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What’s one of the most persistent challenges in customer service? The last mile.
A resolution might be proposed, but what happens next often falls into a gray zone. Agents are waiting for a response, customers are going silent, SLAs are creeping past their due dates. It’s inefficient, inconsistent, and frequently unnoticed until metrics start to dip.
With the latest release, Customer Management Agent (CMA) addresses this decisively. CMA now handles follow-up and case closure in a fully autonomous way, delivering consistency, compliance, and operational clarity at scale.
From resolution to closure, without the gaps
Once a resolution is proposed, either manually or autonomously, CMA initiates a structured follow-up process:
Confirmation outreach: CMA automatically checks in with the customer to validate if the issue has been resolved.
SLA-aware reminders: Follow-ups are timed according to defined SLA policies and escalation thresholds.
Closure logic: If the customer confirms resolution, or remains unresponsive beyond the configured threshold, the case is closed automatically, with full traceability.
This not only reduces the manual workload, it ensures timely and consistent case closure.
Sentiment-savvy and context-aware
Case Management Agent doesn’t just check for a response, it interprets it.
For instance:
A “Thanks, this worked!” leads to confident closure.
A “Still not working” escalates the case and re-engages resolution workflows.
Ambiguous replies or no response? CMA applies retry logic and closure rules to make informed, policy-aligned decisions.
The agent operates with human-like judgment—at scale, with precision.
Controlled autonomy, by design
Autonomy doesn’t mean giving up control. With CMA, administrators have granular configuration options to tailor automation to their organization’s structure, policies, and customer expectations.
Admins can configure:
Automation level: Fully autonomous (no human intervention), semi-autonomous (human oversight included)
Field mappings and related entities for AI-based updates
Follow-up and closure email templates
Number, timing, and frequency of follow-ups
Business rules for closure, including SLA thresholds and exception handling
This ensures autonomy serves the business, not the other way around.
Why this changes the game for your team
Autonomous follow-up and closure goes beyond efficiency:
Reduces time and effort spent managing post-resolution tasks
Minimizes operational overhead by eliminating unnecessary manual steps
The road ahead
As organizations scale and customer expectations continue to rise, intelligent closure will become standard, not optional. CMA delivers this capability in a way that’s flexible, reliable, and easy to govern.
Because in modern customer service, a resolved case isn’t truly complete until it’s closed, intentionally and intelligently.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, we introduced new capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot to help every customer become Frontier—including Work IQ, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents in chat, and Agent 365.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Whether your agents are created with Microsoft platforms, open-source frameworks, or third-party platforms, Agent 365 helps you deploy, organize, and govern them securely.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Frontier Firms put Copilot, agents, and agentic business applications at the core of their operating model to enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes, and bend the curve on innovation. Today, we’re announcing several new agentic capabilities to help customers move to the Frontier—read on to learn more.
Earlier in 2025, we introduced our vision for how AI agents will transform critical sales processes like building pipeline and qualifying leads. Today marks the next milestone in that journey with the Microsoft Sales Development Agent, available through the Frontier Program in December 2025. Many sales organizations are under pressure to deliver more revenue with limited resources, and the Sales Development Agent helps sales teams scale their impact. This allows sellers to focus on nurturing customer relationships and closing deals.
Features include:
Revenue and pipeline growth: The agent continuously researches prospects, crafts personalized outreach, and automatically follows up to ensure no lead is left behind.
Scalability: Fully independent, yet collaborative, the agent acts as a teammate, with the ability to hand off leads to human sellers when needed.
Security and governance: Built on Microsoft’s trusted security and compliance foundation and when enabled with Agent 365, the agent adheres to robust policies and access controls to ensure user data and workflows are protected.
Sales Development Agent connects with leading CRM systems like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the Microsoft 365 apps your teams already use like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.
The Microsoft sales team is among the first to use Sales Development Agent to reinvent the sales engagement process. With the use of Sales Development Agent, there was a 15.1% increase in the lead-to-opportunity conversation rate. 1
Sales leaders want to help sellers act on more leads, reach more customers, grow faster, and improve revenue per seller. Microsoft Sales Development Agent can make that possible by creating an infinitely scalable sales organization, so no lead is left behind. Accenture plans to pilot Sales Development Agent across our global inside sales-as-a-service business—which helps clients sell to customers around the world—to boost their reach and revenue while maintaining cost to serve. We’ll use what we learn to help clients leverage Sales Development Agent, scale their teams, and unlock new growth.
—Chris Hergesell, Sales Reinvention Lead, Accenture Song
In October 2025, we shared our vision for agentic business applications—built on agents, Copilot, and unified data. These components are what define Dynamics 365 as a system of action.
Today, we’re taking that vision further with updates to Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, strengthening the foundation for agentic capabilities across your entire business. MCP servers are configurable bridges between the business data within your line-of-business (LOB) apps, and the agents you build using tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio. It serves as a universal intermediary, unlocking a unified platform agnostic access to app data, modernizing how AI agents are interoperable with your apps.
For customers of Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, we’ve used MCP to simplify integration between agents in Dynamics 365 and the platforms used by sellers and service reps to execute complementary workflows, like lead research, engagement, and qualification, as well as case management and case resolution, available in public preview on November 21, 2025.
For customers of Dynamics 365 ERP, we are announcing the public preview of the MCP server that unlocks hundreds of thousands of ERP functions for real-time use. We are also introducing a new analytics MCP server in public preview starting in December 2025. These two servers provide a secure, standardized foundation to connect ERP data with AI-powered analytics, helping customers make faster, more accurate decisions and innovate without sacrificing governance.
We are also announcing the Power Apps MCP server in public preview that enables agents to seamlessly trigger app capabilities such as approvals, form submissions, and data retrieval. This makes every Power App a composable, reusable building block in your organization’s AI ecosystem empowering both citizen and professional developers to expose app functionality to agents with confidence and control.
Lastly, the Dataverse MCP server, now generally available, allows people to benefit from natural language interactions, receiving real-time answers grounded in Dataverse data, while makers and admins gain powerful, built-in tools for data operations, search, and prompt execution.
We see tremendous excitement from customers and partners for agentic Dynamics 365 applications. Take Ramp, a financial operations platform designed to save companies time and money. Ramp built an agentic solution, currently in preview, using Microsoft Foundry that integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central and Teams to streamline employee expense management.
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1 Internal Microsoft sales team data based on time period January 1 to November 7, 2025. Total customers outreach by the agent: 61,734. Lead-to-opportunity ratio (sales qualification): 15.1%.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, customer expectations are higher than ever. They demand swift, accurate, and personalized support—without the friction of long wait times or repetitive interactions. Autonomous case resolution will redefine how support cases are managed and resolved.
What is autonomous case resolution?
Autonomous case resolution is a specialized sub agent within the broader Case Management Agent (CMA) ecosystem. It uses the identified intent to autonomously generate email responses after a case has been created, ensuring customer issues are resolved with minimal human intervention efficiently, intelligently, and empathetically.
Real-world impact
Imagine a customer emailing a business about a defective product. The AI agent reads the email, identifies the issue, uses a custom agent to check the warranty status, and sends a replacement confirmation—all without human involvement. If the customer’s message is ambiguous, the agent requests clarification. If there’s no response, it escalates appropriately. This level of autonomy not only accelerates resolution times but also frees customer service representatives to focus on more complex, high-touch interactions.
Key features and capabilities
With Case Management Agent now generally available, customers can use several groundbreaking features of autonomous case resolution:
Intent-based resolution: The agent automatically determines customer intent and, based on that, drafts and sends an email, ensuring faster resolution.
Autonomous email drafting: The agent crafts professional, empathetic responses using predefined templates (if configured) tailored to various scenarios. Autonomous case resolution can also fall back to default email template replies, or inline email assist in case an email template cannot be identified.
Custom agent integration: The agent can call upon other specialized agents to handle domain-specific tasks, ensuring seamless collaboration.
Smart escalation and handoff: If a customer’s intent remains unidentified, the case is escalated to customer service representatives. When an autonomous resolution is sent but the customer remains unresponsive for a defined period, the case follow-up and closure sub agent istriggered to ensure timely closure.
Multi intent handling: The autonomous case resolution feature handles multiple customer concerns in a single case. By resolving issues sequentially within one interaction, it delivers a unified experience for customers and reduces duplication for support teams.
The road ahead
Autonomous case resolution is more than just a tool, it’s a glimpse into the future of customer support. As it continues to evolve, it paves the way for a fully autonomous contact center experience, where AI agents handle the bulk of interactions, ensuring faster resolutions and higher customer satisfaction.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Customers expect quick and smooth help when they reach out to customer support—whether it’s about a delayed order, a product question, or a service issue. Good case management means keeping track of all these requests and associated customer conversations to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Managing these cases is not always easy. Fortunately, the case create and case update capabilities of the Case Management Agent (CMA) make life easier for support teams and hence, customers.
From manual to automated
A case is like a digital record that holds all the details about the support request. Traditionally, whenever a customer contacts customer service—by chat, email, or voice—a service rep creates a case and manually tracks the issue from start to finish. Now, case create and case update capabilities make this process smarter and more automated than ever.
Key features and capabilities
We released the first version of CMA in public preview in April 2025, and now it’s generally available. We’ve taken customer feedback into account and added capabilities to make creating and updating cases more holistic than ever:
Automatically create a case from chat when the customer service representative accepts the chat request and automatically update it at the end of the conversation. These capabilities are now supported for voice calls and social channels as well.
When the conversation ends, the conversation summary is posted as a note on the case timeline.
For any incoming customer email, case will be created through automatic record creation (ARC). The case will be kept updated with details from all incoming customer emails.
The ability to configure rules based on which case or related entity fields will be predicted. This means you can configure a rule that updates a certain set of fields based on the product in discussion.
Lookup fields are now supported for predictions. You can add field descriptions for capturing your business context which gets leveraged by AI for prediction. For example, for case category prediction, you can describe what each case category means in your business.
We have made changes to the administrator settings layout and in the service rep experience when AI updates are made to the case they’re viewing. This will ensure a more intuitive experience.
You can leverage multiple queue support in automatic record creation (ARC) for creating cases from emails.
Example scenario
Let’s say a customer sends an email to customer support about their device not working properly. As soon as this email is received, Case Management Agent creates a case with the relevant details from the customer’s email. The AI agent answers the email to request further details to solve the issue. The customer sends an email answering AI agent’s questions.
In a pre-CMA world, the customer service rep would have to input these details in the case manually. Not anymore! CMA updates the configured case or related entity fields automatically using this new email from the customer. Everything is kept in one place, so the next agent who helps the customer has the full story—no confusion, no delays.
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