Tag: information

‘Swarming’ for Customer Service

You might be wondering as to what I mean by ‘swarming’ in the title for this post. Don’t worry – it’ll become clear pretty soon! But first of all, let’s understand the story behind this new functionality.

Where to begin? Well, let’s take a look within an organisation. It doesn’t really matter what sort of organisation it is, as most organisations will have something similar scenarios overall. So, what are we actually talking about?

Customer Service is, of course, a very important functionality of any organisations. Customers who have purchased products may need support, or perhaps are having issues, and need them to be resolved. Customer service agents are there to handle the customer queries, and look to resolve them as soon as possible.

However, it’s possible that the customer service agents don’t actually know how to resolve the customer query/issue themselves. They can, of course, use the Knowledge Base, but that requires knowledge articles to be created & maintained.

Now within the organisation, there will be SME’s (Subject Matter Experts). These are the people who know the matter in precise detail, often being the people who have created the product and/or process to begin with. But these people aren’t usually carrying out the customer service function.

So what this means is that the customer service agents need to try to work out who might actually know the answer/s, be able to help resolve the customer issue, etc. This can take time, be laborious, and perhaps not even be able to be carried out (depending on the organisation).

Hmm. So, what if the system might be able to actually SUGGEST the right people for a problem or issue? Even better, what if the system could support them being involved directly with the record/s, regardless of whether they’re a user within Dynamics 365 or not?

Enter the swarming capability onto the Dynamics 365 scene….

The aim of swarming is to bring together the necessary experts within Dynamics 365. Now, having said that, not all users will actually be interacting directly within Dynamics 365. What happens is that a specific Teams chat is created, so that users outside of the system can see the necessary information, and give input on the situation.

This builds on the existing functionality of being able to use Teams chats directly within Dynamics 365, but takes it to a whole new level, by having the system automatically suggest relevant people within the organisation, and bring them into the swarm chat!

There are some necessary steps to configure to enable this to happen.

Firstly, Teams needs to be enabled within Dynamics 365:

Once we start to turn things on, we can then see the following. This allows us to be able to specify the types of records that we can use swarming on. This is great, as we may be building out custom functionality using other tables, and can enable swarming on these as well

Once Teams chat has been enabled, we can then start setting up the swarming capabilities:

As part of the setup, we have:

  • The ability to set the general message that users will see when they create a swarm
  • Activating the case form that’s used for swarming (as this will include the functionality for swarming on the case form)
  • A Power Automate flow that will be used for sending notifications & invites within Teams for suggested (internal) users
  • Creating swarm condition rules, which allows us to bring in specific conditions around skills etc

So, how does this work in practise, once the system has been initially configured?

Users can go to the relevant record, such as a case record. They’re able to select the ‘Create swarm’ from the menu bar:

This then allows the user to provide a summary of what the swarm is for, the scenario, as well as selecting the skills needed for the swarm. Dynamics 365 can also suggest skills that it thinks would be helpful as well:

Users from across the organisation are matched, according to the skills identified:

Notifications are sent to them within Teams, requesting their help with the matter:

When they accept the invitation, they’re then brought into the swarm:

In fact, the members of the swarm aren’t actually accessing the swarm information within Dynamics 365. Instead, they’re seeing & interacting with the swarm within Teams itself!

Once the swarm is active, information can be shared, and a solution found. The swarm can then be successfully closed down:

This is truly amazing. Obviously collaboration on issues is important, especially when considering that we’re trying to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible! I’m also really excited about this, as I was part of the initial group that Microsoft reached out to initially for feedback on the capabilities of it.

To now be able to collaborate with users who sit outside of Dynamics 365, but have them access the necessary information to help resolve things, is just mind-blowing. So many scenarios that come to mind as to how this can really empower organisations!

Can you think of a way in which this could change things in your own organisation, or at a client? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear more!

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Searching tables within the Modern Advanced Find

Well for a start, I know that the title of this blog post is somewhat of a mouthful. It’s definitely longer than my usual titles! However I felt it important to do so, given the functionality that I’m actually going to talk about…

So here goes!

As part of the Wave 1 2022 release, both for Power Platform as well as Dynamics 365, we have the new ‘Modern Advanced Find’ capability. This replaces the (legacy) Advanced Find interface, which has been around since almost the beginning of Microsoft CRM…that’s quite a few years!

So within a model-app (as this covers both Power Apps as well as Dynamics 365), the classic Advanced Find was a good friend. Though using the legacy interface (& sometimes being VERY slow to load initially), we could create powerful queries through it. Being able to specify conditions, span multiple tables (with needing to understand the data model), we were able to show & filter data as we needed to.

When loading the Advanced Find interface, we could select from any of the tables within the system, with a LONG list presented to us for this purpose:

Now, just because we could see all tables (system & custom) within the list didn’t mean we could view all data within the tables. Oh no – the security roles applied to users limited what we could do.

In fact, users having security roles with NO permissions on certain tables would NOT see those tables appearing in the Advanced Find interface. Even when users had permissions on tables, but these permissions were limited (such as only being able to view our own records), the data results would be filtered based on our security role access to the records within the table.

OK – all good so far. Well, in general – there have been various complaints over the years about the Advanced Find functionality. So finally, Microsoft updated it to the ‘Modern Advanced Find’.

This needs to be enabled by a system administrator in the environment settings:

So in order to access the Modern Advanced Find, we need to do the following:

  1. Click in the search box at the top of the screen
  2. At the bottom, click the ‘Search for rows in a table using advanced filters’ (that’s a mouthful as well, isn’t it!)

After clicking this, we then get presented with the following interface:

Once we select a table (we can only select one table, as this will be the primary table used), we then switch screens to set the filters that we want to use:

Now here’s where things got a little strange. On the filter screen, we can select related tables to the primary table (ie connected through a relationship), and we get EVERY table that’s available for this. So if we’re starting with the Accounts table, we can then select from the following:

So in this list, I can see tables such as Emails, Invoices, and various others as well. In fact, it’s actually a very extensive list (limited, of course, to all tables that have a relationship in place with the Accounts table, and which the user has access to through their security role).

But if I look back at the initial list of tables, I’m MUCH more limited in my choice:

This, to me, was quite confusing. After all, what if I wanted to start the search from a different table – one that isn’t shown in this initial list?

So I started doing some digging. Initially, I thought that these tables are the ones defined in the sitemap (ie the app navigation). This could mean that I’d need to somehow create a section that shows all tables within it, just to be able to have them searchable.

Thankfully, it turns out that this isn’t actually the case. What’s happening is that with the new Modern Advanced Find, tables need to be directly associated to the APP, to be able to show up and use for search purposes.

Actually, there’s some more granularity around this. The list of tables available to search on (as the primary table) need to meet ALL of the following criteria:

  1. Table is part of the model-driven app
  2. Table is enabled for unified interface
  3. Table is valid for advanced find (set on the table settings)
  4. User has read access to the table (handled through security roles)

So essentially, the ability to search tables within an app is now limited to the tables that have been associated to the app itself! This could be very helpful in various scenarios, when users can be quite confused with seeing the entire list of tables.

To do this, we’d edit the app, and add it to the list of tables available through the app designer (note – we don’t have to include them in the sitemap, if we don’t want to display them in the app navigation):

So this now makes sense, and I think it’s a good step forward.

Also thanks to my colleague Bill (who’s an AMAZING Customer Success Manager!) for his collaboration on this.

What are your thoughts on the Modern Advanced Find? Are you finding it better for functionality? Is there something that you feel is missing, or that you’d like to see in it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

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Calculated columns not working with data migration

Interesting title, isn’t it? I thought to do something that might grab peoples attention, and this was the best that I could come up with! So, let’s get into the scenario, the issue experienced, and how we managed to resolve it.

The scenario on this project was as follows. We’ve been implementing a customer service solution for a sales company, that manufacture multiple products, under multiple brands. Currently there are multiple systems used for order entries, which at some point will be moved to a single system.

However for the moment, they’re wanting to be able to carry out holistic customer service across all brands, to be able to enable all customer service agents to have access to the same data, customers able to be serviced in the same way, regardless of brand, etc.

rectangular brown wooden table

As a result, Dynamics 365 Customer Service was the ticket, and has many standard capabilities that addresses the need of the customer.

Now, whilst sales (aka orders) will not be handled within Dynamics 365 itself, we didn’t want the customer service agents to have to look up order information in the ordering systems. Instead, we wanted to be able to bring the sales/order information into Dynamics 365 for reference (at some point it’s likely that the customer will actually use Dynamics 365 capabilities for sales as well).

In order to do this, we’ve had some amazing data architects bringing the data together into Azure Data Factory (ADF)) from the multiple order systems, and then pushing the data into Dynamics 365 (users have read-only view of it).

With bringing in the data, we were looking to capitalise on the native functionality of Dynamics 365, namely the ability for columns to be automatically calculated. An example of this would be bringing in the order line amount, the tax amount, and then having the total order line amount automatically calculated. This is standard system functionality, and when working in Dynamics 365, has many different uses across the system.

Now, it’s important to note here that as we’re not actually handling orders within Dynamics 365, we’re also not holding a ‘proper’ product list within Dynamics 365 itself. However, orders need to show product information on them (bit useless otherwise!), so we’re using the capability of ‘write-in products’.

Note: If you haven’t come across write-in products before, it’s actually a really great item. Essentially, it allows products to be entered for opportunities, quotes, orders etc (wherever products are used), but for when the product/s aren’t in the system product catalogue. Write-in products allow you to simply type the name of a product or service, & then type in the price. This is very useful if, for instance, a product isn’t yet available in the product catalogue, but you still want to be able to quote it. In our scenario, we’re using write-in products to avoid the need to manage the product catalogue itself. It’s also helpful for when you don’t want to use price lists, as all products need to be associated to a price list.

So we start off the data migration, and it’s looking good. No issues being reported by the integration…

But, then users go in to the UAT system to check through things, and find that when looking at orders, the totals aren’t being calculated:

Order line not calculating
Order not calculating either!

Hmm. That’s strange. So we started to look at what could have caused this problem…

  • Is the environment in ‘admin mode’? If an environment is in admin mode, then auto-calculations won’t work at all. Well, the environment wasn’t in admin mode, so it wasn’t that
  • Is there a plugin not firing correctly? Well, this is native Microsoft standard functionality within the platform, so unlikely, but we double-checked to make sure. No, there wasn’t anything causing issues in that dimension
  • Does it work for users, when it’s created manually within the system? Yes, it DOES work when users enter an order/order line with a product. Hmm…this was getting VERY confusing

For clarification, we didn’t want to auto-calculate the information within ADF, and then push it into the relevant Dynamics 365 columns. We wanted to be able to rely on the system working in the way that it should!

Finally, we found out why the calculated columns weren’t working. There’s actually a system setting that governs how this works:

With this set, the auto calculations are now working in the system:

So, thankfully we managed to get this working, and everything went smoothly from that point.

Have you ever been caught out by something similar? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below!

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