You might be wondering as to what I mean by ‘swarming’ in the title for this post. Don’t worry – it’ll become clear pretty soon! But first of all, let’s understand the story behind this new functionality.
Where to begin? Well, let’s take a look within an organisation. It doesn’t really matter what sort of organisation it is, as most organisations will have something similar scenarios overall. So, what are we actually talking about?
Customer Service is, of course, a very important functionality of any organisations. Customers who have purchased products may need support, or perhaps are having issues, and need them to be resolved. Customer service agents are there to handle the customer queries, and look to resolve them as soon as possible.
However, it’s possible that the customer service agents don’t actually know how to resolve the customer query/issue themselves. They can, of course, use the Knowledge Base, but that requires knowledge articles to be created & maintained.
Now within the organisation, there will be SME’s (Subject Matter Experts). These are the people who know the matter in precise detail, often being the people who have created the product and/or process to begin with. But these people aren’t usually carrying out the customer service function.
So what this means is that the customer service agents need to try to work out who might actually know the answer/s, be able to help resolve the customer issue, etc. This can take time, be laborious, and perhaps not even be able to be carried out (depending on the organisation).
Hmm. So, what if the system might be able to actually SUGGEST the right people for a problem or issue? Even better, what if the system could support them being involved directly with the record/s, regardless of whether they’re a user within Dynamics 365 or not?
Enter the swarming capability onto the Dynamics 365 scene….
The aim of swarming is to bring together the necessary experts within Dynamics 365. Now, having said that, not all users will actually be interacting directly within Dynamics 365. What happens is that a specific Teams chat is created, so that users outside of the system can see the necessary information, and give input on the situation.
This builds on the existing functionality of being able to use Teams chats directly within Dynamics 365, but takes it to a whole new level, by having the system automatically suggest relevant people within the organisation, and bring them into the swarm chat!
There are some necessary steps to configure to enable this to happen.
Firstly, Teams needs to be enabled within Dynamics 365:
Once we start to turn things on, we can then see the following. This allows us to be able to specify the types of records that we can use swarming on. This is great, as we may be building out custom functionality using other tables, and can enable swarming on these as well
Once Teams chat has been enabled, we can then start setting up the swarming capabilities:
As part of the setup, we have:
The ability to set the general message that users will see when they create a swarm
Activating the case form that’s used for swarming (as this will include the functionality for swarming on the case form)
A Power Automate flow that will be used for sending notifications & invites within Teams for suggested (internal) users
Creating swarm condition rules, which allows us to bring in specific conditions around skills etc
So, how does this work in practise, once the system has been initially configured?
Users can go to the relevant record, such as a case record. They’re able to select the ‘Create swarm’ from the menu bar:
This then allows the user to provide a summary of what the swarm is for, the scenario, as well as selecting the skills needed for the swarm. Dynamics 365 can also suggest skills that it thinks would be helpful as well:
Users from across the organisation are matched, according to the skills identified:
Notifications are sent to them within Teams, requesting their help with the matter:
When they accept the invitation, they’re then brought into the swarm:
In fact, the members of the swarm aren’t actually accessing the swarm information within Dynamics 365. Instead, they’re seeing & interacting with the swarm within Teams itself!
Once the swarm is active, information can be shared, and a solution found. The swarm can then be successfully closed down:
This is truly amazing. Obviously collaboration on issues is important, especially when considering that we’re trying to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible! I’m also really excited about this, as I was part of the initial group that Microsoft reached out to initially for feedback on the capabilities of it.
To now be able to collaborate with users who sit outside of Dynamics 365, but have them access the necessary information to help resolve things, is just mind-blowing. So many scenarios that come to mind as to how this can really empower organisations!
Can you think of a way in which this could change things in your own organisation, or at a client? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear more!
One of the most basic functions of Omnichannel is the humble chat widget. This lovely little feature is there to be embedded on a webpage. People browsing the website can see it in the corner (or wherever it’s placed), and can then click on it to get help from a customer service person.
When clicked on, the chat window immediately opens, and people can connect to a live advisor. As mentioned previously, it’s also possible to add initial questions to the interface for the customer to fill out, and the information is then provided to the customer service agent.
All of this is wonderful. However, companies are now, more than ever, conscious of their branding. And by branding, I’m not just referring to a corporate logo. Businesses will often have colour schemes that are globally identified with them, along with fonts as well. Think of Coca Cola, for instance. The cursive script used is identifiable wherever you are in the world, even when it’s written in a different language, or the other way around!
With the default system customisation options, the chat widget itself is able to be pointed to a logo to be used in it. However further customisations and options, such as the colour scheme, are limited to pre-set options. So what happens if a company wishes to extend this further, and keep things in line with their corporate image?
Well, thankfully due to some extended development tools, this is able to be done. Below, I’m going to set out some of the functionality that is available through the usage of different scripts that can be added to the webpage within the chat widget code, which will then enhance it even further.
Pop out mode
It’s great to have the chat widget on the same screen, down in the corner somewhere. But what if you’re wanting to have it pop out, and present in a different window? It’s not possible through the default configuration, but it is possible through the usage of code. Simply adding the following line before the ‘></script’ tag at the end of the code block, we get to see this happen:
data-open-in-window="true"
It’s also possible to set the tag to “false”, which will then obviously not pop it open in a new window, but will keep it within the widget itself.
Font options
Not only are we able to pop out the chat window, we’re also able to use custom fonts. Again, the default font options leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion. Given the wide range of fonts being able to be used on websites nowadays, it’s definitely very nice to be able to use more fonts for the chat widget itself. I’d be slightly cautious here against being too ‘wild’ with them, as obviously we want to ensure that they’re accessible for all, and not difficult to read for some people.
Adding the following code snippet before the ‘></script’ tag at the end of the code block will make this happen. Note that we do need to specify the font that we’re wanting to use, though not all fonts may be available on website pages:
data-font-family-override="Stencil; Segoe UI"
Also bear in mind that different browsers may have compatibility issues with more advanced fonts, along with mobile devices, so I’d advise to be careful here. Ensure that you do test this out as widely as you can. There is also a second option font that can be used, in the case where the main font that you’ve specific is not available.
Custom colours
The final piece of customisation that I’d like to mention (at least for the purposes of this blog post) is around colours. Again, there are only a few pre-set colours available to pick from for the chat widget interface, which is a shame. For this, I’d definitely have expected to see the ability to select more colours, or have a colour picker/HEX value column available to use. After all, if it’s possible to do this in Microsoft Word (or other programs), why not Dynamics 365?
So again, there’s a nifty little code segment that can be added to the chat widget code script on the webpage. This requires you you know the HEX value for the colour that you’re wanting (if you don’t know this off the top of your head, there are free tools out there that can easily and quickly provide it to you).
data-color-override="#174F15
Personally, I think that the colour option is the best one to go for, as you can immediately utilise any custom colours that your branding contains!
Overall, I think that these are really great, and as you can see, I’ve played around with them for my own environment!
Have you ever had a need to customise something like this, but faced challenges? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
One of the themes running through the Wave 2 2020 update for Omnichannel is the personalisation aspect. Though systems work just fine on their own, it’s always nice to add a ‘personal touch’ to the parts that we can. Last week I shared how quick replies are now able to be personalised (Personalised Quick Replies). This week I’m going to go into how the sound notifications can be personalised as well!
These seem to be just small little features, but in my view they do bring things to the next level. Examples of this are the following:
If a customer session starts, wanting to know which channel it’s come in through, without needing to open the conversation
Many agents in a contact centre – if everyone is using the same sound, no-one knows if it’s their computer or not!
The different between a new conversation starting, and a new message being received on an existing conversation
Wanting to ensure that sound volumes aren’t too high, else they’ll disturb other people.
All of these are extremely valid scenarios, along with other ones (such as disabling sound entirely, for example!). Though this seems simple to implement, and isn’t very difficult to set it, there’s a lot of flexibility involved. I’m therefore really happy that this is now available to be used.
So, let’s see how to go about setting it up. There are two parts to this – the Omnichannel Administrator side, and what the Agent can then do
Omnichannel Administrator
In the Omnichannel Administrator Hub, the administrator should open the Notifications section, and go to the Sound Notification Settings tab:
There’s a single setting there, to toggle sound notifications on or off. Setting it to ‘Yes’ will then show the following section on the screen:
Once it’s enabled, there are then a number of system default options that are automatically loaded. Here the administrator can do the following tasks:
Choose to allow sounds to be played at a per channel level
Change the system default sound notification (more on loading in custom sounds below)
Allow the sound notification to be repeated until the call is answered
Set the maximum volume allowed for the sound (this is a lovely slider control!)
There are of course sound files that come included in the system by default. But what if we’re wanting to upload custom sound files to be used? Well, that’s not a problem. Simply by clicking in the lookup field to select a sound file, we are given the option to upload a new audio file:
Clicking this brings up the Audio File record, which we use to upload. We need to give it a name & save it, and then we’re given the ability to upload the file itself:
Note: There are specific file types that need to be used, with a maximum file size of 1MB. It does say that for best experience to use the OGG file format. There are plenty of free resources out there to download OGG files, or to convert MP3 files to the OGG file format if you need
Once we’ve uploaded the file, we get presented with a mini player to hear how it sounds. This is really cool!
All of the audio files in the system (both default & custom) are then available for agents to personalise their own experience
Note: If a company wants to upload many different custom audio files, it may be easier to add the Audio Files entity to the sitemap, and then perform this function from there
Note: To prevent agents from uploading their own audio files directly, the Omnichannel Agent security role only allows Read access, not Create/Edit access:
Omnichannel Agent
With the initial system setup performed by the Omnichannel Administrator, agents are then free to go ahead & personalise their own experience. This is done directly within the Omnichannel for Customer Service app, by selecting ‘Personalisation’ from the available menu:
Once this is selected, the agent is presented with a very similar interface to the Omnichannel Administrator:
Here the agent can change the system default for themselves (this does not affect any other Omnichannel users), change the various settings, modify the volume levels, etc.
Once saved, it’s then live & active, and will work as desired.
Incoming message alerts for active sessions
At the bottom of the sound notification settings screen, there is one further setting. This is around the behaviour of sounds for existing conversations:
This can be helpful (either from an overall system perspective, or an individual agent perspective) to either allow or turn off sounds from conversations that are already happening. Some people might find it very annoying that every time a customer sends a new message through, the system plays a sound. This is especially true when dealing with multiple conversations (which, after all, is what Omnichannel is all about!)
In summary, it’s a really good feature to have now at our convenience to use. Obviously I’d suggest not to load rock music into it, for example, unless of course your company specialises in rock music! How do you think this would be beneficial to your users? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
One of the things that customer service agents absolutely HATE is having to type full replies to customers. There are many things that they’ll do which are quite repetitive, and having to type the same response each & every time gets frustrating to say the least.
As I’ve covered previously at Quick Responses in Omnichannel, Omnichannel has the ability for Quick Replies. With these, agents are able to select the response that they’re wanting to use, and quickly populate it into the chat session that they’re having.
It’s also possible, using ‘slugs’, to set up responses that will automatically populate with specific pieces of information in the system. For example, something like ‘Good morning, my name is {Agent Name}, how may I assist you?’ will automatically populate the name of the agent into the chat session.
This is great; the main drawback to date has been that Omnichannel administrators are required to set these up, as well as maintain them. That’s not so great, when you consider that agents might want to personalise their responses as well. To date, that’s not able to be done within the system.
However, with Wave 2 2020, it’s now possible to allow agents to create their own quick replies, to be able to be used within chat sessions. It’s also not particularly difficult to go about getting this into the system, as we’ll see below.
The Omnichannel Administrator simply needs to go to the Personal Quick Replies section, and change the toggle to ‘Yes’, then save. This will enable personal quick replies for agents simply & swiftly.
Once the system setting has been set, and is active (it can take a few minutes to refresh through), agents are then able to start setting up their own quick replies.
To do this, agents will need to be in the Omnichannel for Customer Service app, and select the Personalisation option from the drop-down menu:
This will then open the agent personalisation tab, which has several different sections on it. The first one is the one that we’re interested in – Personal Quick Replies:
Here will list any personal quick replies that have already been set up by the agent, as well as give the option to create further ones to use:
Clicking this option brings up the familiar interface to set this up:
Note: Personal quick replies aren’t localised in Omnichannel. That’s why you need to select a Locale for the record. To be able to provide the quick response in multiple languages, create a specific response for each language, and select the locale that’s appropriate for it
Once the record is saved, it’s then possible to add tag/s to it for referencing:
Note: If you want to use the hash character (#), you can only use it at the beginning of the tag, not anywhere else in it
Once these have saved, they’re then available to be selected from the chat by the agent. The chat interface will show both system & personal quick replies. Typing ‘/q’ into the chat window will bring these up:
We can select the tab at the top to show just the personal quick replies that the agent has set up:
Alternatively, if the agent starts searching with text, they can easily distinguish between system & personal quick replies by looking at the icon against each one. System replies have a globe-style icon, whereas personal replies have a person-style icon:
So in summary, I think that this is a really great feature to add onto the original way of quick replies working. It’ll free up time for the Omnichannel Administrators, and allow agents to put their own responses in that they need. It’s also possible to share this using the OOB record sharing functionality, which means that a team lead can set them up, and then share them with the rest of the team!
How do you think this could enable or help you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
I’ve recently been spending time looking at, and talking about, how we can handle company hours within Omnichannel. This has covered both how to use them within chat (Handling Company Hours) as well as being able to change the chat widget functionality (Handling ‘Out of Hours’).
Imaging my surprise therefore when someone asked me ‘how do we go setting them up properly?’. When I originally looked at how to use them within chat, I used the Quick Create functionality. I had meant to come back to looking at it in more detail, but that somehow fell by the wayside. So, I’m now going to make up for it!
As a quick recap – Operating Hours are what we set to show when the company is ‘open’ (or for our purposes, active). This doesn’t need to reflect the actual store hours that might exist – customer support could well start before/end after the normal store times. It’s also the case that we usually can’t just set blanket times – we’ll need to handle holidays, seasonal occasions, etc. This is where Operating Hours really comes into its own.
So to start off, it’s simple to enter operating hours. Really simple. We go to the navigation area, select, it, and click ‘New’:
We’ll create a new record, and click Save:
Once we do that, the magic starts to happen – we get to see the ‘Working Hours’ tab. Clicking on it will give us the following screen (which I can only describe as absolutely amazing!):
I don’t know about you, but I’m loving being able to see the hours for each day in a calendar-style view. It’s so much easier than needing to scroll down a list of records, trying to find a specific date. It’s also much simpler for the eye to follow/see.
At the top, we can navigate between dates, change the view to switch between a specific day, week or month, and enter new information:
There are two options for inputting new settings here:
Working Hours
Holiday
For working hours, we can input the times, whether it repeats or not, and whether it’s a full day event or not:
We can also edit an existing Working Hours entry simply by clicking on it to change it. When we do this, we get the option as to whether to modify the single item that we’ve selected, or the entire series:
It’s important to note that we’re not limited to entering just a single range per day. We can enter multiple records for a single date, or a date range, to fit what we’re actually trying to do.
For Holidays, we don’t need as many options. We assume that by setting holiday, the company is closed. We’re therefore prompted just for a date (range) to then set this:
So what we then do is build up our calendar. This will result in (hopefully!) a full overview of our company, that we can then use.
What’s important to remember is that we could have different dimensions to our company though. We may allow Sales to be open 20 hours, but Customer Service to be open only for 12 hours.
We’d therefore create multiple Operating Hour entries for each requirement, and point each channel towards to the applicable record. If we only have a single scenario that we need to handle, we can point multiple channels towards the same operating hours record – that’s not a problem at all.
So with this, we can really tweak operating hours as we need to, for each possible usage. It’s really powerful, so easy to set up, and gives us full control over things.
Have you ever struggled with something like this? How did you overcome it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Let’s face it – we can be quite spoiled at times. As a customer, we can sometimes expect that companies be available 24/7 to service our requests, needs, issues, etc. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it! Imagine that you have a mobile phone issue at 2am – you could call up your provider, and have it handled (or a new handset sent out) immediately. That would be quite nice!
Unfortunately the real world doesn’t (always) quite work like that. Of course there are companies that operate on a multi-national or even global scale, and there’s always customer service available (Amazon – I’m thinking of you right now!).
Previously I’ve gone into how we can set operating hours for a company, so that the ability to contact a customer support agent is only shown during these times. Take a look at Handling Company Hours for a refresher on this.
But sometimes not showing the ability to contact support could potentially be counter-productive. Customers may think that our website isn’t working properly, and possibly attempt to try to reach us through other means. This could quite well frustrate them.
Due to this, we have a nice little piece of functionality that’s now come out in Omnichannel. It’s small, simple, but yet quite brilliant in my humble opinion. This is the ability to have a chat widget available, but let customers know that that it’s currently out of company hours.
To activate this, we need to open the Chat record in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, and go to the Design tab:
Quite helpfully, the section is labelled ‘Offline’! How much better could we get.
We do need to understand that (at the time of writing this post) it’s currently in Preview, with all of the usual caveats around how that works.
We have several items available here:
Show widget during offline hours. This is what actually activates the setting – leaving this to false won’t do anything for us!
Theme colour. This allows us to set the specific theme to be used during ‘offline’ hours. It’s actually really helpful, as it serves/gives a very visual aspect to the customer to display that it’s out of hours
Title. The title of the chat widget, which will be displayed to the user
Subtitle. This allows us to place a subtitle as well, for the user to be able to see
So what does this then look like? Well, let’s take a look:
Personally I think that being able to set a theme colour for offline access gives it that little edge. Customers will become aware of this (subconsciously) when visiting the website, and come to the point of not even trying to start a chat when they see that it’s out of hours.
One MAJOR thing to bear in mind. We’re only going to be given the option to set this when we have a value set for Operating Hours. Without this being set, we won’t be shown this option. Go try it for yourself and see!
There’s not really much else to this, to be honest. But I’m liking it. I know that from a personal perspective I’ve been on various websites, and have no idea if the support chat is actually working or not. With this in place, I’m able to see that it is available for use at the correct time, and not have to wonder about it.
Have you ever thought about implementing something like this? Have you actually done so? I’d be really interested to hear from you about how you went about it – please drop a comment below!
We’ve all been there. We’re in the middle of a chat session with a support agent, or talking to a salesperson, etc. Suddenly things go wrong – our browser hangs, the internet loses connection, or something else…
Alternatively, I do know of situations where kids have pulled out the internet cables during ‘playtime’ – it really does happen!
Immediately we’re frustrated. Not only have we not finished what we were trying to achieve, but we’re going to need to start all over again. Perhaps the agent took notes & logged them against our contact record, but the likelihood is that it hasn’t happened. It’s going to take time to get through to an agent again, then we have to explain the whole situation from the absolute beginning. It’s heartrending, and can cause our day to absolutely go down the tubes!
Well, what if we could just re-connect to the chat session with all our data saved? Better still, what if we could go back and continue chatting with the specific agent that we had been communicating with? Sounds amazing, but wishful, right?
Well, we now have this ability within Omnichannel, to be able to enable our customers even further. There are even two ways in which we can offer this:
Reconnecting with a link (URL). If the agent is concerned that the chat session may be interrupted, they can provide a URL at the start of the session. If the customer becomes disconnected from the session for whatever reason, they can click the link, and it’ll take them right back to it. This works for both authenticated & unauthenticated users
Reconnecting through a prompt. For authenticated chat users, if the session drops they can be presented with a prompt. This will allow them to choose whether to connect to the previous session, or start a new session.
Let’s take a look at it, and how it works.
In the Omnichannel Administration Centre, we need to go to the specific Chat record that we’re wanting to set this up for. We open the record, and are now presented with the following (we do need to scroll down the screen a bit):
Note that this is in Preview currently, so just be a bit careful with it!
There are several options available. We don’t need to use each one, but let’s understand what each one does:
Turn on reconnect to previous chat. This is the option to enable if we’re wanting to offer this. Without it set, it’s not going to work!
Reconnect time limit. How long we’ll offer the option to the customer to reconnect for. See the note below around this
Reconnect to previous agent for. How long we’ll allow the customer to connect back to the same agent. This needs to be equal or less to the ‘Reconnect Time Limit’ value that we’ve set. During this period of time, the agent’s capacity is blocked, unless the agent uses the ‘Close’ button on their interface to end the conversation (which then releases the agents availability)
Portal URL. As mentioned higher up, the agent can provide a URL for the customer to auto-reconnect if the session drops. This value is the URL that the chat widget is deployed to
Redirection URL. If the connection drops, and the re-connection timeout occurs, we can redirect the customer to a specific web-page. If this isn’t set, the customer will see the option to start a new chat conversation
Note: The ‘Reconnect Time Limit’ value is auto-set by the system to the value specified in the work-stream that’s associated with the chat widget. It’s not possible to manually change this in the chat widget itself. Instead, the work-stream ‘Auto-close after inactivity’ value would need to be changed. This is shown below:
Note: It’s also important that the customer hasn’t closed THEIR chat window! All of this relies on the customer chat still being there. If the customer has closed their window/browser, they won’t be offered this option.
Have you ever needed to offer customer capability along these lines? How did you go about it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
One of the most useful features that Dynamics 365 has to offer (in my opinion) is the ‘Knowledge Base’ feature. The purpose that this serves is multi-faceted. It can act as a repository for internal information, serve as a FAQ store, or even be used to publish information externally.
The amount of knowledge held within any organisation can be quite staggering at times. Think back to when you’ve been trying to get an answer to an obscure question, and only Bob in Repairs knows about it. Trying to track down that answer can be quite time-intensive at times (you need to find out who to ask, where they are, etc). In the modern digitally-connected world, we have better forms of communications available. However even with those, we’re still challenged at times.
Enter the Knowledge Base. Here people can enter information that can then be searched on. It could be a simple one-line explanation, or an in-depth instruction as to how to do something very technical.
It’s also a really useful place to hold business processes in. This can come in really helpful when rare situations occur, so that customer service agents can refer to them to find out exactly what to do.
There’s already a massive amount of information (if you’ll pardon the pun!) out there around the Knowledge Base, so I’m not going to go into deep detail here around it.
However, what I DO want to talk about is the ability to use Knowledge Base within Omnichannel!
See, customer service agents are the ‘first line’ of support that customers will deal with. Admittedly they’re also the 2nd, 3rd etc (until it may get to a very technical/specific question). The types of queries that they may need to handle can be astonishing at time! Being able to refer to information ‘at their fingertips’ is therefore vital, & key in driving efficiency. This then in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction, with queries being resolved quickly & easily.
So with all of that said, let’s take a look to see how this is used within Omnichannel. Essentially, there’s a Knowledge Base tab that can be opened for the customer service agent to access:
This opens automatically when a new customer sessions starts, and is then available for the customer service agent to click into.
Note: The behaviour to open it automatically is driven from the Session Template that’s set up for the communication stream. If it’s not set up in here, it won’t automatically launch. See the screenshot below for how this is set up, and refer to Omnichannel & Application Tabsfor more information around this:
Alternatively, the agent can launch this directly from the chat itself, by clicking the ellipse icon, and then selecting it from the menu:
This will then put the agent directly within the Knowledge Article search tab. When this opens, it’s blank! Don’t worry about this however – it’s only blank, as there haven’t been any searches carried out yet! When the user starts to search, it’ll then return results into the pane:
If the user wants to open the article in a new window, all they need to do is click the little ‘pop open’ icon on the article summary, which will then launch a new window with it in it. This can be helpful if the agent is needing to have several different articles open at once:
If your company has configured an external portal for sharing Knowledge Articles with the public, it’s also possible to send a link for a specific article to the customer. To do this, either click the arrow button on the article, to click the Send URL button on the menu bar:
Now, the general layout used for Knowledge Articles will be familiar to anyone who has used the same ability within Cases in Dynamics 365. However for people who are used to working directly within Knowledge Articles, it will look slightly different. There’s no ability to add a new article or edit an existing one, publish, etc.
The reason for this is that within Omnichannel itself, the functionality interface is being surfaced as a web resource. There’s no need to worry though, as users can open the familiar Knowledge Article interface as well directly from within Omnichannel. To do this, the customer service agent should click the ‘+’ button on the tab bar, and then select ‘Knowledge Articles’:
Voila! A new tab will open, and the traditional Knowledge Article experience will load. All of the expected functionality is present, and users are able to do anything that they may need to inside of here.
So in summary, this is a continuation of the empowerment of customer service agents. With the knowledge ‘at their fingertips’, they’re able to provide the best possible experience for customers. Not only that, but queries can get answered and/or resolved in less time. Customer satisfaction will (hopefully!) increase as a result of this, with everyone feeling empowered & efficient!
So here’s my question – are you currently using Knowledge Articles (it doesn’t have to be within Omnichannel)? If you are, what benefits do you see that it brings to your company? If you’re not, what could help you to adopt them? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below!
Anyone familiar with Dynamics 365 will of course be aware of ‘Notes’. These are the very useful ability to for system users to add notes into records. For customers, these show up within the Activity timeline. Every time a note is added, it’s added to the activity timeline to be able to be viewed. It’s also possible to add attachments to notes, which can be very handy too.
Each note is stored with it’s own date/time logged, so it’s possible to see when each one was created. Of course it’s also possible to click into a note to edit it, if it’s necessary to add additional information.
Now, what about within Omnichannel? The interface is different, as we know. So if agents need to capture notes, are they still able to?
Well, let’s take a look at the interface. As shown below, we do indeed have a Timeline section that agents can see. Here they can view the activities that have been previously carried out with this specific contact:
Not only can the agent see notes in this section, they can also see the other items in the activity history. So they’re able to then bring up previous conversations etc.
There are two ways in which agents can log notes within Omnichannel itself. The first way is the ‘usual’ way that we’re used to. Within the Activity Timeline, they can click to enter a note, and then save it:
This will then create a note against the record, in the normal way that we’re all used to. However, there’s a MUCH nicer way to do this!
See, it’s possible for the agent to create the note from the chat itself!:
Clicking this causes a HUGE notes window to appear next to the actual chat:
This is quite nice. It gives the agent a lot more screen space to capture information for the note. They could also quickly copy/paste from the customer conversation into here.
They’re not able to add attachments though through this large pane. Instead, the agent would need to save the note, which would then cause it to appear in the Activity Timeline view. Once there, the agent could click into it, and add any attachment/s that they may need to.
OK – so we’ve found out how agents can use Notes within Omnichannel. But there’s actually a really cool function from doing it directly from the chat.
When we add Notes in the ‘traditional’ style, and save them, it creates a record for each one. As mentioned above, it’s obviously possible to open up a note, edit it, and then save it again. But this can be a slight hassle at times.
Having to wade through a load of ‘ad-hoc’ notes when reviewing a record can be difficult & take a lot of time. It also doesn’t really look very neat, and can cause challengers when trying to get a good overall picture of what’s been happening. Additionally, it’s REALLY hard to search on properly, and a we all know how important (good) searches can be in our daily lives!
There will be situations where an agent captures a note, saves/closes it, then needs to come back to it. Perhaps they may need to come back to it multiple times. For example, closing notes at the end of a customer conversation.
Omnichannel facilitates this in a most marvellous way. When the agent creates the note from the chat & saves it, it saves the Note record. If the agent clicks the Note button again from the chat, they’re presented with the ‘clean’ interface again: the previous note/s don’t appear there.
However, ALL of the notes entered are saved to the SAME notes record. It doesn’t matter how many times the agent creates/saves a new note from the conversation – they all appear in the same record. This is really great in my opinion, as it means that we can have the entire view of ALL of the notes in one place.
Interestingly enough, it doesn’t put them on different lines – I’m going to look into this further, to see if this is actually what is meant to happen or not…
This in turn then facilities clean records, clean notes, and can save us a great deal of time. Aren’t clean data structures amazing.
So my question to you is – do you use Notes currently? What challenges have they presented you with, and have you come up with any workarounds? Please share – I’d love to hear!
Many people in the IT scene will know of LogMeIn (https://www.logmein.com/), or LMI for short. For as long as I can remember (which means going back almost 2 decades!) they’ve been one of the main remote access solutions. With their product range, it was possible to leave your computer at home, travel abroad, and easily log into it from practically any computer anywhere.
It’s also a great product for IT professionals. Being able to deliver customer support through remote sessions, manage identity solutions, etc. The number of products over the years has grown, and been quite pleasing to watch:
Pro handles unattended remote access for up to 10 computers, and is aimed at small businesses
Central takes this up to the next level, covering 250 computers, but has all of the admin features that larger businesses want
Of course, LogMeIn Free (a great starter product for personal usage) was removed some years back, which to this I still believe is a great pity. Obviously the company decided to focus on the more enterprise side of things, which I can understand as a business.
So, why am I now writing about them? Quite simple, actually. LogMeIn are one of the providers that are working with Microsoft to provide Co-Browse solutions for Omnichannel! It’s a very new piece of functionality that’s been launched in the Dynamics 365 product, and there aren’t many providers out there that have integration points to it.
What is Co-Browse?
It’s important to understand what co-browsing is, and some useful stats:
“Co-browsing” refers to the ability to have a service provider & customer jointly navigate an application in real time through the web.
Co-browsing: The Gateway to Happy Customers & Better Financial Results, 2015
So co-browsing is useful. But just how useful can it actually be? Well, apparently it can be VITAL:
Co-browse has the potential to bridge the gap between human & AI-driven customer interaction, & to enable organisations to differentiate their customer service.
By 2022, co-browsing will be used in 2% of customer service interactions, up from 0.1% in 2017 (2000% growth).
Gartner 2017: How Co-browsing Can Differentiate Your Customer Service
LogMeIn has had their Rescue offering available on the general market for a while as a standalone product (alongside the rest of their offerings). They’ve now build it out into a new standalone product called Rescue Live Guide, and provided an integration into Omnichannel for Dynamics 365. Customers obviously need to have licenses for the product, but with these, they now have the ability to co-browse during support sessions. Not only can they see what’s going on, but they can also interact with the customer browser itself, providing an even better support experience.
So, let’s go ahead and take a look at how to set it up, the experience itself, and my thoughts on things.
Setup
When I first started testing out the LogMeIn offering, I had to go through a manual install process. This was due to the product just being released (in May 2020), but wasn’t actually that difficult to carry out.
However, they were in the process of switching over to an automatic installation through AppSource, as most of the other apps have. It’s great to be able to see that this has gone live, and is now available for users – it really does make the install that much easier!
Clicking ‘Get It Now’ takes you through the usual route of installing a solution from AppSource: selecting the environment, confirming the installation, etc. After around 5 minutes, I can now see the following:
Once it’s installed, we’ll need to set it as the co-browse provider for the channel that we’re wanting it for. To do this, open the chat record, go to Conversation Options, and select it there:
We’ll also need to put in two records for the LogMeIn co-browse configuration:
Finally, there’s a script block that needs to be added to the webpage where the chat widget is located. This enables the LogMeIn co-browsing ability from the customer side. It can be added right under the chat widget code itself; in the fullness of time, this may be able to be auto-generated as part of the chat widget code, but it’s not at the moment (this is dependent on Microsoft being able to offer it):
Right – setup all done, but before we see it in action, let’s take a quick look at the Rescue Live Guide admin console side of things.
Rescue Live Guide Admin Console
Although the functionality is within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, administering agent licenses and groups takes places within the Rescue Live Guide admin console at https://console.logmeinrescue.com/admin. As companies will need to have Rescue Live Guide licenses, they would usually be familiar with this.
There’s the ability to create new users or groups, and manage them as well:
It’s also possible to set the names that are used for the agent & customer. These can be either the actual name of the agent, or instead potentially a job role/title:
I’m not going to go further into the admin functionality here – documentation can be found on the Rescue Live Guide site around this. Let’s instead take a look at the experience within Omnichannel, which after all is what we’re here to see!
Agent Experience
So how does this actually work, in practise? Well, from the customer side, they start a chat like they would usually do. When the agent responds, they’re given an option for ‘Live Guide’:
When the agent clicks on this, two things happen:
Firstly, there’s a URL that’s posted in the chat. This contains a link for the customer to click, with an auto-generated ID number
The agent is taken to the LogMeIn Rescue site page in a new tab.
Note: At the moment, the agent will have to sign in manually. LogMeIn have told me that their roadmap includes Single Sign On, so that after the initial setup they’ll be signed in automatically, and not have to perform this step in the future.
Once logged in, the agent will see that the session is ready, & waiting for the customer to connect to it. Once the customer has clicked the URL provided in the chat, it will open the Rescue Live Guide session, and authorise the agent to co-browse with them. They’ll then see the following prompt. This tells them that the session is connected to the agent, and that they can begin:
Once the customer has accepted to start browsing together with the agent, they get some small extra items appearing on their screen:
They can see that there is indeed a shared browsing session happening
They can also see where the agent’s mouse cursor is pointing to (by default, without the agent actually doing anything)
It’s important to note that that the co-browse session is taking place within the specific browser (tab) that is open. Therefore if the user navigates away, the session is paused until they navigate back to it.
On the agent’s side, they can view the customers browser. They can only see what’s happening in the actual tab that’s open for the co-browse session (see below for some more information around this though). It’s quite similar to the customer’s side, though has some LogMeIn features available. Well, obviously it’s similar to the customer – the agent is seeing the customer’s browser window!
They can of course still access the Omnichannel chat itself, and send information through that as well if they wish to.
Just as the customer can see the agent’s mouse position, the agent can see the customer’s mouse position. There are also gesture indicators so that each person can see what the other clicks etc as well, which can be really helpful when walking through a process.
The functionality currently available to the agents covers scrolling (within the page), highlighting, drawing and ‘virtual tabs’. As shown in the image above, the agent is able to highlight text/images, which will then be displayed as being highlighted to the customer. Agents are also able to enter text into text fields, click on buttons, and interact with the native webpage functionality.
Note: The Rescue Live Guide admin centre provides granular controls around these, so that customers can allow agents certain rights, rather than allow them to do everything.
The agent is also able to ‘draw’ on the webpage to be able to point something out, highlight a part of the page, etc.
Note: These annotations will disappear once the customer or agent starts scrolling up/down the page again.
As I’ve mentioned above, the session is taking place within a single browser tab. If the user nagivates away (to a different tab), the session is paused. The agent isn’t able to see any other tabs. So what happens if we do indeed need to open a new tab for something?
Well, there’s a really nice feature that the agent is able to use for this. It’s sort of a ‘virtual tab’ within the browser tab. Sounds interesting!
The customer is able to see this, and can navigate between the tabs. They’re now also able to open a new virtual tab themselves (which is an update to the functionality – originally they weren’t able to, and had to request the agent to do it).
Customer view of the support session
If the customer wants to pause or stop the session, the user simply has to click the ‘Stop’ button in the bottom left. They’ll then be presented with the following screen:
Whilst the session is paused, the customer can continue to use their machine as normal, but the agent won’t be able to see what’s going on. Only if the customer allows the session to resume by clicking ‘Continue Browsing’ will the agent be able to see the customer’s browser once again.
Alternatively, the agent can end the support session themselves, and the customer will be notified about this.
Suffice it to say that LogMeIn have been a market leader for many years in this sector, and I’m happy that sessions through their products are adequately encrypted & protected.
Other functionality
Apart from the above, which is obviously the core of the product, there’s other functionality that’s possible to enable through the LogMeIn Rescue console:
Session recordings. It’s possible to record these for playback, which is then available from the LogMeIn portal. All recordings are carried out from the agent’s viewpoint, not the customers – there is therefore no issue that sensitive information from the customers side could be seen
Data masking. It’s possible to use data masking to hide sensitive information. At the moment the setup for this is a very manual process, so I’m not going to go into how to set it up it here. Having played with it a little, it’s really quite useful. Agents can’t see sensitive information on their screen, and if a customer needs to enter/update information, the session pauses whilst this is being done. However I understand that part of the LogMeIn roadmap for the near future is to make the setup process much more user friendly. When this is released & available, I’m planning to do a post on this
Reporting happens through the LogMeIn portal (see my thoughts below on this). It looks nice, and can be downloaded as a CSV file. Again, the functionality of this is going to be expanded in the near future.
Reporting in the LogMeIn website console
My thoughts
Having gone through testing out the product, I think that LogMeIn has brought a really great product of theirs into the Omnichannel experience. I used to use their products regularly (I ran an IT MSP some years back, in which we used LogMeIn products as well), and always found that they behaved well.
Now having the ability for agents to not only see, but also interact with the customer browsing experience really does take things to the next level. Audio and/or video support is great of course, but sometimes being able to see what the customer is seeing in their browser results in a much quicker resolution. This of course results in happy customers, which is what we’re striving to achieve!
As I’ve said above, I’ve used LogMeIn over the years, and always found their products to be pretty much amazing. With Rescue Live Guide, there are several differentiators that the solution brings to market:
For the standalone solution of Rescue Live Guide dedicated web resources aren’t needed. It’s an easy solution to set up, and for the customer to engage with – all it requires is a URL to be provided to them to get the session going. Obviously, as mentioned above, there is some slight coding needed for the Omnichannel integration, but this is really minor. Any company having Omnichannel installed/configured will already have power users/admin familiar with what’s needed for this, so it’s a very small additional step
It’s possible to co-browse on any website that the customer wants to, not just a single specific website. Once the co-browse session is active, the customer can change to any other website, as long as they do so within the co-browse session tab. Most other co-browse solutions out there can’t do this, so this is a really strong point in favour of this solution.
The data masking is really cool, and for most customers, will be a ‘must have’ rather than ‘nice to have’. I’m looking forward to when the setup for this is updated to be more business-user friendly, and will then do a separate blog post around it, together with a video!
A few things that I think would be nice to have:
The agent is already able to draw on a webpage during the co-browse session, and select different colours for this. It would be great if the agent could also type text in to display on the screen (not in a specific field) in colour. Sometimes being able to see an example written in front of you (without it going into the actual field) can be quite handy.
Being able to transfer the co-browse session to another agent. This could be either another Omnichannel agent, or a separate specialist team. It is of course possible to transfer the chat session to another Omnichannel agent, but then they’d have to start the whole co-browse session again (with a new PIN, etc)
Reporting (for the most part) all occurs in LogMeIn at the moment, as Dynamics 365 only has very limited reporting on this natively. However I understand that this is due to change at some point this year, with the ability to report properly on it within Dynamics 365 itself.
At the point when new items do get released, I’ll be aiming to do a review of them, and add to the knowledge around the product.
So, with all of that, how do you think this could best help you & your customers? Please comment below – I’d love to hear!
