This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Empowering today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce requires the right culture powered by the right technology. This month in Microsoft 365, we’re highlighting new capabilities to boost productivity and inclusion.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As a contact center manager, you need to ensure that customers are routed to the right agent while balancing factors like customer satisfaction, tiered SLA commitments, and agent satisfaction and utilization. Automated work assignment in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can help. Choose the right assignment method to prioritize agents when multiple agents satisfy a work item’s skill and availability requirements, and Dynamics 365 unified routing will do the rest.
Out-of-box work assignment strategies
Let’s look at the assignment strategies available in unified routing and the scenarios where they may be most effective. Three are provided for you “out of the box.” These strategies incorporate skills-based routingthat is, if an incoming call is associated with a skill, then the assignment strategy will select only appropriately skilled agents. You can also create custom assignment methods to meet your business needs.
Highest capacity: Assign the work to the agent who has the most capacity remaining
In messaging channels like live chat and social media, agents can carry on multiple conversations at the same time. The number of conversations an agent can manage in parallel is their capacity. When more than one agent meets the requirements of an incoming work item, the highest capacity method assigns it to the agent who has the most capacity remaining. This strategy helps maintain an even distribution of conversations, leading to happier agents and more efficient agent utilization.
Let’s see how highest capacity assignment plays out in a sample scenario. We have two agents in a chat queue, Kayla Lewis and Finn Patel. Each has the same skills and the capacity to handle up to three chats at once.
Kayla and Finn are each assigned two chats. Kayla closes one of hers quickly. When the next chat comes in, both Kayla and Finn match the requirements, but Finn is still working on both of his earlier chats. Kayla has more available capacity, so she’s assigned the incoming chat.
Let’s extend this scenario and see what happens when there is a tie in capacity. When the next chat comes in, Kayla and Finn are “tied” at two chats each. Unified routing uses round robin assignment to break the tie. That means that since the last chat was assigned to Kayla, the new chat will be assigned to the next available agent, Finn.
Round robin: Assign the work to the agent who’s next in line
With asynchronous and longer-running conversation types like email, incidents, and tasks, capacity isn’t as important a consideration in assigning agents. In these cases, round robin assignment offers a way to evenly distribute conversations across agents. Round robin assigns a new work item to the next agent in turn. (This feature will be renamed “advanced round robin” in an upcoming release.)
Let’s look at how this plays out. This time Kayla and Finn are tasked with handling cases. By mid-morning, Kayla and Finn have been assigned four cases each. Kayla’s fourth case was assigned before Finn’s. After some time, Finn resolves one of his cases, leaving him with three open cases. A short while later, a new case comes in. Since Finn received a case last, unified routing assigns the next case to Kayla, even though Finn has more capacity available. This ensures that Kayla and Finn can work on a similar number of cases at an even pace.
Most idle: Assign the work to the agent who’s had the longest break
Most idle assignment is a common routing strategy in automatic call distribution systems. This method assigns conversations to agents based on how long ago they ended their last conversation. It gives agents who are working on longer, more complex conversations a chance to take a break and distributes new conversations to other agents. Most idle assignment has the largest impact on agent satisfaction and utilization in the voice channel.
Returning to Kayla and Finn, we find they’re now working in the voice queue. Kayla has a call that comes in at 1:00 PM. Finn takes a call at 1:05 PM. Kayla’s issue is complex and takes her 15 minutes to close. Finn solves his customer’s problem in five minutes. The next call comes in at 1:20 PM. The round robin method would assign the new call to Kayla since it’s her turn and she’s available. But with most idle routing, Finn is assigned the call instead since his last call ended earlier than Kayla’s. In effect, he’s had a longer break.
Custom strategies for complex work assignment requirements
If your call center has more complex work prioritization and agent assignment requirements, custom rules may meet your needs better than the out-of-box rules. Unified routing in Dynamics 365 Customer Service offers an option to create custom work assignment methods when you need to:
Route work items to agents based on specific attributes or related entities
Dynamically match an agent attribute with a conversation attribute
Create fallback conditions to ensure the customer connects with an agent without a long wait (bullseye routing)
Sort or prioritize agents based on attributes like proficiency in a particular skill type, the agent’s name, and so on
A custom assignment method is made up of two parts, a custom prioritization ruleset and a custom assignment ruleset.
Custom prioritization ruleset. By default, unified routing assigns work in first-in, first-out order. This ensures that the customers who have been waiting the longest are connected to an agent first. If you need more prioritization bucketsfor priority customers, SLA expiration, and so onthen you can define a custom prioritization rule with multiple rules for each bucket.
Custom assignment ruleset. You can define assignment rules with custom agent matching and ordering parameters.
Choosing the right work assignment strategy is essential to maintain high agent satisfaction while optimizing agent utilization. Which assignment strategy do you use?
Learn more
To get more information about unified routing and work assignment in Customer Service, check out our recent blog post and read the documentation:
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As technology advances, so do customer expectations. Whether a consumer or a buyer, it no longer matters as the respective lines between customer expectations have blurred, and, at the end of the day, the business-to-business (B2B) buyer is a consumer too. Hyper-personalized, self-driven, seamless interaction across any channel at any time is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have as customers want to engage on their own terms and expect businesses to deliver even better experiences. At the same time, exacerbated by a turbulent economy, businesses need to reduce cost and complexity to innovate quickly and stay resilient so they can meet current customers’ expectations and find new ways to engage them. Businesses that take the opportunity to optimize their processes to do more with less will stand out against the competition and be better positioned to drive loyalty, retain customers, and emerge stronger from these uncertain times.
We’re excited to share the new capabilities coming in the 2022 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and, more importantly, how these new capabilities will help you deliver greater efficiency, empower marketers to be more productive, and provide value to customers in moments that matter. Ready? Let’s get started!
1. Maximize the value of your data to understand your customers
The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and intent of each customer.
If you are a new Customer Insights user, you will be delighted by the first-run experience feature that helps you accelerate understanding your customers. To fuel your journeys, valuable insights are generated in a matter of minutes simply from a customer list, saving you time and avoiding advanced configurations.
2. Engage your customers in moments that matter with real-time marketing
To deliver unforgettable experiences, marketers need to send the right message on the right channel at the right time. To allow you to do just this, we have further developed our real-time engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Whether it’s to catch your customer’s attention to collect relevant details, or capture leads to nurture and strengthen the sales funnel, we’ve enhanced our capabilities so that marketers can effortlessly design customized forms with a few clicks. Through the modern drag-and-drop editor, marketers are guided step-by-step from creation to preview, test, and publish. Within seconds they can deliver compelling branded forms, on websites or landing pages, while directly tracking conversions.
To engage customers through their preferred channel, marketers can now easily build custom channels in real-time marketing. We’ve improved upon the model in outbound marketing by providing the ability to create a channel with all the power and flexibility that the box channels have. It enables marketers to extend their reach across bespoke text message providers, Viber, or direct mail, and activate these new channels in customer journeys using out-of-the-box modern templates, text message editor, and consent collection. In addition, marketers can natively track deliverability analytics to monitor the success of the custom channel activation.
Customers often qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. The frequency cap feature prevents message fatigue by setting limits on the number of messages that can be sent per channel per day, week, or month. At the same time, marketers can bypass the limit for the most important journeys, ensuring customers never miss an important message.
Define the maximum number of commercial messages with the frequency cap feature.
3. Personalize content to grow your audience engagement
Each customer is unique and driven by different incentives. To get noticed, businesses need to easily create personalized content that stands out and resonates to keep their brand top of mind.
Finding inspiration to create enthralling emails has never been so easy. Thanks to AI, marketers receive engaging content ideas, based on the key messaging points they want to convey. Marketers can also use feature-rich text links and QR codes for events and coupons within email campaignsto get more customers to engage, click, and convert.
Kick-start your email creation thanks to AI-generated content ideas.
Managing multi-brand content is often demanding as marketers spend time customizing each email to comply with specific brand guidelines. The new brand profile functionality helps them to gain time and consistency, and reduce content-related errors by defining default senders for emails and social links, as well as custom values such as URLs or compliance messages, and easily switch these settings for the brand they are working on.
To ensure compliance and privacy of customer interactions across multiple brands or business units, marketers now have the ability to fully customize out-of-the-box preference centers to match their business needs, from tracking or isolating consent data to adhering to brand guidelines for logos, styles, and colors. Furthermore, marketers can create and manage topics that align with your brands and business for customers to opt-in to marketing subscriptions, for example: “Get cooking tips and tricks”. Last but not least, consent is becoming entity agnostic and will work with customer profiles, contacts, leads, and custom entities.
Maximizing the impact of personalized content requires effectively targeting the right audiences. As part of our effort to improve marketers’ efficiency, we have redesigned our segment builder. The workflow and UX have been enhanced, and we’ve set the foundation for supporting contacts, leads, and any entity, including custom, in the future. Segments can be created instantly using an intuitive and powerful logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures. Marketers are empowered by AI-assisted natural language capabilities, the ability to create a static snapshot of segment membership, as well as previewing segment members and size. This not only scales reach but improves marketing productivity.
Improve your efficiency with the new segment builder, target both contact and leads, and preview segment members.
4. Connect your sales and marketing to provide seamless experiences
By placing customer needs at the center of the organization, deep collaboration within and across departments unlocks significant business growth opportunities.
For instance, as marketers nurture leads with real-time journeys, signals from the lead might indicate an urgency to engage with the sales team. Marketers can directly trigger a sales sequence or assign a follow-up call from the journey to the sales team to ensure the lead gets individualized attention at the right time when they are most likely to engage. Marketers identify potential leads, and sales teams receive smart assistance to optimize their time and prioritize opportunities in the lead nurturing process.
Hand off leads to sales by directly assigning, or phone call, or a sale sequence from the journey.
Businesses can capitalize on B2B contact unification in Customer Insights to create a complete view of accounts and contacts within the same environment. Typically, businesses engage with contacts, however, the context for engagement is based on the attributes of the organization in which the contact resides. Unified contacts provide the ability for marketers to now generate segments of contacts based on account attributes.
5. Use data and AI to optimize your campaigns and scale up your business
Harnessing the power of data and AI is key to marketing at scale and achieving higher levels of marketing maturity.
As businesses create a vast number of assets, they need to organize them according to their organizational structure to remain compliant and productive. They can now effortlessly organize their digital assets, content and journeys according to their business structure. Whether it’s business data or customer data, it can be isolated by departments, regions, brands, business units, and product lines, reducing your compliance risk.
In the upcoming months, you will be able to increase your throughput to send up to 300 million messages per month. This added capacity empowers your team to deliver personalized experiences at scale and will help you grow your business, whether you are increasing your customer base in new markets, expanding geographies, promoting new products, or building your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.
Use new features for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights with the 2022 release wave 2
From leveraging AI to capitalize on your data, optimizing real-time interactions and personalization capabilities, to customizing tools to meet your unique business needs, or facilitating deeper collaboration between departments, we are thrilled to deliver solutions that are designed to make your job easier, more productive, and ultimately enable you to transform customer experiences.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Now you can reach even more customers using the new Apple Messages for Business channel in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Customers can use the familiar Messages app on their Apple devices to connect with your service teams, confident that their conversation is verified and secure. Rich messages help your service team resolve customer issues, collect information, schedule appointments, and complete sales, all in the same conversation.
Like other asynchronous digital and social channels, Apple Messages for Business gives users the flexibility to start a conversation with your support team and return to it when it is convenient for them. Plus, a customer can initiate a conversation on their mobile device and continue it seamlessly on their Mac or iPad.
Benefits of Apple Messages for Business in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
By including Apple Messages for Business in your digital messaging solution, your service team can provide a more meaningful and personal customer service experience. The enhanced interactions available through this channel help your service team spend less time crafting messages and collecting data, and more time ensuring quality customer experiences.
Apple Messages for Business simplifies many common service interactions. With integration in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, it expands the options for how you engage with customers.
Using Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Apple Messages for Business in your omnichannel digital contact center provides the following benefits:
Customers can look up your company in Apple Maps, Safari, or Search and start messaging by tapping the Messages icon. It’s also easy to add a link directly in your own app, website, or other touch points.
Rich messages are used to simplify interactions like collecting information, scheduling appointments, completing transactions, and authenticating user identity.
Agents can use the same unified, contextual, and productive interface used by chat and other social channels to engage with customers and resolve issues.
Customers engaging with your digital contact center will find a consistent, customer-focused experience across any channel.
Administrators, supervisors, and managers can access the same integrations, services, and insights available for chat and other social channels.
Better together
As a digital channel, the addition of Apple Messages for Business expands and unifies the core omnichannel capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service with a configurable, high-productivity interface. It provides contextual customer identification, real-time notifications, integrated communications, and agent productivity tools, including rich messages, knowledge base integration, and search. Apple Messages for Business helps deliver more innovation and opportunities into your digital contact center to empower you to continually exceed customer expectations.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
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.
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