In this post, we’re going to see how we enable Skill-Based routing within Omnichannel, as in order to use skills, we need to enable it! (seems obvious, right?).
To do this, we need to be signed into the Omnichannel Administration app, and we then go to ‘Skill Based Routing’, which is under the Settings area in the left-hand side navigation bar:
Clicking here brings up the skill-based routing settings. At the time of writing, this feature is still in preview, and shows an information window declaring this (this will disappear once it goes GA)
Clicking on the toggle slider will change the value to ‘Yes’, and will enable it. It’s also shown nicely in green, which is something that I’m really liking!
Select a Rating Model to use, from the right hand grid. As touched upon in the previous article, rating models are used to set how proficient a user is with a specific skill. You can have multiple rating models saved, and use them for specific scenarios.
Rating Models are made up of two parts:
Rating Model (being the name of the rating model, and the minimum/maximum rating values allowed)
Rating Values (the actual values being used – the number of rating values should be the same as the range for the Rating Model minimum/maximum that you’ve set)
Enabling/configuring the ability for chats to utilise skill-based routing
Yup – it’s somewhat more complex than just saying ‘I want skills!’
So this post is going to cover how to actually set up the skill record entries, which thankfully isn’t too difficult (especially if you’ve been bearing with me, and following the other setup instructions that we’ve been through so far).
To create skills, it’s necessary to have a skill type. Think of it as a hierarchy – if you’re wanting to provide customer services in multiple languages for technical issues, you’re going to want a Language skill type, and Technical skill type. Under each skill type, you’re going to have the applicable entries. So for Language, you’ll have English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.
At the time of writing, creating Skill Types are done from the Systems Customisation (this will likely move to the new Admin Centre at some point, but hasn’t yet). So make sure that you’re logged in as a Dynamics system Administrator, and open Advanced Settings:
Note: The process below is taking place in the default solution. It’s of course possible to deploy this as part of a custom solution – if you’re wanting to do this, then open the custom solution from the Power Platform admin centre, and continue with the steps shown below.
Hover over ‘Settings’ in the ribbon menu bar, and choose Customisations
Now select ‘Customise the System’
Select ‘Option Sets’ in the left hand navigation, then scroll down to ‘Bookable Resource Characteristic Type’ in the main window
Open up, and you’ll see the following window
Using our scenario, I’ve added Language and Technical Area as skill types. Now very importantly, ensure that you SAVE the record, and then PUBLISH it. If you don’t, the skill types won’t show to be used!
Right, now that we’ve done all of that prep work, we can get on with actually entering the skills that we want to use…
So, go back to the Omnichannel Administration section, scroll down in the left hand menu to Skills, and click it to open it. It’ll show all of the skills that we’ve entered (well, it won’t show any entries here yet, as none have been put in yet!). Click ‘New’ on the menu ribbon to create a new entry
You’ll be presented with the following screen, which after all of the above is thankfully quite simple.
The fields are as follows:
Name. What it says on the field – nothing complicated. It does need to be unique though, so have a careful think about your needs. You can always use multiple skills together to create a blend that you need across skills
Type. This is the Skill type (which we’ve just set up beforehand). If you don’t see the values that you’ve set up in here, make sure that you saved and published the customisations!
Description. Put something user-friendly in here to describe what the skill is (if you think it’s necessary…)
Then click ‘Save’ on the menu bar. Once the entry saves, the form will update, and now show a User (Agent) section:
You can now add users (agents, as they’re referred to) to the skill. Click the ellipse on the right hand side of the Users (Agents) grid, and then select the ‘New Bookable Resource Characteristic’ option (the names of these things just keep on getting longer and longer, don’t they!)
A nice simple window will open on the right of the screen, where you can enter the details:
This is done as follows:
Skill Value – this is the skill that you’re wanting to assign a user to
User (Agent) – this is the actual user. You can type to search through the available users. Very important to note that if you didn’t follow the steps to set up the user as a Bookable Resource, you won’t see them in this list (see https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-users/ for instructions on how to do this)
Rating Value – this is used to rate the proficiency of the user at the skill. We’ll cover setting this up in a later post, but essentially think of using a 5 star scale. 1 would mean the user has basic ability at the skill, 3 would mean they’re alright with the skill, and 5 means that they’re at the top of their game with it
You can then click the ‘Save and Close’ button at the bottom of the window, and it’ll add them.
However if you have multiple users that you’re wanting to add, I’d HIGHLY recommend clicking the arrow next to this button, and selecting the ‘Save and Create New’ option. It’s not just to create with the same skill – you can change the Skill Value as well, and it’ll save you more clicks!
Hopefully you’re still following along, and managing to get the setup done correctly – well done!
To do this, we need to be in the Omnichannel Administration application (accessed through the Dynamics 365 navigation bar), and select the ‘Users’ option under ‘Queues & Users’
If you hover over a user, you get a quite useful little window, showing their status and some details
Double clicking on the user will open up the system user record. The important thing to note is that there’s now an ‘Omnichannel’ tab available.
From here, it’s possible to set the users default presence (such as Available, DND, Busy, etc – you’re able to add new entries to this list) and capacity.
Capacity is a sort of loose term. Essentially (as we’ll cover in another post) it’s possible to set up different enquiry types. Each enquiry type will have a capacity against it, based on how complex you think it’ll be. So for example checking an order may have a lower capacity set against it than someone dealing with a damaged item.
Capacity is used with routing rules (which will also be covered in another post). When a communication channel is opened up, the system will check to see which agent/s are showing as available, and of those agent/s, which one/s have available capacity for the session (as they may be already dealing with other sessions at the same time).
You’ll also be able to see a list of the Queues that the user has been assigned to.
What you’ll now do is add a Bookable Resource record for the user. What is this exactly?
A bookable resource is anything that can be scheduled. Field Service uses this as well, usually covering people, equipment, and physical spaces (facilities). Each resource can have different attributes that distinguish it from others, including but not limited to:
Characteristics (eg Accounting)
Categories (eg Manager)
Territories (eg United Kingdom)
Organisational Unit (eg Customer Service)
Location (eg London)
Resource Type (eg User)
Omnichannel uses scheduling to know which users are available, assigned to specific queues, etc. Due to this, we need to create this ‘Bookable Resource’ record (which is unique – you can only have one of these for each user!).
To create this, scroll down the page, until you get to the ‘Skills Configuration’ section. Here you should click the menu ellipse, and select ‘New Bookable Resource’.
This will open the ‘New Bookable Resource’ window. Leave everything as it is, and just fill in the ‘Name’ field with the name of the user
Click the save button on the menu bar, and it’ll then take you back to the user record. Well done! You’ve now created the Bookable Resource record for the user.
At the heart of Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 (apart from the actual communication channels, of course), are Queues and Users, with Skills alongside them. Lets take a look at what these actually are, and how they work.
Queues
Queues are really exactly what they sound like – they’re used to collect and distribute the (communication) workload amongst agents (users). All items coming in, such as Chats, SMS’s, Facebook conversations etc are automatically added to a queue (see more below about using queues to specialise). Agents (being the system users) are added as Queue Members to the queue, and then the workload within the queue is distributed amongst them (based on availability, capacity, etc).
It’s possible to use Omnichannel queues as proxies for specific skills or domains. For example, you can create separate queues for billing issues, investment issues, and so on. When a customer query comes for these issue types, it is automatically routed to its designated queue (as customer would select what they’ve wanting to communicate about).
With the new features of Power Virtual Agents, bots should be able to pick up on the type of query that’s being raised, and route it to the appropriate queue as well.
It’s also possible to assign priorities to queues. All conversations in a queue take the priority of the queue and higher priority conversations are allocated first. For example, if there are two chat conversations coming from two queues with priorities assigned as Priority 1 and Priority 2 respectively, the chat conversation with Priority 1 will be allocated to an agent first.
Users
Users are the actual people that handle and deal with the communications, through the various channels and methods that will have been set up within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365.
There’s a separate post that’ll be around how to set up users, assign security to them, and other necessary information.
Users can have skills set against them (see the Skills section below), and be assigned to be a part of one or more queues. Based on their availability status, workloads from the queues will be assigned to them, that they can then pick up and work with.
Skills
In a customer service centre, or across an organisation, agents (the users) will usually have different skills and abilities that they’ll use in dealing with customers. For examples, these could be language based (ie agents can converse in different languages), technical based (eg for a computer company, these could be desktop knowledge, laptop knowledge, server knowledge, etc), or service based (eg for a local council, this could be around council taxes, rubbish collections, voter registration, etc).
Customers reaching out to the company will have different needs, which will usually be identified in the initial reach-out.
Skill-based routing allows the distribution of the workload (ie the conversation) to agent/s who are skilled in the necessary area, and who are best qualified to handle and answer the situation. This in turn will improve the quality of the customer service, resulting in a better customer experience, which in turn will drive customer retention and loyalty.
It’s also possible to use skill-based routing for multiple required items. Using an example of a computer company, it’s possible to set up skill-based routing that will allow a customer to communicate to an agent who’s a subject-matter expert on servers that are running Server 2016.
Skill-based routing allows you to easily match the conversation to the agent most proficient in dealing with it while maintaining the workload of the agent. You can associate distinct skills with each agent on a team and create rules to make sure that conversations matching those skills are always assigned to them.
Well, to start off with, I wasn’t actually planning on writing this blog post – I was going to continue looking at the setup for Queues, but that’s going to have to wait until later on this week!
The subject of this post has come out of several conversations that I’ve been having with the lovely Tricia Sinclair on Omnichannel, who’s also extremely knowledgeable about Customer Service and DevOps.
This situation was regarding a company based in Australia. Their main tenant was set in the North America region (when you set up your tenant, you choose where the default should be).
They had also set up one of their organisations within the Australian region (ie not in their default tenant region), and were trying to install Omnichannel for it. However, they were running into an interesting error, and couldn’t get it to work, no matter what they tried to do.
In the end, the decision was taken to reach out to the Microsoft Product Team for Omnichannel, in order to try to solve the issue. Thankfully the product team identified the sticking point, which is actually a VERY important lesson to keep in mind when setting up Omnichannel.
The answer was that the organisation (environment) HAS TO BE in the same region as the tenant itself. Ie it MUST be in the default region. If it’s not, then it won’t be possible to set up Omnichannel!
This hadn’t helped with troubleshooting the issue, as these needed to be carried out as well.
So in summary:
It’s vitally important to ensure that the Organisation is set up in the same region as the tenant default region
It’s also vitally important to carry out all of the installation/configuration steps correctly (as per the above links) to ensure a successful Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 installation
However, once we’ve gotten it to appear, we now need to carry out the initial basic configuration to get it to be active.
This will then get us to a point where we can start configuring it to use with the different channels that we’d want to have it active for, such as online chat, Facebook, etc.
So if you’ve been following the process so far, in the Dynamics 365 Administration Center you’ll see the following:
The next step is to select the line for Omnichanel, and click ‘Manage’:
You’re going to be prompted with another permissions request, and oh boy this is a LONG one! Select the ‘Consent’ box, and click Accept to continue (you’ll need to be a Global Tenant Admin to do this)
For all of your hard work so far, you’re going to be presented with the following BEAUTIFUL screen!
This is the Omnichannel Admin Centre, where you’ll be able to now set up Omnichannel for the environment/s that you want to have it present in. To proceed, click the ‘Add an org’ button, and you’ll be asked which environment (organisation) you want to set up Omnichannel for:
Select the environment, accept the Privacy Terms, and then click the purple right-arrow to move on to the next step.
For each of the options available (currently they are Chat, SMS and Facebook), you’ll be asked if you want to enable it for your organisation. Select the option/s you wish to be present, and click the purple right-arrow to continue (example shown below of the Chat enable screen):
Continue until the end, where you’ll get the Summary screen (shown below). Click the purple check button to confirm and continue:
You’ll now be shown a status screen, where it’ll tell you that your selected options are being set up:
At this point it’s a good idea to take a break. Simply because the setup of these is going to take a whiiiiiiiiiiiile (it’s obviously doing a lot behind the scenes!). Go have a coffee, a walk, visit the gym, do some laundry, etc. Once it’s finally finished, it’ll show that setup is complete:
And if you go back to the overall Omnichannel Administration summary page, you’ll see a nice little summary of the environment here as well (along with the option to set up another environment with Omnichannel)
Once this has been completed, you’ll now be able to see Omnichannel present within the list of Dynamics apps within the Dynamics environment:
The next stages will be to carry out the Omnichannel configuration within Dynamics 365 for the different channels, which I’ll be going into in the next series of posts.
I hope that you’ve found this helpful so far – please reach out with any questions that you may have!
In the previous post in this series, where I talked about the first part of installation (https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-trial-part-i/), I covered how to get the first 3 prerequisites dealt with for installing Omnichannel (namely Customer Service Hub, PowerBI licenses, and Data Consent).
In this post, I’m going to be covering the 4th item – actually getting the Omnichannel Hub installed. It’s not as straightforward as you may think, so I’ve included lots of screenshots, as well as a bonus YouTube video at the end showing the process for this as well (for people who prefer videos).
If you look at the official Microsoft documentation on Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, it says that you need to install the solution from the Dynamics 365 Administration Center:
That’s all very well and good, but doesn’t actually show the reality of things! If you go to the Dynamics 365 Administration Center for your environment, you’re likely to see something similar to the following (you may be fortunate enough to see the option for Omnichannel there, in which case skip to ):
Hold on. There’s no ‘Omnichannel for Customer Service’ option there! Indeed so – and you’re not going to find it easily.
So, in order to actually get the Omnichannel option there in the Applications section, you’re going to need to do the following:
Scroll down the page, and where it asks for your email, enter the email address that you used to sign up for the trial with! (this will be in the format of user@domain.onmicrosoft.com). Enter your phone number as well, and click ‘Get Started’
It’ll tell you that you already have a Dynamics 365 account. Click ‘OK, got it’ to continue. What is happening in the background is that a new trial is being created in your tenant, but at the same time Omnichannel for Customer Service is being installed. You don’t need to use the trial environment (and it’ll expire after 30 days), but you WILL be using the Omnichannel application (which will stick around even after the new trial expires).
You’ll then get a beautiful whirly GIF, showing that setup is happening
Once setup has completed, go back to the Dynamics 365 Administration Center (go to http://admin.powerplatform.com/, select ‘Environments’ from the left navigation bar, select an environment, and click the ‘Manage Solutions’ button on the menu bar. Select the ‘Applications’ option from the menu ribbon and Hey Voila! You should see ‘Omnichannel for Customer Service’ present! (you may need to click to the next page on the Applications screen)
Note that it’s showing as being ‘NotConfigured’ – we’ll go through the configuration of this in the next blog post.
Also note that there are two other options underneath this. Once is for Facebook, and one is for SMS. These are the direct integration points for this products that are provided by Microsoft (rather than an ISV or 3rd party solution), and more will appear over time as Microsoft releases further functionality.
Now for the YouTube video, in which I walk through all of the above in a live replay!
In order to be able to access Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, it’s necessary to install the Omnichannel Hub solution. There are several prerequisite items that are necessary in order to do this, with several steps.
The requirements for Omnichannel Hub are as follows:
The Customer Service Hub needs to be installed on the environment within the tenant
There needs to be a PowerBI License assigned to the user/s
Data Access Consent needs to be accepted
The Omnichannel Hub needs to be installed
Let’s go through the above steps. Due to the length of this, I’m going to be splitting this into two parts. This guide will cover getting Omnichannel up and running in a Trial environment – I’ll be doing a separate entry on getting it in a Paid For environment.
Customer Service Hub
This is actually quite simple. When setting up your trial at https://trials.dynamics.com/ (using the link to set up the trial for development purposes, of course)
You need to select the option below on the scenario screen (you can of course select the ‘All of these’ option as well!)
If creating the environment from admin.powerplatform.com, ensure that you select the option to create a database for the environment, ensure that you select the option to deploy Dynamics 365 apps, and then select the ‘Customer Service’ option (you can select others as well – it won’t affect Omnichannel)
Once it’s installed, you can check that it’s there by going to your Apps within the Dynamics 365 environment, and you should see the Customer Service Hub option there, both on the app menu on the left, as well as on the main screen
PowerBI License
Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 requires a PowerBI license assigned to users. They may have this already as part of their assigned license/s. Sometimes the system doesn’t always pick this up – if this happens, it’s possible to get and assign PowerBI Free licenses for users through the Office Admin portal (under Billing/Purchase Services):
When going through the check-out process, you’ll be prompted for a credit card. Thankfully it’s possible to bypass this by selecting the option to invoice, rather then use a credit card (it’s a free license anyhow, so just go through the process and finish). Once the licenses are in the admin centre, assign them to the users who’ll be using Omnichannel.
Data Access Consent
In order to allow Omnichannel for Customer Service to read and write data on behalf of users, Data Access Consent needs to be granted. This has to be performed by a Global Tenant Admin, who needs to use the following link – https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2070932.
Once they access the link, they’ll need to sign in, and they’ll be presented with the following acceptance screen (note how many things are being accessed!):
They should select the ‘Consent’ box, and then click Accept
