Customer service agents in a digital contact center handle multiple customer queries simultaneously and work on several support requests in a day. Often, they might spend extra time creating support cases, catching up on past activities, or performing simple case management processes. This leaves them with less time to focus on customer queries, which affects customer satisfaction. Enhanced case forms in Dynamics 365 Customer Service provide a streamlined layout to help agents expedite the case creation process and find relevant information quickly.  

With enhanced case forms, agents spend less time creating a case or finding required information and more time helping customers. As a result, agents reduce case handling time, improve productivity, and drive better customer satisfaction.   

To ensure agents can create cases quickly, Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers enhanced case forms. These forms allow agents to take quick notes before saving a case, add multiple attachments directly on the case, and access color coded priority and case status fields.   

Enhanced quick case forms

The Enhanced quick case form in the side pane helps agents enrich the case with the relevant information, while keeping sight of the customer’s details, past cases, and previous interactions. They can verify and edit customer details without switching tabs, provide updates on existing cases without interrupting case creation flow, and avoid case duplication. Moreover, auto-filling case fields with an AI-generated conversation summary reduces agents’ manual efforts and saves time. 

Enhanced full case forms

The Enhanced full case form offers a single-tab experience for simplified data entry while creating a case. Additionally, agents can enter formatted content on the Description field, including images and files. Agents can edit the customer details inline and view recent cases in context of the identified customer. This eliminates the need for screen navigation and reduces multiple clicks.

After saving a case, agents can use the SLA timer to identify overdue activities and take action to meet their deadlines. The SLA timer is available by default on the form. Agents can view the queue the case has been added to and modify the details with minimum clicks. Also, they can access all attachments associated with a case with the ability to preview and download them. Finally, they can access knowledge articles and similar cases linked to the case without switching tabs on the form. 

Administrators can enable enhanced case forms for agents to use in the Customer Service workspace application. However, enhanced forms along with individual controls can be used in other applications using Power Apps maker portal.

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

To find out more about enhanced case forms, read the documentation: Use enhanced case forms to manage cases

The post Create and manage cases efficiently with enhanced case forms  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Introduction

From same-day delivery to social commerce and self-service solutions, the modern-day supply chain is pushing retailers to keep pace with consumer expectations for near-instantaneous, omnichannel service. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, retailers can offer customers the best shipping and fulfillment options in real-time. Now, with the new Distributed Order Management (DOM) API, you can take advantage of the core capabilities of Intelligent Order Management well in advance of order orchestration in a platform-agnostic way.

What capabilities does the DOM API unlock? 

• Call the DOM API from any platform. Get the fulfillment source and shipping options for an order or cart items in real-time by making a call to the DOM API from any e-commerce, ERP, or marketplace platform. Configure the rules in your fulfilment optimization settings in Intelligent Order Management so that the API can search your stores and warehouses.

• Get shipping rates and estimated delivery dates. The DOM API can call your shipping carrier’s APIs to get the rate and estimated delivery dates for the items in an order or cart. The API can even exclude any items eligible for free shipping when calling the APIs for shipping rates.

• Use the working calendar to optimize order routing. With the introduction of the working calendar in Intelligent Order Management, you can establish working days and holidays for each of your fulfilment sources. Turn on the constraint “Respect warehouse timings” in your fulfilment optimization settings to route your orders only to the fulfilment sources that are working on the day or time of the request. 

• Use the carrier pickup schedule to send accurate pickup times to the carrier. With the introduction of the carrier pickup schedule in Intelligent Order Management, you can maintain up to five pickup slots for your shipping carriers. The API checks the schedule to send an accurate pickup slot to the carrier’s API to return the estimated delivery date.

Example request using the new Distributed Order Management API

Here’s an example of an API call to the FedEx API:

{{Dataverse URL}}/api/data/v9.2/msdyn_IomDomAPI 
apiVersion: 1.0 (string - mandatory) 
payload: 
{ 
"fnoCompanyId": "USMF", 
"orderId": "b16bd573-ad9a-4188-bc08-e5ac5eca776e", 
"strategyId": null, 
"carrier": "fedex", 
"salesOrderOrigin": null, 
"customerInformation": { 
"name": "Whole sales", 
"customerNumber": "US-001", 
"customerGroup": "10", 
"customerEmail": "test@microsoft.com" 
}, 
"orderDestinationAddress": { 
"addressType": "Residence", 
"address1": "537 N St. Francis", 
"address2": null, 
"address3": null, 
"city": "Wichita", 
"stateOrProvince": "KS", 
"postalCode": "67214", 
"phoneNumber": null, 
"country": "US" 
}, 
"lineItems": [ 
{ 
"lineId": "d5670621-910d-486b-90ca-61d739e9a92e", 
"itemId": "1000", 
"quantity": 2, 
"freeShipping": "No" 
}, 
{ 
"lineId": "5c8b423b-c9fe-4ff1-a16e-a75a35d7c424", 
"itemId": "T0001", 
"quantity": 2, 
"freeShipping": "Yes", 
"dimensions": { 
"sizeId": "10" 
} 
}, 
{ 
"lineId": "a359a0ec-cded-4eda-b7b0-d7478dff48b9", 
"itemId": "T0004", 
"quantity": 2, 
"freeShipping": "Yes", 
"dimensions": { 
"colorId": "black" 
} 
} 
] 
} 

Watch Intelligent Order Management orchestrate an e-commerce order fulfilled by Dynamics 365 Commerce

Learn more

Read how one customer is partnering with Microsoft to transform their e-commerce experience, providing shorter lead times and reducing shipping costs.

Read the documentation:

• Fulfillment and Returns Optimization provider overview | Microsoft Learn
• Distributed order management (DOM) – Commerce | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management customer yet?

Take a tour and get a free trial.

The post New API for Distributed Order Management fulfillment optimization appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, contact centers need real-time analytics to provide top-notch customer support under pressure. One of the biggest challenges contact center managers face is the ability to react quickly to unexpected events. These events may include spikes in the volume of incoming customer interactions, longer call lengths, and agent absences.

To address these challenges, we are excited to introduce Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel. This powerful tool provides contact center managers with real-time visibility into overall support performance. They can monitor key operational metrics, make course corrections at the right time, and keep service levels high. 

Monitor customer interactions with real-time analytics

Contact centers need to manage multiple channels, including voice, chat, and social media. With real-time analytics, supervisors can monitor the volume of interactions and wait times across all channels in real-time, providing them with the information they need to make informed decisions. The auto-refresh capability ensures that supervisors have up-to-date information at their fingertips.

Maximize agent utilization

Agent allocation is crucial in managing customer interactions efficiently. With real-time analytics, supervisors can track the current available capacity of agents and monitor what each agent is currently working on. Supervisors can drill down and see detailed metrics for each agent. As a result, this capability helps supervisors make informed decisions about how to allocate resources, ensuring that the right agents are handling the right interactions at the right time.

Proactively monitor customer-agent interactions

Customer sentiment is a crucial factor in providing high-quality service. With the ongoing conversation report, supervisors can proactively monitor customer-agent interactions using real-time sentiment signals. This allows them to identify any issues in real time and provide immediate guidance to agents. Contact center supervisors can ensure that agents are providing the best possible service, resulting in improved customer satisfaction.

Take immediate actions

Contact center managers often need to perform actions such as overriding agent status or assigning customer interactions to agents when they experience sudden spike in volume. With real-time analytics, supervisors can do the following:

• Assign, transfer and force close actions directly from ongoing conversation report. 
• Override agent status to route the customer conversation to the agents. 

Customize Reports

Analyzing data is essential in identifying areas for improvement. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel, supervisors can pause and resume data refresh to analyze the data at their own pace. Additionally, they can personalize out-of-the-box reports by saving filters, allowing them to focus on the data that is most relevant to them, and gain actionable insights.

Try real-time analytics for omnichannel today

Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel empowers contact center managers with real-time visibility into support performance, so they can make data-driven decisions and ensure high-quality customer service. With its powerful features such as real-time monitoring, agent utilization tracking, proactive monitoring of customer-agent interactions and customizable reporting, contact centers can effectively address unexpected events, optimize resources, and enhance overall customer experience. Enable Dynamics 365 Customer Service real-time analytics for omnichannel and stay ahead of the game in today’s fast-paced business environment.  

Learn more

Watch a quick video introduction.

To find out more about real-time analytics for omnichannel, read the documentation:

• Overview of Omnichannel real-time analytics dashboards

• Use Omnichannel for Customer Service metrics

The post Improve operations with real-time analytics in Dynamics 365 Customer Service appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Discover how Dynamics 365 helps customer experience leaders do more with less

Leaders of organizations in every region and industry are cautiously navigating business decisions of 2023. The recent economic turbulence has forced companies to evaluate their internal processes, tools, and enterprise software to optimize for efficiency. Conversely, customer experience (CX) leaders see 2023 as the year of opportunity. By strengthening their customer experience strategy with technology, CX leaders can retain their most valuable customers, acquire new customers, and look to surpass their competitors. The good news is that you don’t need more to do this. You can do more with less, utilizing the power of AI to optimize experiences for your sellers, marketers, and data analysts so they can deliver better experiences for your customers.

Dynamics 365

Drive demand and close deals faster

Take a guided tour

Understand your customer

CX leaders know that the first step to any great customer experience is understanding your customer. They need a customer data platform that can do more for them, making sense of their data, offering recommendations, and serving up valuable insights. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unifies and enriches first-party and third-party data to truly understand your customer and predict their intent. It does this while maintaining privacy and compliance with customer consent. Out-of-the-box AI guides data wranglers with the next best action and also can provide predictions for customer lifetime value, so you can determine how to best invest in your customers.

Business Finland utilized Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to gain greater data insights, resulting in the ability to support thousands of Finnish companies through the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing its export sales by 20 percent, and allowing the Finnish government to fund topics and initiatives that align with its strategic goals.

With the latest Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, data analysts and marketers can engage directly with customer data using simple, natural language. This saves time for data analysts, allowing them to type the query in their own words instead of identifying the query in SQL. This capability democratizes access to insights, allowing marketers to use their customer data platform (CDP) to ask questions using everyday language and receive answers fast, without needing to know SQL programming. With simple prompts, marketers can explore, understand, and predict customer preferences and needs in near real time, reducing the reliance on the analytics team to provide them with the customer insights they need.

Engage your customer

Customers today expect personalized experiences, but your marketers don’t have the time or resources to tailor every interaction with every customer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing can do more with less by using AI to orchestrate personalized journeys across every customer touchpoint. In addition to customer journeys, Dynamics 365 offers email marketing, lead scoring, marketing pages, and social posting, allowing you to seamlessly connect your marketing and sales processes. Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics, an aviation parts supplier, is using Dynamics 365 Marketing to automate the follow-up process for completed repairs, tying this activity into product campaigns, and communicating more effectively with customers.

With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can eliminate the time-consuming process of manually building customer segments for email campaigns, utilizing the query assist feature that allows them to describe their targeted segment in natural language. When they are ready to craft their email content, marketers can harness the Copilot feature, content ideas, to generate content by providing a few prompts. They can also tailor the tone to meet the needs of their audience. With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can spend less time on copywriting and audience segmentation, and more time on strategic marketing efforts.

Deliver for your customer

You’ve moved your customer down the funnel, understanding and predicting their intent, personalizing experiences with communications and offers, and now they’re ready to purchase. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with your customers, take actions based on insights, and close deals faster. You can use Dynamics 365 Sales to keep track of your accounts and contacts, nurture your sales from lead to order, and create sales collateral. Sales managers can use AI to make their sales teams stronger by monitoring conversations with customers using conversation intelligence and providing coaching and feedback to sellers, or by creating step-by-step guidance for next best steps with sequences.

DP World shortened sales cycles enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater retention with Dynamics 365 Sales.

With Copilot in Microsoft Viva Sales, part of Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can save time with generated email content suggestions, which includes data that is relevant to the customer, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. In addition, they can generate an email response that proposes a meeting date and time based on availability of their Outlook calendar. These new capabilities help sellers automate and expedite administrative work so they can focus on what matters mostmaking meaningful connections and building trust with their customers and prospects.

Learn how to do more with less

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Marketing, and Sales, you can connect your teams across all business processes to ensure your customer is always at the center. This ensures they have a personalized, seamless experience, from consideration to purchase. To learn more or take a guided tour, please visit our connected sales and marketing solution page. To learn more about Dynamics 365 Copilot, read the announcement blog from Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Business Applications, Emily He.

The post Optimize experiences for sellers and marketers with Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We’re excited to return to Field Service Palm Springs from April 25 through April 27, 2023, at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa.

We will showcase how Connected Field Service helps leaders:

• Move beyond the costly break/fix model to a proactive, predictive model.
• Unlock the power of data and use Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, and AI.
• Transform their field operations and improve customer experience.

This year, we are hosting a thought leadership luncheon with our partner Hitachi Solutions to discuss the benefits of a connected field service and how to use data to remain competitive, and continuously improve business performance and customer experiences in an increasingly challenging environment.

Field service organizations manage hundreds of technicians with varying expertise, experiences, and skills. With 80 percent of consumers more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences, organizations have come to realize how important quality service is to remain resilient despite uncertainty.¹ Employees are working from remote or distributed locations, reducing the amount of personalized interaction. Meanwhile, remote monitoring of IoT devices continues to transform service from a cost center to a revenue generator.

Connected Field Service is the ability to add connected devices, powered by the Internet of Things (IoT), and uses cloud capabilities to augment your existing field service operations. It enables organizations to transform the way they provide service from a costly, reactive break-fix model to a proactive, and in some cases, even predictive service model through the holistic combination of IoT diagnostics, scheduling, asset maintenance, and inventory on the same platform.

IoT has brought a new level of efficiency to the field service industry, helping service professionals address issues more proactively and minimize downtime. As McKinsey researchers predict, IoT applications could generate a value of over $470 billion annually by 2025 by enhancing operations across various industries.²

By integrating IoT signals across the enterprise, a connected field service helps organizations predict and resolve customer issues before the customer is aware, thereby ensuring consistent and dependable customer operations through hassle-free and preemptive field service.

Four Connected Field Service solutions

Connected Field Service combines four innovative Microsoft solutions that enable service leaders to digitally transform service organizations:

1. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service: Optimizes service operations and inventory management

• Reduces downtime by enabling service organizations to rapidly dispatch technicians
• Helps service teams ensure a first-time fix by selecting the right technicians and parts for each call
• Increases service efficiency by optimizing service call assignments, routes, and scheduling
• Increases customer satisfaction by ensuring technicians are aware of service preferences

2. Azure IoT Remote Monitoring: Gathers data from connected assets

• Helps technicians identify and repair malfunctioning assets before damage occurs
• Reduces the need for service calls by enabling technicians to remotely diagnose equipment issues
• Arms technicians with the diagnostic information they need to ensure a first-time fix
• Enables service organizations to analyze equipment failure patterns to improve maintenance strategies

3. Microsoft Azure IoT Predictive Maintenance: Transforms asset data into insights

• Reduces downtime by enabling technicians to anticipate and preempt equipment failures
• Limits unnecessary maintenance by aligning equipment service strategies to observed patterns
• Increases efficiency by enabling teams to service assets when the right parts and people are available
• Enables organizations to explore new business models using insights from service data

4. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales: Identifies upsell and cross-sell opportunities

• Provides service technicians with upsell and cross-sell recommendations
• Enables team members in non-sales roles to advance deals with step-by-step guidance
• Enables sales teams and service technicians to access customer information and sales resources in non-office environments
• Drives visibility into product and parts usage across the organization

Connected Field Service becomes a reality with Microsoft. Service leaders can better manage costs, enhance service delivery, and increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) by proactively resolving customer issues before the customer is aware. Take advantage of smart, internet-ready devices that can detect and diagnose issues, integrating with field service management (FSM) software like Dynamics 365 Field Service to automatically initiate troubleshooting and, when needed, create work orders to dispatch technicians for onsite service. Learn how you can use technology to schedule preventative maintenance based on consumption rather than rely on a regimented schedule. Best of all, enjoy the flexibility of implementing the solution in stages so your team can ramp up via a natural progression. Learn more about the latest Dynamics 365 Field Service features.

Engage with Microsoft at Field Service Palm Springs 2023

We invite you to join us, along with our partners, to discover how Connected Field Service using Dynamics 365 Field Service and IoT can help create a seamless service experience that enhances customer experiences, increases cost savings, and improves efficiency.

Register for Field Service Palm Springs and visit the Microsoft booth (101/103) where you can meet with Dynamics 365 Field Service experts to discuss how connected data enables better experiences across your organization.

About Field Service Palm Springs

For 20 years, Field Service Palm Springs has become the must-attend conference for service executives. From early IoT concepts to AI, Field Service is where innovative ideas spread, and future strategies are created. Today, Field Service is a global event, with major conferences in Palm Springs, Amelia Island, San Diego, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

Since 2003, the top service and support minds have gathered in Palm Springs in April for the flagship Field Service conference. With forward-looking content and unique session formats that ensure you learn and network most effectively, Field Service is designed to help you achieve service excellence and drive profitability.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service

Optimize service operations and inventory management.

Explore Field Service

Sources

¹ Forbes, 50 Stats Showing The Power of Personalization, 2020

² FieldCircle, How To Utilize IoT in The Field Service Industry?

The post Field Service Palm Springs: Modernize service operations appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.