Tag: customer service

Sharing multiple knowledge articles

Most of us are aware of the knowledge article functionality within Dynamics 365. For those who aren’t familiar with it, knowledge articles can empower users within any organisation with access to existing information.

Types of knowledge articles can include solutions to common issues, product or feature documentation, answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), product briefs, and more. Being able to have access to this means that customer service agents can easily answer queries, without needing to spend (lots of) time investigating what’s happening, and find resolutions.

Note: At this point in time, the Knowledge Article functionality is still a restricted table within Dataverse. It requires either a Dynamics 365 plan, Customer Engagement plan, or Customer Service Enterprise plan

It’s great to be able to share information around within an organisation. There is native functionality for this, with the ability to share a knowledge article record directly with other users by clicking the ‘Email a link’ button:

Note: This is performed through going to the to Knowledge Article table, opening up a record, and carrying out the functionality from there. It cannot be done through access to Knowledge Articles on the Case form.

This will create an email (in Outlook) with a URL to the specific record:

This is of course very helpful, but is only internally facing. It’s not possible to send this to a customer who’s having an issue, as the customer wouldn’t be able to access the URL!

It’s also not particularly useful if we think about how customer service agents work, as they’d need to be moving through different areas of Dynamics 365.

Thankfully knowledge management is built into the customer service capability within the system. So for example, when we open a case record, we have the ability to search for knowledge articles directly in here:

This of course works much better from a customer service agent perspective – they have all of the functionality that they need in just one area.

So how can we share information directly with customers? Copying and pasting the information into a chat or email interaction seems quite manual and bothersome.

But there’s no need to do this manually, thankfully! Again, we have in-built functionality to handle this:

Clicking the little email icon on a knowledge article creates an email within Dynamics 365 (so you’ll need to have email enabled for users, to make this work!) with the information copied into it:

OK – this much easier. We can send customers the exact information, so that they then have it to hand.

But here’s a new scenario – what if we wanted to send MULTIPLE knowledge articles to a customer at once? We could of course click the email icon each time, but that results in a separate email being created for each one, which means the customer will be receiving multiple emails. Not the most ideal scenario, surely?

Well, thanks to my amazing colleague Ryan Hunter-Stott, there is actually a way to do this! In fact, technically you could say that there are two approaches, but holistically it’s the same thing – it involves an email.

So, you can either:

  • Select to email the knowledge article to the customer, or
  • Create a blank new email

Within the email message, we have the following option to insert a knowledge article:

Clicking this brings up an interface to be able to search for knowledge articles. Clicking the envelope icon will then insert the information in the email:

Now it’s not possible to select multiple knowledge articles in this window. BUT, it IS possible to click the button to open it up again, and insert a second one. And then a third one!

This can then be sent out to the customer, with all of the information contained in it!

It’s a nice little touch, and I think it definitely beats copying & pasting information into an email manually!

Have you ever thought about this scenario? Did you find this functionality, or end up doing it in a different way? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

‘Swarming’ for Customer Service

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!

Omnichannel vs Customer Service Workspace

This is a question that I’m being asked on a semi-regular basis at the moment, so I thought it would be helpful to do a writeup around things. It’s definitely not clear from the outset based on existing documentation. However, being able to speak to wonderful people such as Tricia Sinclair has been amazing in being able to figure out the differences between the two applications.

So, where to start. Well, let’s first of all understand the similarities between the two applications.

Firstly, they are both multi-session apps. To put this in context (as mentioned elsewhere previously) – traditionally Dynamics 365 applications have been ‘single session’ applications. This means that users would navigate around, open/close records, create or edit as necessary. If users wanted to have multiple records open, they’d need to have multiple tabs open, or even multiple windows (yes, I still remember the days before browsers had tab functionality!).

What multi-session means in this context is that users are able to open up multiple records, and switch between them in the same tab. Open records pop into the left-hand navigation bar, and users can easily click between them. Not only that – users are also able to open further tabs within the same record pane, to access further information. These stay open whilst users switch to other records, which is really quite helpful!

So for example, a user could open a case record, then open the contact associated to the case, as well as the account related to the case. They could then further open the knowledge base to search for articles, and so on and so forth. All of these stay open.

Both apps are also web applications – they run in a browser, rather than needing to have a specific software application installed for them (unlike Unified Service Desk).

So, where do they actually differ? Well, this was a bit difficult for me to understand in the first instance, though that turned out to be because I had both Customer Service Workspace as well as Omnichannel configured within the same environment! Turns out that this wasn’t the best approach to take to compare the two, & understand their capabilities. Easily fixed though with quickly spinning up a new trial to install one in.

So with knowing how Omnichannel works (after all, I’ve written quite extensively around it), let’s take a look at the Customer Service Workspace app:

Customer Service workspace overview
  1. The session pane lists all the sessions that you are actively working on. Select the tabs to navigate among sessions.
  2. The Home session returns you to the Customer Service Agent Dashboard view.
  3. Each session has a tab in the session panel. Select a tab to navigate to the session you want to work on.
  4. Select a case to open a new session. A single click on a case replaces your view with the case form. Select the back arrow in the upper-left corner of the form to get back to your previous view.
  5. Select the tabs to navigate to your open activities, cases, forms and views.
  6. Select the + icon to expand the menu to view a list of forms, views, and activities. Select the one you want to open in a new tab.
  7. Select the drop-down selector to filter cases in queues you can choose to work on.
  8. Select Shift + mouse click to open a new session for an activity. A single click replaces your view with the activity form. Select the back arrow in the upper-left corner of the form to go back to your previous vie

Now, without Omnichannel installed in the same environment (& obviously licensed for users), it’s not possible to have native Dynamics 365 channels such as Chat, WhatsApp, etc. Conversations will not appear for customer service agents who are using the Customer Service Workspace.

Note: If you DO have Omnichannel installed in the same environment, and users are licensed to use it, then conversations will show up within the Customer Service Workspace app for them. They’ll have notifications pop up on the screen for incoming customer sessions.

That’s not to say that it’s not possible to have channels available within Customer Service Workspace. So how do they actually come in?

Well, as it turns out, channels within Customer Service Workspace need to be third party channels. There are a plethora of 3rd party add-ons for Dynamics 365, that offer different communication capabilities. Some of these do date back a while (to before any native Microsoft capabilities).

For example, there are ISV add-ons for Customer Service that can embed a call dialler into the experience, so that customer service agents can call directly from a record. Or alternatively an add-on such as a 3rd party web chat application, that can then surface these within the Customer Service Workspace. Each of these obviously would need to be purchased, licensed & integrated appropriately with your Dynamics 365 solution as necessary too.

Now both applications also have other similar functionality, such as the Productivity Pane, Agent Scripts, Smart Assist & Knowledge Search. However there can be differences between them. For more information, I’d suggest taking a look at Tricia’s blog article that goes into depth on this.

So to summarise, Omnichannel is for the native Microsoft channels, giving customer service agents the ability to service customers using them. Licensing (currently) is with Customer Service Enterprise, and then either the Digital Chat or Digital Messaging add-on SKU’s.

Customer Service Workspace, on the other hand, allows customer service agents to be able to have a multi-session application for their work, as well as allowing communications through third-party channels. Licensing is as per the different Customer Service SKU’s, with any 3rd party add-on being licensed appropriately.

Hopefully this helps clarify the different between these two, and make them less confusing. If you have any further questions around this, please drop a comment below, and I’ll do my best to respond!

Omnichannel Admin Center (Part II)

We’ve started off looking at the new Omnichannel Admin Center in Part I. I’m going to continue going through the wonderful new app (interface?), showcasing the functionality that’s different (there’s no point in me mentioning things that are the same, right?).

So having taken a look at the general overview, let’s start delving deeper into how it really is better!

Queues

Queues are really the backbone of Omnichannel. Customer interactions come through to a queue, where agents can then pick them up & respond. Without a queue, nothing would ever happen!

In the new interface, the functionality around queues has been extended. This is what the new interface looks like overall:

You’ll note that the default queues aren’t showing up in here. I’m not quite sure why that is, but am looking into it, and will post about it when I find out the reason behind it.

Opening up a queue record gives us the following:

I’m loving the cleanliness of the new layout – it’s something I’m probably going to keep saying! The new UI is just so much nicer on the eye, in my opinion. We have the information laid out well.

New users can be added from the ‘Add Users’ button on the right top, which is a pretty standard interface (ie adding new/existing records into a subgrid on a form).

But there are several new features here that weren’t present through the old interface. The first to talk about is the ability to set Operation Hours (the block at the bottom of the screenshot above). It’s great to see the prompt that if no operating hours are set, it’ll default to 24/7 operation.

Previously, it was a slight pain (ie clicking around a lot!) to get these to be associated. Now all we need to do is click the ‘Set Operation Hours’ button at the bottom of the page, and we can then add an existing record for this, or set up a new one:

Choosing an existing record will also give us the option to modify the settings for it:

One of the really nice things about this is the Assignment Method, which shows how work items will be prioritised. It’s possible change this, as well as create a NEW assignment method:

So quite a few additional functionality options available from the initial interface, rather than needing to click around. I’m liking it!

Workstreams

Just as with Queues, the Workstreams interface has been streamlined as well. One of the important things to note is that workstreams will need to be migrated over from the old interface to the new interface (I guess that there’s something happening behind the scenes?). I’m going to cover how to do this in a future post (stay tuned!), but let’s take a look the functionality in the new interface:

Clicking into a workstream record gives us the following information:

That’s already MUCH better laid out than the previous way, I think!

So let’s see what we have here. Well firstly, we’re able to move between the channels that are associated to the workstream. This is really helpful, as it can allow us to flip quickly backwards & forwards, and see the relevant information for each channel. We’re able to directly edit each individual channel just by clicking on it (loving the ‘fly out’ side screens for this!), and change the behaviour of it:

The abilities to quickly & rapidly do all of this is just wonderful, rather than needing to have a concrete understanding of the (complex) relationship structures within the system, and clicking around.

It’s also possible to add a new channel directly from this screen, which will easily walk (admin) users through setting up a new channel as needed:

Moving down the options available, we’re able to set routing rules, as well as work classifications. I’m going to talk about this in a separate post, but there’s some really interesting new capabilities here!

Looking at the Work Distribution information, we’re also able to view more information around this, as well as modify some of the settings available. Again, this comes in as a ‘fly out’ style window:

One of the neat pieces of functionality that has been slipped in is the ‘Keep same agent for entire conversation’ option. This means that if the customer interaction drops for some reason, & they come back, it can look for the same agent that they were chatting with previously, if it’s set as such.

Finally, we then have the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab, which gives us information around sessions, notifications, context variables, smart-assist bots, and quick replies. All of these are able to be viewed & configured directly from within the workstream, rather than needing to jump around different parts of the Omnichannel system, & then associating them together:

So to wrap up here (don’t worry, more to come shortly!), the new interface is really enabling admins to be able to quickly & easily create the necessary setup that’s needed. It’s avoiding needing to click around into different parts of the system. Omnichannel is complex enough as it is, and with being able to do the setup from one screen, it really makes life a LOT easier overall with getting the initial setup in place!

What are your thoughts on the new app? Have you used it yet? Have you found that it’s saving you time/effort? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Omnichannel Admin Center (Part I)

So there’s a new kid on the block. Or rather, it’s probably more accurate to say that there’s a new app available in Dynamics 365! This is the ‘Omnichannel Admin Center’ app that’s now present for anyone who currently has Omnichannel installed in their environment, or who is creating a new installation of Omnichannel.

So, what is this all about then?

Well, let’s back up a step here. Previously to set up Omnichannel, users had to go into the Dynamics 365 Settings, find the Omnichannel App, start the setup of it, and then go ahead & manually configure everything in the Omnichannel Administration app.

This, to be frank, took quite a bit of time to do, and needed users to be very familiar with the different parts of the interface. I’ve previously covered the (multiple) steps needed to do all of this in various blog posts, to help users understand what is actually needing to be done.

Thankfully, Microsoft realised the complexity around this, and have come out with a simplified administration experience. I’m very much in support of this, as it reduces the complexity of getting things started for Omnichannel in the first instance!

So let’s go ahead & take a look at this new app

The first thing to notice when opening the new Omnichannel Admin Center app is the interface itself. I think that this is really nice – rather than a ‘typical’ model-driven app experience, users are able to see some useful information on the home page itself!

Also, very nicely done in my opinion, are the three links at the bottom of the page:

  • Release Notes. This takes users to the release notes section on the Microsoft Docs website. It’s a great little thing that can help users understand the latest/greatest features that are being released
  • Ideas forum. People come up with great ideas to suggest to Microsoft to be able to include in their products. The Ideas forum is the location for these, where users can upvote popular concepts, or submit their own ideas. The Microsoft engineering teams do actually keep an eye on this!
  • Support community. The community forums are really helpful in allowing users to raise questions around the products, and give the ability for other users to help them out by giving answers etc. Most users will have already experienced the support forums in one way or another, but having a link directly to it is definitely quite useful to have

Now one thing that’s usually asked is ‘how can we quickly/easily see & set up chat in Omnichannel’? It’s one of the first things asked, as people tend to want to deploy (web)chat capabilities first, and then add other capabilities later on. Setting this up manually does take several steps, along with some waiting time (or, as I like to refer to it as, a coffee/snack break!)

It’s possible to quickly launch this through the button at the top of the page, rather than needing to go through the multiple configuration steps manually:

Click the button to launch it, and you’ll see the following window come up:

Clicking the ‘open chat demo’ will allow the system to start automatically configuring it for you – no more need for manual steps! You’re also able to use sample data if you wish to, to be able to show the experience without needing to load it in manually.

Yes, this really does only take a minute or two to happen!

Once the system has auto-configured everything, you’re now able to go ahead & launch the demo. Again, all the links & information are presented easily to us, telling/showing us what we need to do.

You’ll notice the chat widget in the lower right hand corner, which I’ve outlined in the image above. This launches into the chat widget directly, rather than needing to deploy it first to a webpage:

There’s no need to start needing to get into the setup of workstreams, queues, channels, routing capabilities, etc. It’s all configured right for you, to get you immediately started!

Of course, to test it out fully you’ll also need someone logged in as an Omnichannel Agent, to be able to respond to the chat instance. This could be the same user (in a different tab/browser on the same machine), or a different user on another machine. It’s really up to you as to how you would like to go about it.

So this is a really great feature to be able to have now. It’s not the ONLY great thing about the new app, however – stay turned for Part II next week when I’ll go into more capabilities that it provides!

App Profile Manager

When going through a backlog of various items, I suddenly realised that although the App Profile Manager was released in September 2020, I hadn’t devoted any space to it! So I’ve therefore decided (finally) to do an article to cover it.

First of all, what exactly is the App Profile Manager? Well, it’s a (somewhat) new feature that never existed beforehand. Essentially, the Omnichannel Agent App window has a number of configurable items, such as tabs to load at start-up, etc. Trying to work out where the configuration for each item is can, at times, be slightly frustrating, and I (for one) can’t always remember it correctly! But there’s also more, as I’ll go into below…

So, enter the App Profile Manager. At the moment, it’s only able to be used for two specific standard apps. These are the Customer Service Workspace app, and the Omnichannel for Customer Service app. In the future this may open up some more, but we’re limited to these for the moment.

So what does it do? Well, it’s there to enable system administrators to add configurations to an app. Essentially, it’s focused on on giving users access to certain items & functionality within an app.

As Microsoft puts it, it ‘allows administrators to create targeted app experiences for agents and supervisors as an alternative to building and maintaining custom apps’. Wow – Marketing sure can come up with some interesting lines at times!

I can hear you asking ‘so why should we use it’? After all, customer support agents will just log into the app, for example, and see the interface. Why should we use this, when we can just use the Omnichannel Administration app to configure things.

There’s actually a really simple answer to this. See, if we’re carrying out the configuration just through the Omnichannel Administration app, this will be set company-wide. All users logging in will have the same experience. However, there are companies that, although it’s all based around customer service, will have different teams that handle different things, and want them to have different screen layouts. Perhaps they’re even a multi-national.

It’s exactly for this purpose that the App Profile Manager exists. See, using it we can set up different screen profiles, showing different tabs, having different notifications, etc. We then assign it users to it (unfortunately we can’t use a security group at this point in time). When the users log in, they’ll then be presented with whichever layout they’re associated with. We can create custom profiles as we need, to handle the business needs!

Right – enough of talking about the concept. How do we actually get to it? Well, we need to go to make.powerapps.com, click into the list of apps, and then select either the Customer Service Workspace app, or the Omnichannel for Customer Service app. Clicking the ellipse next to it will give us the option for the App Profile Manager at the bottom of the fly-out menu:

This will then launch the App Profile Manager homepage. Some nice information shown here, with even a link to a video that we can launch to see how to go about things.

On the left hand side, we can see the apps in place, along with the ability to launch directly into the different settings areas for them. This is all standard stuff.

The power of App Profile Manager really comes when we’re going into the App Profiles section. Here we can see all of the app profiles that exist in the system. The ones with padlocks next to them are default system ones, which we can’t modify. But the other ones we ARE able to change, as well as being able to set up new ones:

When we open up one that we’ve created, we can see how we can go about customising it. There’s even a handy little visual guide to help users understand what/where each section is:

We’re able to configure the following (per app profile):

Once we’re happy with the setup performed, we then need to assign users to the app profile itself. To do this, simply slick the ‘Assign users’ button on the menu bar:

This will open up the screen to add users to the app profile. We can easily select from existing users, and then associate them to the app profile:

And voila, we’re done!

Users will access the app in the normal way, either through launching it in the browser, or using their bookmarks. When they log in, they’ll be presented with the app profile that they’ve been associated with.

If a user doesn’t have an app profile associated with them, then the default system app profile will be assigned to them, and they’ll see that when they log in.

Note: Although the system doesn’t enforce it, you should ensure to only assign users to a single app profile!

So there you have it. A way to customise the customer service agent experience across a customer, to provide the best interface possible to them.

How could this help you with your own scenarios? I’d love to hear – drop a comment below to share.

Branding Omnichannel Chat Widget

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!

MB-910: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Engagement Apps

So here’s the thing. There used to be the MB-900 exam, which was the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals exam. This was aimed at people who had a small knowledge of Dynamics 365, and it was really the base/entry-level exam into the qualifications for it.

However, Dynamics 365 is actually comprised of two ‘parts’. There’s the ‘front office’ part that’s usually referred to as Customer Engagement (well, depending on how Microsoft wish to refer to it as, which can change from time to time!), and there’s the ‘back office’ part, which is the ERP side of things. This is the finance & operations sphere, where those functions take place.

The MB-900 was a slightly strange exam, in my opinion, because it covered both. There were questions around things like Sales, Customer Service, etc, but there were also Supply Chain Management questions as well, for example. Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t know about both ‘sides’ of the equation, but people usually (for the most part) handle one or the other. It’s generally unusual to find someone knowledgeable about both.

Furthermore, if we take a look at the more in-depth exams in the MB range, we find that there’s a definitive split there. The MB-2xx series cover Customer Engagement, whereas the MB-3xx series covers the ERP side of things. So it’s definitely not the norm to have both sides included in a single exam.

Microsoft came to the realisation around this, and have therefore decided to update the Fundamentals space. In doing this, they’ve split things out. There’s the MB-910 exam (which is what this post is about), and the MB-920 exam, which focuses specifically on the ERP space. A good move, in my opinion..

The MB-910 launched this past weekend, and I took it around a day after it went live. Let’s go take a look at it, and recap my experience with it.

The official description of the exam is:

This exam covers the features and capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps.

Candidates for this exam should have general knowledge of or relevant working experience in an Information Technology (IT) environment. They should also have a fundamental understanding of customer engagement principles and business operations.

Taking it leads to the qualification for ‘Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Engagement Apps (CRM)’.

The description around the qualification is:

If you’re familiar with business operations, customer relationship management (CRM), and are IT savvy—either generally or through work experience—take advantage of this certification to highlight those skills. Validate your broad exposure to the customer engagement capabilities of Dynamics 365 to enhance your career journey.

People in different roles and at various stages in their careers can benefit from this fundamentals certification. Here are some examples:

IT professionals who want to show a general understanding of the applications they work with

Business stakeholders and others who know Dynamics 365 and who want to validate their skills and experience

Developers who want to highlight their understanding of business operations and CRM

Students, recent graduates, and people changing careers who want to leverage Dynamics 365 customer engagement capabilities to move to the next level

The official page for the exam is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-910 where it gives quite a good overview of things. Go take a look at it, and also take a look at the associated learning paths.

Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). This is the way that I now usually take exams (even if I could go to an exam centre, I think that I’d be unlikely to, given the travel/time needed!). Checking in for the exam went without issues (the process definitely seems to be getting smoother each time), and I was ready to go within a few minutes.

As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else! ). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.

  • Project Operations
    • Scheduling resources
    • Entering project time/costs
    • Skills
    • Roles
    • Different types of project costings
  • Customer Service
    • SLA’s, what they are, which ones to use
    • Omnichannel, including capabilities and channel functions/availabilities
    • Power Virtual Agents
  • Sales
    • Lead processes, deactivating & reactivating
    • Opportunity processes
    • LinkedIn Sales Navigator. How it interacts, which capabilities it has within it, how it works
    • Quotes. How they work, what’s required to handle them, document generation
  • Marketing
    • Website forms
    • Automation around responses
    • A/B testing
    • Event management
  • Field Service
    • Work orders
    • Route optimization
    • Scheduling boards
  • Document options
    • Attachments that users can access within the system, as well as outside of Dynamics 365
    • File collaboration tools, and integration with them
  • Timelines & activities
  • System currencies, default options, additional currencies, and updating them
  • Understanding different types of tables, and when you’d use each one
  • Reporting capabilities
    • How data is able to be reported on
    • Report Builder Wizard
    • Reporting on data held in Dataverse
    • Reports in dashboards
    • Usage of Power BI, including data gateways

I was slightly surprised with the level of detail in some of the areas. I wasn’t, for example, expecting the emphasis on Project Operations and Field Service that came up for me. Some of the level of detail seemed more fitting for an MB-2xx exam than this Fundamentals exam.

In a similar vein, I also wasn’t expecting Power BI and Power Automate so much. Perhaps that’s just my own perspective, though obviously with the Power Platform it would be there. However there is a PL-900 exam, around Power Platform capabilities, that I’d expect those sorts of questions to be in, rather than here in this exam.

Otherwise I think that it was generally on point for what I’d expect to find at this level of exam. The questions have definitely evolved over time, and I found myself giving more consideration to answers than I would have on the previous version.

It’s a good place to start for people who are looking to get qualified around Dynamics 365! If you do decide to take it, please drop a comment below to let me know how it was for you – I’d love to hear about your experience!

Customising Case Resolutions

Well, the title is a bit of a mouthful, I’ll admit. Hopefully though this brings some good information, and can help people out.

Cases are wonderful things, and can be used for tracking client interactions, compliments/complaints, and so many other things. What cases do have is the ability to resolve them, and provide information around the resolution.

Now, the standard way of doing this provides the following screen:

There’s the ability to set the Resolution Type (being a dropdown, aka Choice, field), & putting in free text for the Resolution itself (allowing us to track information around it). There are also time fields, which can be used for working out the time spent, as well as any time that’s going to be chargeable.

Now when going in to modify these, we’d think to open up the Case Resolution table. However, this isn’t actually the right place to do it. Instead, we’re needing to update the Case table itself, as the Care Resolution items comes from the Case Status field!

Somewhat annoyingly, it’s not possible to do this through the new ‘Maker’ interface:

In order to actually handle this, we need to switch across to the Classis editor to set this up. This could be because it’s actually a situation of having both parent & child entries. What I mean by this is that there’s the actual status (being Active, Resolved or Cancelled), and then a reason under each one. Hopefully at some point it’ll be updated into the new UI, so that we can do it from there.

We’ll need to change the Status item to ‘Resolved’, & can then add in the options that we want:

After adding them, we need to save & publish, and then they’ll show up for us, and are able to be selected:

So that’s great – we’re able to customise it. But what if we’re wanting to customise the actual ‘Resolve Case’ form itself? Not everyone wants to show Time/Billable Time on it (quite a few of our clients ask us to remove it), and perhaps they want to add additional custom fields.

So from the usual perspective of doing this, we’d open up the Case Resolution table, create new fields as required, and modify the existing form (we’re not able to create any other forms for this specific table). After all, this is how we’d do it for any table in the system (whether a standard one, or a custom one). This is going to be the Main form, rather than the QuickCreate one:

We save & publish it, and then would open up a Case record, click ‘Resolve Case’, and expect to see it. However, that doesn’t happen, which has been most puzzlingly to me!

It turns out that there are two things needed to be done in order to get to see our ‘custom’ form (though it’s not really custom, as it’s modifying the default form, but whatever).

  1. We need to modify security permissions for users, and is a critical requirement. An example of this is shown below:
Security Role: Customer Service Representative

2. We need to enable customisable dialogues. Yes, it’s a setting that needs to be updated in order for users to see the custom layout of the form. If we don’t do this, they’re shown the default form, even though we’ve modified it! Seems a little strange that the system seems to have this concept of a ‘shadow’ form, but I guess that’s how it is.

To do this, we need to go into the Service Management settings area. I usually launch this through the Customer Service Hub app, though it’s available through several of the other standard apps as well:

Once there, we need to click into the Service Configuration menu item, and then change the ‘Resolve Case Dialogue’ option as shown below:

Remember to click the ‘Save’ button to save this.

Finally we can go back to our Case record, click ‘Resolve Case’, and look what appears!

So in summary, it’s definitely possible to modify & change the way that Case resolutions works in the system. It does take a little bit of fiddling around with settings in different areas, which can be confusing if we’re not used to this, but can give a great result in the end.

Have you ever come across this, and wondered how to do it? Have you developed Case Resolutions any further? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Omnichannel Agent Presence Not Loading

Recently, with some of the system updates that have come out for Omnichannel, there’s been an interesting issue observed. This is essentially when the Agent Presence (which signifies the available of the agent) doesn’t load within the system.

This is of course a problem. Without agents able to set their status, it’s not possible to have conversation sessions come through to them. As a result, they’re not able to do their work!

It’s an interesting issue, and one that I’ve discussed with several other people who are deeply involved with Omnichannel for Customer Service. We’re not quite sure why it’s happening, but there seems to be some different things going on.

It can range from either the presence icon not showing up at all, to it showing up, but not being able to be selected/changed.

As there are already some stellar resources out there around this, I therefore would like to link to these, rather than just repeat information!

The first thing to try is the fix that Tricia Sinclair suggests at Omni Channel Engagement Hub: Fix Missing Presence Icon – Everything D365 (triciasinclair.com). Here Tricia points out how to use the new App Profile Manager to put a fix in. There’s even a really helpful video that she’s done to walk us through the steps!

The second thing to try is the fix that Victor Sanchez suggests at Omnichannel Error in Wave 2 | Victor Sanchez (victorsolaya.com). This involves changing the URL for the Channel Provider

Have you come across this issue, and not been able to solve it? Drop a comment below, and I’ll do my best to try to help out!