Tag: learn

Omnichannel & Sentiment Analysis

In general, it’s usually quite useful to be able to see how customers are engaging with your company, and how they’re feeling about things. If customers are disgruntled, annoyed, or complaining, it’s important to be able to understand the root cause/s of their issue/s, and resolve them as soon as possible.

One of the tools available in Omnichannel is Sentiment Analysis. What is this?

Being able to identify how customers see/interact with your brand, accurately, is vitally important. Using people to manually trawl through your data to attempt to identify this has many drawbacks:

  • Lack of consistent approach
  • Large amounts of time needed
  • Many manual touchpoints

As a natural follow-on from this, being able to identify & categorise the sentiment in customer communications through using machine learning can unlock many business use cases that can then result in immense value for your company.

Microsoft provide the ability for this through Azure Cognitive Services. It’s really quite interesting in how this actually works. You can go to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/, put in a sentence, and see what results come back. It can be quite amusing to see what different colours come out as!

As part of the analytics around chat (and by chat, I’m not referring to just a chat bot – anything within Omnichannel can be referred to as ‘chat’, from an agent perspective), sentiment analysis can be used.

This is quite easy to set up. To do so, open the Omnichannel Administration Hub, go to the Settings area in the left-hand menu, open ‘Sentiment Analysis’, and click to enable it. Remember to save it to apply it!

This will then result in the agent interface showing the following:

Now, this isn’t static. The sentiment will update in real time as the conversation continues, and will change based on what the customer is saying.

Now, obviously we’d expect agents to be able to judge the tone of the conversation based on what’s being said (at least I’d personally expect it). So for this, the sentiment that shows within the chat isn’t that helpful.

However, it does come into its own in a slightly different place. This is the Omnichannel Sentiments Analysis Dashboard, which is served through PowerBI.

Through this, supervisors can understand how their company is measuring up to their KPIs & necessary trends. They can also understand the overall support experience that omnichannel is having, along with tracking the sentiment of customer interactions. As a result of having this to hand, better understanding of customers can take place, resulting in improvement of the overall customer experience.

Once the dashboards have been configured within PowerBI (I’m going to do a separate post on this), it’s then possible to surface these within the Omnichannel Customer Service Hub (which users with the Supervisor role will be able to see). This means that supervisors won’t need to open a separate place to see these; it’s all available through the same interface.

There’s also a more detailed view into what’s actually happening, through the ‘Omnichannel Insights – Sentiment Analysis Report’. This displays a lot more information, drilling down & splitting the data up into agents, queues, channels & trends. Here’s an example of this:

With all of this information as the fingertips, it’s now really possible to drill down into the details. Through this, we’re able to carry out full & proper analysis on what’s actually causing customer interactions. From looking into what’s occurring, it’s then possible to review the current state of things, and see what can be improved. This will then result in more positive sentiments shown by customers, and drive their loyalty to the company!

Omnichannel & Agent Scripts

Earlier this week I started to share information around the Productivity Tools that Microsoft provides (as a separate solution, admittedly) for Omnichannel – https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-productivity-tools/. With it, I also covered Macros, and some of the benefits that using macros can bring to a company

Now, we all know that the absolute key point in ensuring a consistent & holistic approach is to have a method for getting something done. A ‘script’, in other words. With this, we can set out the steps that we want to be carried out, in the order that they should be performed, with appropriate information against each item. This results in agents (hopefully!) following this, giving the customer the same (and great) experience each and every time they need to interact.

Scripts isn’t just about instructions to be carried out though. It also allows macros to be included, that agents can run as they go through the script.

Here’s an example of something that I’ve been playing around with in my test environments (ninja’s are just SO cool, that I’ve had to rein in my imagination!):

So that’s an example of what you can do. Let’s now see how we set these up. There are several steps to it

In the Omnichannel Administration Hub, you should see the Scripts entry in the left hand bar:

Open it, and click on ‘New’ in the main menu bar. You’ll get the following form appearing:

Type in a name for the script, and a description (personally I find it annoying that I can’t see all of the text in the Description field – perhaps Microsoft may change this at some point). Save the form, and the grid to the right becomes active!

Clicking the ellipse (3 dots) in the Agent Script Steps grid gives several options:

One of the very helpful options here is to add an existing script step. What’s a script step, I hear you ask. Well, each specific item in a script is referred to as a ‘script step’. You set these up as you go through your scrip, as shown below. You don’t need to create a new script step for each script if they’re the same thing – you can just create one, & add it as needed to multiple scripts (just be careful, because if you need to change it at some point, the changed/updated version will display in all scripts that it’s associated with!.

As with any record, you’ll put in a name, and a description. What you’ll also do is give it an order number (this is manual, not auto-generated). The order number is how the system orders the different steps. There’s also the option (which is a required selection) as to whether this is text, macro, or a script:

  • Text. This will be free text that you enter into the script step, which will then be displayed on the screen for the omnichannel agent to see
  • Macro. This will give you the option to point to a macro that you’ve already set up. When the agent will click on it during the session, the macro will run
  • Script. This allows you to reference existing scripts – you can have smaller scripts that you can then use as ‘building blocks’ to create more complex scripts

Once you’ve gotten the script set up, we then need to configure the chat sessions to actually use it. This allows us to set up multiple scripts in our system, and use them as appropriate (eg by using pre-survey questions, it’s possible to direct a customer to a specific queue, and then have the agents use a specific script for this).

To do this, we go to Sessions, and open the session entry that we’re wanting to set the script up for:

Once it’s open, switch to the Agent Script tab. This has a grid that shows all of the script/s that are set up for it. To add script/s, use the drop-down menu on the top of the grid:

The last thing that needs to be done is to enable the Productivity Pane, as otherwise agents won’t be able to see all of this in the first place! Thankfully this is a single setting, and is done as follows:

  • Go to the Productivity Pane option in the left-hand menu. Click on it
  • Set the Productivity pane option to ‘Enabled’
  • Set the Mode option based on your requirements (this is how it appears in the agent interface). By default it’s set to ‘Collapsed’
Enable the productivity pane

And VOILA! It’s now all set up and ready to go:

Omnichannel & Productivity Tools

One of the really great things about Dynamics 365 (and other Microsoft products such as Office 365, PowerBI, etc) is that providers can publish solutions that companies can then look to install into their environment. In fact, not only do 3rd parties do this, Microsoft itself does this too!

These are all published to AppSource (http://appsource.microsoft.com) where you can quickly and easily search for solutions. It’s possible to filter based on category, industry, product, pricing level, and several other options. There are thousands of solutions on it – it’s really quite amazing!

So, what does this have to do with what I’m writing about? Well, there’s a package, created by Microsoft itself, called ‘Productivity Tools for Dynamics 365 apps‘ (hyperlink is correct at the time of writing this article).

According to the description against the solution:

…it provides capabilities that help users to perform day-to-day operations in a faster, efficient, and process compliant manner and deliver value to customers…

OK – sounds good. And it’s free – yes, that’s right. Additional FREE functionality that’s being provided by Microsoft (why they don’t roll it into the general solution, I have NO idea). But where does it come into play, and apply, to the customer centre universe?

Well, that’s actually really simple. See, it’s only able to be installed in an environment that has Omnichannel installed to! It can’t be installed if that’s not present – so it doesn’t work with the ‘regular’ customer service first-party applications.

Now, any contact/customer service centre is expected to handle a large number of customer interactions, along with resolving them as fast as possible. I’ve already previously touched on some of the benefits of Omnichannel for Dynamics 365 helping streamline any company team, in that it’s no longer necessary to have a team handling calls, another team handling web enquires, and a third team handling social media, etc. Instead, it’s now possible to have a single team handling all customer interactions and/or communications holistically across all possible channels.

With this, however, comes various challenges:

  • There can be many actions to perform manually (I’ve previously covered using slugs in customer conversations to cut down on manually typing things – https://thecrm.ninja/quick-responses-in-omnichannel/, but there can be lots of other actions as well)
  • Repetitive and/or monotonous tasks – there are scripts that the customer service agents will need to follow for each interaction
  • Not having real-time insight into the customer, and any other relevant needs based on the context of the interaction.

So, what does the Productivity Tools solution actually contain? At the time of writing, it has 3 components that are part of it:

  • Macros
  • Agent Assist
  • Smart Assist

I’m going to cover these functionalities over a couple of posts, to show how they work and bring benefits to an organisation. I’m not going to go into how to install the solution – it’s pretty straightforward, and the instructions are shown on the AppSource page for it.

One thing to quickly mention though is that there are 2 new security roles that are relevant for Productivity Tools, that should be applied to users as applicable to them:

Macros

Macros should be well known to most people, as they’ve been around for a LONG time! It’s possible to have macros in Word, Excel, even Windows itself (I remember back in high school that we used macros within Word to launch Explorer, as it was locked down – we could then open games and play during lunchtime…)! It’s therefore a natural evolution to have them available within Dynamics 365 as well.

Using macros, customer service agents can carry out repetitive tasks that can span multiple entities. Eg opening forms (model-driven apps), pre-populating data into the form, etc. Through this, not only are there less manual tasks/steps to carry out, there’s now the ability to carry out the same tasks, without worrying about a step being missed, or the wrong data copied in, etc.

As with all other configuration in Omnichannel, you’ll need to go to the Omnichannel Administration Hub to access the Macros section:

Click ‘New’ on the menu bar, and hey voila – you can create a new macro!

Now, I had no idea what to expect – and the interface for this was possibly the last thing that I was thinking would be there! It looks EXACTLY like the process for creating a Power Automate Flow, though just for macros. In fact I’d be quite surprised if underneath it all it was actually using something different to do this – after all, if you can build a ‘process builder’ once, in a really great way, why not use it everywhere that you can!

So, once I’ve set up some steps, my screen now looks like this (the syntax does take a little bit of getting used to FYI):

Now, it’s not just a single step that you can perform. As with Power Automate Flows, you can daisy-chain MULTIPLE steps together to achieve the desired result/s:

This is really great, in my opinion. There’s obviously quite a scope of activities and actions which agents would usually carry out manually, which macros now now address & handle.

Macros themselves are used by agents within the Agent Assist and Smart Assist functionality. I’ll be introducing these in the next post, along with how to use macros within it.

Omnichannel & Org URL

This post topic came out of some research that I was doing when getting my Omnichannel webinar presentation together, and I thought it would be useful to share with others.

When an environment (also referred to as an organisation is created within a tenant on the PowerPlatform, it’s given a URL. By default, this will be imaginatively named by the AutoGenerateElves, along the following lines:

It is of course absolutely possible to change this (assuming that someone else hasn’t taken that ‘special’ URL that you’re wanting to use!). To do this, you go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/, log in with system adminstrator credentials, go to Environments, select the one you’re wanting, and click the ‘Edit’ button:

You’ll then be able to enter the name that you’re wanting to use (incidentally this is also where you’re now able to switch environments between Production & Sandbox):

You then click the Save button at the bottom of the screen. Assuming you’ve entered a name that isn’t already being used, all is successful. However if it’s being used by someone else (very frustrating, we know!), it’ll give a lovely error message at the top of the screen along the following lines:

Not very helpful, I know – if only there was a way that when you entered the name you wanted and moved off the field, there could be some validation checking happening there & then, with information in plain English if it was able to be used or not…ah well – one day!

OK – so people know this. Brilliant.

What I want to share, however, is how this affects Omnichannel within an environment.

See, when Omnichannel is provisioned into an environment, one of the things that it sets somewhere in the back end is the environment URL. You can’t see where it’s stored, but it’s saved somewhere. This is then used when setting up things such as Chat within Omnichannel – there’s an auto-generated code snippet that you would then use in an HTML block on a webpage to launch a chat session with an Omnichannel agent:

Now, when you change the URL of an environment, it doesn’t change in here – it seems that whatever is happening/updating in the background when you do the URL change, it’s not being pushed into Omnichannel and refreshing the settings there (and you can’t change them manually). Hopefully at some point it’ll happen, but it’s not doing it now.

Even manually changing the code in the HTML block on the website page won’t work, as it won’t be pointing to a valid Omnichannel URL.

We know that it’s not a usual course of events to change an environment URL, but there are valid scenarios that it would happen in, and we obviously need to know how to deal with it!

Having looked into this and tried out some different things, at this point in time there’s only one way to do this – you need to remove the Omnichannel solution, and then re-apply it to the environment. My immediate reaction to this was WHOAH…what about all of the settings (aka static data) that’s been entered for Omnichannel to be configured to the business needs?

With this in mind, I reached out to some people for advice – and they came through. Yes, you need to remove the solution totally (until a better mechanism will be implemented hopefully). But there’s something called the ‘Microsoft Configuration Migration Tool’.

Disclaimer – I haven’t actually used this yet, so this is based on the information I’ve seen on it

With this tool, it’s possible to select various entities, and export/move the data from one environment into a saved file, and then be able to import it. Phew – this sounds somewhat easier than manually doing things (as long as you remember every single place that you need to get the data from, of course).

Note: PowerObjects has a great article on the tool at https://www.powerobjects.com/blog/2018/08/27/microsoft-dynamics-365-crm-configuration-migration-tool/ , and the tool itself can now be gotten from http://xrm.tools/SDK (as it’s no longer part of the released SDK).

With this in mind, it’s now possible to recreate Omnichannel for the environment without hopefully TOO much fuss. The only additional thing to bear in mind is to then check and update the code snippets for Chat etc to reflect the new URL.

Man in Red Crew-neck Sweatshirt Photography

Let’s hope that in the future, this is streamlined and is much more trivial to be able to do!

Channel Integration Framework (II)

Last week I shared a post about the Channel Integration Framework 1.0 ( https://thecrm.ninja/omnichannel-the-channel-integration-framework-i/), where I introduced what CIF actually is, and how it was originally launched.

I was somewhat naughty – I ended the post on a slight teaser note. See, as I mentioned there, CIF 1.0 was all about allowing channel widgets from providers to integrate with what we refer to as ‘model-driven apps’. Eg Accounts, Contacts, etc, which are all ‘single session’ entities within Dynamics 365 (ie that a single channel is being used, like a phone call). It was never designed to support ‘multi session’ apps, which is what Omnichannel is all about (ie the ability to have multiple ‘conversations’ going on at the same time, regardless of the channel in which they’ve come in on).

This is why in 2019, Microsoft was working on the next version of CIF – 2.0! Imaginatively named, of course. The aim was to take the general concepts from CIF 1.0, and apply them to be able to be used with multi-session applications. Obviously at this point in time, the ONLY multi-channel application is….OMNICHANNEL!

Incidentally it’s important to note that any communication widget built on CIF 1.0 will continue to work. Microsoft is not removing the 1.0 APIs, as they’re still needed to support interfacing with single-session apps

So, what’s new (and improved) with CIF 2.0:

  • The ability to have multiple communications happening at the same time, through either the same channel, or multiple channels
  • The ability to have multiple third-party provider solutions. You could have Provider A for telephony, and right alongside it Provider B for SMS
  • Different modes for the widgets, which can be adjusted per session launched. It’s now possible to have them set to be docked in the interface, minimised to a smaller size (to give agents more screen space to work with) or hidden (where it’s running in the background). Agents are able to switch between docked & minimised modes

This is all really exciting. It will allow companies to mix and match solutions based on their actual requirements, rather than having to settle for a single solution provider that may not actually be everything that they’re wanting.

Note: With an eye to data security and things like GDPR, information, data & events for support sessions will only go to the provider for the channel that the session is coming through. They don’t have access to any other session/s that are happening

One of the other main features that comes with CIF 2.0 are the channel analytics. With CIF 1.0, all of the interactions are surfaced into the Dynamics 365 app, but are actually running on the provider’s system (in the background). Data can of course be exchanged between them, but there’s no real ability to perform analytics of what’s going on (especially as it’s only a single channel)

Black Samsung Tablet Computer

In order to get the full insight into what support agents are actually doing, along with seeing the performance of the support centre, it’s necessary to be able to see information across all of the following:

  • CRM data (itself). This covers the actual data of the customers, communications with them (eg activities and cases), their history over time, etc – all of this is stored in the underlying CDS
  • Agent Behaviour. How the agent handles the session – what they do before, during and after they’ve helped the customer
  • Communication data. How the customer has contacted the company now, how they’ve done so in the past, their experience, etc.

So how exactly does Channel Analytics help with things? Well, what it does is:

  • Provides APIs to bring the conversation data into CDS
  • Along with the APIs, it has a standardised schema for how the analytical data will be stored
  • Brings in a standardised scheme for how all of the data points shown above will be correlated together
  • Extendable – you can bring in your own KPIs and other data to best suit your needs.

With all of this now being available through CIF 2.0, it’s possible to carry out really advanced analytics, crunch the data using a tool such as PowerBI, and other things. It’s also possible, of course, to configure real-time dashboards as well as alerts to cover any issues that may come up.

Benefits of this of course include:

  • Identifying root causes of anomalies, help with audit reports, and tracking KPI’s
  • Help with predictive insights for volume of requests, and where to best focus resources
  • See customer satisfaction & average handling times to resolution, along with on-going customer sentiment

So in summary, this is really great. I’ve actually now started to speak with different companies who have ISV solutions that are going to be on CIF 2.0, and will be writing about them in the near future as well.

Channel Integration Framework (I)

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:

  • It provides an extensible framework to integrate third-party cloud-based channel providers or channel aggregators with Dynamics 365 model-driven app (not Canvas)
  • It’s channel agnostic. Ie channels such as voice, video, chat, co-browse etc can be built as long as there’s a Javascript-based widget available
  • It’s not just a single direction flow of data; it allows two way communication. This therefore allows both inbound and outbound data
  • It exposes Javascript API’s (note the item above about it being a Javascript based widget)
  • Deployment is easy (well, as easy as any deployment can be!). Deployment is also the same across all apps/widgets – it follows a standard process
  • Plug & Play! It’s now very easy to have multiple different providers integrated, rather than being limited to a single provider
  • Dynamics 365 model driven app agnostic – once the channel has been built and deployed, you can then enable it on the model-driven app that you’re wanting to use it with, based on business requirements
  • Not reliant on operating system or web browser – it’s not reliant on a specific hardware/OS/browser configuration (obviously the browser needs to have the appropriate Javascript security settings enabled, or else it won’t work)
  • Screen pop! Popouts are available to display customer information that can help agents with their customer conversations and service.

The architecture behind CIF is as follows:

High-level architecture diagram of Dynamics 365 Channel Integration Framework
  1. The Dynamics 365 environment is where the CIF app is present to create and manage the required configurations
  2. The single-session Dynamics 365 model-driven app exposes the CIF panel to host the 3rd party widget
  3. The CIF Adapter enables the communication between a single-session model-driven app and the channel provider solution
  4. The web-based communication channel (2rd party) is hosted in the widget that the CIF provides. This is multi-purpose; it’s possible to host chat, email, or telephony channels of your choice
  5. The Channel Provider is the service that you want to integrate and interact with using the CIF. Channel capabilities are specific to the channel provider (ie a 3rd party solution that only supports chat won’t be able to support telephony etc!)

So essentially by using 3rd party solutions that integrate with CIF, it’s possible to have customer service offerings covering things like:

  • Telephony
  • SMS
  • Chat
  • Social media

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!).

Excelling in Customer Service

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.

Close-up of Human Hand

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:

  • Being able to be understand by the retailer/service provider, and feeling that my custom is actually appreciated
  • Being able to resolve any issues quickly and easily, without having delays or mis-understandings
  • Knowing that they value me, and go above/beyond in what they’re providing
  • Being able to call up to check on the status of a support case, and the customer service agent seeing my past history; not that they have to ask me absolutely everything again, and start at the very beginning!

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:

  • Knowing that my customers like my service, and will stay loyal
  • My customers aren’t just about the price that they pay. Even if we’re charging more than others, they appreciate the support and additional actions that we undertake for them
  • Our clients know that we’ll do whatever is necessary to handle any issues that occur

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

three black escalators

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!

Omnichannel – Wave 1 2020

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.

  • The Teams channel will be able to be configured through the Omnichannel Administration Hub
  • Employees can get support using Teams
  • Agents (the internal support team/s) will be able to use the Omnichannel for Customer Service Hub to answer and serve the employees
  • Reports can be run on these interactions to help enable the support centre/s to be run effectively and efficiently.

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

  • The WhatsApp channel will be able to be added & configured in the Omnichannel Administration Hub
  • Support agents will access and serve customers through the Omnichannel for Customer Service Hub

Digital messaging support for LINE

Image result for line software"

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).

  • The LINE channel will be able to be added & configured in the Omnichannel Administration Hub
  • Support agents will access and serve customers through the Omnichannel for Customer Service Hub

Digital messaging support for SMS (Twilio)

Image result for sms"

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.

  • The SMS channel will be able to be added & configured in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, using Twilio as a provider
  • Support agents will access and serve customers through the Omnichannel for Customer Service Hub

Digital messaging support for WeChat

Image result 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.

  • The WeChat channel will be able to be added & configured in the Omnichannel Administration Hub
  • Support agents will access and serve customers through the Omnichannel for Customer Service Hub

Digital messaging support for Twitter

Twitter website on desktop

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

  • The Twitter Direct Message channel will be able to be added & configured in the Omnichannel Administration Hub
  • Support agents will access and serve customers through the Omnichannel for Customer Service Hub

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.

  • Chats will be able to be configured in the Omnichannel Administration Hub to enable the elevation of the chat to voice and/or video
  • Agents will be able to elevate a text chat to a voice and/or video conversation during a support session
  • Common audio & video controls to be available for agents (eg camera on/off, mute/unmute)

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!

Quick Responses in Omnichannel

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!

Microsoft and the Not-For-Profit Sector

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:

  • Productivity Applications – this covers Office 365, Dynamics 365 & PowerBI
  • Azure credits – there’s an annual credit available for $3,500
  • Hardware – devices such as the Surface that are available to purchase at a discounted rate
  • LinkedIn for nonprofits – a greatly reduced subscription rate available, along with working directly with the LinkedIn team for fundraising and marketing solutions to drive relationships and awareness of the mission at scale
  • GitHub for nonprofits – including eligibility for a Team account with unlimited private repositories and unlimited users

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!