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!
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!
I’ve previously touched on macros in https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-productivity-tools/, but with some new functionality that’s now come out, I thought it would be quite interesting to dive deeper in them. By doing do, we can see how they work, the functionality that they offer, and some really cool & interesting scenarios!
Let’s have a quick reminder of what macros are all about (for those who don’t know, yet):
Macros allow customer service agents to carry out repetitive tasks that can span multiple entities. Eg opening forms (model-driven apps), pre-populating data into the form, etc. Through this, not only are there less manual tasks/steps to carry out, there’s now the ability to carry out the same tasks, without worrying about a step being missed, or the wrong data copied in, etc.
With that in mind, let’s see what there is for macros in Omnichannel. As a default, there were always the following 3 pre-defined automation actions:
With these, we’re able to do things like:
Opening a form to create a new record. This could be used to create a new contact automatically
Opening an existing record. This could be used to open an existing contact (based on pre-survey questions, such as email address etc
Searching the Knowledge Base using specified keywords/phrases
Opening an email form with a pre-defined templated
Linking records together
There’s now a new option available:
Hmm. This looks interesting. What happens when we select it?
We get a condition block! Clicking ‘Add an action’ will allow us to then add either one of the pre-defined automation actions, or another Control/Condition block.
OK – so you’re now thinking that I’m getting over excited about this. But hold on – let me explain further why I’m really liking this.
So when using Power Automate, frequently I’ll use condition blocks to check/satisfy things (it’s obviously available in Logic Apps as well, but I have minimal experience of those to date). Some of them can get quite advanced, but it comes in useful. However for Omnichannel macros to date, it’s not been possible to do this. We’ve been limited to just a few options, without being able to specify branching criteria based on variables.
Now we’re (finally) able to do this. The Condition field works in the same way as Power Automate does, with being able to string multiple statements together, and have actions that result from them. We’re also able to use slugs in them, to populate variables & use customer-entered data.
Let’s see an example of this. We have a customer who’s opening an Omnichannel chat session. They’ve filled in the pre-survey questions, in which we’ve asked for the following pieces of information:
First Name (required)
Last Name (required)
Email Address (required)
Company Name
With the condition check in place, we can either create just a contact record (if the customer didn’t fill in the company name field), or we can create both account & contact records, and link the two together. We could also check if the customer already exists as a contact, and then not need to create any records for them.
This means that there will be much less manual work for the agent to carry out, as they won’t have to manually create all of these records.
We’re able to string these together in ‘multi’ step scenarios, to allow things to flow on from each other:
There are also other options available to use, such as the ability to clone, and the ability to open a new application tab. I’ve covered application tabs at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-application-tabs/, so we can see how helpful this could actually be. We wouldn’t need to automatically open a specific system for all customers contacting us; instead we’re able to selectively open things based on the actual customer. This makes for a much cleaner & better agent experience, in my opinion.
In summary, this is a really helpful & useful feature that’s been added, bringing even better functionality to macros. We’ve been able to do these sorts of things elsewhere to date, and being able to do it here now as well is great. All I can say is that I’m wondering what else we could do…perhaps kick off a Power Automate Flow as well? We’ll have to wait and see 🙂
One of the really nice things about the Omnichannel Agent experience is that it uses tabs. The conversation itself is in the left side of the screen, with the Customer Summary open in the right side of the screen. However this isn’t fixed into place – it’s possible to open additional tabs next tot he Customer Summary tab, and navigate to various places in the system.
This allows agents to easily look up additional information on records such as contacts & cases, as well as other places.
Agents are therefore able to quickly flip between different system records, getting the information that they may need to satisfy the customer interaction.
So that’s great. Clicking the + icon on the tab allows new tabs to be opened, and the agent can select which record type they’d like to see:
The system allows movement between these if they disappear off the screen with arrow buttons being available:
So all of this is really good, and is provided as system default behaviour, without any customisation or configuration being needed to be done.
So let’s now think about several other types of scenarios, and see what could be done to enable them:
You want the agent to see a dashboard showing how long the production line is currently taking with different order types
You want to be able to look up an item in another stock system
You want to carry out a custom search in your distributor network
All of the above items (and many more) are things that aren’t native within Dynamics 365. It’s therefore not possible to display this with native system functionality…or is it?
Well, it is! Omnichannel has something called ‘Application Tab Templates’. These allow you to specify custom tabs to open when a chat start. With these, you’re able to point to any web-based resource, even if it’s not within Dynamics 365!
Note: It’s not possible to point to a bespoke desktop application using Application Tab Templates. The resource that you’re wanting to point to needs to be web-based. This is one of the main differentiators between Omnichannel & Unified Service Desk – USD allows you to point to a desktop/server application within the window.
Setting up a new Application Tab Template is not too difficult, thankfully:
We’re able to select what the Application Type should be. There are various options here, including web resources, ‘third party’ websites, entity lists, etc:
When we save the record, we can then input the necessary parameters for that type. These parameters are system-defined, so we have to work within these, and can’t add any additional ones (at this point in time). We can also use values from pre-chat surveys based on information that the customer has provided before the chat starts. Imagine being an agent with a new conversation, and you already have the entire purchase history for them open, or their billing records!
Once this has been created, the next step is to associate it with a session template. Session templates govern the following items:
The behaviour of the chat by default (Docked, Minimized or Hidden
The name of the session
The application tab/s that open (you can add as many as you want to)
The agent scripts that are available to be used.
To do this, open the relevant session template, and then add the application tab/s to it that you want to appear:
Save & close the session template record, and refresh the agent interface. When a new chat session comes in, Hey Presto!
Using the ability to have different chat widgets, it’s possible to customise each one in a different way. So for example:
The Sales team could have the distributor system open, to know how long it’ll take to fulfil an order
The Billing team could have their invoice/finance system open, to have the customer billing history
The Motorbike Servicing team could have their system which tracks all work done on your motorbike open, to see the entire service history
It’s really up to you how you choose to best make use of this. I feel it’s really quite helpful, and will cut down on the time that agents need to spend to pull up different pieces of information to help the customer.
How do you think you would use it in your company? Comment below to share 🙂
With all of that, I thought it would be helpful to take a further look into how sentiment analysis actually works, so that we can understand it a little better.
Now, the actual nuts & bolts for sentiment analysis are provided by Azure Cognitive Services. There are a wide range of tools available through this, but we have no need to go into Azure to configure this. It’s a simple setting within Omnichannel to get it working, rather than needing to fiddle around with many different things:
However, what’s actually going on during a conversation, and how is the sentiment analysis worked out/calculated? We see the pretty little face icons (with the different colours), but how are these actually being set?
Well, there are two ways in which algorithms are used to calculate the sentiment that’s shown:
Natural language processing (NLP)
Machine learning (ML) algorithms
With these two ways methods, it’s possible to not only see what the current interactions are showing, but also to enhance the model to understand sentiment better.
Note: In a session that I presented recently, one of the attendees asked if it’s possible to train the model, to result in a custom algorithm. Unfortunately this isn’t possible to do – the machine learning that takes place is the general Azure one, rather than one for a single company or customer
The following diagram shows the sentiments that are used. They’re nicely colour-coded, for ease of reference as well:
When a customer interacts through Omnichannel, the sentiment shown is based on the last 6 messages received from the customer. As a result, the sentiment shown can very well fluctuate & change during the conversation, based on how it’s going.
Obviously, customers aren’t just going to use English to communicate. Companies are based around the world, and will use their native/local language when providing support. Omnichannel allows for this without an issue, utilising the Azure Text Translator API behind the scenes to provide this. If you’re interested to see which languages are supported for this, head to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/language-support which is the latest source of information for this.
There are some interesting things to know around how this actually works:
When a language other than English is used, the Text Translator API translates the text to English, and then it’s analysed/scored for sentiment
If a language isn’t supported by the Text Translator API, it won’t be scored
If profanity (eg a swearword) is detected, the sentiment will automatically be shown as Negative or Very Negative, regardless of the rest of the last 6 lines of conversation
Some people have expressed their concern to me around how accurate the Azure translation actually is, but to date I haven’t seen any major concerns resulting out from it. As with the other Azure services, Microsoft is continually refining & improving it. That being said, there are several languages with very nuanced terms. I’d like to think that these would be supported without issues.
There is, however, somewhat of an interesting behaviour when starting off the analysis at the beginning of the conversation:
If the initial language is detected as English, it’s assumed that all of the subsequent conversation will be in English. As a result, if the customer switches away from English, the system won’t recognise this, and a Neutral sentiment score will be shown
If the initial conversation is not in English, then the system will check every conversation line & re-detect the language as necessary.
This seems somewhat strange to me, as I’d have thought that the system would automatically check the language for each conversation line. I can think of plenty of scenarios where different languages are used in a single conversation, even if it does start with English being used. I’d like to think that this will be updated at some point, to make the experience better.
Going into Matt’s love of films, and why we think we should set up a ‘Quiz Supper Night’ team as a service to others. Discovering the story of the first data migration that he ever did, and his discovery of the special fields to use when uplifting data into a system.
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While I’ve covered a lot of different pieces of functionality from both the end customer & agent experience, I haven’t really touched on the Supervisor experience to date. With the release of a nice little piece of functionality for it around Sentiment Analysis, I’ve therefore decided that it would be a good time to take a look at it.
Now obviously supervisors exist, in the sense that any contact centre would have managers in place to manage the agents. Indeed, they may actually handle customer queries directly as well – miracles have been known to happen! 😉
Really the aim of the supervisor role within Omnichannel is intended to help customer service managers or supervisors enhance their team’s performance and improve customer satisfaction. They need to ensure that customer queries:
Are being responded to quickly within an accepted period of time
have agents that are providing the right information necessary to handle the query
Are handled in a satisfactory way
Leave the customer feeling positive & satisfied around the interaction
To this end, the supervisor role includes access to various dashboards & views on the sessions that are taking place. From this, they’re able to ensure that KPI’s are being met, that queues aren’t overflowing, and that agents are carrying out the right work.
Please note that PowerBI Pro or PowerBI Premium licenses are required for users with the Supervisor role in order to access & view these dashboards
On-going Conversation Dashboard
The on-going conversation dashboard is one of the first tools available to supervisors. In this, they can see the entire ‘landscape’ at one glance, covering:.
Which conversations are currently active
The queue that the conversation has come through
The channel that the conversation has come through
Which agent is currently handing the interaction
The sentiment of the customer experience (more on this below)
Through this, there’s a wealth of knowledge that the supervisor can use. If a conversation doesn’t appear to be going well, they can reach out to the agent who’s handling it, and ask if they need assistance. They can be ready to offer escalation resolution should it be needed.
Supervisors are also able to allocate any conversation that’s an in ‘Open’ state (ie it hasn’t yet started) to a specific agent, or to a specific queue.. They would do this by selecting the conversation in the window, clicking the Assign button (which appears when the conversation is selected), & selecting either Agent or Queue. Depending on which option is selected, they can then select the agent or queue that they wish to.
Furthermore, supervisors are also able to monitor any conversation that is happening (as long as it’s in the Active or Wrap Up stage). When doing this, the customer & the agent don’t know that the supervisor is monitoring the conversation (unless the agent requests it, of course). Through this, they can keep an eye on how things are going, and if they feel it’s necessary, they can join it (without needing to be invited to it). Of course when they join the conversation as an active party, the customer is then notified about it.
To do this, a supervisor would select the conversation (providing it is in the ‘Active’ or Wrap Up’ state) and then can click ‘Monitor’. This action triggers a new session for the supervisor to be pulled into the conversation.
Sentiment Analysis for Supervisors
So one of the really cool features (in my opinion) that’s recently appeared is the ability to use sentiment analysis to automatically alert supervisors.
You’re able to choose the level of sentiment that you want supervisors to be alerted on. When a conversation reaches the predefined level, the supervisor will get a prompt like this:
Sentiment analysis notification
They can then click through to either monitor the conversation (& help out if necessary), or to ignore it. This can be really helpful as it’s allowing the supervisor to be proactive, rather then needing to keep a close eye all the time on the supervisor dashboards. Indeed for a large contact centre, there could be dozens or even hundreds of conversations happening at the same time, so this will immediately flag these conversations to them.
This section gives supervisors insights into conversations that have occurred over the last 24 hours, against a range of KPI’s. This is therefore a ‘rolling state’ dashboard, without the ability to go back further over time, or pick a specific date-range. If this ability is needed, then the Agent Insights dashboard will be used.
As you can see from the image above, we’re looking at metrics across different sorts of KPI’s:
Average wait times
Average handling times
Conversations exceeding specified criteria
This can be very helpful on an on-going basis to see how the contact centre is performing overall, over the time period. Drilling down into these items can help identify bottlenecks & choke points, which can then be worked on to provide better service & efficiencies.
Agent Insights
This part of the dashboard gives information across various health & status items on any given day. Using this, supervisors can drill down into issues that may not be visible through the conversation insights dashboard.
From the screen above, we can see that things like conversation states, agent status & participation modes are available to view.
Because these are PowerBI dashboards, it’s possible to drill down further into them, filter by item (eg queue, agent, etc), and see very specific stats about items.
I hope that this proves to be helpful in understanding some of the tools that are available within Omnichannel for supervisors, and the help that they can give in running an efficient and productive contact centre!
Finding out what Ramon misses about Spain, and the wonders that he’s discovered in London. If you’re ever in the mood for a stroll along South Bank, drop him a line! Going into details around his background as a pure .Net developer, and what happened on a project for a contact that didn’t go through proper requirement gathering. Quite an interesting story.
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Here’s a scenario that could be all too familiar to us. We’re on-boarding users (to either Dynamics 365 or a Power Platform app), & they’re new to the environment that it’s deployed to. So they’re set up, and all ready to go. Suddenly they start asking why records created (or modified) by colleagues show up as having the wrong time on them.
Does this sound familiar? I’m sure it does to quite a few people out there!. See, there’s no way to set a default system-wide time zone in Dynamics 365 (or Power Platform). At least not that I’ve come across – if you know of one, please comment below with instructions as to how to do this!
As a result, users are given the default timezone, and need to change it. This is easily done through the Personalization settings area in the app. Users click here, and then select their appropriate time-zone. Brilliant…or so you’d think.
See, when it’s one or two users, it’s generally OK to tell them to do that. However, when it’s 200 or 2000 users, you’re going to get push-back. The last thing you want is for a large number of them to start contacting you to work out how to do it (read the instructions, perhaps?).
I’ve had this scenario over the last week, where the client actually told us that they didn’t want us to tell users to update it manually. They wanted a better solution.
Well, there is a solution out there to update users. It’s the ‘User Settings Utility’ app that’s in the XrmToolBox (https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/plugins/MsCrmTools.UserSettingsUtility/). Really neat & nifty, and does just what it says on the box. Simple enough to select users (or all of them at a time), select the time-zone you’re wanting to apply to them, and click a button. Hey presto – it’s been updated
Hmm. But what if you didn’t want to have to do this manually. Or (and this is what I was dealing with), there were decent enough number of users being added to the app every few days, & I didn’t want to have to do this as a manual task.
So I started digging into how the time-zone setting was actually stored. It turns out that there’s an entity called ‘User Settings’, which is associated with a User record. Oh, and if you’re going to want to take a look at this entity to see what it contains, it’s NOT available through the front end. You can’t go into the entity list and just display it (though if you’ve found a way to do this through the Power Platform NATIVELY, drop me a line, please?).
Anyhow, back to things. There’s a value for ‘TimeZoneCode’, which maps to a specific time-zone. Aha, I thought! Right – now what’s the best way that I could work out to do this automatically. Checking in with some contacts in the tech community (thanks BlackOps etc!), Power Automate was suggested, so I started to see about how I could go about it…
So, I created a Power Automate Flow (haha…I got the name right there!). On creation of a new user record, it would programmatically go away and update the value to the one for the time-zone that I wanted it to be set as. This actually worked really well.
The only drawback is that through the user interface, it’s not actually shown as being updated, though it has been. Or sometimes it changes, but doesn’t reflect it accurately. This is somewhat annoying, and caused me quite some confusion between checking the front end to see if things were working, & confirming through the back end (& opening records up) to see that it was. I still have NO idea why this was happening.
Before changing my settings
After changing my time zone to USA (EST)
For my specific scenario, all of the users are in the UK, so I set it to update every user on creation to the UK time-zone. Obviously if you have users in different time-zones, you’d want to set this differently. This shouldn’t be an issue though, as you can expand the Power Automate Flow and add logic conditions/branches to be able to do this.
Now I think that this is pretty cool, and I couldn’t find anything out there for this. I’ve therefore decided to release this in a small solution, for others to be able to use. Part of this is the entire list of time-zones with their specific codes, so that you can update to whichever one you need to.
Talking through Ben’s love of cars & sound systems (he has friends who have been on Pimp My Ride), how he actually really respond to long emails (and the outcomes from that), and what he really thinks of Outlook-reminder style app. Also touching on the important of empathy in the workplace, and getting better from mistakes.
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Finding out from Matt as to how he got into vlogging (video blogging) to begin with, and the special test that he uses when explaining technology concepts. Matt shared with us about his special ‘love’ of Sharepoint content types with inheritance, how he occasionally does a spot of ‘pruning’ with Sharepoint forms, & the absolutely important of community!
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