Proactive chat in Omnichannel for Dynamics 365

We’ve all been there. We’re on a website page, trying to understand it, and not really getting anywhere. Whether it’s about how to fill in a form, or technical instructions and information, our mind has gone blank. The words are on the page, but they’re just not making sense – and we don’t know what to do!

What would we say if suddenly a prompt came up, asking if we needed some help with understanding things, and offering to connect us with a live agent if we wanted some assistance? Well, quite a lot of people would be grateful for that, I’d think.

There are quite a few websites out there that have this functionality – I know that I’ve seen it on various sites I’ve been on, though it’s not always been implemented in the best of ways.

Well, now Microsoft have decided to bring in their own form of it, and it sits right within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365! It’s able to allow customers to interact either with a bot or with a live agent, depending on how you’ve configured it to work.

Currently it’s in Preview, but I’m expecting it to move to General Availability soon.

Even better, Microsoft have even released a short video around it!

There are two parts to configuring it:

Firstly, you need to enable Proactive Chat. Go to your Chat channels under Omnichannel Administration, open up the Chat record you’re wanting to have Proactive chat enabled for, and change the ‘Enable Proactive Chat’ option to Yes (obviously if you don’t have any chat channels set up, you’d need to create a new one)

Secondly, there’s some code that needs to be embedded on the actual web-page that the chat is active on. Now I know what some of you are thinking – ‘how the heck do I code’? (OK – so the developers aren’t thinking that – they’re thinking ‘oh goodie!!’. Well, I’m not from a development background myself, but I managed to get it to work quite easily. Take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/omnichannel/developer/how-to/start-proactive-chat , where several different scenarios are shown (along with sample code), and you can tweak these as required.

The result then looks like:

This is really helpful. I can then click the ‘Chat Now’ button to start the chat. What I’m also really liking about the experience is that the chat option/window floats on the bottom right side of the screen, so no matter where I am in the page, it’s available (and easily able to be seen)

There are many different ways in which this can be configured. Some of the immediate ones that come to mind (but by no means all of them) are:

• Someone staying on a webpage for a long period of time
• Someone who keeps coming back to the same page (perhaps they’re lost, and not able to find what they’re looking for)
• Someone on a support portal looking at a support case, and wanting to see more information on it
• Someone coming from a specific webpage to another page
• Someone accessing the webpage from a specific location (eg country) in the world
• Special offers being available during a specific time-frame, and only website visitors during that time get the option for the special offers

It’s a really helpful addition to the current Omnichannel capabilities, and I’m sure that there will be many more to come!