systems, and more. What’s even better? You don’t need a team of data scientists or developers to implement these journeys let the app do the heavy lifting for you. Use point-and-click toolbox in the designer to create each step in the journey, and AI-guided features to create, test, and ensure your message is delivered in the right channel for each individual customer.

2. Event catalog with built-in and custom events for triggering customer journeys

Journeys created with Dynamics 365 Marketing are customer led, they can start (or stop) when an event is triggered and can be executed in real time. “Events” are activities that your customer performs, including digital activities like interacting on your website, or physical ones like walking into a store and logging onto the Wi-Fi. Event triggers are the powerhouses behind the scenes that make it all happen, and you can create them quickly and easily by using built-in events from the intuitive event trigger catalog or creating custom events that are specific to your business.

By strategically using event triggers you can break down silos between business functions. Gone are the days of tone-deaf, disconnected communications from different departments, now you can deliver a congruous end-to-end experience for each of your customers.

3. Hyper-personalize customer journeys using data and insights from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Dynamics 365 Marketing goes beyond a typical marketing automation tool by leveraging the power of data, turning that data into insights, and activating it. Microsoft’s customer data platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, makes it easy to unify customer data, augment profiles and identify high-value customer segments. You can use this profile and segment data in Dynamics 365 Marketing to fine tune your targeting and further refine your journeys so that you can drive meaningful interactions by engaging customers in a personalized way.

4. Author personalized emails quickly and easily using the new email editor

The completely new, intuitive, and reliable Dynamics 365 Marketing email editor helps you to produce relevant emails with efficiency and ease. The modern layout with the redesigned toolbox and property panes makes everything simpler to find. Personalization is also streamlined just click the “Personalization” button to navigate through all available data so you can customize your messages with speed and ease.

You can also take advantage of new AI-powered capabilities within the editor like AI-driven recommendations to help you to find the best media to complement the content in your messages. We make it easy to create professional emails with advanced dynamic content resulting in messages that better resonate with your customers.

5. Create and send personalized push notifications and SMS messages

Because email is not the only channel to reach your customers, we have also streamlined personalization across SMS messages and push notifications and made both editors easy and intuitive to use so you can create beautiful, customized messages to keep your customers engaged throughout transactional communications, marketing campaigns, and customer service communications. Using these additional channels enables you to react to customer interactions across touchpoints.

6. Search, manage, and tag your digital assets with a new centralized asset library

The new centralized asset library is the cherry on top of all channel content creation within Dynamics 365 Marketing. The new centralized library lets you upload files then AI automatically tags them for you. You can then search, update and add or delete images. No matter where you’re accessing the centralized library from, you’ll have access to the latest assets for your company helping you to build successful multitouch experiences for your customers.

7. Improve journey effectiveness with a built-in cross-journey aggregate dashboard

At the end of the day, you want to know if your customer journey is meeting its objectives. Dynamics 365 Marketing not only helps you to easily set the business and user-behavior goals for your customer journeys, it tracks progress towards those goals and gives you a clear dashboard with the results so you can troubleshoot areas of friction or see what’s working so you can recreate that same approach in other journeys. The new built-in analytics dashboard also makes it easy to view results and act upon cross-journey insights to further optimize individual journeys.

These preview capabilities are now available to customers who have environments located in the U.S. datacenter, and will be available to customers with environments located in the Europe datacenter starting early next week. When you log into the product, a notification banner will let you know when the preview capabilities are available for you to install. You can install these from the settings area of your app. If you are not a Dynamics 365 Marketing customer yet, get started with a Dynamics 365 Marketing free trial to evaluate them.

We look forward to hearing from you about the release wave 1 updates for Dynamics 365 Marketing and stay tuned, we have a lot more coming!

The post Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey orchestration preview now available appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As the pace of manufacturing accelerates to meet demands across global customers, organizations are struggling to rapidly train and upskill workers on factory lines and the production floor. In fact, up to 2.4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs could remain unfilled between 2018 and 2028 due to this challenge.¹

Today we’re introducing an exciting update to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Guides that promises to improve the way frontline workers access digital guidance in real-world scenarios, empowering them with hands-on opportunities to learn new and revised technical skills on-site. By engaging employees in hands-on, experiential learning, they are better able to retain and apply new skills to meet evolving job demands.

State of learning today

Traditional classroom training methods are not only expensive to implement and maintain but also are often ineffective. On average, employees only apply about 54 percent of new skills learned and business leaders are similarly disenfranchised.² 88 percent of human resource leaders are looking to invest in new technologies and 84 percent of business leaders want to rethink their workforce experience.³ At Microsoft, we see an opportunity to shift the way employees learn by providing organizations with the technology to attract, train, and maintain their workforce. Instead of static, hundred-page manuals that employees consume in a classroom, employees move towards immersive and collaborative experiences that are incorporated into daily workflows. With an estimated 97 million new jobs created by the year 2025, organizations need to provide employees with greater operational knowledge and a seamless, improved way to learn on the job.⁴ The question is, where do you get started?

On-the-job guidance with Dynamics 365 Guides and Azure Object Anchors

Dynamics 365 Guides is the mixed reality solution for organizations looking to accelerate upskilling and empower employees with transformational learning experiences. With Dynamics 365 Guides, employees can author step-by-step workflows with holograms on a head-mounted display to effectively imitate real-world scenarios.

Visual overlays and markers hover over the next step, using visual reinforcements to help improve muscle memory and reduce downtime.

Non-linear guides can incorporate branching logic to account for skill level and workflow variability in which users can easily select the option best fits their skillset or situation.

Operators can stay in the flow of work while following step-by-step instructions overlaid directly in front of them, empowering employees to learn on the job and reduce downtime spent in a classroom.

Yesterday at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit, we announced the latest development: Dynamics 365 Guides with Azure Object Anchors. Azure Object Anchors enable users to automatically align digital content with physical objects, eliminating the need for QR-code markers while improving alignment accuracy. Using Dynamics 365 Guides and Azure Object Anchors, operators can easily move from one workstream to the next as HoloLens’s spatial insight detects anchors and seamlessly launches overlaid digital content. Organizations can move from a manual process, often ripe with inaccuracies, to a walk-up and work experience that improves user learning and reduces errors.

Azure Object Anchors is a recent example of the innovation that stems directly from customer feedback, and we’ve seen it in use recently at Toyota Japan, where they used Azure Object Anchoring to place digital markers in their environment to improve process efficiencies. Without the need for physical markers, Toyota was able to incorporate Azure Object Anchors across dealerships to help technicians get up and running much faster. We are excited to bring this new capability to Dynamics 365 Guides to improve the workflow experience and unlock additional operational efficiencies.

Innovative solutions and technology are needed to address the growing skills gap faced by many industries. As organizations eschew the status quo and adopt experiential learning solutions, like Dynamics 365 Guides, they are better prepared to meet this challenge and empower their employees to learn on the job more effectively.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Guides and Azure Object Anchors.

¹Deloitte Insights and the Manufacturing Institute, 2018 Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute Skills Gap and Future of Work Study, 2018

²Baker, Mary. “Stop Training Employees in Skills They’ll Never Use.” Smarter With Gartner, August 28, 2020.

³Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2019, “Leading the Social Enterprise: Reinvent with a Human Focus,” Deloitte, 2019.

⁴Russo, Amanda. “Recession and Automation Changes our Future of work, but there are Jobs Coming,” World Economic Forum, 2020.

The post Improve on-the-job guidance with Dynamics 365 Guides and Azure Object Anchors appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2021 release wave 1 includes a new, intuitive timer control that displays service-level agreement (SLA) milestones for service cases or any SLA-enabled entity. The new timer addresses key feedback that we received from our customers. The timer is optimized to display SLA metrics, and it supports the display of multiple SLA metrics at the same time.

The SLA timer can be added to SLA-enabled entity forms, and the timer then tracks all SLAs associated with that entity. The timer shows the remaining time with a ticking timer, displays the latest status, and offers a refresh option so that agents can be sure they are seeing the latest status.

Here’s an example of an SLA timer control that shows all the SLAs with their time remaining, status, and timestamp of the last update:

Key capabilities

These key capabilities of the new timer improve agent experience:

• Near-real time ticking timer: For each SLA, the timer shows the time in days, hours, minutes, or seconds, depending on the remaining time.
• Multiple SLA KPIs: The timer control shows all the SLA KPIs applicable to that case or entity.
• Distinct icons for each status: Distinct and clear icons indicate each possible status so that agents can immediately understand the state of their SLAs. For example, the status can show hold/paused, succeeded, failed/expired, nearing noncompliance, in-progress, or canceled.
• Dynamic icons show near-real time progress: For every SLA, a dynamic icon progresses and is updated in near-real time.
• Manual refresh and timestamp: An icon in the grid allows agents to manually refresh the status of all SLA KPIs without having to wait for an auto-refresh. The timestamp of last refresh is also updated.

Configuration options give admins more control over SLA timers

Administrators enable the timer control on their entity forms depending on business needs. There are a few configuration options to provide the optimal experience to the agents, and admins can use the classic form designer to configure the SLA timer control.

The following configuration options are available:

• Filter SLA KPIs: Choose the SLA KPIs to be shown on the form. Control the view by using Data source and views.
• Update frequency: Choose how frequently all the SLA KPIs will be automatically updated with the latest status. We recommend that you use an auto-refresh interval of 30 minutes or greater for optimal form performance.

Next steps

To learn more about the SLA timer control and how to configure it, read the documentation:

Add an SLA timer to an SLA-enabled entity

Timer control for SLA-enabled entities

Define service-level agreements

Manage service configuration settings

The post Improved SLA timer control helps agents track KPIs appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.