Anyone familiar with Dynamics 365 will of course be aware of ‘Notes’. These are the very useful ability to for system users to add notes into records. For customers, these show up within the Activity timeline. Every time a note is added, it’s added to the activity timeline to be able to be viewed. It’s also possible to add attachments to notes, which can be very handy too.

Each note is stored with it’s own date/time logged, so it’s possible to see when each one was created. Of course it’s also possible to click into a note to edit it, if it’s necessary to add additional information.

Now, what about within Omnichannel? The interface is different, as we know. So if agents need to capture notes, are they still able to?

Well, let’s take a look at the interface. As shown below, we do indeed have a Timeline section that agents can see. Here they can view the activities that have been previously carried out with this specific contact:

Not only can the agent see notes in this section, they can also see the other items in the activity history. So they’re able to then bring up previous conversations etc.

There are two ways in which agents can log notes within Omnichannel itself. The first way is the ‘usual’ way that we’re used to. Within the Activity Timeline, they can click to enter a note, and then save it:

This will then create a note against the record, in the normal way that we’re all used to. However, there’s a MUCH nicer way to do this!

See, it’s possible for the agent to create the note from the chat itself!:

Clicking this causes a HUGE notes window to appear next to the actual chat:

This is quite nice. It gives the agent a lot more screen space to capture information for the note. They could also quickly copy/paste from the customer conversation into here.

They’re not able to add attachments though through this large pane. Instead, the agent would need to save the note, which would then cause it to appear in the Activity Timeline view. Once there, the agent could click into it, and add any attachment/s that they may need to.

OK – so we’ve found out how agents can use Notes within Omnichannel. But there’s actually a really cool function from doing it directly from the chat.

When we add Notes in the ‘traditional’ style, and save them, it creates a record for each one. As mentioned above, it’s obviously possible to open up a note, edit it, and then save it again. But this can be a slight hassle at times.

Having to wade through a load of ‘ad-hoc’ notes when reviewing a record can be difficult & take a lot of time. It also doesn’t really look very neat, and can cause challengers when trying to get a good overall picture of what’s been happening. Additionally, it’s REALLY hard to search on properly, and a we all know how important (good) searches can be in our daily lives!

There will be situations where an agent captures a note, saves/closes it, then needs to come back to it. Perhaps they may need to come back to it multiple times. For example, closing notes at the end of a customer conversation.

Omnichannel facilitates this in a most marvellous way. When the agent creates the note from the chat & saves it, it saves the Note record. If the agent clicks the Note button again from the chat, they’re presented with the ‘clean’ interface again: the previous note/s don’t appear there.

However, ALL of the notes entered are saved to the SAME notes record. It doesn’t matter how many times the agent creates/saves a new note from the conversation – they all appear in the same record. This is really great in my opinion, as it means that we can have the entire view of ALL of the notes in one place.

Interestingly enough, it doesn’t put them on different lines – I’m going to look into this further, to see if this is actually what is meant to happen or not…

This in turn then facilities clean records, clean notes, and can save us a great deal of time. Aren’t clean data structures amazing.

So my question to you is – do you use Notes currently? What challenges have they presented you with, and have you come up with any workarounds? Please share – I’d love to hear!