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Ana is excitedly setting up her new smartphone when the screen goes blank. In dismay, she calls customer service. The estimated wait time is more than 30 minutes. All the agents are busy handling the holiday spike in call volume. She decides to stay on the line, but after five minutes, her call drops. Understandably, Ana is beyond disappointed. If the company had implemented the enhanced voice overflow management now available in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Ana’s holiday would have been much cheerier.
Introducing call overflow management in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
All customer contact centers face similar issues of limited agent availability during spikes in call volume or calls arriving after hours. At such times, customer satisfaction drops steeply due to longer wait times and higher abandonment rates. Agent satisfaction takes a nose-dive as well due to the overwhelming workload. Contact centers everywhere are looking for elegant methods to handle call overflow situations, hoping to reduce customer churn and balance agent utilization.
Dynamics 365 unified routing now includes enhanced overflow management for the voice channel to seamlessly handle customer calls in specific queue overflow scenarios. Organizations can configure conditions and actions to handle incoming calls before the customer begins waiting.
Queue overflow conditions can be based on:
Maximum estimated call wait time in the queue
Hours of operation of the queue
Maximum number of calls waiting in the queue
Based on these conditions, the following actions can be taken:
Allow the customer to leave a voicemail (preview)
Allow the customer to request a callback when they are next in line (preview)
Transfer the call to another queue
These actions are in addition to existing overflow actions such as transferring to an external phone number, keeping the call waiting in the same queue, or ending the call.
How better call overflow management serves the customer
Here are a few scenarios that illustrate how call overflow management makes customers happier even when waits are long.
Scenario 1: Ana leaves a voicemail describing her issue. The voicemail is assigned to an agent, who responds by a call or other support channel.
Scenario 2: Ana chooses to receive a callback without waiting in the queue. The call is held in line and assigned to the next available agent for a direct callback.
Scenario 3: There are agents available in another voice queue to respond to Ana. The call is routed to that queue and assigned to an agent, who provides timely service.
Scenario 4: Ana calls outside operating hours. The call is transferred to another queue located in a time zone where the call center is operating, or the call is transferred to voicemail and Ana is connected to an agent eventually.
Seamless call overflow management keeps customer happy all year long!
The next time Ana calls the company’s customer service number, the call is handled seamlessly, and she’s kept informed of her current status instead of having to wait endlessly. Sharing information with the customer when delays are inevitable, along with an actionable plan for responding, helps customers gain confidence in the service. That leads to increased CSAT and more productive agent utilization. And Ana may even tell her friends about her wonderful customer service experience, influencing future sales!
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Detours in the Warehouse Management mobile app in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management allow a worker to temporarily jump into another flow and come back to exactly where they were to continue the interrupted process. We have enhanced the detour feature to enable the system to fetch data related to the current task automatically, and then use the data in the detour flow. This enhancement can help reduce the number of steps in a flow, make data capture more accurate, and improve worker efficiency.
Warehouse worker efficiency is key to achieving high throughput at low cost. This is especially true when warehouse business processes are manual and complex. Barcode scanning in the Warehouse Management mobile app makes capturing data easy and accurate. But sometimes, barcodes are unreadable or required information does not exist as a barcode. In these cases, workers must look up and manually key in the data. This can result in data entry errors and reduced efficiency.
Reduce or eliminate manual entry with detour data inquiry
Using flexible detour data inquiry, workers can now look up information while working in standard Warehouse Management mobile app flows. Filtering options ensure that only the most relevant data is listed, making manual selection faster and more accurate.
The mobile app can also bring data from a detour flow back to the calling step. By completely skipping a previously required manual input process, capturing data is even faster and more accurate to improve worker efficiency.
Detours within detours
We have expanded the detour capability by adding another leveldetours within detoursto help workers be even more efficient. For example, coming from a “Pack inventory into containers” menu item to a “Container creation” menu item flow, you might want to include yet another detour to provide a data look-up for the container types that are required to create a new container for the packing process.
How detour data lookup improves worker efficiency
Here is an example using a purchase order receiving flow in the Warehouse Management mobile app. A purchase order number must be captured to match the arriving inventory. Admins can easily configure menu items to provide a card list view of relevant purchase order numbers. Workers can continue the receiving flow by selecting the right one.
The following screenshot shows a detour lookup of open purchase orders using part of a vendor’s name and a wildcard character.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
With most customer support agents now working remotely, the days of getting help from a peer in the next cubicle are over. Working in isolation, agents are frustrated, issues take longer to resolve, and customers aren’t happy. But while agents are isolated, resolving a customer issue often requires input from multiple departments across the company. It was no surprise that in our research, agents ranked collaboration as the second most important part of their job, behind only customer engagement. That’s why we’ve made collaboration easier in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. With collaborative customer support powered by embedded Microsoft Teams chat and case swarming, agents can resolve issues fasterwhether it requires consulting a peer, a team, a department, or an entire organizationand that makes for happier agents and customers.
Collaborative customer support starts with embedded Teams chat
With Teams collaborative experiences embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, agents can get help immediately from experts across the company. AI is infused throughout the collaboration. Agents can share relevant information without extra typing or context-switching, giving them more time for the things that matter. They can chat not only with colleagues related to the case, but to agents who helped resolve similar cases.
And that’s just the beginning. Because the system automatically shares relevant case details in the chat, the expert gets context quickly without more work from the agent.
Moreover, if the agent is conversing with the customer, AI provides a summarized transcript, saving even more time.
The system automatically connects collaboration chats to cases. Other agents can catch up quickly if they need to take over a case in a hand-off. And coming soon, chat details will appear in the case’s timeline, making it easy for agents to get the full context in one place.
Watch this brief video:
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What about when agents need help to resolve a complex case and don’t know who to seek help from? The solution is case swarming. Case swarming brings together experts with the skills to resolve a case faster, regardless of where they are in the organization. They get the context they need automatically, saving agents from typing the details.
When experts accept the swarm invitation they join the swarm chat, which provides the details of the case along with the swarm request. Experts work together to guide the agent to a resolution.
After resolving the case, the agent can create a knowledge article to preserve relevant information that colleagues can access in the future. The experts who participated in the swarm get an update, too, keeping them aware without extra effort from the agent. Case swarming makes collaborative customer support across an organization seamless.
Case swarming has another benefit. Agents can engage with customers in a more personalized way, acting as the point of contact throughout the life of the issue, and in the process, are upskilled, too.
With embedded Teams chat and case swarming, collaborative customer support is the solution, not the sore spot. Start democratizing knowledge sharing and empower your agents and customer service organization for success.
Watch this brief video:
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
To run a digital contact center effectively, supervisors need up-to-the-minute insights on all the activity between agents and customers. With new enhancements to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, it’s easier than ever to find and customize the historical analytics you need to identify key areas for improvement. Last month, we released four new features that will change the way you view Customer Service data:
Unified reporting across Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel
Bookmarks for frequently used reports
Contact center operations monitoring in near real-time (preview)
Data model customization (preview)
Unified reporting of customer service data across Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel
As a contact center supervisor, you need to know how your customers are navigating the support funnel. This information helps you take corrective steps at each leg of the customer journey to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost. When customer journey data is fragmented across different applications, it’s hard to understand what actions to take to improve.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service now provides a unified report with Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel analytics. You can easily monitor escalations from bots to human agents. These integrated insights help you more efficiently handle case volumes. Revise Power Virtual Agents bots based on the agent resolution steps of escalated conversations to increase the deflection rate.
The Omnichannel Summary dashboard provides integrated analytics. You’ll find key metrics across Power Virtual Agents and agent conversations across channels. Use the Omnichannel Bot dashboard to see detailed bot session-level metrics and identify why the conversation was escalated to a human agent.
You can also drill down into specific bot pages and view topic-specific metrics. Make changes to the bot to enhance its performance, including modifying the topic name and trigger phrases and adding more trigger phrases if needed.
Bookmarks for frequently used customer service data reports
Bookmark frequently used out-of-the-box historical analytics reports to personalize your workspace. You can set a default bookmark that will be loaded every time you start a new session. Navigate between bookmarks in the bookmarks side panel, update the corresponding report with filters, and delete bookmarks you no longer need.
Contact center operations monitoring in near real-time (preview)
One of the biggest challenges supervisors face is the constantly changing nature of the digital contact center. You must handle everything from spikes in incoming customer requests to new agent training to unexpected absences in your workforce. With near real-time visibility into your overall support organization, you can make quick decisions and allocate your agents appropriately.
Using four new reports, you can monitor the volume of customer interactions, wait time, and other key metrics across multiple channels. Reports automatically refresh in real-time. However, you can pause the process to analyze the metrics and then resume automatic refresh when you’re finished. Near real-time analytics are in the following reports:
Summary report: View key performance indicators (KPIs) across the volume of customer interactions and service levels, along with the available capacity. You can filter metrics by time, channels, queue, time zone, or conversation status.
Ongoing conversation report: View a list of all current conversations along with the wait time and handle time, and drill down to the conversation form.
Agents report: View agent performance across all channels or a single channel. You can also see the current agent capacity and what each agent is working on, with detailed metrics for each agent.
Voice report: Shows key metrics across the voice channel, if the voice channel is configured in your Omnichannel environment. You can filter metrics by time, queue, time zone, conversation status, or direction.
Digital contact centers have diverse needs and goals, so they need metrics that are relevant to their industry and business. When out-of-the-box metrics don’t fit your unique business needs, you might build a separate analytics infrastructure to integrate and store your data. This leads to higher overhead and maintenance costs.
With data model customization, administrators can extend the out-of-the-box Customer Service Power BI data model. To track what matters most to your business, add new custom metrics, custom entities from Dataverse or any other data source, or integrate with an external data set. Customized reports can be embedded in the Customer Service workspace application.
Report authors can also customize fields containing measurements and attributes, and visualizations such as filters, page size, and page background.
By extending out-of-the-box analytics available natively in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, every organization can handle its unique business requirements in a fraction of the time instead of reengineering and maintaining costly data warehouses.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Organizations worldwide seek reliability in their supply chains to meet the demand of their customers. If there is anything that companies have learned from the years past, it’s to plan for the unexpected. Using history to make decisions for the future no longer works. Customer demand is constantly changing, whether it’s influenced by the economic climate or making environmentally conscious purchase decisions.
At the Microsoft Supply Chain Reimagined digital event, you heard how conversations about supply chains have been elevated to the board room as they are pivotal to gain a competitive advantage for any organization today. We heard from supply chain practitioners, both within Microsoft and from our customers, on the need to address the fragmented ecosystems of supply chain technologies. This is critical for enabling end-to-end visibility of supply chains in near real time. Without this visibility, customers are struggling to unify data to proactively predict and mitigate disruptions.
Earlier this week, we announced the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform to help address these challenges. An open, extensible, and adaptive platform enables companies to unify experiences across different planning and execution systems. At the core of the Supply Chain Platform is the Microsoft Supply Chain Center, which introduces a ready-made command center for users to manage disparate supply chain data. Microsoft Supply Chain Center is now available in preview.
Watch the video:
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Most organizations rely on legacy systems and one-off “best-in-breed” applications to manage their supply chain rather than a single, integrated platform, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
Recent research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services commissioned by Microsoft shows that 65 percent of executives cite lack of access to real-time supply chain data as a technological obstacle to their supply chain operationsand only 11 percent have a modern, integrated digital solution for their supply chain.*
We are helping companies address this challenge with the Supply Chain Center. Its data manager harmonizes data across existing and new enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain systems in the company. For example, it can unify and harmonize data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, Oracle, Overhaul, C.H. Robinson, FedEx, FourKites, and many more. An open, flexible platform helps maximize their existing investments without needing to replace them. Now companies can have better data visibility in near real time across their entire supply chain to better assess risks.
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Microsoft customers, like Kraft Heinz, joined the discussion during the Supply Chain Reimagined event to share how the Supply Chain Platform will empower them to gain reliability and scalability by identifying trends faster than ever before. Kraft Heinz can not only assess risks faster but also collaborate efficiently across its teams and suppliers to mitigate those risks proactively.
With Supply Chain Center, we want to make it easy for companies to adopt new supply chain solutions in an incremental manner to digitally transform different functional areas of their supply chain while ensuring that those new solutions adopted in the future are interoperable with their existing landscape to achieve faster time to value. It’s all about doing more with less.
Enhance supply chain visibility
Once companies overcome the challenge of data visibility, the Supply Chain Platform enables them to generate actionable insights from this unified data to predict stockouts or shipment delays and prevent overstocking. Companies can track orders all the way until they reach their end consumer and proactively mitigate any constraints along the way to meet customer commitments. This type of end-to-end visibility is only possible with a unified platform approach.
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Customers like Daimler Truck North America manage hundreds of thousands of parts across their global supply chain. Using the AI-powered supply and demand insights capabilities of the Supply Chain Center, which harnesses data flowing from the rest of the platform, they predict any parts shortages in their supply chain ahead of time so that they can proactively mitigate them and deliver on their promises to their customers, dealerships, and partners.
Another customer, iFIT, leverages Supply Chain Center to generate intelligent insights that will enable it to place products closer to where its customer demand is rather than just relying on history. It was able to improve efficiency from 30 percent to 75 percent in its forward stocking inventory, which means it can fulfill customer demand in two days versus two weeks, resulting in more satisfied customers.
The research with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services also finds that nearly one third of the companies struggle with poor collaboration between internal supply chain teams and external partners.*
The best part about leveraging the Microsoft ecosystem is that the supply chain team can rapidly act on these recommendations by collaborating internally or with external suppliers with built-in Microsoft Teams capabilities right from within the Supply Chain Center without having to toggle between multiple systems.
Gain agility to meet market demands
The Supply Chain Platform helps companies adapt to changing business needs with ease. Companies like GN Group, which offers brands like Jabra and Resound, are using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, a market-leading solution of the Supply Chain Platform, to future-proof its business and gain the flexibility to adapt to changing needs. Other customers like ChemTreat, Inc. are able to improve proactive planning with Dynamics 365 to mitigate part shortages. With Dynamics 365, organizations can shorten delivery lead times by running material resource planning (MRP) frequently throughout the day in a matter of minutes, optimize inventory with a real-time view of inventory across channels, and fulfill order promises by reserving inventory for high priority orders.
Companies can gain flexible capacity by rapidly deploying pop-up warehouses with robotic automation to meet seasonal demand more effectively, and the warehouse employees can gain additional agility using the mobile warehouse app to execute the warehouse processes.
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Companies like Barnas Hus, a leading children and baby product retail chain in Norway, worked with KPMG to implement the warehouse management capabilities of Dynamics 365 to power its new state-of-the-art warehouse that utilizes robotics to accurately pick, sustainably pack, and ship products to its stores, giving it the inventory visibility that it always needed.
Another customer, Peet’s Coffee, uses the advanced warehouse management capabilities of Dynamics 365 to serve multiple channels: direct-to-consumer, retail coffee bars, customer warehouses, e-commerce customers, and direct store delivery (DSD) warehouses. Dynamics 365 provides Peets Coffee the flexibility it needs to support a diverse range of channels.
Improve efficiency and productivity
For many manufacturers, the current state of their operations is disconnected and rigid. With the Supply Chain Platform, companies can take advantage of intelligent automation to reduce costs, maximize operating margins, and improve employee experiences. With Dynamics 365, companies can build connected and intelligent manufacturing processes with an intuitive, touch-friendly production floor execution interface. New process advisor capabilities in Microsoft Power Automate provide customers with deep insights to identify bottlenecks in processes to drive optimization and efficiencies with low-code automation.
The Supply Chain Platform has enabled customers like Jansen to extend Dynamics 365 with Power Apps and Power Automate to create bespoke processes on the production floor that get the right information to the right operator with the least amount of manual intervention. The power of unifying all data in Dynamics 365 has enabled production planners at Jansen to provide more efficient production sequences, minimizing materials and equipment changeovers so that they can meet customer orders on time by reducing time and enhancing operator productivity.
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Organizations can further enhance the visibility on their production floor with native integration to any manufacturing execution system (MES) without replacing it. They can optimize the use of equipment and resources with AI-driven, capability-matching production scheduling.
Another customer, Alterra Mountain Company, has increased asset utilization and gained complete visibility into asset costs and conditions across its ski resorts in North America. It performs proactive maintenance to decrease unplanned asset downtime and downstream disruptions and optimize maintenance spend and spare parts inventory.
The research with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services also showed that more than 30 percent of the companies struggled with finding the right talent with supply chain skills and expertise.*
The Supply Chain Platform keeps frontline workers safer while accelerating upskilling, reducing errors, and increasing yield with step-by-step holographic work instructions. Use mixed reality and built-in Teams capabilities to collaborate in real-time with experts, improving productivity and reducing environmental impact from unnecessary travel.
Enhance security and sustainability
Organizations are encountering increased volumes and more sophisticated threats to their environments than ever before. Unmanaged Internet of Things (IoT), industrial control system (ICS), and operational technology (OT) devices are a force driving new advances in the industry but have also tripled the size of the attack surface area. Securing these devices is a mission-critical objective for any organization. The Microsoft Supply Chain Platform helps organizations create a secure supply chain by detecting and preventing any cyber threat by improving cyber security, physical management, and endpoint security across their entire supply chain network with multiple levels of security and continuous updates and patches.
The Supply Chain Platform also helps accelerate sustainability initiatives all the way from sustainable design, to sourcing, to manufacturing, and fulfillment. With Supply Chain Center order management capabilities, retailers can streamline returns sustainably with out-of-the-box connectors to FedEx. They can implement boxless returns with supporting carriers for less packaging waste and fewer consolidated trips instead of individual customer returns.
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The rules-based fulfillment orchestration engine in Supply Chain Center enables organizations to fulfill orders sustainably while meeting their customer’s order promise. For instance, rules-based setup allows companies to balance miles travelled from fulfillment center to customers to minimize their emissions with service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure on-time delivery.
Companies can establish ethical and sustainable sourcing practices with Dynamics 365. Sustainability scoreboards help them make data-driven decisions about supply chain changes to improve their metrics and further their sustainability goals.
Another way to operate sustainably is to drive circularity. Essentiallyinstead of throwing away goods at the end of their life, finding ways to reuse or recycle them to reduce carbon emissions. This could also be a new revenue stream for companies.
Our own Microsoft Circular Centers have a unique process to optimize warehouse routing and management systems to process decommissioned servers from Microsoft datacenters. By leveraging the low-code Microsoft Power Platform solutions, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management was extended to build a reverse logistics solution that helped reuse, resale, and recycle the decommissioned data center assets. This is helping to put Microsoft on the path to achieving its sustainability goals by 2030.
To further support organizations to achieve their sustainability goals, last month at Microsoft Ignite we introduced new capabilities in Sustainability Manager, a Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution that enables organizations to store and reduce indirect value chain emissions (also known as “Scope 3” emissionsthe supply chain of your suppliers), which account for a disproportionate share of most organizations’ carbon footprints. The solution includes prebuilt calculation methodologies for more than half of the 15 categories of Scope 3.
Partner to empower customers in supply chain transformation
With the Supply Chain Platform, partners can bring their industry and domain expertise to create integrated solutions leveraging Microsoft Supply Chain Center, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Microsoft Azure, Teams, and Microsoft Power Platform. We will continue to support our customers with a rich partner ecosystem, including advisors and implementers like Accenture, Avanade, EY, KPMG, PwC, and TCS. In addition, to help customers find the best solution for their supply chain needs, we’ll continue working with solution providers such as Blue Yonder, Cosmo Tech, Experlogix, Flintfox, inVia Robotics, K3, o9 Solutions, SAS, Sonata Software, To-Increase software, and many more.
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This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Traditionally, warehouse workers pack items for shipment at a specific packing station, using a process that’s optimized to ship small and medium-sized parcels. To improve packing efficiency when working in larger areas and with larger items, the Warehouse Management mobile app in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management now provides a mobile packing experience that gives workers the freedom to move around while performing packing activities.
Flexibility improves packing efficiency
The packing flow in the Warehouse Management mobile app includes three main processes:
Identifying the items to pack
Creating and identifying the containers to pack the items into
Closing the containers to finalize the packing process
To provide for more flexibility, you can easily embed the container creation and closing processes in any packing operation step using a detour. The same applies to look-up requirements (for example, when not able to scan an item barcode label) by querying data using mobile app detours.
To improve packing efficiency even more, you can configure the packing process to automatically print a container label from the mobile app. Workers can apply the label to the container to ease the packing validation process when they are packing items into the container.
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