Organizations are looking for ways to offer hyper-personalized service and foster deeper relationships with their customers. Customers want to connect to agents who understand their needs. They feel more comfortable talking to an agent who has served them in the past, knows about their issues, and can resolve them quickly. Agents want to serve their customers, meet service-level agreements (SLAs), and receive high satisfaction ratings. The key to achieving all these goals is a good relationship between agents and customers. Preferred agent routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help build those relationships.

Introducing preferred agent routing in Customer Service

With the preferred agent routing feature in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations can offer relationship management to their customers. Once set up, the unified routing system will connect the customers to their corresponding preferred agents, thus ensuring a delightful service experience.

Administrators can associate up to three agents with a contact to help ensure that if a customer’s most preferred agent isn’t available, they can still be connected to an agent who is familiar with their past interactions and preferences.

Fallbacks ensure no customer goes unattended

In case no preferred agent is available, fallback options ensure that a customer will never be left unattended. Administrators can choose one of two fallback options:

• Next best agent based on assignment logic. The system will try to find an available agent based on the assignment rules already in place. If no preferred agent is found or is available, then the work item is assigned to other available agents, ensuring that the customer is always served. We suggest this option for live chat conversations and voice channel calls.
• No one. Let the work remain unassigned in the queue. A supervisor or available agent must manually pick up the work item. We suggest this option for asynchronous or social channels, where the customer doesn’t directly connect to a live agent.

Preferred agent routing in action: Contoso Coffee’s Gold membership plan

To see how your organization can benefit from preferred agent routing, consider the following scenario based on the illustration above.

Contoso Coffee recently started offering a Gold membership plan. Gold membership comes with premium customer service, which includes a dedicated relationship manager (preferred agent).

Madison calls the support line to report a problem with her old coffee machine. She has such a pleasant interaction with the support agent, Malik, that she buys a Contoso Caf 100 and enrolls in the Gold membership plan.

When Kayla, the customer success manager, gets the new subscription information, she reviews Madison’s customer service history. Noticing the positive sentiment in her interaction with Malik, she associates Malik as Madison’s preferred agent.

A few months later, Madison buys a bag of coffee beans and receives the wrong product. She initiates a chat to get a replacement. The chat is automatically routed to Malik, Madison’s preferred agent. Knowing her purchase history and remembering that she had praised Arabica coffee beans in their previous interaction, Malik suggests replacing the incorrect product with Contoso’s new Arabica beans, recommended for the Caf 100.

Madison feels happy and satisfied with the personalized support she received, without having to explain her issue to different agents. Malik feels happy to receive a high satisfaction rating from Madison.

Learn more

Check out the documentation for more information about automatic assignment and preferred agent routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service:

Configure routing to preferred agents | Microsoft Docs

Assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Docs

Configure assignment methods for queues | Microsoft Docs

This blog post is part of a series of deep dives that will help you deploy and use unified routing at your organization. See other posts in the series to learn more.

The post Use preferred agent routing to create lifelong customer relationships appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

We all know one, the person whose weekend is consumed by a singular passion for their favorite sports team. Their weekdays are dedicated to deconstructing the recent drama while contemplating the narrative awaiting the Saturday or Sunday afternoon ahead. The rain-soaked terraces are home to them. The booming music of the arena is their hymn book, and the legendary names hanging from the rafters are their heroes. A peek into their closet will reveal a sea of matching colors printed on scarves and t-shirts. Their social media will be awash with images of heroes present and past, opinions of games told in terms worthy of epic conquests, and, of course, the barbed insult to anyone who dares question the validity of their narrative.

Read how Microsoft helped Valencia CF unlock the value of their customer data to create super fans.

Engage super fans through actionable insights

This is the world of the sports “super fan”they are the backbone of the world’s greatest sports franchises. Along with their passion, the super fan is the mainstay of a team’s economy, accounting for a disproportionate number of ticket sales, merchandise, media impressions, and revenue. Teams all over the world love their super fans. In some countries and sports, they have seats in the boardroom and strong voices in ownership decisions. And while it is tempting to view the super fan as a dynastic, generational phenomenon passed on through time and culture, the truth is that today, the super fan is a function of data as much as history. Big, multidimensional data gleaned from the numerous touch points between fans and sports franchises is woven into insights that are specific and actionable at an individual level. Data is how casual fans ascend the ladder of engagement to become super fans and how super fans are rewarded and celebrated.

Row 15 seat 164 in Valencia’s vast Mestalla Stadium is a hallowed place. It is occupied by a statue honoring Seor Vicente Navarro Aparicio, a lifelong Valencia CF fan who sat in that seat for 25 years, never missing a game, even when his eyesight failed him in his later years. Seor Aparicio is the very definition of “super fan.” Valencia CF is more than 100 years old with a proud history of Spanish and international success, and a worldwide fan base of more than 50 million supporters. Although fan engagement has always been a top priority, the club didn’t always know its fans or what they needed in the intimate detail they do today. When Franco Segarra joined Valencia CF as Innovation Director, he immediately recognized the need for a new game plan to enhance fan engagement.

“Super fans aren’t like ordinary customers. They are passionateexperiencing euphoria and shedding tears or losing sleep with the inevitable ups and downs. The sport is steeped in tradition, where fans have special rituals, passed down from parents and grandparents. Therefore, each fan is unique. Fragmented data makes it impossible to understand, let alone deliver, deeply personal experiences that speak to each fan as an individual.”Franco Segarra, Innovation Director, Valencia CF.

Innovate personalized customer experiences

As an innovative and forward-thinking organization, Valencia CF is continuously improving the global fan experience and building new connections with their fans. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, the club gained new and actionable insights and a deeper understanding of its fans. With an integrated data architecture, Valencia can run personal campaigns with its season ticket holders. From deploying an app to speed food orders in the stadium to checking in with 1,500 season ticket holders who missed in-person games during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Valencia has used the insights from its customer data to create delightful, rewarding, and engaging fan experiences. By applying custom Al on top of the unified data, the club was able to predict which season ticket holders were most likely to attend games. For those who missed two consecutive games, Valencia CF reached out with a tailored email. And for a subsegment of the fans, football legends Ricardo Arias and Miguel Angel Bossio, who played for Valencia CF in the 80s and 90s, made personal calls.

“Imagine the older fans’ reactions when their all-time favorite idol calls to say hi and see how things are goingit’s an unforgettable experience. It also gave us the opportunity to sincerely thank our fans and hear firsthand what’s on their mind. Customer insights helped us engage at the right moment with a meaningful personal touch that deepened the relationship and strengthened loyalty.”Franco Segarra, Innovation Director, Valencia CF.

Take a look at how Valencia CF leveraged customer data and technology to create amazing fan experiences.

Valencia CF demonstrates that transforming a casual fan into a super fan is about delighting and engaging that fan on a one-to-one basis.

Super fans are increasingly important in the world of sports brands. Building the commitment of the super fan is not just about tradition and generational influence. It’s about data, and more specifically, drawing all the diverse data sources into one platform driving innovation. But we are only at the beginning of this data journey, and Microsoft is the partner enabling sports teams all over the world to discover the exciting possibilities when the power of integrated data is unleashed.

Next steps

• Read how Microsoft helped Valencia CF unlock the value of their customer data to create super fans.
• Learn more about the Microsoft Customer Experience Platform.

The post Data empowers Valencia CF to create personalized fan experiences appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

When a customer needs support, they not only expect fast, convenient ways to get help, but also to have their personal information protected. However, when verifying that people are who they say they are, many contact centers use traditional authentication methods that are no longer fit for purpose. That’s why the biometric security on the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform is so essentialwith biometrics, contact centers can provide intelligent fraud prevention and fast, effortless customer authentication. 

Why contact center security must change

The classic methods for verifying customer identities and weeding out fraudsters depend on knowledge-based authentication (KBA)the PINs, passwords, and security questions we are all familiar with.

However, KBA causes problems in multiple ways:

1. It’s very easy for fraudsters to steal, buy, or phish for customers’ information, which makes it simple for them to pass KBA checks.
2. Lengthy authentication processes add friction to the customer journeyand often have to be performed multiple times as customers move between channels.
3. Customers expect brands to know who they are; they don’t want to sit through an interrogation to prove their identity.
4. Customers often lose or forget the authentication information they need, increasing the time, effort, and frustration of the interaction as they search for usernames and passwords.

That is why biometric security is so important for helping organizations protect their customers and their business.

With biometrics, organizations can leave the issues of KBA in the past by enabling fast, frictionless, and accurate authentication for genuine customers while quickly detecting fraudsters and preventing fraud in every channel.

By layering voice, behavioral, and conversational biometrics (how people sound, how they behave, and what they say) with non-biometric factors, a central AI risk engine can make intelligent assessments of authentication and fraud risk. By using biometrics, the system can identify the actual person behind the interaction, rather than just the information they have or the device they are using.

And now that Nuance Gatekeeper biometric security is closely integrated with Microsoft products on the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, our combined solutions will multiply the benefits for all our customers.

Seamless authentication

The combination of Gatekeeper and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service on the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform will help strengthen the overall identification and verification (ID&V) process and give agents tools that help them provide seamless service across any channel. While customer relationship management (CRM) data provides the customer ID, multimodal biometrics bolsters verification to validate customer identities quickly and accurately. Meanwhile, call validation detects common fraud tactics like Automatic Number Identification (ANI) spoofing, and environment detection interrogates the trustworthiness of device and network signals.

Stronger fraud prevention

As stated earlier, biometric security has a dramatic impact on organizations’ ability to detect and prevent fraud in customer engagements across any channel. Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection is a perfect complement to biometricsproviding an adaptive AI tool that guards organizations against payment fraud, account takeovers, and many other transactional fraud threats.

With these technologies working in unison, the AI has an enriched data set to make better-informed decisions about when to use step-up authentication or flag a transaction or individual as suspicious. Gatekeeper identifies the human behind the transaction while Dynamics 365 examines the transaction itselfa powerful combination that delivers a unique offering in the fraud protection market.

Enhanced personalization

With biometric authentication, it is also much simpler to personalize customer engagements from the beginning; particularly with passive voice biometrics, where customers can be identified and their experience tailored within seconds as they explain their need to an agent or a conversational interactive voice response (IVR).

Voice biometrics solutions make it simpler to offer personalized service and specialized support to a variety of customers. For example, Telefnica, the leading Spanish telco needed a way to prioritize vulnerable customers at the start of the pandemic, when call volumes skyrocketed. It used voice biometrics to identify seniors based on numerous voice characteristics and route them directly to a priority service line, offering a more personalized experience for seniors who depend on Telefnica to keep them connected.

There is also an opportunity to create more personalized experiences for employees. Another exciting benefit of bringing Nuance and Microsoft products together on the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform is the integration between Gatekeeper and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Employees at many enterprises across the globe use Azure AD to log into their accounts every day, and that will become even simpler by using biometric authentication instead of usernames and passwords.

Create a more secure contact center

Our vision for the future of the digital contact center is one where biometric security is built into all customer engagements to streamline, personalize, and protect every interaction.

By integrating our products on a single platform, we are bringing that vision to life, empowering customer engagement teams to serve and sell more effectively and enabling fraud teams to detect and prevent more fraud.

Learn more about our contact center solution

Throughout this series, we have explored how to create engaging, personalized digital experiences, achieve superior self-service voice support, and build conversational AI applications with the protection of advanced biometric security solutions. This is the contact center of the future, made possible through the Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform.

The post The AI-powered contact center, part 4: Enhance contact center security with biometric authentication appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.