This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Getting customer signoff on a completed Work Order is a key job to be done for any service technician. Earlier this year, Dynamics 365 Field Service released a new and improved signature control to capture customer signatures on mobile devices. It supports drawing a signature on the screen as well as typing a name in lieu of a drawn signature. This enhancement was a key customer request, and also helps the scenario to be more accessible for our users.
How it works
Technicians in the field can open the form that has been configured to capture the customer signature on the Field Service mobile app and hand over the device to the customer.
Drawing the signature on the screen
Technicians will then be able to choose how they want to enter the signature, either drawing it on the screen with their finger or stylus pen, or by typing it on the keyboard.
Typing the signature using keyboard
How to configure a form to add the control
If you use default forms provided by Microsoft, the existing signature controls have already been updated, and there’s no action needed to configure it.
For example, the Booking and Work Order Form in the Bookable Resource Booking entity, contains the Signature field in the Notes tab. By opening this form in Power Apps, you find the associated component Signature Control
Add the signature control to a custom form
Follow these steps to add the new control to a custom form.
Edit a custom form and add the Signature field (or your custom Multiline text field where you store the customer signature) on your form. Optionally, hide the label, so the control can use all the available space on screen.
Expand the Components section at the bottom of the field detail pane and add the Signature Control component.
If the Signature Control is not in the list, select Get more components.
Note: The new Signature Control replaces the Pen input control.
Select the Signature Control in the list of controls to add it.
Save and Publish your form to make it available to your technicians.
We hope that these new enhancements in Field Service mobile will make your work even more productive. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on how to improve the product. Please feel free to leave comments in the Dynamics 365 Community Forum or suggest features in the Ideas portal.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s dynamic business environment, efficient resource allocation and planning are paramount for the success of any organization. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service brings a powerful forecasting feature that empowers businesses to predict and manage their service volumes and agent demands effectively. Leveraging AI-based algorithms, this intelligent forecasting model runs behind the scenes, analyzing historical data and trends to provide accurate predictions. With the ability to forecast both volume and agent demand, organizations can streamline their operations, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction. This blog post focuses on volume forecasting for cases and conversations as well as agent forecasting for conversations.
Front-office and back-office forecasting
Dynamics 365 Customer Service recognizes the diverse nature of service channels, distinguishing between front office and back-office operations. Front office channels encompass voice, chat, email, messaging, and social channels, representing direct interactions with customers referred to as conversations in Dynamics 365. Back-office operations, on the other hand, refer to cases that require internal processing and resolution. Customer Service offers flexibility in forecasting front-office, back-office, or blended agents. This capability enables organizations to tailor their strategies to the specific needs of each operational area, ensuring optimal resource utilization and service delivery.
Volume forecasting
Forecasting provides daily forecasts for case and conversation volumes for up to six months into the future. Daily forecasts enable organizations to anticipate and prepare for fluctuations in service demand. Additionally, the system offers intraday forecasts at 15-minute intervals. Intraday forecasts allow for granular planning up to six weeks ahead. This level of foresight empowers businesses to allocate resources efficiently, ensuring optimal service levels.
Agent Forecasting
In addition to volume forecasting, organizations can forecast agent demand for conversations on a daily interval for up to six months into the future. Like volume forecasting, the system provides intraday forecasts at 15-minute intervals, allowing for precise resource allocation and scheduling.
Incorporating service-level metrics
The feature considers operational metrics such as service level, shrinkage, and concurrency when forecasting agent demand. By considering these factors, organizations can ensure that the agent capacity forecast aligns with service level agreements and operational constraints, maximizing efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Auto-detection of seasonality
By analyzing historical traffic patterns, our AI model automatically detects seasonality, enabling more accurate forecasts. This feature helps organizations adapt their operations to seasonal variations in service demand. Addressing these variations helps organizations maintain high service levels regardless of fluctuations in customer activity.
Auto-detection of holidays
Our forecasting model utilizes historical traffic patterns to automatically identify holidays, which leads to more precise predictions. This functionality assists organizations in adjusting their operations according to holiday-related changes in service demand across various regions, guaranteeing that they can maintain optimal service levels despite fluctuations in customer activity during holidays.
Forecast vs. actual charts
User-friendly charts are available to visually represent service volume and agent demand forecasts alongside actual performance across daily, weekly, and monthly intervals for up to six months. This comparison enables organizations to assess the accuracy of their forecasts and identify areas for improvement.
Customizable slicing and exporting
The flexibility of forecasting extends to its ability to slice forecast data by channels and queues, providing insights tailored to specific operational needs. Moreover, users can export forecast data into a spreadsheet for further analysis or integration with other tools, enhancing the usability and accessibility of the forecasting feature.
Key considerations for accuracy
We recommend the following criteria for using historical data to generate accurate forecasts.
Non-sparse data: The dataset contains information for every day, ensuring that there isn’t missing or incomplete data. Each day has a recorded volume, providing a comprehensive set of observations.
Clear weekly pattern: The data shows a weekly pattern, wherein the volume consistently follows a specific trend. For instance, weekends consistently have low volumes, while workdays show higher volumes, and vice versa. This pattern helps establish a reliable basis for forecasting.
Volume-based accuracy: If the criteria are met, the forecast quality improves with larger volume inputs. Higher volumes of data contribute to a more accurate and robust forecast.
Absence of level shift: Recent days and future periods don’t experience any sudden or significant shifts in volume levels. This absence of sudden changes ensures that the historical patterns stay relevant and dependable for forecasting purposes.
Longer historical data set: If all the above criteria are met, a longer history of data further improves the forecast accuracy. A greater historical data set provides a more comprehensive understanding of the patterns and trends over time. With an extended history, the forecast model can capture and incorporate more variations, leading to more accurate predictions.
Weighting recent forecast accuracy: When considering future periods, understand the forecast’s accuracy tends to be higher for more immediate timeframes. As time progresses, the certainty and precision of the forecast may decrease. Therefore, the most recent forecast should be given more weight and considered to have better accuracy compared to future forecasts.
Stay ahead of the curve
In conclusion, forecasting offers a comprehensive solution for predicting support volumes and agent demand, empowering organizations to optimize their operations and enhance customer satisfaction. With daily and intraday forecasts, and auto-detection of seasonality, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and agility in their service delivery. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, organizations are driving success and growth through effective resource planning and management.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have tremendous vision and passion, and Copilot for Microsoft 365 can help turn dreams into reality. With Copilot for Microsoft 365, you can use the power of AI to reduce the daily grind of running your business—giving you additional time to reach more customers, create new products, and continue to grow your business.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Great customer service is absolutely critical to any organization’s success. Today, organizations require modern solutions that can help them support customers on the channels and touchpoints of their choice, by providing customers with self-service options and arming customer support agents with access to information and experts to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. We are pleased to share the results of a March 2024 Forrester Consulting Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) Study commissioned by Microsoft. Forrester calculates Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered benefits of $14.70 million over three years to a composite organization. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315% with a payback period of less than six months.
Methodology and purpose
Forrester’s TEI study is a methodology developed specifically to assist companies with the complexities of procuring technology solutions. The TEI study also aids technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value proposition. To these ends, the TEI study discussed here provides a framework for business-decision-makers to assess the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
dynamics 365 customer service drives roi and enhances operations
Ultimately, the financial impact of the 2023 study is a projection for a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses that currently use Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These businesses’ experiences and the interview results are aggregated to create a composite organization to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks. For this study, the composite organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic organization that operates at multiple locations around the world. It has 5,000 employees total, and 500 of those are customer support agents who support a growing customer base. Each agent works an average of six hours a day and spends 75% of that time on support interactions.
Continue reading to learn what key challenges the composite organization faces and the study’s critical findings.
Key challenges
In the interviews conducted for this TEI study, the organizations shared the following common challenges:
A disparate stack of aging customer support and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
Siloed customer data, which led to suboptimal support.
Increasing support capacity requirements.
An inconsistent and one-sized customer experience.
With these challenges top of mind, the organizations wanted to find and invest in a customer service solution that could:
Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams.
Deliver automation and AI-driven insights to the customer support function to enable agents to deliver a better support experience while limiting the requirements for additional support agents.
Help establish and curate a knowledgebase to help agents further support the customer experience.
Key findings
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides service organizations’ agents the tools they need to deliver faster, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service simplifies and automates support agent processes with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service while delivering faster support experiences to organizations’ customers, which can improve customer satisfaction and lead to additional revenue and profit.
Forrester’s study revealed four quantifiable impact areas: improved handling times leading to greater agent productivity, improvements to first-call resolution and misrouted calls, improvement to sales pipeline generation leading to revenue increases, and cost savings after retiring other customer service solutions.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas below to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value for customer support organizations.
Reduced call handling time by 40%
Interviewees noted several inefficiencies across their organizations’ previous customer service solutions that increased agents’ interaction time with customers:
Multiple solutions for different support functions, leading to siloed customer data and relevant support information.
Lack of visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and resolution.
A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing.
No automation for common support tasks.
Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled their organizations to automate manual aspects of their agents’ daily responsibilities, which helped to reduce the time they spent searching for customer information and best practices. Because agents were able to have shorter, more efficient interactions with customers, the composite organization saved an average of 468 hours per agent each year.
Improved first-call resolution by 20%—and decreased misroutes by 15%
With their legacy customer support tools, agents at the study’s participant organizations had no easily accessible customer knowledge base with records of common support issues. They also had no easy way to locate specialists who could help resolve issues, so calls were frequently misrouted to the wrong specialists.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they found they could automatically route support cases to the best specialists depending on the nature of the case. This helped them to both increase first-call resolution rates by 20% and shorten the overall time of interactions. They also decreased the times agents misrouted calls to the wrong specialists by 15%. Overall, the composite organization’s agents saved up to 292 hours per year.
Increased sales pipeline generation to drive additional profitability
Some interviewees shared revenue impact to their organizations’ revenue based on the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. A CRM product manager at a travel and hospitality organization explained that because Dynamics 365 Customer service automates the majority of searches performed by agents, they can spend more time on revenue-linked interactions. Another interviewee at a manufacturing organization said that customer information and leads are shared between support agents using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling salespeople to see customer interactions and identify opportunities for new revenue.
Saved up to $978,000 in costs on retired customer service solution(s)
By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, participant organizations were able to retire their previous customer service solutions, saving costs on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. Interviewees from one manufacturing organization said their company reclaimed nearly $100,000 annually by decommissioning two third-party customer service solutions made redundant by Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Other benefits
Forrester Consulting Total Impact Study
See the total economic impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Study participants mentioned additional benefits to their organizations that were not quantified for this report, including:
Integration with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Power BI for discovering and predicting common support issues and Teams for easy collaboration between support agents and specialists to help resolve issues.
An improved customer support experience with reductions in key support metrics such as handle time, hold time, and resolution rates—and the ability to deliver faster, more personalized, and more nuanced support experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Next steps
Forrester’s TEI study of Dynamics 365 Customer Service found four primary quantifiable impact areas and several soft benefits. Taken together, the study found that Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered a total economic impact of $14.7 million in financial savings over three years. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315%.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Great customer service is absolutely critical to any organization’s success. Today, organizations require modern solutions that can help them support customers on the channels and touchpoints of their choice, by providing customers with self-service options and arming customer support agents with access to information and experts to resolve issues quickly and efficiently. We are pleased to share the results of a March 2024 Forrester Consulting Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) Study commissioned by Microsoft. Forrester calculates Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered benefits of $14.70 million over three years to a composite organization. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315% with a payback period of less than six months.
Methodology and purpose
Forrester’s TEI study is a methodology developed specifically to assist companies with the complexities of procuring technology solutions. The TEI study also aids technology vendors in objectively evaluating and communicating their solutions’ value proposition. To these ends, the TEI study discussed here provides a framework for business-decision-makers to assess the potential financial impact of implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
dynamics 365 customer service drives roi and enhances operations
Ultimately, the financial impact of the 2023 study is a projection for a composite organization developed by Forrester through real-world interviews with five businesses that currently use Dynamics 365 Customer Service. These businesses’ experiences and the interview results are aggregated to create a composite organization to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks. For this study, the composite organization is a $1 billion industry-agnostic organization that operates at multiple locations around the world. It has 5,000 employees total, and 500 of those are customer support agents who support a growing customer base. Each agent works an average of six hours a day and spends 75% of that time on support interactions.
Continue reading to learn what key challenges the composite organization faces and the study’s critical findings.
Key challenges
In the interviews conducted for this TEI study, the organizations shared the following common challenges:
A disparate stack of aging customer support and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
Siloed customer data, which led to suboptimal support.
Increasing support capacity requirements.
An inconsistent and one-sized customer experience.
With these challenges top of mind, the organizations wanted to find and invest in a customer service solution that could:
Integrate seamlessly with other Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft Dynamics 365 modules, Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft Teams.
Deliver automation and AI-driven insights to the customer support function to enable agents to deliver a better support experience while limiting the requirements for additional support agents.
Help establish and curate a knowledgebase to help agents further support the customer experience.
Key findings
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides service organizations’ agents the tools they need to deliver faster, seamless, personalized experiences across any channel. Dynamics 365 Customer Service simplifies and automates support agent processes with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service while delivering faster support experiences to organizations’ customers, which can improve customer satisfaction and lead to additional revenue and profit.
Forrester’s study revealed four quantifiable impact areas: improved handling times leading to greater agent productivity, improvements to first-call resolution and misrouted calls, improvement to sales pipeline generation leading to revenue increases, and cost savings after retiring other customer service solutions.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these areas below to understand how Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivers value for customer support organizations.
Reduced call handling time by 40%
Interviewees noted several inefficiencies across their organizations’ previous customer service solutions that increased agents’ interaction time with customers:
Multiple solutions for different support functions, leading to siloed customer data and relevant support information.
Lack of visibility into customer histories and best practices for service and resolution.
A one-size-fits-all approach to service-case routing.
No automation for common support tasks.
Implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service enabled their organizations to automate manual aspects of their agents’ daily responsibilities, which helped to reduce the time they spent searching for customer information and best practices. Because agents were able to have shorter, more efficient interactions with customers, the composite organization saved an average of 468 hours per agent each year.
Improved first-call resolution by 20%—and decreased misroutes by 15%
With their legacy customer support tools, agents at the study’s participant organizations had no easily accessible customer knowledge base with records of common support issues. They also had no easy way to locate specialists who could help resolve issues, so calls were frequently misrouted to the wrong specialists.
With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, they found they could automatically route support cases to the best specialists depending on the nature of the case. This helped them to both increase first-call resolution rates by 20% and shorten the overall time of interactions. They also decreased the times agents misrouted calls to the wrong specialists by 15%. Overall, the composite organization’s agents saved up to 292 hours per year.
Increased sales pipeline generation to drive additional profitability
Some interviewees shared revenue impact to their organizations’ revenue based on the implementation of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. A CRM product manager at a travel and hospitality organization explained that because Dynamics 365 Customer service automates the majority of searches performed by agents, they can spend more time on revenue-linked interactions. Another interviewee at a manufacturing organization said that customer information and leads are shared between support agents using Dynamics 365 Customer Service and salespeople using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, enabling salespeople to see customer interactions and identify opportunities for new revenue.
Saved up to $978,000 in costs on retired customer service solution(s)
By implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Service, participant organizations were able to retire their previous customer service solutions, saving costs on license fees, infrastructure, and personnel maintenance hours. Interviewees from one manufacturing organization said their company reclaimed nearly $100,000 annually by decommissioning two third-party customer service solutions made redundant by Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Other benefits
Forrester Consulting Total Impact Study
See the total economic impact of Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Study participants mentioned additional benefits to their organizations that were not quantified for this report, including:
Integration with other Microsoft products including Microsoft Power BI for discovering and predicting common support issues and Teams for easy collaboration between support agents and specialists to help resolve issues.
An improved customer support experience with reductions in key support metrics such as handle time, hold time, and resolution rates—and the ability to deliver faster, more personalized, and more nuanced support experiences with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Next steps
Forrester’s TEI study of Dynamics 365 Customer Service found four primary quantifiable impact areas and several soft benefits. Taken together, the study found that Dynamics 365 Customer Service delivered a total economic impact of $14.7 million in financial savings over three years. The total investment required was $3.54 million over three years and provided a ROI of 315%.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft Teams is where work happens, and now we’re excited to announce new Copilot in Teams enhancements that will supercharge collaboration and make hybrid meetings even better. Read on for all the details.
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