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We recently announced the unified Customer Service admin center, which consolidates administration experiences across the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service suite. The unified admin center simplifies setup tasks with a step-by-step guided experience to help admins easily onboard customer service channels. A dedicated search for settings makes discovering and updating settings fast and easy.
Follow the wizard to easily set up customer service channels
The guided setup wizard helps you configure customer service channels such as email, case, chat, and voice. The wizard guides you through all the steps to configure users and permissions and set up queues and routing rules to help you start handling customer issues with minimal fuss.
After all the steps are complete, you’ll find instructions to validate that the channel is set up correctly. You can also go directly to a step to modify settings.
Search for admin settings
The search admin settings page helps you quickly discover the admin setting you want to manage. Along with top matches, the page lists settings for new features, so that you can evaluate whether they might be helpful for your business and start to adopt them.
With the new unified Customer Service admin center, it’s easier than ever to manage users, add channels, route and distribute workloads, and get valuable insights about all the activity across your digital contact center. Migrate to the new app to discover how you can streamline digital contact center operations, help your agents be more productive, and earn customers for life.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Now more than ever, IT leaders need to reduce costs while securing and empowering their workforce. Microsoft 365 combines the capabilities organizations need in one secure, integrated experience—powered by data and AI—to help people work better and smarter.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In a recent keynote at Microsoft Inspire, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella made this prediction, “The next 10 years are not going to be like the last 10,” and that “Digital technology will be the only way to navigate the headwinds facing business leaders today.” Today, we face is a world of perpetual change with ever-increasing economic, environmental, and social complexities. This brings us to a cumulation of factors that profoundly impact the health and success of individuals and corporations. The opportunity facing business leaders is to find ways to utilize technology to drive a positive impact on business performance and the well-being of society and the environment.
Reduce operating costs with ESG initiatives
It has become clear that ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives are becoming a top business priority for many organizations. The Gartner annual CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey states, “In 2022, environmental sustainability became a top 10 business priority for the first time ever, with 9 percent of the respondents naming it as one of their top three.”1 This focus in priority is for good reason. Studies show that companies that execute effectively on ESG programs can reduce operating costs by up to 60 percent2 and that higher ESG scores correlate to lower costs of capital (6.16 percent compared to 6.55 percent for the lowest ESG scores).3
What is less clear is how businesses execute ESG initiatives in ways that do not require more effort or added expenseeffectively, how to do more with less. In his Microsoft Inspire keynote, Satya stated, “Doing more with less doesn’t mean working harder or longer. That’s not going to scale. But it does mean applying technology to amplify what you’re able to do across an organization so you can differentiate and build resilience.” The expectation that we must do more with less is especially relevant when actioning on ESG goals. The approach business leaders must consider is anything that reduces energy costs or increases resource efficiency will be highly beneficial to CEOs, customers, employees, investors, and the environment.
Go paperless with Dynamics 365 Finance
There are many ways to make ESG impact, and perhaps most attractive to business leaders are opportunities that align business processes to ESG outcomes. One very accessible possibility exists in the automation of paper-intensive business processes. For example, Accounts Payable (AP) has historically been plagued by the manual effort and cost required to manage tens of thousands of paper invoices. AP invoicing is heavy with storage, printing, disposal, and document security costs that can easily be mitigated through digitization.
Though the digitization of office paper has been achievable for over a decade, organizations still struggle to phase out paper-laden business processes. Some estimates show that US offices use 12.1 trillion sheets of paper annually and that demand for paper is expected to double before 2030.4 To address this trend, companies should turn to robust and easy-to-use technology to help quickly reduce paper usage.
If your organization is ready to embark on the journey to go paperless, Microsoft is here to help. We are excited to release the preview of Invoice capture within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. Invoice capture will allow our customers to digitally transform the entire invoice-to-pay process within their AP departmentdelivering better spend control, faster cycle times, and paperless processing, leading to more automation and less waste. With the support of advanced technology, organizations can efficiently drive outcomes that benefit both business interests and the greater good.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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Understanding risk enables businesses to take proactive actions to balance cost and resilience as they optimize their supply chains. The new supply risk assessment workspace in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps supply managers understand the risk of encountering sourcing shortages and delays.
Discover supply chain risk based on performance metrics
The supply risk assessment workspace helps you to discover risks to future planned purchases. Risk assessment considers the past performance of your suppliers or product metrics like purchase order delivery date confirmed as requested, on-time in-full deliveries (OTIF), on-time delivery (OT), and in-full delivery (IF).
The workspace also identifies single-sourced products that didn’t perform as expected so that you can change your order strategy for the future. You can build a supplier and product ranking, analyze it, and filter OTIF metrics over time or against other dimensions, such as delivery method or site.
Explore the supply risk assessment workspace
Begin your exploration in the supply risk assessment workspace, which provides views of products and vendors that fall outside your performance goals. Customize separate goals for OT, IF, OTIF, and other metrics in a dedicated configuration page.
Supply risk assessment workspace
Navigate directly from the workspace to Power BI reports to view product and vendor performance and ranking.
Supplier performance report
With the reports, you can:
Use filters to focus on specific legal entities, vendors, items, product groups, and vendor regions
Study performance history
Zoom in on specific time periods of concern
Supply risk assessment report
Identify risks for future purchases by mapping past OTIF observations to planned orders and suppliers
Select the most impacted products by potential risks translated into quantity and amount at risk and validate the assigned vendors
Drill in on specific products or vendors with their planned amounts and volumes at risk
Enable the workspace in feature management
To take advantage of the new capability, enable Assess supply risks to prevent supply chain disruptions in feature management. You can change default thresholds for your metrics in Supply risk assessment parameters to specify what you consider a risk for your business. By default, the threshold is set to 96%. Then navigate to the Supply risk assessment workspace to start your discovery.
Tip: Supply risk assessment workspace doesn’t show updated data?
The performance metrics have been added to the Purchase cube. If you are not using the Purchase cube for analysis yet, go to the Entity Store page, refresh the Purchase cube, and enable it also for automatic refresh.
You might need to select the Refresh data link to view the updated data in the workspace. If the link is not available, go to the Data set cache configuration and enable the cache consumer VendSupplyRiskCacheDataSet to turn on manual refresh.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In October, we launched the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform 2022 release wave 2. This is our second release wave of the year and it includes hundreds of new capabilities and features.
This release wave is a big one, and it comes at a critical time for many organizations. We are committed to continually innovate and help your business grow, no matter what challenges or headwinds you face. Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help strengthen your technology ecosystem by seamlessly providing visibility into every area of your business, empowering employees to focus on what they do best, and enabling your teams to create world-class customer experiences.
To help you quickly get up to speed on highlights from this release wave, as well as provide context into what’s possible, we’ve created a set of demo videos dedicated to key areas of business. As introduced in the special Business Applications release launch session at Microsoft Ignite, each video showcases how real-world organizations are taking full advantage of the new capabilities to achieve new levels of efficiency, cross-functional engagement, and breakthrough customer experiences.
To get started, watch the overview below of some of the highlights from the 2022 release wave 2.
Find out what’s new for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform in this introduction from Charles Lamanna.
Do more with less to empower growth and agility
You’ll hear a common theme across these videos: do more with less by becoming more agile and efficient with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. The 2022 release wave 2 unlocks durable growth by unifying business data, relationships, and workflows with a single, cohesive business cloud.
Watch the video below to learn howeven in times of uncertainty and disruptionDynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help reduce costs and complexity while empowering teams to focus on superior customer experiences and operational excellence.
Learn how Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform help reduce costs and complexity.
Sales | How Teleperformance boosts its sellers’ effectiveness with Viva Sales
We recently announced the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales, a seller experience that enriches Microsoft 365 applications and Microsoft Teams with seller workflows. Your sales team can now automatically capture, access, and register customer data into any customer relationship management (CRM) system, including Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. Learn how Teleperformance, a global business process outsourcing and customer experience service provider, eliminated the administrative burden of manual data entry to give sellers more time to focus on selling.
Learn about new capabilities in the 2022 release wave 2 across Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Viva Sales.
Sales and marketing | Financial services provider Eika orchestrates personalized campaigns to fund sustainable businesses across Norway
Eika, one of the largest financial services providers in Norway, is an alliance of 53 independent banks supporting two Norwegian dialects. It is also focused on being a driving force for sustainability and has launched an initiative to provide loans to businesses that are installing sustainable solutions. Learn how new AI and automation capabilities in Dynamics 365 are helping Eika’s sales and marketing teams seamlessly collaborate on campaigns to provide a personalized customer experience.
Learn how Eika is creating new customer experiences with AI and automation capabilities in Dynamics 365.
Customer service | Baylor Scott & White brings a new level of patient experiences to healthcare
Healthcare organizations today are being evaluated on their ability to deliver preventative services and improve overall health outcomes for the communities they serve. One way they’re meeting this challenge is through personalized omnichannel services. Baylor Scott & Whitethe largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas and one of the largest in the United Statesis a leader in overall patient experience in the United States.
Using our Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform, Baylor Scott & White is streamlining patient communications through a combination of personalized self-service and an AI-driven contact center. Explore how the new features in the release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service can support patient relations teams through enhancements and omnichannel engagement.
Learn how Baylor Scott & White is streamlining patient communications with Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Innovation across Dynamics 365 Field Service, Mixed Reality, and Connected Spaces
Field service operations are undergoing rapid changes due to a scarcity of skilled workers and the shift from a cost center to a revenue driver. In addition, technology spurred by the industrial metaverse is enabling new scenarios for mixed and augmented reality, as well as enabling organizations to monitor and optimize spacesfrom retail stores to factory floors.
Explore how 2022 release wave 2 updates to Dynamics 365 Field Service, Remote Assist, and Connected Spaces are transforming field service operations.
Operations | Global IT services provider Columbus Global elevates consulting experiences with AI, streamlined processes, and analytics
Columbus Global, a leading IT services and consulting company, acts as a digital trusted advisor for organizations across the globe as they reimagine their businesses. One of its many offerings is subscription consultancy services. Learn how new automation, process support, and analytics capabilities empower teams across finance, project operations, and HR to seamlessly build quotes, onboard customers, and track progress on time and on budget.
Learn how IT services and consulting leader, Columbus Global, has transformed its operations with Dynamics 365.
Supply chain | Improve inventory visibility, and planning and agility of your warehouses
Supply chain disruptions over the last few years have exposed supplier vulnerabilities and fragility across industries and countries. Enhancements to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can help organizations exceed customer expectations, mitigate financial risks, and deliver on time.
In the next video, learn how Dynamics 365 can help digitally transform your supply chain without replacing existing systems and turn supply chains into a competitive advantage.
Learn about new capabilities that will be released for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in the 2022 release wave 2.
Scale low-code across the organization to do more with less
With new enhancements to Microsoft Power Platform in 2022 release wave 2, we’re continuing to empower users to rapidly build solutions and transform their businesses with a comprehensive set of low-code development tools. Two big announcements are that Microsoft Power Pages and Managed Environments are now generally available! Additionally, with the new AI copilot in Microsoft Power Automate, you can create a flow in seconds simply by describing what you want to automate in a sentence.
Watch the video below to learn how organizations like Degrees of Change and Rabobank are using capabilities across the entire Microsoft Power Platform to streamline and automate their business processes.
Learn about new capabilities that will be released for Microsoft Power Platform in the 2022 release wave 2.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Unified routing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides capabilities to connect customers to the best agents. To provide a world-class customer engagement experience, around the clock and across the globe, large organizations rely on multiple vendors and expert pools. They need to balance the incoming workload across service departments, vendor queues, and their expert pools. Percentage-based routing, a new capability of unified routing, helps organizations to easily allocate work to different queues representing departments, vendors, or groups of agents in specific percentages.
How does percentage-based routing help?
Let us look at a customer scenario to understand how percentage-based routing can help your customer service organization.
Contoso Solutions is a Fortune 500 software product and services company. It has a large customer support organization covering more than 20 product lines, served by three vendors with more than 5,000 agents worldwide. Most of their customer queries are in the Billing and Subscriptions area. A single vendor team cannot handle the load. Rajeev, the director of customer support at Contoso, wants to distribute the workload across all three vendors based on each vendor’s pricing plan, quality of service, and the volume it can handle. He has come up with the following allocation:
60% to Woodgrove Solutions, which has consistently delivered good customer support and has offered volume-discounted pricing to Contoso
30% to Adatum Corporation, which has a smaller workforce but can quickly ramp up agents when Contoso releases new features
10% to First Up Consultants, a new vendor that Contoso wants to try out
Rajeev is looking for a solution that can help him implement the percentage-based routing easily to control customer wait times during the busy holiday season. He learns about the percentage-based routing capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. In the Customer Service admin center, he opens the workstream and configures a Route to Queue rule with the work allocations he devised.
From that moment, the algorithm dynamically routes every customer query from the Billing and Subscriptions area to one of the three vendor queues according to the configured percentages.
Monitor vendor queues in reports
Rajeev can check the number of customer queries that go to each vendor using the Omnichannel historical analytics insights dashboard.
Conclusion
In a world of high-volume, 24/7 customer engagement, percentage-based routing can be extremely helpful for organizations that want to efficiently manage their workload across multiple vendors and deliver delightful customer experiences to their global customer base.
Learn more
To get more information about unified routing and automated routing rules in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, read the documentation:
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