I originally had a different article planned for today, but with the current situation that’s happening over the world, I decided to change what I was going to talk about.
The world has gone crazy, in so many ways. There’s plenty of information out there around what’s happening, and with best advice to people as to how to deal with things, cope, etc. I’m not going to cover that (besides, it’s likely that things will change over time, which means that anything I write could be out of date soon).
Instead, I’m going to address one of the specific issues that I’m seeing again and again. This is the bottleneck that people are facing when trying to contact companies, whether the company is their bank, their utility provider, their health provider, or even travel companies.
Regardless of whether people are trying to cancel an existing holiday & get a refund, speak to their bank to get a mortgage holiday, or get medical advice, they’re facing the same major issue – they’re not the only ones trying to get through. Phone lines are jammed (assuming that they’ve not been stopped due to agents being sick), static forms where you fill in information aren’t liked (as you don’t know what the actual status of things are), and online chat takes an absolute age. I had an online chat session with Amazon two days ago, and it took over an hour for one of their associates to join my session to help me.
Go to any major company website, and you’ll probably see something like the following (this is from British Airways):
I’d like to be clear – companies couldn’t really have forecast all of this happening, if you’d go back several months.
But what companies can, and should have in place, are clear communication protocols that actually enable them to handle a massive scale-up of customers contacting them. It’s not going to be perfect, but can help mitigate the bottleneck to certain degrees.
Having an efficient system can allow a single agent to handle multiple communication streams at the same time. Indeed, it’s not just about handling multiple web-chat sessions concurrently – it’s also about handling communication across different mediums. So agents can handle webchat, Facebook messages, Twitter DM’s, etc.
This is, I believe, where products such as Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 can really come into their own, and shine through. Using it, companies can ensure that their workforce (which is likely to be impacted as well by the situation) can be as best empowered as possible, and assist customers as speedily as they are able to.
Hopefully the current situation will resolve itself as soon as possible, and coming out from it, we should look to carry out any efficiencies that we are able to. This will allow companies to better serve their customers moving forward, and streamline communication channels.
I hope & pray that everyone stays safe & healthy through this crisis, and that we help each other out (to the best of our abilities) to get through it.
Companies want to be able to support their customers, and provide a valuable customer experience. That’s a given, of course! On the other hand (especially if the company isn’t a multi-national), they’ll have hours of operation that they’re open for. When the company isn’t open, they’ll want to ensure that customers will know this, and not be routed to customer support when it’s not available.
There are several different ways of handling this, depending on how exactly the system/s have been implemented. Let’s take a look at some of these
When setting up a chat channel directly from within Omnichannel, we can leverage the inbuilt settings for Operating Hours:
By using this, we’re able to set up different day & time combinations, along with the timezone that’s it’s applicable for (I’d suggest to use appropriate names and/or descriptions to easily identify them, of course!):
It’s not even a blanket setting (ie that you set up one record for this, that governs all communication channels). You’re able to set up multiple Operating Hour records, and can then point each chat instance to a specific one. To do this, go to (or create) the Chat record, open the Design tab within the record, and select the Operating Hour record you’re wanting to associate to the chat:
Now, when this has been applied, the chat widget button will only be displayed on the webpage/s where it’s deployed to during the specified Operating Hours. Great!
Power Virtual Agent
There will be scenarios where you’ll be implementing a Power Virtual Agent in the first instance, rather than using the Omnichannel chat itself. Reasons for this include the ability to have automated responses to issues, allow users to self-service their enquires, and other.
Having taken a look, the configuration for escalating a PVA conversation into an Omnichannel queue is actually quite simple and basic. Unfortunately, there doesn’t (at the time of writing) seem to be any way of picking up the Omnichannel Operating Hours that are set up within the system, nor any method to specify these in any other way for the PVA itself. Hopefully this will change at some point!
Azure Chat Bot
I’ve also taken a look at Azure Chatbots, as these are another way in which companies will enable customers. Once again, there’s no way to have an Azure Chatbot respect/pick-up Omnichannel Operating Hours. I would hope that this will be functionality that comes in the future.
However (unlike Power Virtual Agents), it should be possible to write code within the chatbot (using the Microsoft Bot Framework) to indeed take these into account.
Other channels
There are of course other channels such as Facebook, SMS, and the Wave 1 2020 items (Twitter etc). With all of these, there are likely to be different methods in getting the Operating Hours set up, along with things like auto-responses (eg ‘The office is now closed, please contact us again between 09:00 & 17:30 Monday through Friday to speak with an agent’) to give the best experience.
In general, it’s usually quite useful to be able to see how customers are engaging with your company, and how they’re feeling about things. If customers are disgruntled, annoyed, or complaining, it’s important to be able to understand the root cause/s of their issue/s, and resolve them as soon as possible.
One of the tools available in Omnichannel is Sentiment Analysis. What is this?
Being able to identify how customers see/interact with your brand, accurately, is vitally important. Using people to manually trawl through your data to attempt to identify this has many drawbacks:
Lack of consistent approach
Large amounts of time needed
Many manual touchpoints
As a natural follow-on from this, being able to identify & categorise the sentiment in customer communications through using machine learning can unlock many business use cases that can then result in immense value for your company.
Microsoft provide the ability for this through Azure Cognitive Services. It’s really quite interesting in how this actually works. You can go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/, put in a sentence, and see what results come back. It can be quite amusing to see what different colours come out as!
As part of the analytics around chat (and by chat, I’m not referring to just a chat bot – anything within Omnichannel can be referred to as ‘chat’, from an agent perspective), sentiment analysis can be used.
This is quite easy to set up. To do so, open the Omnichannel Administration Hub, go to the Settings area in the left-hand menu, open ‘Sentiment Analysis’, and click to enable it. Remember to save it to apply it!
This will then result in the agent interface showing the following:
Now, this isn’t static. The sentiment will update in real time as the conversation continues, and will change based on what the customer is saying.
Now, obviously we’d expect agents to be able to judge the tone of the conversation based on what’s being said (at least I’d personally expect it). So for this, the sentiment that shows within the chat isn’t that helpful.
However, it does come into its own in a slightly different place. This is the Omnichannel Sentiments Analysis Dashboard, which is served through PowerBI.
Through this, supervisors can understand how their company is measuring up to their KPIs & necessary trends. They can also understand the overall support experience that omnichannel is having, along with tracking the sentiment of customer interactions. As a result of having this to hand, better understanding of customers can take place, resulting in improvement of the overall customer experience.
Once the dashboards have been configured within PowerBI (I’m going to do a separate post on this), it’s then possible to surface these within the Omnichannel Customer Service Hub (which users with the Supervisor role will be able to see). This means that supervisors won’t need to open a separate place to see these; it’s all available through the same interface.
There’s also a more detailed view into what’s actually happening, through the ‘Omnichannel Insights – Sentiment Analysis Report’. This displays a lot more information, drilling down & splitting the data up into agents, queues, channels & trends. Here’s an example of this:
With all of this information as the fingertips, it’s now really possible to drill down into the details. Through this, we’re able to carry out full & proper analysis on what’s actually causing customer interactions. From looking into what’s occurring, it’s then possible to review the current state of things, and see what can be improved. This will then result in more positive sentiments shown by customers, and drive their loyalty to the company!
Earlier this week I started to share information around the Productivity Tools that Microsoft provides (as a separate solution, admittedly) for Omnichannel – https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-productivity-tools/. With it, I also covered Macros, and some of the benefits that using macros can bring to a company
Now, we all know that the absolute key point in ensuring a consistent & holistic approach is to have a method for getting something done. A ‘script’, in other words. With this, we can set out the steps that we want to be carried out, in the order that they should be performed, with appropriate information against each item. This results in agents (hopefully!) following this, giving the customer the same (and great) experience each and every time they need to interact.
Scripts isn’t just about instructions to be carried out though. It also allows macros to be included, that agents can run as they go through the script.
Here’s an example of something that I’ve been playing around with in my test environments (ninja’s are just SO cool, that I’ve had to rein in my imagination!):
So that’s an example of what you can do. Let’s now see how we set these up. There are several steps to it
In the Omnichannel Administration Hub, you should see the Scripts entry in the left hand bar:
Open it, and click on ‘New’ in the main menu bar. You’ll get the following form appearing:
Type in a name for the script, and a description (personally I find it annoying that I can’t see all of the text in the Description field – perhaps Microsoft may change this at some point). Save the form, and the grid to the right becomes active!
Clicking the ellipse (3 dots) in the Agent Script Steps grid gives several options:
One of the very helpful options here is to add an existing script step. What’s a script step, I hear you ask. Well, each specific item in a script is referred to as a ‘script step’. You set these up as you go through your scrip, as shown below. You don’t need to create a new script step for each script if they’re the same thing – you can just create one, & add it as needed to multiple scripts (just be careful, because if you need to change it at some point, the changed/updated version will display in all scripts that it’s associated with!.
As with any record, you’ll put in a name, and a description. What you’ll also do is give it an order number (this is manual, not auto-generated). The order number is how the system orders the different steps. There’s also the option (which is a required selection) as to whether this is text, macro, or a script:
Text. This will be free text that you enter into the script step, which will then be displayed on the screen for the omnichannel agent to see
Macro. This will give you the option to point to a macro that you’ve already set up. When the agent will click on it during the session, the macro will run
Script. This allows you to reference existing scripts – you can have smaller scripts that you can then use as ‘building blocks’ to create more complex scripts
Once you’ve gotten the script set up, we then need to configure the chat sessions to actually use it. This allows us to set up multiple scripts in our system, and use them as appropriate (eg by using pre-survey questions, it’s possible to direct a customer to a specific queue, and then have the agents use a specific script for this).
To do this, we go to Sessions, and open the session entry that we’re wanting to set the script up for:
Once it’s open, switch to the Agent Script tab. This has a grid that shows all of the script/s that are set up for it. To add script/s, use the drop-down menu on the top of the grid:
The last thing that needs to be done is to enable the Productivity Pane, as otherwise agents won’t be able to see all of this in the first place! Thankfully this is a single setting, and is done as follows:
Go to the Productivity Pane option in the left-hand menu. Click on it
Set the Productivity pane option to ‘Enabled’
Set the Mode option based on your requirements (this is how it appears in the agent interface). By default it’s set to ‘Collapsed’
One of the really great things about Dynamics 365 (and other Microsoft products such as Office 365, PowerBI, etc) is that providers can publish solutions that companies can then look to install into their environment. In fact, not only do 3rd parties do this, Microsoft itself does this too!
These are all published to AppSource (http://appsource.microsoft.com) where you can quickly and easily search for solutions. It’s possible to filter based on category, industry, product, pricing level, and several other options. There are thousands of solutions on it – it’s really quite amazing!
So, what does this have to do with what I’m writing about? Well, there’s a package, created by Microsoft itself, called ‘Productivity Tools for Dynamics 365 apps‘ (hyperlink is correct at the time of writing this article).
According to the description against the solution:
…it provides capabilities that help users to perform day-to-day operations in a faster, efficient, and process compliant manner and deliver value to customers…
OK – sounds good. And it’s free – yes, that’s right. Additional FREE functionality that’s being provided by Microsoft (why they don’t roll it into the general solution, I have NO idea). But where does it come into play, and apply, to the customer centre universe?
Well, that’s actually really simple. See, it’s only able to be installed in an environment that has Omnichannel installed to! It can’t be installed if that’s not present – so it doesn’t work with the ‘regular’ customer service first-party applications.
Now, any contact/customer service centre is expected to handle a large number of customer interactions, along with resolving them as fast as possible. I’ve already previously touched on some of the benefits of Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 helping streamline any company team, in that it’s no longer necessary to have a team handling calls, another team handling web enquires, and a third team handling social media, etc. Instead, it’s now possible to have a single team handling all customer interactions and/or communications holistically across all possible channels.
With this, however, comes various challenges:
There can be many actions to perform manually (I’ve previously covered using slugs in customer conversations to cut down on manually typing things – https://thecrm.ninja/quick-responses-in-omnichannel/, but there can be lots of other actions as well)
Repetitive and/or monotonous tasks – there are scripts that the customer service agents will need to follow for each interaction
Not having real-time insight into the customer, and any other relevant needs based on the context of the interaction.
So, what does the Productivity Tools solution actually contain? At the time of writing, it has 3 components that are part of it:
Macros
Agent Assist
Smart Assist
I’m going to cover these functionalities over a couple of posts, to show how they work and bring benefits to an organisation. I’m not going to go into how to install the solution – it’s pretty straightforward, and the instructions are shown on the AppSource page for it.
One thing to quickly mention though is that there are 2 new security roles that are relevant for Productivity Tools, that should be applied to users as applicable to them:
Macros
Macros should be well known to most people, as they’ve been around for a LONG time! It’s possible to have macros in Word, Excel, even Windows itself (I remember back in high school that we used macros within Word to launch Explorer, as it was locked down – we could then open games and play during lunchtime…)! It’s therefore a natural evolution to have them available within Dynamics 365 as well.
Using macros, customer service agents can carry out repetitive tasks that can span multiple entities. Eg opening forms (model-driven apps), pre-populating data into the form, etc. Through this, not only are there less manual tasks/steps to carry out, there’s now the ability to carry out the same tasks, without worrying about a step being missed, or the wrong data copied in, etc.
As with all other configuration in Omnichannel, you’ll need to go to the Omnichannel Administration Hub to access the Macros section:
Click ‘New’ on the menu bar, and hey voila – you can create a new macro!
Now, I had no idea what to expect – and the interface for this was possibly the last thing that I was thinking would be there! It looks EXACTLY like the process for creating a Power Automate Flow, though just for macros. In fact I’d be quite surprised if underneath it all it was actually using something different to do this – after all, if you can build a ‘process builder’ once, in a really great way, why not use it everywhere that you can!
So, once I’ve set up some steps, my screen now looks like this (the syntax does take a little bit of getting used to FYI):
Now, it’s not just a single step that you can perform. As with Power Automate Flows, you can daisy-chain MULTIPLE steps together to achieve the desired result/s:
This is really great, in my opinion. There’s obviously quite a scope of activities and actions which agents would usually carry out manually, which macros now now address & handle.
Macros themselves are used by agents within the Agent Assist and Smart Assist functionality. I’ll be introducing these in the next post, along with how to use macros within it.
This post topic came out of some research that I was doing when getting my Omnichannel webinar presentation together, and I thought it would be useful to share with others.
When an environment (also referred to as an organisation is created within a tenant on the PowerPlatform, it’s given a URL. By default, this will be imaginatively named by the AutoGenerateElves, along the following lines:
It is of course absolutely possible to change this (assuming that someone else hasn’t taken that ‘special’ URL that you’re wanting to use!). To do this, you go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/, log in with system adminstrator credentials, go to Environments, select the one you’re wanting, and click the ‘Edit’ button:
You’ll then be able to enter the name that you’re wanting to use (incidentally this is also where you’re now able to switch environments between Production & Sandbox):
You then click the Save button at the bottom of the screen. Assuming you’ve entered a name that isn’t already being used, all is successful. However if it’s being used by someone else (very frustrating, we know!), it’ll give a lovely error message at the top of the screen along the following lines:
Not very helpful, I know – if only there was a way that when you entered the name you wanted and moved off the field, there could be some validation checking happening there & then, with information in plain English if it was able to be used or not…ah well – one day!
OK – so people know this. Brilliant.
What I want to share, however, is how this affects Omnichannel within an environment.
See, when Omnichannel is provisioned into an environment, one of the things that it sets somewhere in the back end is the environment URL. You can’t see where it’s stored, but it’s saved somewhere. This is then used when setting up things such as Chat within Omnichannel – there’s an auto-generated code snippet that you would then use in an HTML block on a webpage to launch a chat session with an Omnichannel agent:
Now, when you change the URL of an environment, it doesn’t change in here – it seems that whatever is happening/updating in the background when you do the URL change, it’s not being pushed into Omnichannel and refreshing the settings there (and you can’t change them manually). Hopefully at some point it’ll happen, but it’s not doing it now.
Even manually changing the code in the HTML block on the website page won’t work, as it won’t be pointing to a valid Omnichannel URL.
We know that it’s not a usual course of events to change an environment URL, but there are valid scenarios that it would happen in, and we obviously need to know how to deal with it!
Having looked into this and tried out some different things, at this point in time there’s only one way to do this – you need to remove the Omnichannel solution, and then re-apply it to the environment. My immediate reaction to this was WHOAH…what about all of the settings (aka static data) that’s been entered for Omnichannel to be configured to the business needs?
With this in mind, I reached out to some people for advice – and they came through. Yes, you need to remove the solution totally (until a better mechanism will be implemented hopefully). But there’s something called the ‘Microsoft Configuration Migration Tool’.
Disclaimer – I haven’t actually used this yet, so this is based on the information I’ve seen on it
With this tool, it’s possible to select various entities, and export/move the data from one environment into a saved file, and then be able to import it. Phew – this sounds somewhat easier than manually doing things (as long as you remember every single place that you need to get the data from, of course).
With this in mind, it’s now possible to recreate Omnichannel for the environment without hopefully TOO much fuss. The only additional thing to bear in mind is to then check and update the code snippets for Chat etc to reflect the new URL.
Let’s hope that in the future, this is streamlined and is much more trivial to be able to do!
I was somewhat naughty – I ended the post on a slight teaser note. See, as I mentioned there, CIF 1.0 was all about allowing channel widgets from providers to integrate with what we refer to as ‘model-driven apps’. Eg Accounts, Contacts, etc, which are all ‘single session’ entities within Dynamics 365 (ie that a single channel is being used, like a phone call). It was never designed to support ‘multi session’ apps, which is what Omnichannel is all about (ie the ability to have multiple ‘conversations’ going on at the same time, regardless of the channel in which they’ve come in on).
This is why in 2019, Microsoft was working on the next version of CIF – 2.0! Imaginatively named, of course. The aim was to take the general concepts from CIF 1.0, and apply them to be able to be used with multi-session applications. Obviously at this point in time, the ONLY multi-channel application is….OMNICHANNEL!
Incidentally it’s important to note that any communication widget built on CIF 1.0 will continue to work. Microsoft is not removing the 1.0 APIs, as they’re still needed to support interfacing with single-session apps
So, what’s new (and improved) with CIF 2.0:
The ability to have multiple communications happening at the same time, through either the same channel, or multiple channels
The ability to have multiple third-party provider solutions. You could have Provider A for telephony, and right alongside it Provider B for SMS
Different modes for the widgets, which can be adjusted per session launched. It’s now possible to have them set to be docked in the interface, minimised to a smaller size (to give agents more screen space to work with) or hidden (where it’s running in the background). Agents are able to switch between docked & minimised modes
This is all really exciting. It will allow companies to mix and match solutions based on their actual requirements, rather than having to settle for a single solution provider that may not actually be everything that they’re wanting.
Note: With an eye to data security and things like GDPR, information, data & events for support sessions will only go to the provider for the channel that the session is coming through. They don’t have access to any other session/s that are happening
One of the other main features that comes with CIF 2.0 are the channel analytics. With CIF 1.0, all of the interactions are surfaced into the Dynamics 365 app, but are actually running on the provider’s system (in the background). Data can of course be exchanged between them, but there’s no real ability to perform analytics of what’s going on (especially as it’s only a single channel)
In order to get the full insight into what support agents are actually doing, along with seeing the performance of the support centre, it’s necessary to be able to see information across all of the following:
CRM data (itself). This covers the actual data of the customers, communications with them (eg activities and cases), their history over time, etc – all of this is stored in the underlying CDS
Agent Behaviour. How the agent handles the session – what they do before, during and after they’ve helped the customer
Communication data. How the customer has contacted the company now, how they’ve done so in the past, their experience, etc.
So how exactly does Channel Analytics help with things? Well, what it does is:
Provides APIs to bring the conversation data into CDS
Along with the APIs, it has a standardised schema for how the analytical data will be stored
Brings in a standardised scheme for how all of the data points shown above will be correlated together
Extendable – you can bring in your own KPIs and other data to best suit your needs.
With all of this now being available through CIF 2.0, it’s possible to carry out really advanced analytics, crunch the data using a tool such as PowerBI, and other things. It’s also possible, of course, to configure real-time dashboards as well as alerts to cover any issues that may come up.
Benefits of this of course include:
Identifying root causes of anomalies, help with audit reports, and tracking KPI’s
Help with predictive insights for volume of requests, and where to best focus resources
See customer satisfaction & average handling times to resolution, along with on-going customer sentiment
So in summary, this is really great. I’ve actually now started to speak with different companies who have ISV solutions that are going to be on CIF 2.0, and will be writing about them in the near future as well.
One of the great features being released as part of Wave 1 2020 for Dynamics 365 is the ability to have Kanban boards in the system!
For those people who are unfamiliar with this functionality, “Kanban” is the Japanese word for “visual signal”. A kanban board helps make work visible using cards & columns to easily display data visually. This allows people to keep on top of things, rather than be distracted by lots of lists and data in different places.
Example of a generic kanban board:
When an item on a kanban board changes status (or whatever property the board groups by), it moves to the relevant column. This could be as simple as having PostIt notes on a wall somewhere and a member of the team physically moves it to a new column, or having a record value be updated and then it automatically moves in the view. Items can also be dragged/dropped to a new column in some systems, which then updates the status
I’ve used Pivotal Tracker for several projects that I’ve been working on over the years, which works exactly in this way.
One of the drawbacks with how data is displayed in Dynamics 365 is that the views are lists of records. You can add columns for fields that you want to reference (eg status), sort & filter on them, but visually it’s not very exciting. There’s the ability of course to have charts, graphs & Power BI objects (with the ability to drill down into these), but it’s still not the best of experiences in my opinion.
Well, that’s now no longer the case! You can now use the kanban board ability to display data more visually, as well as interacting with it (think drag/drop)
Caveat: At the moment, although you can add kanban to practically any entity, it’s actually only able to be used on Opportunity
On the right side of the page, you’ll see the Wave 1 release (see screenshot below). Select the ‘Manage’ button, and confirm the upgrade (it’s not reversible FYI). Wait patiently for it to install (it can take several hours)
Once the installation is finished, refresh the environment, open the environment, click the cogwheel on the top right, and select ‘Advanced Settings’
Joyfully, this takes you to the old system settings menu, as this functionality hasn’t yet been moved into the configuration available at make.powerapps.com (yet!). Click the dropdown arrow next to Settings in the menu ribbon, and select Customisations
Open the solution up (remember, you should probably be doing this in a custom solution, rather than the default one!), expand entities, and find Opportunity. Click on it, and then click on the ‘Controls’ tab
You’ll see the option for ‘Add Control’. Click this, then scroll down the list until you see Kanban! Add it, and it’ll show up in the list of controls
Now, it’s VITAL that you save, and then publish the customisations.
Close all of this, and go to the Opportunity entity. Click the 3 dots to expand the menu on the menu bar, click to slide into the Show As menu, and then select Kanban (you can of course change the default view to use Kanban, if you so desire)
And BOOM! The screen layout will magically change, and you should now see the following sort of thing (assuming you have data for Opportunities, of course)
Incidentally, there are actually two Kanban board views available for Opportunities. One of these groups by the record status, and the other groups by where records are within the Business Process Flow timeline (which is shown in the screenshot above). You can switch between these easily by selecting the option that you want on the screen.
Now, as I stated above, this is currently only available for Opportunity (and you need a Sales Enterprise or Sales Professional license to use it). However, I really think this is great functionality, and would hope that it’ll roll out to other parts of Dynamics 365, as well as being available for Power Apps built on the CDS.
How do I see this being valuable? Good question to ask! I think that initially it could be really valuable for customer service scenarios, especially tracking negative interactions with customers (ie where the customer isn’t happy with support and/or the resolution, or there’s a fault, etc).
The ability to display this data visually, with time filters as well, should bring things into focus quite quickly to see where a company can both improve its offering, as well as pick up any issues that are occurring. Obviously regular reporting and BI will still continue to play their crucial roles, but this is another piece of functionality being added to the overall ‘toolkit’ to help get things every better!
So for starters, the title is somewhat of a mouthful, right? Try saying ‘Channel Integration Framework’ several times fast, and you’ll end up with some VERY interesting sounding words. Thankfully, people and organisations working with it usually shorten it to ‘CIF’. So that’s what I’m going to do as well (which will also hopefully prevent any RSI whilst I’m typing this all out).
The definition of CIF according to Microsoft is:
The Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework is a cloud-to-cloud extensible framework to integrate third-party channel providers with Dynamics 365 model-driven app using a browser-based JavaScript API library.
Now, for the technically minded (isn’t that all of us?), CIF is a set of API’s (methods, events & protocols) that enable developers to build their own solutions, and integrate them with Dynamics 365. Examples of these would be a communication widget that’s running on a 3rd party provider cloud system, but that can surface and interact with Dynamics 365.
There are multiple partners out there who are doing this, such as Solgari. The immediate benefits of this is that additional functionality can be provided for customers that Microsoft hasn’t built into the system (yet!). An example of one of the functionalities provided by Solgari is the ability to dial a number directly from the Contact record (telephony):
Before CIF was available, it was usually an immense headache to integrate a 3rd party application solution into the system. It could be done of course, but was something that you had to be REALLY dedicated to doing, with all of the time, efforts and costs that it would involve.
With it being launched, many people breathed a massive sigh of relief, and then started to look around for partners who had solutions that supported it. There are now several Microsoft partners who offer solutions that integrate with CIF, and through this extend the functionality.
The CIF framework offered the following benefits:
It provides an extensible framework to integrate third-party cloud-based channel providers or channel aggregators with Dynamics 365 model-driven app (not Canvas)
It’s channel agnostic. Ie channels such as voice, video, chat, co-browse etc can be built as long as there’s a Javascript-based widget available
It’s not just a single direction flow of data; it allows two way communication. This therefore allows both inbound and outbound data
It exposes Javascript API’s (note the item above about it being a Javascript based widget)
Deployment is easy (well, as easy as any deployment can be!). Deployment is also the same across all apps/widgets – it follows a standard process
Plug & Play! It’s now very easy to have multiple different providers integrated, rather than being limited to a single provider
Dynamics 365 model driven app agnostic – once the channel has been built and deployed, you can then enable it on the model-driven app that you’re wanting to use it with, based on business requirements
Not reliant on operating system or web browser – it’s not reliant on a specific hardware/OS/browser configuration (obviously the browser needs to have the appropriate Javascript security settings enabled, or else it won’t work)
Screen pop! Popouts are available to display customer information that can help agents with their customer conversations and service.
The architecture behind CIF is as follows:
The Dynamics 365 environment is where the CIF app is present to create and manage the required configurations
The single-session Dynamics 365 model-driven app exposes the CIF panel to host the 3rd party widget
The CIF Adapter enables the communication between a single-session model-driven app and the channel provider solution
The web-based communication channel (2rd party) is hosted in the widget that the CIF provides. This is multi-purpose; it’s possible to host chat, email, or telephony channels of your choice
The Channel Provider is the service that you want to integrate and interact with using the CIF. Channel capabilities are specific to the channel provider (ie a 3rd party solution that only supports chat won’t be able to support telephony etc!)
So essentially by using 3rd party solutions that integrate with CIF, it’s possible to have customer service offerings covering things like:
Telephony
SMS
Chat
Social media
This is really great, and is really the starting point for taking customer service to the next level. Companies want to be able to easily and quickly support their customers across all possible channels, as forcing them into using a specific channel doesn’t always work well, and can in fact be counter-productive.
Now, all of the above is of course amazing, and really great. The MAIN drawback is that this was CIF 1.0…..and it’s not possible to load a CIF 1.0 widget into Omnichannel! Aarghhh!!! It’s only possible to use 1.0 widgets with model-driven apps, which Omnichannel is not (more on that another time). So it’s possible to have chat or telephony integrating with Accounts, Contacts etc.
However, don’t despair yet. Microsoft has released CIF 2.0, which DOES integrate with Omnichannel. So stick around, and I’ll be putting up a post around how that works (I know – such a teaser!).
I was out with some friends from the Microsoft technical community over the weekend, and obviously we got to talking about what we’re passionate about, our visions and values, and what we’re trying to achieve – in essence, what drives us.
From my side of things, I believe very strongly in the vision of excelling in customer service. It’s one of the main reasons that I started this blog, to be able to share my passion for it with others, and help them with getting along the journey on this as well. Obviously I also talk about other things in the technical universe, and have some fun along the way as well (which is also very important!), but ultimately I generally try to have my material centred around customer service.
Now it might seem obvious as to why customer service is so important. After all, we all want to have the best experience possible.
But hold on – take a moment or two, and ask yourself exactly what excelling in customer service actually means to you? What comes to mind when you say it to yourself, and what visions are conjured up?
Having spoken with many people along the way, some of the answers that come out of this exercise can be:
Being able to be understand by the retailer/service provider, and feeling that my custom is actually appreciated
Being able to resolve any issues quickly and easily, without having delays or mis-understandings
Knowing that they value me, and go above/beyond in what they’re providing
Being able to call up to check on the status of a support case, and the customer service agent seeing my past history; not that they have to ask me absolutely everything again, and start at the very beginning!
Now flip the scenario around, and imagine that you’re providing a service, or a brand. What does excellent customer service mean to you, and why is it so important?
Again, some of the common themes and concepts that come out of this include:
Knowing that my customers like my service, and will stay loyal
My customers aren’t just about the price that they pay. Even if we’re charging more than others, they appreciate the support and additional actions that we undertake for them
Our clients know that we’ll do whatever is necessary to handle any issues that occur
There are plenty of examples of companies who have not just good, but great customer service. I’ve experienced a few myself over the years.
There’s the amazing example of an Amazon support representative who took the initiative in a support conversation to say that they’re Thor (a Norse god). The customer wanted to play along, and well, the rest can be seen below:
Did the support agent solve the problem? Yes. Did the customer walk away feeling that the situation was resolved? Yes. But…did the customer feel that they were engaged and had a positive support experience, and would continue with the provider? YES!!
I had a support session once myself with Amazon (unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot of it anymore) where the support session turned into comparing different fruits, and the benefits of each. Was it germane to the support session? Nope – but I came out of it feeling that the agent was really trying to understand me, and go above/beyond the general support role.
In today’s day and age, where there are so many competitors in markets, it’s the customer service that REALLY can make a specific brand or service provider stand out. It’s this that ensures that customers stay loyal, feel rewarded and empowered, and even recommend to others (which is, at the end of the day, absolutely free marketing for the company!).
Two great examples of this have been demonstrated by Lego and Trader Joe’s:
Lego
Losing a favourite toy feels devastating to a young child. Longtime Lego fan Luka Apps spent all of his Christmas money on a Ninjago (Lego ninja). Against his dad’s advisement, he brought his Ninjago on a shopping trip … and lost it. Luka wrote a letter to Lego explaining his loss and assuring the Lego staff that he would take extra-special care of his action figure if they sent him another one:
The response he received from Lego customer support representative Richard was nothing short of amazing. Richard told Luke that he had talked to Sensei Wu (a Ninjago character), writing:
Trader Joe’s
An elderly man, 89 years of age, was snowed in at his Pennsylvanian home around the holidays, and his daughter was worried that he wasn’t going to have access to enough food due to the impending storm and bad weather in the area.
After calling multiple stores in a desperate attempt to find anyone who would deliver to her father’s home, she finally got hold of someone at Trader Joe’s, who told her that they also do not deliver … normally.
Given the extreme circumstance, they told her that they would gladly deliver directly to his home, and even suggested additional delivery items that would fit perfectly with his special low-sodium diet.
After the daughter placed the order for the food, the employee on the phone told her that she didn’t need to worry about the price; the food would be delivered free of charge. The employee then wished her a Merry Christmas.
Less than 30 minutes later the food was at the man’s doorstep — for free!
In refusing to let red tape get in the way of a customer in need, Trader Joe’s shows that customer service doesn’t need to be about the fanfare; it can simply be about doing the right thing.
The above two examples show how companies can go above and beyond, and deliver stellar customer service. In these stories, did they make anything on it financially? Well no, not immediately. But the customer appreciation and loyalty, not to mention the (eventual) publicity, is priceless. Customers WANT to have a company or service provider that would do this sort of thing for them in an emergency.
Having been involved with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 product for over a decade now, I’ve carefully followed the path that it’s taken, and where the roadmap seems to be pointing to.
Now, Unified Service Desk (USD) has been around for a while, and it’s a really good product. Neil Parkhurst has written extensively on the subject over the years (take a look at https://neilparkhurst.com/ for more information around it). Omnichannel is, in my opinion, NOT a replacement for USD, though it could play a part in it (one of the reasons it’s not a replacement is because Omnichannel can’t connect to legacy on-premise systems, whereas USD can).
However, I believe that for companies that have a cloud-centric approach, Omnichannel is really the key answer to bringing all of their customer engagements together. Together with the enterprise-grade routing that’s available within it, it can enable and empower organisations like nothing before (well, nothing without having to write a LOT of very custom code, of course).
Being able to effortlessly serve communication across all contact channels, seeing the history of these interactions, and building the customer appreciation and loyalty really is what is key for all businesses now. It’s what will make them stand out from their competition, draw customers in, and put themselves ahead of everyone else
This is where Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 has been positioned, and the value that it will bring to all. It’s an amazing journey, and it’s only getting started!
