Tag: instructions

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Chat Transcripts

We’ve all been there (well, at least I have). We’ve been having an online chat with a customer service person at a company, and we’re wanting to have a record of the actual chat that took place. Of course we could (hopefully) copy and paste the entire conversation into a document and save it, but that would be laborious, and also potentially not be legal proof of the actual conversation.

In some cases, companies may actually encourage customers to save a record of their chat history on their account (as an example, Amazon offers this at the end of each chat). Customers can then return at a later date to download the conversation to their own computer at their leisure, which can be more convenient at times (say you’re travelling on holiday, and don’t have your own computer with you!). It could even be possible to get it automatically emailed to your own email address, which would also allow a company to add additional information to it (for example a feedback survey request on your chat experience, some marketing information, etc)

Well, Omnichannel has the ability for this, in multiple ways! It can allow a user to:

  1. Download a full transcript at the end of the chat
  2. Email a full copy of the chat transcript

Both of these features are available from the chat window using icons, allowing a quick and easy experience for the users. You can decide if you want to allow one or the other, or both, quite easily.

Enabling this is quite simple, though there are some additional options to set for the auto-emailing feature (basically selecting the email template and user mailbox – you can set up a specific mailbox to use if you’re wanting it eg ‘customerservice@abc.xyz’).

In the Omnichannel Administration Hub, open the Chat channel that you’re wanting to enable this for. Under the ‘Chat Transcripts’ section, select the option/s that you’re wanting to enable:

Downloading the chat transcript

At any time during the chat conversation, users can click the download icon at the bottom left of the chat window, and the conversation will be downloaded to their default Downloads folder on their computer.

This saves as an HTML file, and when opened looks like this:

At the end of the chat, the person will be prompted and asked if they’d like to save the conversation, with quick instructions as to how to do so. Obviously this option will ensure that the customer has the complete conversation, rather than just a part of it, so this reminder is really nice and helpful in my opinion

Emailing the chat transcript

Customers can also get the chat transcript auto-emailed to their email address. Clicking the email icon will prompt the customer to enter their own email address (or whichever email they’d like the chat transcript to be sent to).

This option allows companies to be able to format the email template that’s used for this. Examples of things that a company might want to do could include:

  • Using company logo’s, images and fonts
  • Feedback survey information, to understand how the customer felt about the chat session
  • Marketing material for upcoming events

Note: When setting up the ability for chat transcripts to be emailed, don’t forget to approve and test the mailbox being used in the Email Configuration settings! If you don’t do this (or it hasn’t already been done), they won’t be emailed out!

There’s also one further piece of configuration that needs to be carried out for emailing chat transcripts. As all emails from that chat channel will be using the same email address to send out the emails, this means that the ‘Allow send on behalf of’ option must be selected on the mailbox user’s personal settings. You’ll therefore need to log into Dynamics as the mailbox user, open personal options, and set this manually

In summary, this is really helpful to customers, and a great little feature for Omnichannel.

Installing Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 – Part III

So far I’ve covered the Omnichannel installation process over the last two posts (https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-trial-part-i/ and https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-trial-part-ii/), which is all about getting the Omnichannel Application to appear in the Dynamics 365 Administration Centre under Applications.

However, once we’ve gotten it to appear, we now need to carry out the initial basic configuration to get it to be active.

This will then get us to a point where we can start configuring it to use with the different channels that we’d want to have it active for, such as online chat, Facebook, etc.

So if you’ve been following the process so far, in the Dynamics 365 Administration Center you’ll see the following:

The next step is to select the line for Omnichanel, and click ‘Manage’:

You’re going to be prompted with another permissions request, and oh boy this is a LONG one! Select the ‘Consent’ box, and click Accept to continue (you’ll need to be a Global Tenant Admin to do this)

For all of your hard work so far, you’re going to be presented with the following BEAUTIFUL screen!

This is the Omnichannel Admin Centre, where you’ll be able to now set up Omnichannel for the environment/s that you want to have it present in. To proceed, click the ‘Add an org’ button, and you’ll be asked which environment (organisation) you want to set up Omnichannel for:

Select the environment, accept the Privacy Terms, and then click the purple right-arrow to move on to the next step.

For each of the options available (currently they are Chat, SMS and Facebook), you’ll be asked if you want to enable it for your organisation. Select the option/s you wish to be present, and click the purple right-arrow to continue (example shown below of the Chat enable screen):

Continue until the end, where you’ll get the Summary screen (shown below). Click the purple check button to confirm and continue:

You’ll now be shown a status screen, where it’ll tell you that your selected options are being set up:

At this point it’s a good idea to take a break. Simply because the setup of these is going to take a whiiiiiiiiiiiile (it’s obviously doing a lot behind the scenes!). Go have a coffee, a walk, visit the gym, do some laundry, etc. Once it’s finally finished, it’ll show that setup is complete:

And if you go back to the overall Omnichannel Administration summary page, you’ll see a nice little summary of the environment here as well (along with the option to set up another environment with Omnichannel)

Once this has been completed, you’ll now be able to see Omnichannel present within the list of Dynamics apps within the Dynamics environment:

The next stages will be to carry out the Omnichannel configuration within Dynamics 365 for the different channels, which I’ll be going into in the next series of posts.

I hope that you’ve found this helpful so far – please reach out with any questions that you may have!

Installing Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 (Trial) – Part II

In the previous post in this series, where I talked about the first part of installation (https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-trial-part-i/), I covered how to get the first 3 prerequisites dealt with for installing Omnichannel (namely Customer Service Hub, PowerBI licenses, and Data Consent).

In this post, I’m going to be covering the 4th item – actually getting the Omnichannel Hub installed. It’s not as straightforward as you may think, so I’ve included lots of screenshots, as well as a bonus YouTube video at the end showing the process for this as well (for people who prefer videos).

If you look at the official Microsoft documentation on Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, it says that you need to install the solution from the Dynamics 365 Administration Center:

Manage omnichannel

That’s all very well and good, but doesn’t actually show the reality of things! If you go to the Dynamics 365 Administration Center for your environment, you’re likely to see something similar to the following (you may be fortunate enough to see the option for Omnichannel there, in which case skip to ):

Hold on. There’s no ‘Omnichannel for Customer Service’ option there! Indeed so – and you’re not going to find it easily.

So, in order to actually get the Omnichannel option there in the Applications section, you’re going to need to do the following:

  1. Go to https://trials.dynamics.com/
  2. Select the ‘Customer Service’ option

Scroll down the page, and where it asks for your email, enter the email address that you used to sign up for the trial with! (this will be in the format of user@domain.onmicrosoft.com). Enter your phone number as well, and click ‘Get Started’

It’ll tell you that you already have a Dynamics 365 account. Click ‘OK, got it’ to continue. What is happening in the background is that a new trial is being created in your tenant, but at the same time Omnichannel for Customer Service is being installed. You don’t need to use the trial environment (and it’ll expire after 30 days), but you WILL be using the Omnichannel application (which will stick around even after the new trial expires).

You’ll then get a beautiful whirly GIF, showing that setup is happening

Once setup has completed, go back to the Dynamics 365 Administration Center (go to http://admin.powerplatform.com/, select ‘Environments’ from the left navigation bar, select an environment, and click the ‘Manage Solutions’ button on the menu bar. Select the ‘Applications’ option from the menu ribbon and Hey Voila! You should see ‘Omnichannel for Customer Service’ present! (you may need to click to the next page on the Applications screen)

Note that it’s showing as being ‘NotConfigured’ – we’ll go through the configuration of this in the next blog post.

Also note that there are two other options underneath this. Once is for Facebook, and one is for SMS. These are the direct integration points for this products that are provided by Microsoft (rather than an ISV or 3rd party solution), and more will appear over time as Microsoft releases further functionality.

Now for the YouTube video, in which I walk through all of the above in a live replay!

In the next part of the series at (https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-part-iii/), I go through the actual initial configuration of the Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 configuration

Installing Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 (Trial) – Part I

In order to be able to access Omnichannel for Dynamics 365, it’s necessary to install the Omnichannel Hub solution. There are several prerequisite items that are necessary in order to do this, with several steps.

The requirements for Omnichannel Hub are as follows:

  1. The Customer Service Hub needs to be installed on the environment within the tenant
  2. There needs to be a PowerBI License assigned to the user/s
  3. Data Access Consent needs to be accepted
  4. The Omnichannel Hub needs to be installed

Let’s go through the above steps. Due to the length of this, I’m going to be splitting this into two parts. This guide will cover getting Omnichannel up and running in a Trial environment – I’ll be doing a separate entry on getting it in a Paid For environment.

Customer Service Hub

This is actually quite simple. When setting up your trial at https://trials.dynamics.com/ (using the link to set up the trial for development purposes, of course)

You need to select the option below on the scenario screen (you can of course select the ‘All of these’ option as well!)

If creating the environment from admin.powerplatform.com, ensure that you select the option to create a database for the environment, ensure that you select the option to deploy Dynamics 365 apps, and then select the ‘Customer Service’ option (you can select others as well – it won’t affect Omnichannel)

Once it’s installed, you can check that it’s there by going to your Apps within the Dynamics 365 environment, and you should see the Customer Service Hub option there, both on the app menu on the left, as well as on the main screen

PowerBI License

Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 requires a PowerBI license assigned to users. They may have this already as part of their assigned license/s. Sometimes the system doesn’t always pick this up – if this happens, it’s possible to get and assign PowerBI Free licenses for users through the Office Admin portal (under Billing/Purchase Services):

When going through the check-out process, you’ll be prompted for a credit card. Thankfully it’s possible to bypass this by selecting the option to invoice, rather then use a credit card (it’s a free license anyhow, so just go through the process and finish). Once the licenses are in the admin centre, assign them to the users who’ll be using Omnichannel.

Data Access Consent

In order to allow Omnichannel for Customer Service to read and write data on behalf of users, Data Access Consent needs to be granted. This has to be performed by a Global Tenant Admin, who needs to use the following link – https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2070932.

Once they access the link, they’ll need to sign in, and they’ll be presented with the following acceptance screen (note how many things are being accessed!):

They should select the ‘Consent’ box, and then click Accept

In the second part of this series (https://thecrm.ninja/installing-omnichannel-for-dynamics-365-trial-part-ii/ ), I go into the details of how to actually install the Omnichannel Hub!

Introduction to Omnichannel for Dynamics 365

With all of the functionality that has recently been released for Dynamics 365, I’ve been taking a look into the Omnichannel capabilities, and what it brings to enable clients and their customers from a technology standpoint.

I feel that this is really going to be a major benefit to many different sectors, and will allow users to benefit majorly in being able to retain and grow their customer base, through the general customer experience and behaviour.

The video below is the start of a new series in which I’m going to go deep into what Omnichannel actually is, how it works, and the capabilities that it brings.