Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Chatting to Chad around his love of travelling, data migrations, having a new addition to the family, & MORE data migrations (oh why can’t they actually just be very simple to do…)
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So last week the Wave 2 2021 information dropped. It’s taken me a few days to get round to it (family stuff happening), but I’m finally able to do a quick recap of it. As most people know, Microsoft releases features in two waves – one in the spring (Wave 1), and one in the autumn (Wave 2). As usual, I’ve included the links for the full release notes across both Dynamics 365 & Power Platform below, though will be focusing on the product features for Omnichannel
The links are here:
As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.
GA – Oct 2021
As more and more organisations move in the direction of omnichannel system capabilities, there is a growing need for the actual agent experience to be better optimised. The inbox view that this functionality will deliver is aimed to address the needs to quickly triage requests, and allow agents to focus on customers & their issues. It will be integrated into the Customer Service workspace as well as the Omnichannel Engagement Hub, and will allow agents to effectively navigate their emails & conversions whilst handling customer interactions.
Early Access – Aug 2021. GA – Oct 2021
The Customer Service workspace and Omnichannel Engagement Hub are multi-session applications that allow users to be able to multi-task with customers to provide support on multiple cases simultaneously. This release provides usability improvements to help agents be more productive, including simplified navigation as well as the migration of productivity tools to the new extensible App side pane.
GA – Nov 2021
Agents who use Dynamics 365 Customer Service can easily collaborate with anyone within their organization, such as agents from other departments, supervisors, customer service peers, or support experts, over Microsoft Teams to resolve customer issues, without leaving
the case or conversation. Chats over Teams will be linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience
Some of the key features coming in this release are:
At Ignite in September 2020, Microsoft announced the new Voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The aim of the solution is to provide simpler administration & management experiences within the platform itself, rather then needing traditional cloud component integration complexities.
With the release of this, voice, SMS, and digital messaging channels, and a PVA-powered intelligent interactive voice response (IVR), real-time voice intelligence, and insights across all channels, speech-based self-service, and intelligent skills-based routing are all brought together in a single package.
GA – Nov 2021
As mentioned in the Wave 1 2021 post, there’s a new voice channel that’s coming in. This new solution for Customer Service enables an all-in-one customer service solution without fragmentation or requirement of manual data integration. It will provide a single view of the customer that empowers agents to provide personalised service across all channels, and true omnichannel analytics and insights for agents and supervisors alike. Providing organizations with a choice of telephony delivered directly by Microsoft enables quick and easy deployment of a voice channel for their business.
Now there has been a slight delay in rolling this out. As a result, the GA dates for the below have been pushed back to Nov 2021:
Traditionally, organizations use “queue-based routing,” where incoming service requests are routed to a relevant queue, and agents work on those service requests by picking them from the queue. Organizations can miss service-level agreements if agents pick the easier service requests and leave the higher-priority requests in the queue. To address this scenario, organizations either create custom workflows to periodically distribute service requests among their agents or have dedicated personnel to distribute the service requests equitably among agents while adhering to organizational and customer preferences. Both methods are inefficient and error prone and necessitate continuous queue supervision.
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels (cases, entities, chat, digital messages, and voice) to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and auto-skills matching. The new routing service uses AI to classify, route, and assign work items with full automation, eliminating the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations
GA – Oct 2021
Administrators use unified routing and routing rules across the classification and assignment stages to help ensure the work item is assigned to the best suited agent. Embedded historical analytics provides an overview of routing performance of each channel to help optimize the routing strategy and improve the routing and workforce efficiency. Providing organizations a view of the effectiveness of configurations allows them to improve routing configurations to help increase their customer satisfaction and agent satisfaction scores.
GA – Oct 2021
Routing diagnostics helps an organization to better understand the path a work item takes after it comes into the routing system, through all the classification and assignment rules, to ultimately land in a queue or be assigned to an agent. Current routing diagnostics are available for administrators and are more focused on the workstream and queue routing. In this release, routing diagnostics are being introduced to supervisor experiences, and the quality of the diagnostics is being improved.
I’m really quite excited to see how the new Voice channel will be received, as I think it’s a great feature addition to the overall tools available. It will be interesting to see how clients may choose to use it over their existing voice channel setup.
I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!
Chatting to Ivan (who’s ALSO a Ninja!!) around his love of basketball, the interesting topic of kilts, and the ‘wonders’ of Dataflow operations
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Speaking to Ana about hippies, our mutual interest/hobby of deep sea diving, and the ‘wonders’ of #DevOps releases!
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Chatting to Brent about his love of golf, some interesting stories about how/where he’s played, and how he came to leave the United States of America & never went back to it!
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On a recent client project, we’ve come up against an interesting situation. Some of the users have the ‘Follow’ functionality available to them, but others don’t seem to have it. This, of course, is quite confusing, so I thought it would be good to write about it, for others who may come up against this.
But first, let’s take a step back. After all, before this had happened I had never heard of the ‘follow’ functionality within the system, and I’m quite sure that many others haven’t either! So what exactly is this all about?
We’ve all been there – we have some customers who are ‘priority customers’, and we want to know/see everything that’s happening around them. Obviously we can go into their specific record/s, and see what’s going on. For example, seeing new cases added for these customers, other activities, etc. But what if we don’t want to have to manually open the records each time, or set up specific views in the system for them?
Well, this is where the Follow functionality comes in. It’s possible to track activities (in ‘real-time’) for records that a user follows. Microsoft has given us the ability to set this (or unset this) on a per record basis, so that users can set their own preferences within the system. When a user follows a specific record, the details for that record then show up in the users activity feed. This can then be used further, such as displaying it within a dashboard, for example.
It’s also possible to automatically follow records based on specific criteria.
In order for records to be able to have the follow functionality available to them, they need to have the Activity Feed enabled for the specific table. The default system tables such as Accounts, Contacts & Leads already have this enabled, so these records are able to be followed without any additional configuration around them.
To enable other tables (such as custom tables that you may have created) to be able to have the records within them followed, we need to carry out the following steps:
2. Find the table that we’re wanting to configure this for (if it’s not showing up, click the ‘Refresh’ button on the menu)
3. Click the ‘Activate’ button on the menu bar
4. Confirm the pop up screen
And voila – you’re done! Users will now be able to go into the table/s, and follow (or unfollow) records there
So we now understand what the follow functionality is, and how to enable it. But what happens when users can’t actually see it within the system, to be able to use it?
Well, there are several different things that we can do to look to solve the issue:
The second one is what turns out to have been the issue for this project. It’s been quite confusing, as originally mentioned, that certain users did see the follow functionality, but others users didn’t see it.
The first place to check is the ‘follow’ privileges on each security role:
As you can see above, we had given organisation-level access on the security role (& actually across all security roles), though the users were still having issues. So the next step is to check a different security privilege within the security role. This is the ‘Post Configuration’ setting, which is found under the Custom Entities section (why it’s under Custom, I have NO idea):
Without this enabled, users with the security role will NOT be able to see/use the follow functionality within the system!
Hopefully this should then sort out all issues, and users will be able to use the functionality as required.
Have you ever had issues with this feature? Have you found a different solution to fix it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!
Talking to Nicole about the joys of children & discovering how baking enraptures them, the Zen of running, and how she decided to start up her own business! Also find out how she then transitioned into the Microsoft Partner space.
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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 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!
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!
Chatting to Scott around travelling, interesting things around motorbikes (who would have thought!), & the ‘joys’ of data migration projects at enterprise-level scale…
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Talking to Kevin about his involvements with the Scouts/Cubs movement, why duct tape is SO important in life to always have with you, and what could possibly happen (or not happen) when looking at data migrations.
If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!
Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.