Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Discussing how LEGO is of vital importance in teaching & business applications, and what happens when Scrum isn’t performed properly on a client project. Neil also runs a Scrum for Business Applications course – https://customery.academy/courses/foundations
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Chatting about the importance of stickers, swag, and the amazing Microsoft community that we’re part of. Covering a major project that was going to use Unified Service Desk (USD), and what happened when trying to deploy the configuration data between environments!
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Talking about Tomasz’s love of photography, which camera brand he actually uses, windsurfing, & how projects shouldn’t be pushed by IT into the business, but rather be project led/project driven. Also briefly touching on why gamification & swag can be so useful with user adoption!
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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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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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Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.
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!