Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Talking with Iain about his gaming console selection & finding out about bulk-updating fields in Prod with the XRM Toolbox. Some UN-expected consequences, and a major cleanup operation that was needed!
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Looking back at the information that I’ve already posted on around Omnichannel for Microsoft Dynamics 365, I seriously can’t believe that I haven’t already done an article on how to set up a chat channel. I know I’ve talked about some of the functionality within chat itself, but it’s now time to sort this out.
This was the FIRST thing that I did when I got my first Omnichannel environment up & running. The feeling of satisfaction when it was all complete and worked was incredible. I think I may have bounded out of my chair, punching the air!
So, with that all being said, let’s see how to go about it. It’s not that difficult, and there are some helpful settings within it. The functionality has also increased with the Wave 1 2020 release, which is quite cool.
Now, you can create multiple chat channels, and position them where you want to. Each chat channel can point to a different workstream, and then feed into a different queue (more on that in another post).
To create a chat channel, go to the Omnichannel Administration Hub, select ‘Chat’ in the left hand menu, and click ‘New’
You’re then presented with a new Chat record window, to set it up. It’s actually quite simple to go through, with tabs providing different options. Don’t forget about these!
A few things to point out from the main page:
Once you’ve filled in the main information, switch to the Design tab. Here you’ll be able to configure the look & feel of things:
Now at this point in time, you’re only able to use the pre-defined theme colours for the Omnichannel chat widget. That’s not to say that you can’t work around this – if you use an Azure bot, or a custom bot (which needs to be using the Azure bot framework, admittedly), you could set a custom colour there.
You can change the logo displayed – this needs to be a publicly accessible online image. This can result in some fun looks!
You can also set Operating Hours for when the chat will be active (see https://thecrm.ninja/handling-company-hours/ for how to set this up).
Heading to the pre-chat survey tab, we can set up survey questions for the customer to answer before the chat actually starts with an agent.
There are some nice options here:
Now at this point in time, it’s not possible to use the answers given (eg with using an option-set) to route a customer to a specific queue. It would be amazing if this would happen, but it’s not there yet. Instead the information from the pre-survey questions are displayed in the agent interface. This is aimed at being able to gather information upfront, rather than the agent needing to ask for this during the chat session
The next tab allows the ability to tie the chat widget to a specific website. This means from a security point of view that if someone copies the source code from your webpage, it won’t work on a different website. If no domain is specified, the chat widget can be embedded on any website, without restrictions. It’s a useful concept that can be handy in certain scenarios.
We’re also able to capture the customer geo-location. This will prompt the customer to allow their location to be shared with the agent. If the customer doesn’t consent, then it won’t be shared. Note that this does require Bing Maps to work
Part of the Wave 1 2020 release has been additional functionality for Omnichannel agents to use. This includes abilities to call, co-browse, and screen-share during customer chat sessions.
I’m going to going into detail around these options in a separate post. I’m also going to be looking into the current solution providers for this, and seeing what each one provides above & beyond Omnichannel integration
The final tab gives the option to use custom messages for some of the system functionality. Essentially things like starting a chat, ending a chat, and chats timing out all have messages around them.
These are things like ‘An agent will be with you in a moment’:
What custom messages allows you to do is to change these. So for example, you could set up the following to be displayed:
I hope that this has been helpful in seeing how you can set up a chat channel. Stay posted for how to set up the other channels as well!
Chatting about Benedikt’s love of bouldering & rock climbing, as well as why ALM is so important. We also discussed a project of his single client that had 9 Dynamics 365 organisations that needed to be deployed to, with nothing in place to automate this at all.
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Finding out about Mark getting Jon Levesque dressed in a kilt at Scottish Summit, and how that went. Also discussing how Mark’s first foray into consulting occurred, and how he learned all about project time projects for clients.
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Finding out how Sara decided to get a dog (no, she didn’t dog-nap someone else’s!), starting out as a Dynamics 365 customer, actually getting involved in customising the solution, and why things went so wrong when updates were released.
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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.
Exploring how Malin got into micro-brewing, her fondness for the product formerly known as ‘Talent’, and the family love for beer. Also finding out how she switched into consulting in the first place (spoiler: she didn’t start out in consulting!)
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Discussing how LEGO is of vital importance in teaching & business applications, and what happens when Scrum isn’t performed properly on a client project. Neil also runs a Scrum for Business Applications course – https://customery.academy/courses/foundations
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Chatting about the importance of stickers, swag, and the amazing Microsoft community that we’re part of. Covering a major project that was going to use Unified Service Desk (USD), and what happened when trying to deploy the configuration data between environments!
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Talking about Tomasz’s love of photography, which camera brand he actually uses, windsurfing, & how projects shouldn’t be pushed by IT into the business, but rather be project led/project driven. Also briefly touching on why gamification & swag can be so useful with user adoption!
If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!
Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.