Tag: empowerment

Omnichannel & LogMeIn

Overview

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:

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:

  1. 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
  2. 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.

Security

I’m not going to dwell too much on security, as there’s a great document available at https://logmeincdn.azureedge.net/legal/gdpr-v2/Rescue_Live_Guide_SPOC_2020.pdf which goes into quite some detail.

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!

Uses for Omnichannel in times of crisis

I originally had a different article planned for today, but with the current situation that’s happening over the world, I decided to change what I was going to talk about.

The world has gone crazy, in so many ways. There’s plenty of information out there around what’s happening, and with best advice to people as to how to deal with things, cope, etc. I’m not going to cover that (besides, it’s likely that things will change over time, which means that anything I write could be out of date soon).

Instead, I’m going to address one of the specific issues that I’m seeing again and again. This is the bottleneck that people are facing when trying to contact companies, whether the company is their bank, their utility provider, their health provider, or even travel companies.

Image result for bottleneck

Regardless of whether people are trying to cancel an existing holiday & get a refund, speak to their bank to get a mortgage holiday, or get medical advice, they’re facing the same major issue – they’re not the only ones trying to get through. Phone lines are jammed (assuming that they’ve not been stopped due to agents being sick), static forms where you fill in information aren’t liked (as you don’t know what the actual status of things are), and online chat takes an absolute age. I had an online chat session with Amazon two days ago, and it took over an hour for one of their associates to join my session to help me.

Go to any major company website, and you’ll probably see something like the following (this is from British Airways):

I’d like to be clear – companies couldn’t really have forecast all of this happening, if you’d go back several months.

But what companies can, and should have in place, are clear communication protocols that actually enable them to handle a massive scale-up of customers contacting them. It’s not going to be perfect, but can help mitigate the bottleneck to certain degrees.

Having an efficient system can allow a single agent to handle multiple communication streams at the same time. Indeed, it’s not just about handling multiple web-chat sessions concurrently – it’s also about handling communication across different mediums. So agents can handle webchat, Facebook messages, Twitter DM’s, etc.

This is, I believe, where products such as Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 can really come into their own, and shine through. Using it, companies can ensure that their workforce (which is likely to be impacted as well by the situation) can be as best empowered as possible, and assist customers as speedily as they are able to.

Hopefully the current situation will resolve itself as soon as possible, and coming out from it, we should look to carry out any efficiencies that we are able to. This will allow companies to better serve their customers moving forward, and streamline communication channels.

I hope & pray that everyone stays safe & healthy through this crisis, and that we help each other out (to the best of our abilities) to get through it.

Continual development in small steps

One of my resolutions for 2020 is to go out and get books to read, for self improvement – all in the name of getting better at stuff!

One of the books that I’ve read is The Phoenix Project (billed as a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win). It’s been a real eye opener as to how we may currently go about projects, and what would be a much better approach. The thinking behind it is to look at how to best use DevOps.

Incidentally Tricia Sinclair has recently started talking about DevOps, and is REALLY knowledgeable on the subject. I’ve had many conversations with her, and her breadth of information and understanding is second to none. I’d really recommend that you go check out her blog at https://triciasinclair.com/.

There are several ideas/concepts that I’ve taken out of it. One of the main ones (as far as I’m concerned) is about continual improvement, and doing this in small steps.

It’s not about massive changes in life. It’s about identifying something (small) that can be changed/modified, and implementing a new regime around it, or a new way of doing it. This way you can train yourself into a new habit, which will take you forward. Once it’s settled in, pick something else, and then work on that.

The effect will be gradual, but it’ll be noticeable in being better at whatever it is that you’re addressing. It doesn’t just stop there though – improvement in ONE area has shown a noticeable marked improvement in OTHER areas as well across the board.

This concept doesn’t just apply to personal habits – it also applies to technology. Gone are the days (for most people!) when the next updates and/or items were released just in new product versions, or major updates.

Yes it’s true that there are two major releases each year for Dynamics and PowerPlatform (Spring/Fall), but the Microsoft Development Teams don’t work on items and then queue them all up for the major release.

Instead there are items that are released as soon as they’re ready (take a look at https://thecrm.ninja/required-fields-on-forms-what-did-you-forget-to-fill-in/ for an example of this). This is why you’ll be using the system, and suddenly notice that you don’t have as many steps to carry out, or something looks better and works faster, etc.

Every member of the team should feel that their input is valued, and able to be used – this will reinforce the team status. In the Toyota Way (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way for more information) quality takes precedence. Anyone at all, even a ‘lowly’ factor worker, is empowered to stop a production line when they’ve identified a problem.

One of the items in the ‘Toyota Way’ is called the ‘Toyota Kata’. This is a skill-building process to shift our mindset and habits from a natural tendency to jump to conclusions, to a tendency to think and work more scientifically. It’s not difficult to pick up, and recommendations are to practise it for only 10 minutes a day!

Everyone knows that making small improvements everyday is good and everyone wants to do that. But the following questions arise:

  • What to improve?
  • How to improve?
  • How will I know am improving?

The Toyota Kata comprises of 4 steps:

  • Plan. Draw up a list of things to do over the next period of time (one or two weeks). Establish objectives and processes required to deliver the desired results.
  • Do. Carry out the planned items. Small changes are usually tested, and data is gathered to see how effective the change is.
  • Check. The data and results gathered from the Do phase are evaluated. Data is compared to the expected outcomes to see any similarities and differences. The testing process is also evaluated to see if there were any changes from the original test created during the planning phase.
  • Act. This is where a process is improved upon. Records from the “Do” and “Check” phases help identify issues with the process. These issues may include problems, opportunities for improvement, inefficiencies and other issues that result in outcomes that are not optimal. The root causes of such issues are investigated, found and eliminated by modifying the process (as part of Plan in the next cycle).

Work in the next cycle Do phase should not create recurrence of the identified issues – if it does, then the previous action was not effective.

The most obvious manifestation of the Toyota Kata is the two-week improvement cycle at Toyota itself, in which every work centre supervisor must improve something (anything!) every two weeks. Mike Rother (who wrote the book for Toyota Kata) says ‘The practice of kata is the act of practising a pattern so it becomes second nature. In its day to day management, Toyota teaches a way of working—a kata—that has helped make it so successful over the last six decades.”

My resolve is to do this – not only on my personal items, not only in my work environment, but also with the clients that I work with.

Let’s go out there and use this to make things better for everyone. Let’s challenge our clients and see how this can enable and empower them? Sounds crazy, right – but it could actually bring a massive benefit to project/s. Sit down with the business team/s, and get them to identify one point (that’s not too big) that can be (quickly) worked on (try using the 80/20 rule). Do the work on it, release it, and then get them to do it again. See the results and benefit from it!

Note: Don’t get them to build too much of a backlog around this, as release items may cause one or more of the backlog items to be non-relevant anymore!

You could even get managers to give a reward for coming up with ideas around this concept that have a major noticeable effect on productivity etc.

By bringing these concepts together, our clients (along with ourselves) can better understand what’s happening, bring better suggestions to the table in order to build better systems, and a much higher working co-efficient will evolve, empowering everyone!

Introduction to Omnichannel for Dynamics 365

With all of the functionality that has recently been released for Dynamics 365, I’ve been taking a look into the Omnichannel capabilities, and what it brings to enable clients and their customers from a technology standpoint.

I feel that this is really going to be a major benefit to many different sectors, and will allow users to benefit majorly in being able to retain and grow their customer base, through the general customer experience and behaviour.

The video below is the start of a new series in which I’m going to go deep into what Omnichannel actually is, how it works, and the capabilities that it brings.