Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Discovering what Mary actually uses her time at (American) football game practices for, as well as finding out about her professional background. We chat about how she kept going when working at an end-user, and what happened when major accounting errors in the system were discovered!
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So for starters, the title is somewhat of a mouthful, right? Try saying ‘Channel Integration Framework’ several times fast, and you’ll end up with some VERY interesting sounding words. Thankfully, people and organisations working with it usually shorten it to ‘CIF’. So that’s what I’m going to do as well (which will also hopefully prevent any RSI whilst I’m typing this all out).
The definition of CIF according to Microsoft is:
The Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework is a cloud-to-cloud extensible framework to integrate third-party channel providers with Dynamics 365 model-driven app using a browser-based JavaScript API library.
Now, for the technically minded (isn’t that all of us?), CIF is a set of API’s (methods, events & protocols) that enable developers to build their own solutions, and integrate them with Dynamics 365.
Examples of these would be a communication widget that’s running on a 3rd party provider cloud system, but that can surface and interact with Dynamics 365.
There are multiple partners out there who are doing this, such as Solgari. The immediate benefits of this is that additional functionality can be provided for customers that Microsoft hasn’t built into the system (yet!). An example of one of the functionalities provided by Solgari is the ability to dial a number directly from the Contact record (telephony):
Before CIF was available, it was usually an immense headache to integrate a 3rd party application solution into the system. It could be done of course, but was something that you had to be REALLY dedicated to doing, with all of the time, efforts and costs that it would involve.
With it being launched, many people breathed a massive sigh of relief, and then started to look around for partners who had solutions that supported it. There are now several Microsoft partners who offer solutions that integrate with CIF, and through this extend the functionality.
The CIF framework offered the following benefits:
The architecture behind CIF is as follows:
So essentially by using 3rd party solutions that integrate with CIF, it’s possible to have customer service offerings covering things like:
This is really great, and is really the starting point for taking customer service to the next level. Companies want to be able to easily and quickly support their customers across all possible channels, as forcing them into using a specific channel doesn’t always work well, and can in fact be counter-productive.
Now, all of the above is of course amazing, and really great. The MAIN drawback is that this was CIF 1.0…..and it’s not possible to load a CIF 1.0 widget into Omnichannel! Aarghhh!!! It’s only possible to use 1.0 widgets with model-driven apps, which Omnichannel is not (more on that another time). So it’s possible to have chat or telephony integrating with Accounts, Contacts etc.
However, don’t despair yet. Microsoft has released CIF 2.0, which DOES integrate with Omnichannel. So stick around, and I’ll be putting up a post around how that works (I know – such a teaser!).
Finding out from Linn Zaw Win about his hobby of online RPG gaming marathons (mostly using PS4 and Nintendo Switch), iterating on projects with minimum viable product sprints, & the need to have people familiar with the actual way to use low code in the Power Platform as well as having code reviews carried out within the team!
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I was out with some friends from the Microsoft technical community over the weekend, and obviously we got to talking about what we’re passionate about, our visions and values, and what we’re trying to achieve – in essence, what drives us.
From my side of things, I believe very strongly in the vision of excelling in customer service. It’s one of the main reasons that I started this blog, to be able to share my passion for it with others, and help them with getting along the journey on this as well. Obviously I also talk about other things in the technical universe, and have some fun along the way as well (which is also very important!), but ultimately I generally try to have my material centred around customer service.
Now it might seem obvious as to why customer service is so important. After all, we all want to have the best experience possible.
But hold on – take a moment or two, and ask yourself exactly what excelling in customer service actually means to you? What comes to mind when you say it to yourself, and what visions are conjured up?
Having spoken with many people along the way, some of the answers that come out of this exercise can be:
Now flip the scenario around, and imagine that you’re providing a service, or a brand. What does excellent customer service mean to you, and why is it so important?
Again, some of the common themes and concepts that come out of this include:
There are plenty of examples of companies who have not just good, but great customer service. I’ve experienced a few myself over the years.
There’s the amazing example of an Amazon support representative who took the initiative in a support conversation to say that they’re Thor (a Norse god). The customer wanted to play along, and well, the rest can be seen below:
Did the support agent solve the problem? Yes. Did the customer walk away feeling that the situation was resolved? Yes. But…did the customer feel that they were engaged and had a positive support experience, and would continue with the provider? YES!!
I had a support session once myself with Amazon (unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot of it anymore) where the support session turned into comparing different fruits, and the benefits of each. Was it germane to the support session? Nope – but I came out of it feeling that the agent was really trying to understand me, and go above/beyond the general support role.
In today’s day and age, where there are so many competitors in markets, it’s the customer service that REALLY can make a specific brand or service provider stand out. It’s this that ensures that customers stay loyal, feel rewarded and empowered, and even recommend to others (which is, at the end of the day, absolutely free marketing for the company!).
Two great examples of this have been demonstrated by Lego and Trader Joe’s:
Lego
Losing a favourite toy feels devastating to a young child. Longtime Lego fan Luka Apps spent all of his Christmas money on a Ninjago (Lego ninja). Against his dad’s advisement, he brought his Ninjago on a shopping trip … and lost it. Luka wrote a letter to Lego explaining his loss and assuring the Lego staff that he would take extra-special care of his action figure if they sent him another one:
The response he received from Lego customer support representative Richard was nothing short of amazing. Richard told Luke that he had talked to Sensei Wu (a Ninjago character), writing:
Trader Joe’s
An elderly man, 89 years of age, was snowed in at his Pennsylvanian home around the holidays, and his daughter was worried that he wasn’t going to have access to enough food due to the impending storm and bad weather in the area.
After calling multiple stores in a desperate attempt to find anyone who would deliver to her father’s home, she finally got hold of someone at Trader Joe’s, who told her that they also do not deliver … normally.
Given the extreme circumstance, they told her that they would gladly deliver directly to his home, and even suggested additional delivery items that would fit perfectly with his special low-sodium diet.
After the daughter placed the order for the food, the employee on the phone told her that she didn’t need to worry about the price; the food would be delivered free of charge. The employee then wished her a Merry Christmas.
Less than 30 minutes later the food was at the man’s doorstep — for free!
In refusing to let red tape get in the way of a customer in need, Trader Joe’s shows that customer service doesn’t need to be about the fanfare; it can simply be about doing the right thing.
The above two examples show how companies can go above and beyond, and deliver stellar customer service. In these stories, did they make anything on it financially? Well no, not immediately. But the customer appreciation and loyalty, not to mention the (eventual) publicity, is priceless. Customers WANT to have a company or service provider that would do this sort of thing for them in an emergency.
Having been involved with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 product for over a decade now, I’ve carefully followed the path that it’s taken, and where the roadmap seems to be pointing to.
Now, Unified Service Desk (USD) has been around for a while, and it’s a really good product. Neil Parkhurst has written extensively on the subject over the years (take a look at https://neilparkhurst.com/ for more information around it). Omnichannel is, in my opinion, NOT a replacement for USD, though it could play a part in it (one of the reasons it’s not a replacement is because Omnichannel can’t connect to legacy on-premise systems, whereas USD can).
However, I believe that for companies that have a cloud-centric approach, Omnichannel is really the key answer to bringing all of their customer engagements together. Together with the enterprise-grade routing that’s available within it, it can enable and empower organisations like nothing before (well, nothing without having to write a LOT of very custom code, of course).
Being able to effortlessly serve communication across all contact channels, seeing the history of these interactions, and building the customer appreciation and loyalty really is what is key for all businesses now. It’s what will make them stand out from their competition, draw customers in, and put themselves ahead of everyone else
This is where Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 has been positioned, and the value that it will bring to all. It’s an amazing journey, and it’s only getting started!
Andrew brings a personal halo to the discussion, where we covered wine, book writing, and his first job involving pulling cabling through ceiling spaces! We may have also discussed fires – watch the episode to find out more!
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A week ago, the release notes for Wave 1 2020 come out, covering both Dynamics 365 ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave1/) and the Power Platform ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/). Well, people have been VERY eagerly waiting for these, and my news feeds started to blow up with people commenting on the new features that are coming out.
I’ve been very carefully reading through them to see what’s applicable for Omnichannel, as well as researching other sources. The great news is that there’s some really cool stuff that’s going to be released within this (or before!) for Omnichannel – to date we’ve had a good start as a baseline for the product, and this is going to enhance it further (obviously there are going to be continual developments, and it’s really reassuring to see the effort that Microsoft are putting in to this to get it right).
Incidentally, this is how Microsoft actually talk about Omnichannel within the release notes:
“A true omnichannel experience in the product will preserve context and provide a continuous experience as customers seamlessly switch across self-service, peer-to-peer service, and assisted-service channels. An empowered agent experience will provide an application experience that is unified across channels and line-of-business (LOB) applications, is contextual to the engagement, and comes with productivity tools to resolve issues faster“
So, without further ado, here we go! (I’m including the dates that are applicable to each item for reference)
Digital messaging support for Microsoft Teams
Public Preview – April 2020. No current date for GA release
Companies that are already using Teams for communications will be able to use it for internal support delivery, thereby reducing the number the tools that the business needs to manage. This will allow employees to raise items internally through Teams, which will feed through to teams using Omnichannel for internal company purposes.
Digital messaging support for Whatsapp (Twilio)
Public Preview – April 2020. No current date for GA release
The communication methods will expand to include the ability to have communications through WhatsApp Messenger. This is a widely used mobile app throughout the world, and people will be able to use it to contact companies directly
Digital messaging support for LINE
GA – April 2020
Businesses will be able to add a communication channel for LINE communications (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software) for further information about LINE).
Digital messaging support for SMS (Twilio)
GA – April 2020
Currently Omnichannel support SMS through Telesign. Wave 1 will include additional capabilities to access SMS through Twilio. Customers will require a Telio SMS subscription to leverage this.
Digital messaging support for WeChat
GA – April 2020
Any company that has business in China will be aware of WeChat. It’s similar to WhatsApp Messenger, through with admittedly greater capabilities (people can pay for goods using WeChat, transfer money, and carry out a variety of other tasks).
This release will add native WeChat capabilities for Omnichannel, which will be of major benefit to companies that have Chinese clients.
Digital messaging support for Twitter
GA – April 2020
Wave 1 will allow customers to engage with companies through Twitter, using Twitter Direct Message (DM’s). The end-user experience will be directly through Twitter, whilst the agent experience will be using Omnichannel
Raise live chat conversations to a voice/video call
GA – April 2020
Expanded channel choices will allow customers to raise a conversation from the live chat experience to a voice/video call. This in turn will allow queries to be expedited and resolved in less time, as well as allowing agents to better understand what the customer is trying to achieve, and creating a more personal interaction with the customer.
Co-browse capabilities through 3rd party providers
Public Preview – January 2020. GA – April 2020
One of the most frustrating things about providing support to someone is that occasionally you wish you could actually see their screen, just to understand what the customer is actually doing! Well, this is coming to Omnichannel!
Agents can better help customers when customers can show agents what’s happening on their device. In this release, API & related artifacts are being provided that will allow partners to integrate existing 3rd party co-browse solutions. There are already several partners working together with Microsoft to get this out there, and I’m sure that there will be more over time.
Remote assistance capabilities through 3rd party providers
Public Preview – January 2020. GA – April 2020
Following on from the item about regarding co-browsing, the next logical step is to be able to have a support agent accessing a device to address an issue, rather than trying to walk the customer through what could be some quite technical steps.
In this release, API & related artifacts are being provided that will allow partners to integrate existing 3rd party co-browse solutions. There are already several partners working together with Microsoft to integrate their products with Omnichannel
All in all, I’d say that the above capabilities that will be coming to Omnichannel are really encouraging, and I can’t wait to play (and talk through) them! I’m also starting to wonder what goodies will be dropping for Wave 2!
Discussing marathons, triathlons, and how Dave got into these. Also discussing the joys of bulk deletion jobs with appropriate scheduling timing, and the ‘joys’ of unmanaged patches with managed solutions!
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We’ve all had these types of scenarios. You know, when you’re needing to type the same response (or similar ones) time and time and time again to customers. Or alternatively queries can be grouped together under different topics, and you just wish there was a way to quickly and easily answer these, rather than manually answering each customer.
Thankfully, there is indeed such functionality within Omnichannel! No longer do you need to type out general responses (or indeed custom responses) each and every time that a customer requests some information about something, or when helping them out.
In Omnichannel, these are called ‘Quick Responses’, and are really incredibly easy to use.
As a default, the system ships with some quick responses already loaded in, and available to use. This covers usual circumstances such as ‘Hello, how may I assist you?’, ‘Your patience is appreciated. I will be with you shortly’, and also ‘This chat service is permission based. Before a chat begins, no data is collected about you beyond the information which websites usually collect. Once an invitation is accepted, all chats are monitored for quality assurance purposes. Any information gathered is for internal use only.’
In fact, not only are these pre-loaded in English, they’re actually pre-loaded in 23 other languages as well! (at the time of writing, that is – I’m sure there will be more to come)
Now these are all very well and good for generic customer service. What makes this really cool though is that you can create your own ones, and then use them.
Setting them up is really simple and straightforward. Make sure that you’re in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, scroll down in the left side navigation bar to ‘Quick Replies’ (in the ‘Agent Experience’ section), click it, and then click the ‘New’ button on menu ribbon bar:
Give the record a title to identify it by, select a local, and then enter the message that you’re wanting to use:
Now all the agent needs to do in the chat window is use the ‘/q’ command (without the quotation characters, of course). Typing this will bring up the Quick Response window in the chat session.
The agent can then type in a keyword, and the list of available quick replies will be filtered to just those that have the keyword in it:
Note that due to the way in which Omnichannel works, it can sometimes take a little time before the new Quick Reply entries will appear for the agent to use in the chat interface
Clicking on the line that they want to use will then populate the text from that quick reply into the chat window. The agent can modify it if they want to, and then send it to the customer:
This is a really helpful feature, and can assist greatly in speedier responses to customers, as well as cutting down on the time needed for interactions!
This is a slightly different post to the ones that I usually do, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s something that I’ve been wanting to do a post on for a while. Secondly, the release notes for Wave 1 2020 drops today, and I’m obviously wanting to do a write-up on the details from it as soon as I can!
So, the Not For Profit (NFP) sector. Well, organisations within this sector can vary, of course. There are classic examples such as Greenpeace and the National Trust (for those people outside of the UK, take a look at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ for more information on what this is, and what it does.
There are also many other examples, namely charities. Now there are a great many types of charities, ranging from the Great Ormond Street Children’s Charity (Great Ormond Street Hospital, or GOSH as it’s known for short, as a world-renowned children’s hospital based in London, UK) to local small community charities.
Where am I going with all of this? Well, it’s quite simple actually. Microsoft provides low cost access to their software and offerings, as well as some free items as well. In fact it’s incredible how extensive this can be! (there are of course other organisations that provide similar offerings too, which shouldn’t be forgotten).
As part of my involvement in my local community, I’m the IT administrator for several community charities/organisations (yes – I’m the one they call to reset their password when they’ve forgotten it!!). In my role for them, I’ve used Microsoft offerings such as Office 365, as well as PowerPlatform apps sitting on the CDS to get things working more efficiently.
I had known for a while about the discounted software offerings that were available, such as Office (desktop & cloud versions) and other software.
There’s a global company called Techsoup (https://www.techsoup.org/) who’s mission is to build a dynamic bridge that enables civil society organisations and social change agents around the world to gain effective access to the resources they need to design and implement technology solutions for a more equitable planet. Companies such as Microsoft partner with Techsoup, and once a charity is qualified and confirmed by Techsoup as meeting all of the necessary criteria, they can sign up for and purchase software. It’s really amazing to see the extensive catalogue available, and can really help the smaller organisations (who otherwise would be paying a lot for software licensing).
However, Microsoft takes this to another level. There’s a specific Microsoft NFP website (https://nonprofit.microsoft.com/) at which NFP organisations can sign up for, to gain access to resources that they wouldn’t necessarily find elsewhere.
Microsoft states there that ‘Microsoft is dedicated to making the benefits of world-class cloud technology accessible and affordable for nonprofits. We offer discounted and donated industry-leading solutions for nonprofits.’
There are currently 5 areas that are offered against:
This is all really great and amazing. What’s even more amazing is that there’s special licensing available around things like Dynamics 365 & the Power Platform, where I’ve been seeing so much growth recently in.
NFP organisations knowing about all of these things could then work forward to use the technology to enable & empower them (yes, this is sort of a catchphrase of me, I know…). They could do this either themselves, with their existing IT people, or super/power users who understand technology. These people could quite easily start learning the skills to use such tools as PowerBI, PowerApps, etc, and see how they could bring the technology to the best usage cases for the organisation.
Alternatively, they could partner (if they’re not doing so already, of course) with implementation providers who specialise in the NFP sector. In the UK, one of the main ones in the Microsoft solutions space is m-hance (https://m-hance.com/). They are well known within the UK for their attention to detail, and their passion for the NFP sector.
Note: For sake of clarity, I have not/do not work for/with m-hance, nor gain anything from any work that they carry out, nor from any company that may wish to engage with them from having read this post
I also personally know one of the people who work there – Mike Hartley (oh yes Mike, I am indeed mentioning you on my blog!). I’ve known Mike for a while now, and he’s one of the most passionate people that I’ve met within the Microsoft communities. I’ve chatted with him one-on-one around both technical and non-technical concepts, and have always been really impressed with how he approaches things. I’ve also attended sessions that he’s presented on, and always walked out with new ideas in mind! He’s just one example of the way in which passion and drive can really TRULY help with social and community items – we’re not even talking major scale, but rather on a local scale to help the people around us.
I have spoken to several organisations that have benefited greatly through services from Microsoft partners who work in this space, and heard how incredible the journey has been. It’s really a wonder to see their technological journey, and see how they’re making people’s lives better, one day at a time.
So….if you work in a charity, or know a charity that you think might benefit from this – speak to your company, mention this to them, and spread the word. One of the concepts that I try to practice daily is the concept of ‘pay it forward’ – do/help someone else, not because you’re wanting them to then do something for you, but altruistically. This can have an immeasurable effect over time!
Discussions around diving, cats (lots of cats!), and children. Bringing important thoughts to the conversation on why it’s so important to have ‘safety barriers’ in place for things in life, especially when you don’t have control of the environment
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!
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