Introduction

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, supply chain disruptions are a common occurrence, leading to rapid shifts in supply and demand. This poses challenges for procurement professionals and buyers, who must deal with a significant volume of purchase order change responses on a daily basis. To address these challenges and streamline the process, intelligent and agile tools are required. To meet this need, Microsoft has introduced Copilot support for procurement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

The Copilot support for procurement is an advanced tool that empowers users to efficiently manage and assess changes to purchase orders on a large scale. By providing insights into the impact and risk associated with these changes, it greatly enhances procurement decision-making. With this tool, users can swiftly identify high-impact or low-impact alterations, enabling prompt actions to mitigate potential risks.

The technology behind Copilot support for procurement offers a concise overview of purchase order modifications, including adjustments in quantities and delivery dates. It also highlights any potential downstream effects that may arise from these changes. Leveraging the powerful Text-davinci-003 generative AI model, Copilot generates natural-language summaries of these modifications, making it easier to understand and communicate their implications through emails and Teams conversations.

Supply Chain Management Copilot in action:

Procurement: Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes

The latest addition to the Copilot support for procurement set of AI-powered tools is the “Confirmed Purchase Orders with Changes” workspace. This feature is particularly valuable as it simplifies the identification and reconfirmation of changes that have minimal downstream impact. Procurement managers can efficiently focus their attention on high-impact changes, thoroughly assessing their effects on downstream orders, and directly communicating with vendors to address any potential issues. Overall, this comprehensive set of features helps optimize the entire procurement process and improves collaboration between stakeholders.

Link to: Confirmed purchase orders with changes workspace

To open the workspace, go to:

Procurement and sourcing > Workspaces > Confirmed purchase orders with changes.

The workspace lists all previously confirmed purchase orders that have been changed since confirmation. It helps the review process by identifying potential impacts on production work, service work orders, and sales orders.

At the top of the workspace, the three tiles summarize groups of changes to confirmed purchase orders and the related downstream impacts.

In preview, the grouping is predefined and limited to pegged orders that have been created by planning.

• Low impact changes – This tile highlights changes to purchase orders that have no known impact on downstream orders that have been created by planning, also called pegged orders. A summary of changes is generated to help you review and validate the purchase orders.
• High impact changes – This tile highlights purchase orders that have known downstream impacts on pegged orders. These high-risk changes are summarized together with the detected impacts, to help you investigate further and decide what action to take.
• Impacted downstream orders – This tile summarizes impacts on pegged orders by the number and type of orders, and it shows the purchase order changes that cause each impact. This information helps you review potential downstream impacts based on the latest master planning run.

Each tile provides a “Show” link, which lets you filter the list of purchase orders and purchase order lines. The list includes columns for the original and new quantities, original and new confirmed delivery dates, and so on.

Review changes to confirmed purchase orders

Purchasers use the workspace to review and accept changes to confirmed purchase orders. They typically follow these steps.

1. Study all changes to confirmed purchase orders and their downstream impact.
2. Focus on changes that have a low risk of downstream impact.
3. Review changes that have a high risk of downstream impact.
4. Review the remaining downstream impact.

The following subsections describe these steps in more detail.

Step 1: Study all changes to confirmed purchase orders and their downstream impact

The purchaser first opens the Confirmed purchase orders with changes workspace and studies all the changes that have been submitted through the purchase order change management process. Vendors can submit these changes through several channels.

When a purchase order that was previously confirmed is changed, it’s moved back to the Approved state. The workspace shows all purchase orders that have been changed after confirmation.

The workspace shows two lists: one for the purchase orders and one for the purchase order lines.

The purchase order list shows the purchase order number, the vendor, and the requested receipt date from the purchase order header. To view the related records, select the purchase order or vendor link in the list.

The purchase order lines list shows information about each line that has proposed changes. This information includes the item number, product name, original quantity, new quantity, original confirmed delivery date, and new confirmed delivery date. The workspace also provides a hierarchical view of any downstream impact. The Reference field indicates the type of downstream impact, such as a planned kanban for a production order, a sales order, or a maintenance work order.

Step 2: Focus on changes that have a low risk of downstream impact

To take action effectively and efficiently, you typically start by focusing on low-impact changes. These changes have no known downstream impact according to the current plan.

The Low impact changes tile at the top of the workspace provides an AI-generated, natural-language summary of the changes that have a low risk of impact. Select the Show link to open the corresponding filtered view.

The purchaser reviews the changes and can then accept them by selecting individual or multiple purchase orders and then selecting Confirm purchase orders on the toolbar above the list. The procedure for confirming the changes is the same as the procedure for confirming a purchase order for the first time, and it supports batch processing. Any extension that’s registered for purchase order confirmation will also be run.

After the selected purchase orders are reconfirmed, they’re moved back to the Confirmed state.

Step 3: Review changes that have a high risk of downstream impact

The purchaser will spend more time on changes that have a high risk of downstream impact. These changes have downstream orders allocated to them, and the downstream impact has been identified.

The High impact changes tile provides an AI-generated, natural-language summary of the changes that have a high risk of impact. Select the Show link to open a filtered view where you can focus on those impacts and take action.

Note: Only direct downstream impacts are considered. Indirect downstream impacts, such as product work that depends on other production work, aren’t yet considered.

From this view, you can reach out to a vendor using email or Microsoft Teams. Using the contact details of the vendor contact person, the system generates a proposed message text and adds it to a new email message or Microsoft Teams chat. You can then review, update, and send the message.

After you’ve communicated with the vendor, you can update the order further and then send it back to the vendor for confirmation. Alternatively, you might cancel the order and plan for alternative supply.

Step 4: Review the remaining downstream impact

After most of the order changes have been addressed, the purchaser can review the overall downstream impact of the remaining open order changes.

The Impacted downstream orders tile provides a summary of the downstream impact. Select the Show link to open a filtered view where you can focus on those impacts and take action.

In this view, you can analyze the changes from the perspective of downstream impact and identify the purchase order changes that are causing the impact. You can then take action on those purchase orders.

A good way to focus on the most pressing downstream impact is to sort and filter the list by the date of impact (the requested date in the downstream order). You can then take action by communicating with downstream stakeholders. Those stakeholders might, in turn, contact affected customers and replan the downstream orders.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Microsoft’s Copilot support for procurement in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management offers a powerful and intelligent solution to address the challenges of managing purchase order changes in today’s fast-paced business landscape. The tool empowers procurement professionals to efficiently assess and manage changes, identifying high-impact alterations and streamlining collaboration with vendors. With its AI-driven capabilities, Copilot optimizes the procurement process, improves decision-making, and enhances communication between stakeholders, ultimately leading to a more agile and responsive supply chain.

Read more in the documentation for the:

Confirmed purchase orders with changes workspace

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Supply Chain at Microsoft

Take a tour – Supply Chain Management | Microsoft Dynamics 365

We’re excited to launch Free Trial | Microsoft Supply Chain Center Preview ,
which harnesses generative AI to assist Supply Chain managers in real-time communication with suppliers regarding specific news

Learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot:

Dynamics 365 AI webpage

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The post Make more effective procurement decisions with Dynamics 365 Copilot in Supply Chain Management appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Customer service agents in a digital contact center interact with a high volume of customers. Often, they handle multiple conversations simultaneously. For example, they might be interacting with three or more customers over chat at the same time.  

During customer interactions, they want to capture critical information in quick notes. After wrapping up the conversation, while creating a case, they need to rewrite the information they took already in the note on the customer timeline. Or, after taking notes on the customer’s timeline during the conversation, they need to copy them to the case. Agents must perform this manual process, just to transfer the notes they took onto an existing or a new case.  

Now, agents can relate a note on a customer’s timeline to an existing case or create a new case from the note, thus helping them avoid reentering notes during case creation. This expedites conversation wrap-up time and enables agents to create cases quickly.  

By linking the note to a case, agents spend less time creating cases and more time helping customers. As a result, agents can have more customer conversations with improved productivity and drive better customer satisfaction.   

To ensure agents can create cases quickly, Dynamics 365 Customer Service enables agents to create a new case or associate an existing case with notes they write on the customer timeline during a conversation. This feature is available for the account, contact, and case entities, which means agents can create or associate a note with a new or existing account, contact, or case.  

Configure forms to create table records from timeline notes

Administrators can enable this feature from Power Apps by navigating to the form where the timeline is added. They can select one or all the tables (account, contact, or case). Then they can configure the form type and the form to be displayed when an agent creates a new record.

They can also map the notes title and notes description fields to the appropriate table field. For example, they can the map notes title to Case Title. Then they can map the notes description to the case Description. That way, these fields are auto populated when an agent creates a case from the note.

Associate notes from the customer timeline

During the conversation with the customer, the agent might capture a quick note on the customer timeline. Also, while using digital channels, the agent’s notes appear on the customer timeline on the conversation form. The agent can select the note and either search for an existing case (if case table is enabled by the administrator) to associate with it or create a new case.  

When they create a new case from the note, the form opens with Case Title and Description fields auto populated with the administrator’s mapping configuration. Upon case creation or case selection, the agent can unlink the note from the current table record. For example, while associating a new or existing case to the note taken on contact timeline, the note will get transferred to case and will be dissociated with the contact. Hence, note will appear on the case timeline and disappear from the contact timeline.  

Based on administrator configuration, agents can associate a note with an existing or a new case, account or contact.

Learn more

Watch a quick video demonstration.

To find out more about linking timeline notes with tables, read the documentation:  

• Turn on linking of timeline notes with other tables | Microsoft Learn 

• Learn about linking timeline notes with tables | Microsoft Learn 

The post Create cases, contacts, and accounts faster from notes on the timeline  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Effective communication is vital in building strong customer relationships and closing deals. Mining actionable insights from customer calls can be a daunting task. Conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales is a game-changer for sales professionals who want to unlock the full potential of their phone calls. Conversation intelligence captures and analyzes every call. Insights are available in real time during the call—in the Sales app when using the integrated Teams dialer or in a Teams meeting—and in the CRM record afterward. Managers can view aggregated data in a dedicated dashboard.  

Even more exciting, the integration of third-party telephony systems brings this powerful tool to a wider audience. Businesses of all sizes can now harness the true potential of their phone conversations, equipping their sales teams with invaluable data that drives informed decision-making, elevates customer interactions, and boosts overall sales performance. 

Integrate conversation intelligence with your own telephony system

We’re excited to unveil new extensibility options for conversation intelligence in the latest update of Dynamics 365 Sales. Partners and developers can now connect their customers’ third-party telephony systems to conversation intelligence using the Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework (CIF). Phone conversations are recorded and securely stored in either Microsoft-provided storage or the customer’s Azure blob storage and analyzed to glean valuable insights in real time and after the call. 

Integrating third-party telephony providers with the conversation intelligence capability in Dynamics 365 Sales involves three key steps, performed by a partner or developer: 

1. Register the provider: Using the conversation intelligence API, an admin registers the phone provider’s details and obtains the list of users to be recorded. This process establishes a connection between the telephony system and Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling seamless data exchange. 
2. Fork the media: The system directs a fork of the audio stream of a call to the conversation intelligence recorder using the Session Recording Protocol (SIPREC). In this step, conversations are recorded, analyzed, and securely stored. 
3. Send real-time events: In the final step, the system sends real-time events from the provider’s client UI to Dynamics 365 conversation intelligence.  

Conversation intelligence highlights

• Allows sellers to focus on what matters most with real-time, AI–powered assistance.  
  Your sellers can record their calls (either manually or automatically) and get real-time call transcription with business-critical insights, automatically detected action items, intelligent note-taking, and an automatic call summary. 
• Empowers sales managers with post-call analysis.  
  After a call ends, managers can access a rich summary that includes sentiment analysis, automatic segmentation, call playback, and a transcript where they can leave messages for their team members. Conversation intelligence also automatically tags calls, so managers know which calls are important and worth checking. 
• Lets managers better understand customers with advanced insights and interactions styles. Get a wide perspective view of customer needs and interests in real time. Use aggregated data to analyze market trends, rising competitors, and overall sentiment, and dive into the details where needed. 

Next steps

• Learn how to integrate third-party dialers with Dynamics 365 conversation intelligence. 
• See an example of an integration project between Twilio Flex and Dynamics 365 Sales conversation intelligence. 
• Not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer? Take a tour and start your free trial today.

The post Conversation intelligence unleashes the potential of your sales organization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Only months after announcing Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, employees at more than 63,000 organizations—including brands like 3M, Prada Group, Campari, and Kraft Heinz—have had the opportunity to experience some of the AI-assisted features firsthand—and the reviews are pouring in.

A common theme in the feedback we’ve received is a boost in efficiency and productivity, with employees able to reduce the time and effort spent completing common tasks. Organizations also report higher quality work, helped by AI-assisted insights and guidance, from suggested actions and content ideas to faster access to valuable business data.

Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF), a 103-year-old football club in eastern Spain, has used Copilot to help create opportunities for more meaningful and personalized fan engagement. “From creating content or journeys, to segmentation to gaining insights—Copilot enables our teams to deliver fan experiences and business impact faster and easier,” shared Franco Segarra, Innovation Director at Valencia CF. “It’s going to be amazing to uplevel our work with Copilot.”

Northrop & Johnson, the world’s leading superyacht brokerage, shared the team’s early experiences with Copilot. “We’ve tried some machine learning-based AI point solutions before—they were expensive and not as efficient as what we are seeing now with generative AI,” explains Keith Perfect, Director of Tech & Intelligence. “It’s amazing to have Copilot built right into Dynamics 365 as it is in the flow of work, has the business context, adheres to our existing security model, and also doesn’t come with the extra cost.”

Like Valencia CF and Northrop & Johnson, we’re hearing from a range of organizations that expect Copilot to boost results across teams, from customer-facing departments like sales, marketing, and service to operations, finance, and supply chain roles.

Copilot helps sales professionals focus on closing deals

One of the first sales organizations to try Copilot in Viva Sales, launched in March, is Microsoft’s own business-to-business sales team. Nearly 4,000 sales professionals have used its capabilities, and the impact has been significant, with approximately 37,500 draft emails generated through the power of generative AI. Viva Sales was rolled out with a “customer zero” mindset, designed to create the best experience for employees to accelerate innovation and improvements for customers. According to Lori Lamkin, Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience platform, feedback from the team has influenced new capabilities added to Microsoft Sales Copilot. “Sellers can get real-time suggestions and guidance as they craft emails, pulling insights from automated email summaries. It’s like having a virtual assistant right at their side, helping them to generate compelling content and ensuring that no opportunity is missed. Our sellers have embraced these features with enthusiasm, recognizing how it significantly boosts their productivity and enables them to focus on building strong customer relationships.”

Using Copilot to gain better insights faster from the data in Dynamics 365 is a strategic priority area for Sandvik Coromant, one of the world’s leading suppliers of tools, tooling solutions, and know-how for the metalworking industry. “We are very excited about Sales Copilot helping us accelerate here with opportunity summary,” shared Per Hoffner, Product Owner, Dynamics CRM at Sandvik Coromant, referring to the ability to get auto-generated opportunity summaries including status, progress, and highlights of key changes; all from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. “The feedback from our pilot groups has been very positive.”

For insight into day-to-day selling assisted by Copilot, read the guide “How Sellers Can Use AI to Better Engage with Customers” at Microsoft WorkLab.

Copilot helps marketers improve customer experiences

We previously announced Copilot capabilities for marketers, including AI assistance to help brainstorm marketing copy for email campaigns, create targeted marketing segments, and use natural language to infer key insights from customer data. These and newly announced Copilot capabilities are available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights which, as reported last month, will offer both customer data platform and customer journey orchestration capabilities as a single solution.

NC Fusion, a professional soccer team and sports organization serving the Triad region of North Carolina, is an early adopter of Copilot. Marketing director Chris Barnhart shared the team’s experience. “Normal engagement runs about 20 to 30 percent and there’s a lot of factors that go into the email itself, but with the email written with content ideas the engagement was about 70 percent.” The content ideas feature helped them save time, too. “[It] helps us tremendously to efficiently produce emails,” said Barnhart. “In fact, I can tell you it was normally at least an hour, and I did it in 15 minutes, it takes me ~25 percent of the time it took before to create email content!” Learn more about how NC Fusion is using Copilot to inspire young soccer players.

Campari Group, a worldwide leader in the spirits industry, is also benefiting from the ability to prompt Copilot to generate content ideas. “Setting the tone allows Campari Group, a global company, to tailor the tone of voice for each brand and region’s communication style saving us hours of copywriting,” said Liam Barnes, Global IT Director – Marketing Technologies at Campari Group. 

“It’s pretty impressive,” said Keith Perfect, Director of Technology and Intelligence from Northrop & Johnson. “Our team has been very happy using the feature. it’s making delivering great content faster and easier.”

Institutions for higher learning can also benefit from Copilot by equipping departments and colleges with Copilot capabilities to better engage a variety of audiences. “Once we share this with our teams, it has the potential to be quite transformational,” shared Sidney Fernandes, Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Technology at the University of South Florida. “Students and staff won’t need to be educated on the nuances of student data or copywriting to engage the right audiences impactfully.”

Coffee + Dunn, a leading technology and customer engagement consulting firm, shared its experience using query assist to use conversational, everyday language to quickly build targeted segments. They can simply describe the attributes of the target segment—such as demographics, psychographics, behaviors, or preferences—and query assist will automatically generate the list of contacts. “Using query assist was quick and easy,” said Tyler McClain, Senior Solution Consultant. “I just typed ‘anniversary within the past five years,’ and it gave me exactly what I was looking for. This feature can further empower our clients to engage their customers with ease, and I’m excited to share it with them.”

To learn more about AI-assisted marketing tasks, read the guide “How Marketers Can Use AI to Unlock Breakthrough Creativity” at Microsoft WorkLab.

Using AI for breakthrough customer service experiences

Customer and field service teams are on the frontline for customer satisfaction and retention. Based on early reviews, Copilot promises to help service agents and field teams to improve service delivery and customer experiences.

Firesafe, a market-leading provider of fire protection components and systems in Nordic countries, will deploy Copilot as part of an extensive customer engagement transformation. “We are excited about the Copilot capabilities for customer service and omnichannel and are looking forward to see the anticipated productivity gains for the customer service agent in real action,” explained Petter Aamot Vangstein, CDO.

Delivering more strategic value across operations, supply chain, and finance roles with AI

With Copilot, you can further unlock the potential of enterprise resource planning (ERP) by bringing together data and AI to accelerate the speed of execution and business outcomes. Bartek is the world’s largest producer of malic and fumaric acid—two key ingredients for many foods, beverages, and industrial applications. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, it now has perpetual inventory sales that gives the company visibility to see inventory and customer orders all in one system. “Business Central and the Power Platform really lets us leverage a small team, and create very big outcomes,” explained Steven Chambers, Chief Financial Officer, Bartek. “As we move into more automated planning and bringing in AI-assisted demand planning, I know Microsoft and Business Central are there.”

Explore what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot—and share your review

We are dedicated to helping your employees be more effective and provide customers with amazing experiences. With Copilot, your teams can do more with less and focus on higher-impact work. Best of all, teams across your organization can start experiencing Copilot. Many Copilot capabilities are available now, with more coming over the following months. Explore more about what’s possible with Dynamics 365 Copilot and get started on your journey today.

The post The early reviews are in: Dynamics 365 Copilot helps to reclaim time, drive innovation, and engage customers    appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We are excited to announce the preview of SharePoint integration with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Dynamics 365 customers can now sign up to preview this capability in their test environments and provide early feedback. 

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service already works with your internal knowledge base to guide agents and improve their productivity. It can generate suggestions for chat and draft email content. Agents can also use the multi-turn conversational experience to discover high quality information and serve customers with confidence.  

However, our customers currently previewing Copilot capabilities also indicated the need for Copilot to use substantial knowledge across external sources like SharePoint. Acting on this feedback, we are now inviting customers to participate in the preview to help us understand their use cases for this feature. 

Administrators can easily configure Copilot settings within the Customer Service admin center app to include underlying knowledge sources, which could be either an internal knowledge base or SharePoint. If they choose SharePoint, they must configure and link active SharePoint portals with Copilot as shown below: 

After configuration, Copilot will use the federated search framework within Dynamics 365 with graph search APIs to search for SharePoint content in real time. Copilot will then process it further with Azure Open AI service to generate a relevant response parsed across thousands of lengthy files (Word, PDF, text formats) making the content easy for agents to read and act upon quickly. 

Plan for future Copilot updates

Currently, customers previewing Copilot can use either their internal knowledge base or SharePoint as their primary knowledge source, but not both. Based on feedback and collective assessment, we would like to bring SharePoint and internal knowledge bases together for Copilot to generate unified responses across both sources. The following features are already on our roadmap:   

• Unified Copilot response: We will be enhancing the ability for Copilot to search and index both internal and SharePoint content together to generate unified response. 
• Improved quality of response: Use Azure Open AI to improve overall quality and relevance of responses with SharePoint content. 
• Support for SharePoint site page contents (*.aspx): Enhance Copilot to include site page content in its responses while answering queries. 

AI solutions built responsibly 

Enterprise grade data privacy at its core. Azure OpenAI offers a range of privacy features, including data encryption and secure storage. It allows users to control access to their data and provides detailed auditing and monitoring capabilities. Copilot is built on Azure OpenAI, so enterprises can rest assured that it offers the same level of data privacy and protection. 

Responsible AI by design. We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. 

Try Copilot with SharePoint

Customers interested in trying this feature can share their org IDs by filling out a short survey form: Copilot Integration with SharePoint as a Knowledge Source

To try other Copilot features in Customer Service, read the documentation: Enable Copilot features in Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

The post Use Copilot with SharePoint knowledge to serve your customers  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The customer service world has undergone a significant transformation in recent years. With the rise of digitalization and advanced technologies, customers now expect seamless and personalized experiences across multiple channels. Automation and AI have become integral to customer support teams, enabling faster response times and more efficient issue resolution.  

Moreover, post-pandemic, remote work and virtual communication have become the norm, reshaping the way customer support teams operate and collaborate. Agents find themselves in silos, unable to seek immediate help from colleagues in neighboring cubicles like in traditional office settings. 

As businesses strive to meet the escalating demands of customers, contact center leaders must be strategic about agent productivity. They must enhance agent collaboration and efficiency, ensuring the delivery of high-quality customer service even in a dispersed working environment. 

We acknowledge customer service is a collective effort. Hence, by bringing together Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Teams, we aim to provide agents with a cohesive environment to get help from experts across the entire company to resolve complex customer issues which they might not have expertise on.  Both experts and agents can use their preferred tools; Dynamics 365 Customer Service for agents and Microsoft Teams for experts. Experts don’t have to be Dynamics users; a Teams license is all they need to participate and collaborate effectively. 

With the enhancements in this release wave, Teams collaboration features (embedded chat, swarming, and Teams meeting integration) are even more robust. Let’s dive into the details of these exciting advancements. 

Keep Teams chat participants informed of updated fields

Reduce overhead for agents by automatically updating all chat participants when an essential field on a connected record is updated. This time-saving feature helps keep everyone in the know without any manual effort. This allows agents to focus on what’s important and helping experts in the chat be aware of pertinent updates.

Send a bot event update in the connected Teams chat to inform participants of an updated field on the connected record. With the suite of Teams collaboration features, not only you can start a chat with the users who are connected with Dynamics 365 records, now you can keep them informed when the record changes, without any manual effort. For example, when the priority of a case changes, all the chat participants are notified. 

Dynamics links unfurled in Teams chat

Links to Dynamics 365 and Power Apps records are unfurled when pasted in Microsoft Teams chats and meetings. See the details of your business data in your Microsoft Teams chats and feel confident that the link you’re selecting is an authentic Power Apps link. Now, when you paste a Dynamics 365 Customer Service link into a Microsoft Teams chat, meeting, or channel, participants will see an adaptive card with more details about the shared link. Links to canvas apps will show the app name and record name. Model-driven app links to records show the entity type. The user pasting the link can delete the card in the message compose window before sending the message if they don’t want to send the link as a card. 

Timeline integration

When you start a connected chat or connect an existing chat to a record, you can see it as an activity on the connected record’s timeline. This makes it easy for agents to get the full case view by allowing them to see any chats related to the case or record directly on the timeline. 

If there is an agent hand-off, the next agent, who may not have been a part of the chat initially, can also see the conversation on the timeline. The next agent can directly join the discussion as a chat participant to see the entire chat exchange.  

To enable the feature, the admin can turn on the Join chat toggle in the Customer Service admin center app. This gives users with read and write privileges the ability to join a connected chat. 

Swarming enhancements

Customer support swarming helps agents connect with experts in their organization to solve cases faster. We made the following enhancements to swarming: 

• Guided admin setup: The guided, step-by-step setup makes it easy for admins to configure and onboard their agents. It significantly reduces the time for admins to configure swarming in their organizations, helping make the onboarding experience more efficient. Now agents can more quickly get the help they need from experts across the organization.
• Swarm form UI: Administrators can add a tab, section, or field to the swarm form and customize it as needed. The changes they make will promptly reflect in the agent workspace. The swarm creation form now comes with an advanced look and feel. With the visual indicator, agents can view the progress of swarm creation and see the steps completed and those remaining. 
• Auto resolve swarm: When a case is closed (that is, canceled or resolved), associated swarms are automatically resolved. 

With Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, collaborating with colleagues is easier than ever. Both agents and experts can stay informed about important case details without making a lot of manual updates and circling back. Try these features and more with the latest updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service. 

Learn more

To learn more about Microsoft Teams chat embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, read the documentation: Overview of collaboration in Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Microsoft Learn

The post Customer service is a (Microsoft) Teams sport  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.