Tag: information

Proactive chat in Omnichannel for Dynamics 365

We’ve all been there. We’re on a website page, trying to understand it, and not really getting anywhere. Whether it’s about how to fill in a form, or technical instructions and information, our mind has gone blank. The words are on the page, but they’re just not making sense – and we don’t know what to do!

What would we say if suddenly a prompt came up, asking if we needed some help with understanding things, and offering to connect us with a live agent if we wanted some assistance? Well, quite a lot of people would be grateful for that, I’d think.

There are quite a few websites out there that have this functionality – I know that I’ve seen it on various sites I’ve been on, though it’s not always been implemented in the best of ways.

Well, now Microsoft have decided to bring in their own form of it, and it sits right within Omnichannel for Dynamics 365! It’s able to allow customers to interact either with a bot or with a live agent, depending on how you’ve configured it to work.

Currently it’s in Preview, but I’m expecting it to move to General Availability soon.

Even better, Microsoft have even released a short video around it!

There are two parts to configuring it:

Firstly, you need to enable Proactive Chat. Go to your Chat channels under Omnichannel Administration, open up the Chat record you’re wanting to have Proactive chat enabled for, and change the ‘Enable Proactive Chat’ option to Yes (obviously if you don’t have any chat channels set up, you’d need to create a new one)

Secondly, there’s some code that needs to be embedded on the actual web-page that the chat is active on. Now I know what some of you are thinking – ‘how the heck do I code’? (OK – so the developers aren’t thinking that – they’re thinking ‘oh goodie!!’. Well, I’m not from a development background myself, but I managed to get it to work quite easily. Take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/omnichannel/developer/how-to/start-proactive-chat , where several different scenarios are shown (along with sample code), and you can tweak these as required.

The result then looks like:

This is really helpful. I can then click the ‘Chat Now’ button to start the chat. What I’m also really liking about the experience is that the chat option/window floats on the bottom right side of the screen, so no matter where I am in the page, it’s available (and easily able to be seen)

There are many different ways in which this can be configured. Some of the immediate ones that come to mind (but by no means all of them) are:

  • Someone staying on a webpage for a long period of time
  • Someone who keeps coming back to the same page (perhaps they’re lost, and not able to find what they’re looking for)
  • Someone on a support portal looking at a support case, and wanting to see more information on it
  • Someone coming from a specific webpage to another page
  • Someone accessing the webpage from a specific location (eg country) in the world
  • Special offers being available during a specific time-frame, and only website visitors during that time get the option for the special offers

It’s a really helpful addition to the current Omnichannel capabilities, and I’m sure that there will be many more to come!

Akhilesh Dubey on The Oops Factor

Talking about how running can help with things, interesting sights seen during some of the runs, managing expectations for system migrations with new fields, and the importance of involving the key business unit users as early as possible during the project process!

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.

Required fields on forms – what did you forget to fill in?

Well, somewhat of a mouthful of a title for this article, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it!

You know the scenario – we’ve all been there. There’s a custom form (for a system entity, or even a custom entity). Multiple sections, tabs, and multiple fields that are required. Users are going through data entry, but SOMEHOW have forgotten to fill one (or more???) in, and they’re just not able to save the form!

Well, Microsoft has now upped the quality of the user experience, and OH BOY was I SO excited to see this!

Previously when you clicked the Save button, it just wouldn’t allow you to save. It told you that it was missing required information, and you had to go search to see WHICH field(s) you had missed out on.

But search no longer. For now the notification bar has a whole new behaviour:

Firstly, it tells you that there are notifications, and to select to view (Note: If you’ve only missed out one field, just skip to step 2!)

Then when you click on it, it tells you which (required) fields have data missing from them!

Even better, if you click on the notification for a specific missing field, it even takes you to that field – no longer do you have to try to find where it is!

This is truly amazing, and will help enable users (and relieve their frustration) so much!

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Skills Part III

The previous post in this mini series looked at how we go about enabling skill-based routing (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-ii/).

What we’re now going to do is understand how we go about attaching skills (which we’ve already learned how to set up) to conversations. The premise behind this is that when a customer will access Chat on a website interface, they’ll be presented with one (or more) pre-chat survey questions. The answer/s that are given are then used as skills, and the chat session will be automatically routed to the user who is best placed to help the customer. This is done based on the skill-attachment rules, which we’re now looking at.

There are two types of options available for skill matching:

  1. Exact skill matching. The skill attachment logic looks for the exact skill/s and proficiency level that an agent should have to work on the conversation (and uses this as the minimum criteria). Then it searches for an available agent with these, to route the conversation to. If the minimum criteria aren’t met, then it searches for a higher proficient level. If no agent with a higher proficient level is found, then the conversation remains in the queue
  2. Closest skill matching. This initially works the same as the exact skill matching. The system will identify the skill/s and minimum proficiency levels, and see if there’s an agent available. If not, it’ll search for a higher proficiency level. All the same so far. But if there are no agents matching (or having a higher) proficiency level, it will look for any agents that are available with a lower proficiency level, and route the conversation to them

To create a new skill attachment rule, you’ll need to create (or modify an existing) workstream (we’re going to look at workstreams in another post)

Go to Skill Attachment Rules, select the type of matching logic that you’re wanting, and create a new rule (assuming you’re not modifying an existing one)

In the new rule window that opens, fill in the necessary information on the left hand side. You can then start to set up your rule conditions (and oh boy can these be complicated!) in the Condition box on the right.

Once done, hit the Save button, and the Skills section box will become active. Clicking the ‘New Attach Skill’ button in this box will allow you to select the skill/s and proficiency levels that you’re wanting to use.

Click the ‘Save and Close’ button, and it’ll appear in the Skills box. If you’re wanting to add more than one skill at a time, click the arrow on the Save & Close button, and click the ‘Save and New’ option.

If you then go back to the Workstream record, you’ll need see this appearing in the Skills Attachment Rules section.

Jason Almeida on The Oops Factor

Jason Almeida comes on The Oops Factor, and talks about a somewhat different hobby, along with how he’s been using the PowerPlatform to help with it! We then discuss the importance of communication, and the benefits that it brings.

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.

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Skills Part II

In the previous post, we started to learn how we go about setting up Skills for Omnichannel within Dynamics 365 (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-i/).

In this post, we’re going to see how we enable Skill-Based routing within Omnichannel, as in order to use skills, we need to enable it! (seems obvious, right?).

To do this, we need to be signed into the Omnichannel Administration app, and we then go to ‘Skill Based Routing’, which is under the Settings area in the left-hand side navigation bar:

Clicking here brings up the skill-based routing settings. At the time of writing, this feature is still in preview, and shows an information window declaring this (this will disappear once it goes GA)

Clicking on the toggle slider will change the value to ‘Yes’, and will enable it. It’s also shown nicely in green, which is something that I’m really liking!

Select a Rating Model to use, from the right hand grid. As touched upon in the previous article, rating models are used to set how proficient a user is with a specific skill. You can have multiple rating models saved, and use them for specific scenarios.

Rating Models are made up of two parts:

  1. Rating Model (being the name of the rating model, and the minimum/maximum rating values allowed)
  2. Rating Values (the actual values being used – the number of rating values should be the same as the range for the Rating Model minimum/maximum that you’ve set)

In the next article (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-iii/) we look at how we go about attaching skills to conversations

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Skills Part I

We’ve already gone through and taken a look as to how we set up Queues (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-queues/) and Users (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-users/). The final part of this trio is looking at how we set up Skills in Omnichannel, and apply them (which is going to be in several parts, due to the complexity of this one item!)

As we’ve previously covered (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-queues-users-skills/), skills are used within Omnichannel to enable Skill-Based Routing.

There are several parts to getting this working:

  1. Setting up the actual skill entries
  2. Enabling/configuring skill-based routing
  3. Enabling/configuring the ability for chats to utilise skill-based routing

Yup – it’s somewhat more complex than just saying ‘I want skills!’

So this post is going to cover how to actually set up the skill record entries, which thankfully isn’t too difficult (especially if you’ve been bearing with me, and following the other setup instructions that we’ve been through so far).

To create skills, it’s necessary to have a skill type. Think of it as a hierarchy – if you’re wanting to provide customer services in multiple languages for technical issues, you’re going to want a Language skill type, and Technical skill type. Under each skill type, you’re going to have the applicable entries. So for Language, you’ll have English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.

At the time of writing, creating Skill Types are done from the Systems Customisation (this will likely move to the new Admin Centre at some point, but hasn’t yet). So make sure that you’re logged in as a Dynamics system Administrator, and open Advanced Settings:

Note: The process below is taking place in the default solution. It’s of course possible to deploy this as part of a custom solution – if you’re wanting to do this, then open the custom solution from the Power Platform admin centre, and continue with the steps shown below.

Hover over ‘Settings’ in the ribbon menu bar, and choose Customisations

Now select ‘Customise the System’

Select ‘Option Sets’ in the left hand navigation, then scroll down to ‘Bookable Resource Characteristic Type’ in the main window

Open up, and you’ll see the following window

Using our scenario, I’ve added Language and Technical Area as skill types. Now very importantly, ensure that you SAVE the record, and then PUBLISH it. If you don’t, the skill types won’t show to be used!

Right, now that we’ve done all of that prep work, we can get on with actually entering the skills that we want to use…

So, go back to the Omnichannel Administration section, scroll down in the left hand menu to Skills, and click it to open it. It’ll show all of the skills that we’ve entered (well, it won’t show any entries here yet, as none have been put in yet!). Click ‘New’ on the menu ribbon to create a new entry

You’ll be presented with the following screen, which after all of the above is thankfully quite simple.

The fields are as follows:

  • Name. What it says on the field – nothing complicated. It does need to be unique though, so have a careful think about your needs. You can always use multiple skills together to create a blend that you need across skills
  • Type. This is the Skill type (which we’ve just set up beforehand). If you don’t see the values that you’ve set up in here, make sure that you saved and published the customisations!
  • Description. Put something user-friendly in here to describe what the skill is (if you think it’s necessary…)

Then click ‘Save’ on the menu bar. Once the entry saves, the form will update, and now show a User (Agent) section:

You can now add users (agents, as they’re referred to) to the skill. Click the ellipse on the right hand side of the Users (Agents) grid, and then select the ‘New Bookable Resource Characteristic’ option (the names of these things just keep on getting longer and longer, don’t they!)

A nice simple window will open on the right of the screen, where you can enter the details:

This is done as follows:

  • Skill Value – this is the skill that you’re wanting to assign a user to
  • User (Agent) – this is the actual user. You can type to search through the available users. Very important to note that if you didn’t follow the steps to set up the user as a Bookable Resource, you won’t see them in this list (see https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-users/ for instructions on how to do this)
  • Rating Value – this is used to rate the proficiency of the user at the skill. We’ll cover setting this up in a later post, but essentially think of using a 5 star scale. 1 would mean the user has basic ability at the skill, 3 would mean they’re alright with the skill, and 5 means that they’re at the top of their game with it

You can then click the ‘Save and Close’ button at the bottom of the window, and it’ll add them.

However if you have multiple users that you’re wanting to add, I’d HIGHLY recommend clicking the arrow next to this button, and selecting the ‘Save and Create New’ option. It’s not just to create with the same skill – you can change the Skill Value as well, and it’ll save you more clicks!

Hopefully you’re still following along, and managing to get the setup done correctly – well done!

Up next – enabling skill based routing( https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-ii/)

Dilyana Radulova on The Oops Factor

Talking with Dilyana Radulova on The Oops Factor about some quite interesting hobbies, and then going into discussions about confidence and over-confidence, and how this can impact projects.

Also a suggestion for another hashtag that can be used!

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.

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Users

Now that we’ve set up and assigned Omnichannel security role/s for the users in the system who need access to Omnichannel (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-security/), and seen how queues work (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-queues/), we’re going to look at how we manage users and the various pieces of information for them.

To do this, we need to be in the Omnichannel Administration application (accessed through the Dynamics 365 navigation bar), and select the ‘Users’ option under ‘Queues & Users’

If you hover over a user, you get a quite useful little window, showing their status and some details

Double clicking on the user will open up the system user record. The important thing to note is that there’s now an ‘Omnichannel’ tab available.

From here, it’s possible to set the users default presence (such as Available, DND, Busy, etc – you’re able to add new entries to this list) and capacity.

Capacity is a sort of loose term. Essentially (as we’ll cover in another post) it’s possible to set up different enquiry types. Each enquiry type will have a capacity against it, based on how complex you think it’ll be. So for example checking an order may have a lower capacity set against it than someone dealing with a damaged item.

Capacity is used with routing rules (which will also be covered in another post). When a communication channel is opened up, the system will check to see which agent/s are showing as available, and of those agent/s, which one/s have available capacity for the session (as they may be already dealing with other sessions at the same time).

You’ll also be able to see a list of the Queues that the user has been assigned to.

What you’ll now do is add a Bookable Resource record for the user. What is this exactly?

A bookable resource is anything that can be scheduled. Field Service uses this as well, usually covering people, equipment, and physical spaces (facilities). Each resource can have different attributes that distinguish it from others, including but not limited to:

  • Characteristics (eg Accounting)
  • Categories (eg Manager)
  • Territories (eg United Kingdom)
  • Organisational Unit (eg Customer Service)
  • Location (eg London)
  • Resource Type (eg User)

Omnichannel uses scheduling to know which users are available, assigned to specific queues, etc. Due to this, we need to create this ‘Bookable Resource’ record (which is unique – you can only have one of these for each user!).

To create this, scroll down the page, until you get to the ‘Skills Configuration’ section. Here you should click the menu ellipse, and select ‘New Bookable Resource’.

This will open the ‘New Bookable Resource’ window. Leave everything as it is, and just fill in the ‘Name’ field with the name of the user

Click the save button on the menu bar, and it’ll then take you back to the user record. Well done! You’ve now created the Bookable Resource record for the user.

In the next section, we look at how to start setting up Skills – https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-skills-part-i/

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Queues

In the previous article, we’ve taken a look at what Queues, Users and Skills are actually all about (https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-queues-users-skills/)

We’re now going to look as to how we go about configuring these. In this post, we’re going to look at Queues.

Please note that there is a default Omnichannel queue that is created for each organisation.

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This default queue can’t be deleted, not even by an admin! By default, all Omnichannel users are members of the default queue. Therefore, the membership of this queue can’t be changed

Amusingly the priority of this default queue is set to 2147483647! This is, of course, the maximum value that the field can hold.

The way that queue priorities work is that the lower the number, the higher the priority. So 1 is higher than 2, etc. Thankfully Microsoft realised that there could be situations where everything just went to the default queue even when custom queues had been created, and therefore did the extremely intelligent move of setting the default queue to be the lowest possible priority!

Creating a new queue is quite simple! Navigate to the ‘Queues’ option in the left hand navigation, click on it, and then click the ‘New’ button on the menu ribbon bar

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You’ll be prompted to give the new queue a name, and set a priority. Fill these in, and then click the ‘Save’ button on the menu ribbon bar

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Once the queue has been saved, the form layout changes to allow users to be added to the queue, by using the ‘Add Existing User’ button in the Users grid.

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Adding one or more users here will mean that when queries come into this queue that’s just been set up, these specific users will be able to see and respond (other users will not be able to).

In this manner, it’s possible to easily control which users have access to specific queues, which can benefit the efficiency of the engagement

Please note that only users who have been enabled for Omnichannel (ie had the necessary security role/s given to them) will be available to be added here.

So if you’re trying to add a user who isn’t coming up in the search here, please check that they have the security roles given to them, as we’ve covered in the post at https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-security/ (and of course that they’re correctly licensed!)

In the next post, we’ll be looking at how to set up and assign Skills.