Tag: D365

Dynamics 365 Contact Centre – worth it or not?

As quite a few people are aware, my background is decently embedded in customer service capabilities. In fact when I launched this blog, I did a massive number of articles around the new Omnichannel capabilities that Microsoft had just released for Dynamics 365 Customer Service!

Since then, Microsoft have been releasing new & updated functionality over the last number of years, and it’s been really great to see the journey & roadmap that’s been implemented. It’s now absolutely possible to have a full customer service experience, across many different channels (first party provided by Microsoft, as well as through 3rd party solutions).

Last year, Microsoft brought out a new offering called ‘Dynamics 365 Contact Center’. This is an interesting angle on the products being offered by Microsoft. I’ve recently had the opportunity to dig deeper into the offering, and want to share my thoughts below as to whether it’s worth it or not.

Before I start, I’m going to be quite clear – having spent several weeks deep on this, including talking to various senior technical people at Microsoft, my general conclusion is that this is more of an outlier/edge case product, rather than being something that most organisations will look to adopt.

Personally I also think that this is more of a political consideration to be able to get on the analyst charts/reports for Contact Centre (given that organisations need to have their technology be able to connect into multiple platforms).

With that said, let’s take a look into WHY I say that (though I’m happy for my mind to be changed!).

Offering

The way that Microsoft pitches the product is as follows:

Deliver intelligence, automation, and efficiency across channels through a Copilot-first contact center that works with existing CRMs.

What does this actually mean? Well, it’s Microsoft offering communication capabilities across multiple channels, which is essentially the Omnichannel capabilities that Dynamics 365 Customer Service has already. What it doesn’t have is the actual underlying Customer Service functionality that service functions need.

For the eagle eyed amongst you, you’ll have noted the part of ‘existing CRM’s’. What this means is that Microsoft has enabled the technology to be be able to connect into third party CRM systems (eg SalesForce, Service Now, ZenDesk, etc). More on how this is being done further below.

The thinking behind this that this is now an offering for organisations to be able to use Microsoft as the Contact Centre solution whilst continuing to work with their existing systems. This is because larger scale customers are often not able to look at replacing/migrating for both CRM & CCaaS at the same time. Being able to have this as an offering therefore can enable organisations to make use of their Microsoft investment, and possibly using it as a ‘stepping stone’ to migrating to a full Microsoft CRM solution (ie Dynamics 365).

Other providers such as Genesys, NICE, Five9 & Amazon all have similar sorts of companion Contact Centre solutions as well, so Microsoft is obviously looking at competing with these now too.

Integrations

So integrating with other systems are at the absolute core of the product. This is because, as I’ve said above, this is not a complete customer service/CRM solution.

There are two types of integrations that are currently being facilitated by the product:

  • SalesForce. There is a native integration to SalesForce, using the Microsoft SalesForce connector. This is actually connecting directly from Contact Centre to SalesForce through the SalesForce API, without any other components needed
  • All other CRM systems. Connecting into other CRM systems, such as Zendesk & ServiceNow etc, use Power Automate. More specifically, a single Power Automate flow, which needs to be set up, connected & configured. It does allow the ability to use either one of the provided connectors or API calls through HTTP action, but there’s some manual work required. The drawbacks of course of using Power Automate is that it’s not actually a (proper) integration tool, and could possibly run into challenges when handling data at scale – throttling or timing out.

Note: Microsoft teams may also say that it’s possible to deploy Contact Centre on top of Dynamics 365. Though this is technically feasible, it does require its own environment to be deployed, and then using Power Automate (or another data integration/sync technology) to move data backwards & forwards, and is not the way that the product is actually being positioned.

Environment (& storage considerations)

When deploying Contact Centre, it requires its own environment to be set up in. It is not possible to deploy Contact Centre on top of an existing Dynamics 365 (Customer Service) environment.

It’s important to consider the amount of data that’s needing to be synced in to this environment, the ongoing data storage within it, as well as the storage that usage of Copilot will take up. One of the concerns that I’ve seen, especially when at scale in organisations with hundreds or thousands of users, as the amount of storage that the Copilot logs actually takes up (which customers are charged for). These can of course be cleared down, but then the analytics from these won’t be useful for longer periods of time.

Embedded Experience

It is possible to embed the conversation widget from Contact Centre directly into other CRM (or other) systems. This allows users access to this without needing to switch systems. It’s a very nice item to have – it’s something I wish that were possible with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, but unfortunately that’s not possible (at least not at this point in time)!

Licensing

From a practical perspective, I don’t believe that the numbers actually show a positive approach towards adopting Contact Centre on top of other applications.

If we take SalesForce as an example, there are possibly 3 licenses that larger organisations would have (all prices are current list price in USD):

  • Pro Suite – $100 per user per month
  • Enterprise – $165 per user per month
  • Unlimited – $330 per user per month

Adding on Dynamics 365 Contact Centre would then add an additional $110 per user per month. That means a minimum of $210 per user per month, though the likelihood is somewhat higher (as most large organisations would be on SalesForce Service Cloud Enterprise) at around $275 per user per month. Those prices also don’t include additional Dataverse storage that may be needed for large amounts of data being handled.

Compare that with the new Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium offering (wrapping up Customer Service Enterprise, Voice & Digital Channels into a single SKU) at $195 per user per month. In my mind, going native Dynamics 365 all the way is a no brainer (especially as Copilot is native in the product – with SalesForce, you need to pay more for AI!).

Existing Dynamics 365 (Customer Service) deployment

To be clear – if organisations already have Dynamics 365 (Customer Service) deployed & in use, then the specific Dynamics 365 Contact Centre solution is NOT the solution for them. Customer Service is designed to be the complete end to end solution for CRM/Case Management/Ticketing/Omnichannel etc, and Customer Service Premium (as mentioned in the licensing section above) is bringing together Customer Service together with Contact Centre capabilities within a single environment.

Also as pointed out above under Environments, it’s not possible to deploy Contact Centre into an existing Dynamics 365 deployment – you need to set up another environment, and then syncronise the data backwards & forwards, leading to more storage costs, API calls, technical setup/infrastructure, etc.

Summary

In summary, I think it’s an interesting (lightweight) product, and will keep an eye on it to see how it possibly evolves. Time will tell as to whether it takes off at scale or not.

I’d also like to thank Peter Ruiter for his time & expertise on some of the finer nuances on the product.

If you’re considering deploying Dynamics 365 Contact Centre, or have any questions around it, please do drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Knowledge on Portals (& Forms)

As part of my research into Portals and Forms, I’ve reached out to my channels for recommendations of where I could go to find literature, tutorials, etc.

One of the responses that I got was to check out https://meganvwalker.com/blog/, which is really great and helpful.

It’s by Megan Walker (surprise surprise! – after all, it’s all about building the brand), who’s a Microsoft MVP in Business Applications.

Lots of amazing material there, which I’m currently wading through.

She also has a YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChUZXzskYml6q7IFn0VfI7w. I’ve only managed to set up a queue for those videos that I’d like to see, which hopefully I’ll be able to find some time for soon.

I’d highly recommend you to take a look if you’re interested

Seeing D365 through fresh eyes

Today I had the opportunity to present to a technical graduate intake program about Microsoft Dynamics. In fact, it wasn’t just about D365, but about Microsoft in general.

Having spent a few days researching what I was going to talk about, I gained fresh appreciation for the journey that Microsoft has undergone, and where it could be going to.

As we all know, the landscape has changed beyond measure from when things started as a simple add-in for Outlook. When CRM 1.0 was launched as a standalone application, it was purely on-premise. Since then Microsoft has iterated through multiple versions, offering a cloud solution, and then flipping the product around so that the cloud solution is the primary product (we all know scenarios that still require on-premise, and it’s obviously annoying that on-prem is a release cycle behind at a minimum!).

Building out the additional capabilities, from F&O to Talent, AI to Forms, the full product stack really is now a wall-to-wall solution for clients, small to large. There are no other providers who can offered a single integrated solution (single sign on, same interface/GUI, etc).

It was rewarding to hear the questions asked in the session, and see how they were experiencing D365 for the first time 🙂

Although I’ve had much more time in the Dynamics sphere than the graduates, I’m experiencing my own firsts with D365. Be it PowerApps (shout out to Chris Huntingford – https://twitter.com/tattooedcrmguy for that) or Talent, I’m expanding my own knowledge and skillset. In doing so, I’m hoping to share that with others, to help them as well, and pay it forward

Dynamics Community

For those who may be new to CRM, or possibly even those who have been working in with it for a while, I’d highly recommend to engage with the wider CRM Community.

I’ll freely admit that even though I’ve been working with CRM for around a decade or so, I’ve only started engaging with the community for just over a year. Of course I’ve been on the various forums (Technet, StackOverflow etc) to try to find solutions to problems and situations, but I haven’t really done much more.

This changed with attending Summit EMEA 2018 in Dublin.

I was exposed to a wider number of people in different roles, all of whom love CRM. I’ve also signed up to my local CRMUG (User Group) chapter here in London, and have tried to attend all of the events that they’ve had on.

As a result of this, I’ve met some amazing and wonderful people, and made some great contacts (including several MVP’s). My aim now is to continue engaging and learning, and hopefully be able to give something back to the Dynamics community.

I’d highly recommend to look up your local CRMUG chapter and join them. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn, and the people you can meet with to exchange ideas, concepts and thoughts!