Tag: enablement

Canvas Apps & Power Automates

So it’s been a busy few weeks here, which is why I haven’t really been putting up any articles. March/April is always a busy time for our family with stuff going on, and this year I decided not to push myself to get articles out, as otherwise I’d be running very low on sleep!

That being said, I’ve still had some great ideas about things that I’d like to share, and have been keeping a series of short notes for me to pick up. Today’s topic is one of them, which I think has been a major pain to anyone involved in canvas app development!

So, the back story to this is that we’re able to use Power Automate flows together with canvas apps. What I mean by this is that we’re able to directly trigger them from within the canvas app, rather than needing to do something like edit or create a record, and then have the Power Automate flow trigger from the record creation or modification.

There’s a specific Power Apps trigger that’s available within Power Automate exactly for this purpose:

When clicked, it gives us the trigger line in the steps as follows:

So what we’d do is within the canvas app, we would bind a button (or another control) that when selected, it would then go away & trigger the Power Automate flow. Great – so many different things that we can get to happen! One of the benefits of doing things like this is that we can then pass information from the Power Automate flow back to the canvas app directly:

This can then mean that the user can know, within the canvas app itself, that the Power Automate flow has run, and use data (or other things) that have come out of it.

OK – all good so far.

The main issue to date has been with deploying canvas apps together with Power Automate flows. See, as per best practise, we would create a solution, place the canvas app, flows, and anything else that’s necessary for it to work within it, and then deploy the solution to our target environment/s. And that’s where things just…didn’t go quite right.

Obviously within the development environment, the canvas app would be hooked up to the flows, and everything would work. Clicking the button would cause the flow to run, etc. User authentication would be in place (along with licenses of course!), and it was just fine.

But when deploying a solution containing canvas apps and associated flows between environments (regardless of whether it’s been manually deploying, or automated using a tool such as Azure DevOps), the connections to the flows would be broken. Ie, the canvas app would run, but the flows wouldn’t trigger. Looking at the connections in the canvas app within Studio would show something like the following:

All of the connections to Power Automate flows would show as ‘Not connected’. It’s not even possible to click the ellipse next to them and re-connect them – the only option available is to remove it from the canvas app!

So in order to get things working again, we’d need to do the following steps:

  • Open up the canvas app
  • Remove all connections to Power Automate flows
  • Add a temporary button, set it to be a Power Automate trigger
  • Click through all of the Power Automates needing to be connected (waiting for each one to connect, then go to the next one)
  • Remove the temporary button
  • Save and publish the solution

This, in a nutshell, has been a (major) headache. For example, I’ve been working with a solution that has over 30 Power Automate flows that can be triggered from the canvas app (lots of different functionality!). Each deployment has needed the above process to be carried out, which has usually added on at least an hour to the deployment process!

Now, this hasn’t been something that’s been unknown. In fact, the official Microsoft documentation noted the following:

So this is something that Microsoft has been well aware of, but it’s been a pain point that we’ve had to work with.

However, this has now ALL changed, which I (and MANY others) are really pleased about!

Microsoft has rolled out an update last month that means that canvas app connections to Power Automate flows will NOT break when they’re deployed across environments! This is such a massive time-saver, that I’m now trying to work out what to do with all of my free time! Only kidding…more project work will commence!

So what we can now do is take our solution, deploy it across the different environment/s that we need to get it out to (whether manually, or automated using tools such as Azure DevOps), publish the solution, and then everything works! Amazing!!

One small caveat though – to ensure that this work, you will need to go into the app, and re-publish it on the latest Power Apps version. This should of course be done in a development environment, and then can be exported and deployed as required.

Microsoft have also updated their documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/data-platform/solutions-overview to remove the limitation text shown above. It’s a good place to keep an eye on changes that occur over time too.

This is definitely a welcome piece of development, and I know that we’ve been eagerly waiting for this for a while, and now it’s here!

Personalised Sound Notifications for Omnichannel

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!

Personalised Quick Replies

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!

New functionality for Routing Rules

Within Omnichannel, we have the ability to route conversations based on different factors. At this point in time, there’s Skill-Based routing (covered at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-ii/), and Workstream routing (covered at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-pre-survey-responses-routing/).

Routing is used to send customer interactions to specific queues, in order to have them handled by the agents best suited. This could be based on the language that the customer is using, the query that the customer has (involving pre-chat survey questions), etc.

The way that this is done (included in the previous articles) is by selecting the details that we want to use. This could be the contact (when recognised as a record in the system), pre-chat survey responses, or several other options.

However, to date we’ve only been able to use fields/variables from the chat session itself. It’s not been possible to connect to other data that we’re holding within the system, and use that for routing. We’ve only been able to use items that are directly linked to the conversation:

  • Account
  • Case
  • Contact
  • Context Variable
  • Live Chat Context

So if we had identified the customer as existing in the system already, we weren’t able to query related records to them, eg accounts etc. That’s all changed now though – we are now able to do this!

End of term celebration | News Post Page

Let’s see an example of this. We have a customer, and we know from within Dynamics 365 that his company is a VERY large customer of ours. They spend a great deal on our products every year, and as a result, we want to route any interactions with them to a special VIP queue. Previously we were unable to do this, unless we somehow set a flag on the contact record to display this.

What we’re now able to do is go and get values from the linked account record, and use these as the routing variables within the workstream:

We can add multiple rows here, all connecting different parts of the data.

Note: The only caveat is that the entity needs to be linked to one of the Omnichannel items (which are listed above). We can’t daisy-chain non-related entities, eg Contact-Account-Invoices

These can obviously be put together in groups, to satisfy more complicated conditions, using AND/OR conditions. With this, we can therefore address very specific scenarios, tying together conditions across multiple entities.

Even nicer, we’re not restricted by the relationship type. We therefore can select an entity that’s related to the primary Omnichannel entities as:

  • One to Many
  • Many to One
  • Many to Many

With this being in place, we’re now really able to ‘fine tune’ how we can route customer interactions, and set up specific places for them to be directed to. Through this, we can identify & serve identified sectors of our customers in different ways, as we feel is best appropriate.

This is also applicable to skill attachment routing, where the same level of functionality is provided.

So with this in mind, how would YOU think that you would go ahead and use this? Leave a note in the comments below!