Tag: release

Wave 2 2022 – Omnichannel

I know it’s taken me a week (or two) to get round to this, but I’ve had other things on the go (such as starting my new job, for instance). However it wouldn’t be this time of year without doing a summary of new features for the Wave 2 2022 release.

As with previous posts in this area, I’ll be focusing on the Customer Service side of things, and also more precisely with a focus on the Omnichannel capabilities. However, whilst previously I’ve tended to focus just on the Omnichannel items, Customer Service is now being much more tied together with the Omnichannel offering, so it makes sense to broaden things out a bit.

So let’s start taking a look at the wonders that will (hopefully!) be in store for us within a few months:

Customer Service Workspace – enhanced layout

Public Preview – August 2022. GA – October 2022

I’ve previously taken a look at some of the capabilities of the Customer Service Workspace (see Omnichannel vs Customer Service Workspace), and how they compare to Omnichannel. With Microsoft now rollowing out the ability to have multi-session capabilities within it, it’s sometimes a hard decision for organisations to decide which one to use (there are some key differences though).

With the upcoming release, there are going to be new layouts for the site map (navigation menu), sessions & tabs. Some of the key changes coming are:

  • Sessions and child tabs are displayed horizontally
  • Improved handling of overflowing tabs and sessions
  • Tab bar is visible only if multiple tabs are present in a session
  • Improved site map that’s accessed from the hamburger icon with support for grouping and areas
  • Improved accessibility with 400% zoom mode
  • Increased predictability of session closure in multisession apps
  • In-app notifications aligned with the multisession navigation

These look to be quite good (I definitely wouldn’t have thought of all of them!), and I can’t wait to try them out for myself.

Single sign-on capabilities

GA – October 2022

One of the things that can be quite frustrating for customers is that if they’re interacting through live chat capabilities, and then switch over to a Power Virtual Agent, they need to re-authenticate. This is of course not quite optimal for a seamless customer experience.

Microsoft are therefore enabling single sign-on capabilities. What this means in practise is the following:

  • Authenticant contexts are shared between Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel live chat sessions. If a user authenticates in one of them, then they become authenticated across all of the capabilities. There’s no need to authenticate per communication type
  • Customers can start with an unauthenticated conversation, and then authenticate at a later point in the conversation. This will then continue as authenticated across the different channels that they’re communicating through

Voice channel – expansion of availability

GA – October 2022

The voice channel (which I still need to do a write up on!) is really amazing, allowing customers to call in directly via phone etc. It’s been rolled out already to several regions, but customers in other regions have been asking for it.

Microsoft has now confirmed that the voice channel will now be available in the following countries:

  • United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • India
  • Switzerland

This is a great move – it still doesn’t mean that every country has the voice channel available, so I expect that Microsoft will keep on adding more countries for the availability of this (I know that there’s a decent amount of back-end systems that are needed, which is why it’s taking this long to get in place).

Voicemails

GA – January 2023

This one is getting me really excited. Obviously, being able to connect to a customer service agent is important. But what if the agent isn’t around? We could of course send an email, but if we’re already connected through a specific method of contact, ideally we’d like to continue with that method.

Especially when it comes to actually calling into an organisation, it can be quite frustrating to not reach the person we’re trying to get hold of, and then need to send an email.
Voicemail capabilities, coming in early 2023, will mean that customers will be able to leave voicemails for customer service agents to pick up. The agents will be able to set up welcome messages, as well as manage & playback voicemails that have been left.
This is really cool – I’m wondering if there are going to be AI capabilities included in this in the future, so as to automatically transcibe voicemails for the agents, for instance. I don’t think that it would take a LOT more technical capabilities – we already have Azure Cognitive Services that audio can be fed through to for a written transcription to be produced.

Customer Callbacks

GA – January 2023

One of the frustrations that I think is shared universally is when contacting an organisation, and being told that you’re in a queue. Not only are you in a queue, but there may be dozens/hundreds/thousands of people ahead of you…and the number doesn’t seem to be decreasing at a rapid rate.

Some organisations offer the ability to ‘reserve’ your spot in the queue, and will call you back when you’re next. To date, this hasn’t been a feature of Omnichannel.

However, coming in early 2023, this feature will be rolling out!. It will give customers the ability to keep their queue position, and to choose if they’d like a callback to happen when they’re at the front of the queue. Note that this would require a phone number to be provided, for the customer service agent to use to contact the customer.

I think that this is a nice feature, but will be curious to see how it plays out ‘in the real world’. I know that when my local doctor surgery implemented this, it was supposed to be great, but in practise actually didn’t work well.

I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities when they land, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!

Staying up to date with release information

Microsoft releasing new functionality can be an interesting experience, to say the least. As a cloud platform (SAAS – Software As A Service), functionality is released the entire time. A user could log off on Friday for the weekend, and come back on Monday morning to find that something has changed slightly, or a new button is present in the interface. Over time, most of us have come to accept this.

However this is for the ‘smaller’ functionality parts within the system, whether that’s Dynamics 365, or Power Platform related. There are of course two MAIN release announcements each year. These are the Wave 1 (Spring) and Wave 2 (Autumn) release windows, with information announced about what is included in each one publicly. This information usually starts to be available around 4-6 weeks or so before the release starts to hit.

Now that’s not to say that everything within a Wave release is released in a ‘Big Bang’ moment. Far from it actually, based on my experience. Microsoft will announce what is coming as part of the Wave release, along with projected timeframes as to when it will be available. Obviously, just because it’s been announced for Day X doesn’t mean that actually happens, at least for some of the time.

But there’s an inherent time-sink to being on top of all of this information. Firstly, people need to download the Wave release information (there’s one for Dynamics 365, and a second one for Power Platform), wade through all of the information, and somehow then remember it. Let’s just say that this can be challenging for a lot of people…

But what if there was somewhere where we could track this? Well, to date there hasn’t been, at least not until now.

Microsoft have created & made available the ‘Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Release Planner’, which can be found at https://experience.dynamics.com/releaseplans:

So just as a start, this is already MUCH better than the downloadable PDF documents for wave release information (admittedly the information is also available online as a Microsoft document, but still it’s lacking in certain areas).

But there’s more to this functionality than simply presenting a list of areas. Let’s take a look into some of these.

To begin with, there’s the sitemap on the left hand side. This allows us to select a specific area of interest, whether it’s Dynamics 365 or Power Platform (amusingly this reminds me a little of a model-driven app!).

Once in an area, we can then select between Planned features, Coming Soon features, and Try Now features by using the options in the menu bar. This is a nice little piece of functionality, in my opinion, allowing us to see what falls under each ‘category’:

By default, the items are displayed in a list format. However, we’re also able to toggle the view from the menu bar to a release date format, which shows us all items grouped by release month:

There’s also some filtering functionality, allowing us to narrow down the results even further:

Opening a line item (regardless of whether it’s being displayed as a list, or arranged by date) will give further information around the specific item. It also includes a lovely little timeline widget, showing the release dates information, as well as where it’s actually up to currently (which I think is great to have it as a visual reference!):

In here, links are included to documentation around the release overview, as well as specific documentation around the selected functionality item.

Now if this was all that there was, I think that truthfully I would be quite satisfied. It’s a much more modern interface, and really looks nice. I know that various colleagues of mine would be quite satisfied as well.

But….it doesn’t stop there. There’s something else, which is really the cherry on top of the cake icing! So what is it? Well, it’s the ability to create a PERSONALISED release plan information overview.

So on each item of functionality, there’s a button called ‘+ To my plan’:

Note: You do need to be signed into the portal to have this option available to you

Clicking this will add it to a personalised release plan, which you can access from the left-side menu. Here, all of the items that you’ve selected will show up. This is really cool, I think, as it allows you to see the overall picture, but also then focus on just the areas that you’re interested in:

It’s still got all of the functionality available for filtering, date/item sorting, etc. It’s also possible to toggle back to the ‘main’ view of all release information.

So in summary, I think that this is really cool. Admittedly (as it says on the site), it’s in BETA currently. I’m hoping that it’ll stick around, and come out of Beta pretty soon! Regardless, I’m definitely starting to make use of this already in tracking the upcoming features that I’m interested in.

Solution deployments: Automated vs Manual

Over the holiday period, I’ve been playing around with solution deployments. OK – don’t judge me too much…I also took the necessary time off to relax & get time off work!

But with some spare time in the evenings, I decided to look a bit deeper into the world of DevOps (more specifically, Azure DevOps), and how it works. I’ll admit that I did have some ulterior motives around it (for a project that I’m working on), but it was good to be able to get some time to do this.

So why am I writing this post? Well, there’s a variety of great material out there already around DevOps, such as https://benediktbergmann.eu/ by Benedikt (check out his Twitter here), who’s really great at this. I chat to him from time to time around DevOps, to be able to understand it better.

However, I ran into some quite interesting behaviour (which I STILL have no idea why it’s the case, but more on this later), and thought that I would document it.

Right – let’s start off with manual deployments. As we know, manual deployments are done through the user interface. A user (with necessary permissions) would do the following:

  1. Go into the DEV environment, and export the solution (regardless of whether this is managed or unmanaged)
  2. Go into the target environment, and import the solution

Pretty simple, right?

Now, from an DevOps point of view, the process is similar, though not quite the same. Let’s see how it works:

  1. Run a Build pipeline, which will export the solution from the DEV environment, and put it into the repository
  2. Run a Release pipeline, which will get the solution from the repository, and deploy it to the necessary environment/s

All of that runs (usually) quite smoothly, which is great.

Now, let’s talk for a minute about managed solutions. I’m not going to get into the (heated) discussion around managed vs unmanaged solutions. There’s enough that’s been written, said, and debated on around the topic to date, and I’m sure it will continue. Obviously we all know that the Microsoft Best Practise approach is to use managed solutions in all non-DEV environments..

Anyway – why am I bringing this up? Well, there’s one key different in behaviour when deploying a managed solution vs an unmanaged solution (for a newer solution version), and this is to do with removing functionality from the solution in the DEV environment:

  • When deploying an unmanaged solution, it’s possible to remove items from the solution in the DEV environment, but when deploying to other environments, those items will still remain, even though they’re not present in the solution. Unmanaged solution deployments are additive only, and will not not remove any components
  • When deploying a managed solution, any items removed from the solution in the DEV environment, and then deploying the solution to other environments will cause those items to be removed from there as well. Managed deployments are both additive & subtractive (ie if a component isn’t present in the solution, it will remove it when the solution is deployed)

Now most of us know this already, which is great. It’s a very useful way to handle matters, and can assist with handling a variety of scenarios.

So, let’s go back to my first question – why am I writing this post? Well..it’s because of the different behaviour in manual vs automated deployment, which I discovered. Let’s look at this.

When deploying manually, we get the following options:

The default behaviour (outlined above) is to UPGRADE the solution. This will apply the solution with both additive & detractive behaviour. This is what we’re generally used to, and essentially the behaviour that we’d expect with a managed solution.

Now, when running a release pipeline from Azure DevOps, we’d expect this to work in the same way. After all, systems should be build to all work in the same way, right?

Well, no, that’s not actually what happens. See, when an Azure DevOps release pipeline runs, the default behaviour is NOT to import the solution (we’re talking managed solutions here) as an upgrade. Instead (by default), it imports it as an UPDATE!!!

This is what was really confusing me. I had removed functionality in DEV, ran the build pipeline, then ran the release pipeline. However the functionality (which I had removed from DEV) was still present in UAT! It took me a while to find out what was actually happening underneath…

So how can we handle this? Well, apart from suggesting to Microsoft that they should (perhaps) make everything work in the SAME way, there’s a way to handle it within the release pipeline. For this, it’s necessary to do two things:

Firstly, on the ‘Import Solution’ task, we need to set it to import as a holding solution.

Secondly, we then need to use the ‘Apply Solution Upgrade’ task in the release pipeline

What this will do is then upgrade the existing solution in the target environment with the holding solution that’s just been deployed.

Note: You will need to change the solution version to a higher solution number, in order for this to work properly. I’m going to write more about this another time, but it is important to know!

So in my view, this is a bit annoying, and perhaps Microsoft will change the default behaviour within DevOps at some point. But for the moment, it’s necessary to do.

Has this (or something similar) tripped you up in the past? How did you figure it out? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Omnichannel – Wave 2 2021

So last week the Wave 2 2021 information dropped. It’s taken me a few days to get round to it (family stuff happening), but I’m finally able to do a quick recap of it. As most people know, Microsoft releases features in two waves – one in the spring (Wave 1), and one in the autumn (Wave 2). As usual, I’ve included the links for the full release notes across both Dynamics 365 & Power Platform below, though will be focusing on the product features for Omnichannel

The links are here:

As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.

Enhancements to existing capabilities

Agent workspace inbox view

GA – Oct 2021

10 Google Workspace tips to optimize your inbox - Google Workspace Learning Center

As more and more organisations move in the direction of omnichannel system capabilities, there is a growing need for the actual agent experience to be better optimised. The inbox view that this functionality will deliver is aimed to address the needs to quickly triage requests, and allow agents to focus on customers & their issues. It will be integrated into the Customer Service workspace as well as the Omnichannel Engagement Hub, and will allow agents to effectively navigate their emails & conversions whilst handling customer interactions.

Usability improvements for agent workspaces

Early Access – Aug 2021. GA – Oct 2021

Web Usability Definition | Web Wise Wording

The Customer Service workspace and Omnichannel Engagement Hub are multi-session applications that allow users to be able to multi-task with customers to provide support on multiple cases simultaneously. This release provides usability improvements to help agents be more productive, including simplified navigation as well as the migration of productivity tools to the new extensible App side pane.

Increase agent productivity with contextual collaboration using embedded Microsoft Teams

GA – Nov 2021

How to Embed and Share Videos on Microsoft Teams | ClickView

Agents who use Dynamics 365 Customer Service can easily collaborate with anyone within their organization, such as agents from other departments, supervisors, customer service peers, or support experts, over Microsoft Teams to resolve customer issues, without leaving
the case or conversation. Chats over Teams will be linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience

Some of the key features coming in this release are:

  • Ability to chat with contacts from within Dynamics 365
  • Access to key Customer Service contacts, such as supervisors, queue members, and support experts.
  • Access to AI-driven suggestions of agents who resolved similar cases.
  • Access to recent Microsoft Teams chat lists.
  • Ability to link and unlink chats to case records.
  • Access to linked Microsoft Teams chats.
  • Message avatar and presence, where users can easily see profile pictures of a chat participant and their availability (presence)

Omnichannel Voice Channel

At Ignite in September 2020, Microsoft announced the new Voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The aim of the solution is to provide simpler administration & management experiences within the platform itself, rather then needing traditional cloud component integration complexities.

With the release of this, voice, SMS, and digital messaging channels, and a PVA-powered intelligent interactive voice response (IVR), real-time voice intelligence, and insights across all channels, speech-based self-service, and intelligent skills-based routing are all brought together in a single package.

Voice channel powered by Azure Communication Services

GA – Nov 2021

NEW Voice Channel Capabilities Announced for Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Preact

As mentioned in the Wave 1 2021 post, there’s a new voice channel that’s coming in. This new solution for Customer Service enables an all-in-one customer service solution without fragmentation or requirement of manual data integration. It will provide a single view of the customer that empowers agents to provide personalised service across all channels, and true omnichannel analytics and insights for agents and supervisors alike. Providing organizations with a choice of telephony delivered directly by Microsoft enables quick and easy deployment of a voice channel for their business.

  • This feature enables organizations to adopt Azure Communication Services as a voice provider natively in Omnichannel for Customer Service, and facilitates the following features:
  • Phone number procurement and management
  • Ability to handle and distribute incoming calls
  • Ability to make outbound calls
  • Ability to manage SMS (inbound and outbound)
  • Deep integration of voice into core Omnichannel for Customer Service functionality
  • Real-time sentiment analysis
  • Real-time transcription
  • Real-time translation
  • Real-time smart assist suggestions
  • Operations management through supervisor dashboards
  • Ability to record and manage phone call

Now there has been a slight delay in rolling this out. As a result, the GA dates for the below have been pushed back to Nov 2021:

  • Call intelligence
  • Call recording
  • Call transcription and real-time sentiment analysis
  • Consult and transfer
  • Direct outbound calling
  • Embedded analytics for voice channel
  • Intelligent voice bot via Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Bot Framework
  • Modern administration experience for Omnichannel voice (number management)
  • Modern administration for Omnichannel SMS via Communication Services (number management)
  • Supervisor monitoring and barge
  • Topic clustering for voice

Unified routing

Traditionally, organizations use “queue-based routing,” where incoming service requests are routed to a relevant queue, and agents work on those service requests by picking them from the queue. Organizations can miss service-level agreements if agents pick the easier service requests and leave the higher-priority requests in the queue. To address this scenario, organizations either create custom workflows to periodically distribute service requests among their agents or have dedicated personnel to distribute the service requests equitably among agents while adhering to organizational and customer preferences. Both methods are inefficient and error prone and necessitate continuous queue supervision.
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels (cases, entities, chat, digital messages, and voice) to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and auto-skills matching. The new routing service uses AI to classify, route, and assign work items with full automation, eliminating the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations

Improved historical analytics for unified routing scenarios

GA – Oct 2021

historical analysis on real-time data with ActivePivot

Administrators use unified routing and routing rules across the classification and assignment stages to help ensure the work item is assigned to the best suited agent. Embedded historical analytics provides an overview of routing performance of each channel to help optimize the routing strategy and improve the routing and workforce efficiency. Providing organizations a view of the effectiveness of configurations allows them to improve routing configurations to help increase their customer satisfaction and agent satisfaction scores.

Routing diagnostics for supervisors

GA – Oct 2021

Computer diagnostics icon (PSD) psd free file | Download now!

Routing diagnostics helps an organization to better understand the path a work item takes after it comes into the routing system, through all the classification and assignment rules, to ultimately land in a queue or be assigned to an agent. Current routing diagnostics are available for administrators and are more focused on the workstream and queue routing. In this release, routing diagnostics are being introduced to supervisor experiences, and the quality of the diagnostics is being improved.

I’m really quite excited to see how the new Voice channel will be received, as I think it’s a great feature addition to the overall tools available. It will be interesting to see how clients may choose to use it over their existing voice channel setup.

I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!

Omnichannel – Wave 1 2021

Today is a day that I’ve been looking forward to over the last few days. Leaving aside anything else that may be happening, it’s the day when the 2021 Wave 1 Release Notes come out! These cover the new functionality & features that will be released during the first half of 20201 for both Dynamics 365 & Power Platform.

The links are here:

There’s an amazing amount of functionality, but what I want to focus on specifically are the capabilities coming down the line around Omnichannel for Customer Service

As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.

Enhancements to existing capabilities

Embedded analytics for Chat and Digital Messaging

GA – April 2021

10 Great Google Analytics Alternatives

Traditional dashboards have limited interactive capabilities and provide a narrow view into the overall organization. Omnichannel’ s Embedded analytics for chat and digital messaging allows service managers to identify problem areas and opportunities to improve from historical data, along with rich slice and dice capabilities powered by Power BI.

With this release, the embedded analytics for chat and digital messaging allows service managers to understand how agents and queues are performing. The analytics provide trends based on problem areas and opportunities allowing the service managers to analyze the corrective measures they can take, provide appropriate guidance to agents, and improve the customer support experience. Key Insights cards provide a glimpse into the notable trends on core metrics and topics that are important for a supervisor to further investigate the analytics.

Enhanced supervisor experiences for operational monitoring of Chat and Digital Messaging

GA – April 2021

How Can I Use Microsoft SCOM for End-to-End Performance Monitoring – eG Innovations

Supervisors need key metrics and channel-specific performance measures to take operational decisions to meet and exceed service-level goals

  • As contact centres deploy multiple channels to provide an omnichannel experience in customer service, supervisor can view and track relevant metrics for operational efficiency in the following ways:
  • Equip team leads to monitor channel-specific performance metrics to handle agents who are dedicated to a single channel
  • Enable senior team leads and service delivery managers to monitor All-up metrics across all channels
  • Capability to quickly switch between the views

Historical topic clustering for all channels

GA – April 2021

Topics | National Museum of African American History and Culture

Topics are automatically generated using AI to organize similar issues into groups. By aggregating metrics from issues grouped into the same topic, organizations get a full view of KPIs and metric impact for each topic. For example, organisations can view the average handling time, sentiment, and CSAT for a specific topic, and whether the topic is a key driver for any of those metrics.

Modern Administration Experience for Omnichannel Chat and Digital Messaging

GA – April 2021

Modern - Responsive Admin Dashboard Template by stacks | ThemeForest

With the modern administration experience, administrators can easily start the first chat conversation with only a few clicks and see the immediate value of chat conversation powered by Omnichannel for Customer Service. The modern administration experience is intuitive to follow and allows administrators to quickly understand and perform the configuration steps.

Introducing the first run experience to help administrators automatically set up the chat channel and start the first chat conversation. Also, introducing the modern administration experience to guide administrators to set up the end-to-end configurations in Omnichannel for Customer Service.
The key highlights of this feature include:

  • First run experience of chat channel
  • Streamlined and simplified administration user experience of work stream, queue, and global setting configurations for digital messaging channels

Omnichannel Voice Channel

At Ignite in September 2020, Microsoft announced the new Voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The aim of the solution is to provide simpler administration & management experiences within the platform itself, rather then needing traditional cloud component integration complexities.

With the release of this, voice, SMS, and digital messaging channels, and a PVA-powered intelligent interactive voice response (IVR), real-time voice intelligence, and insights across all channels, speech-based self-service, and intelligent skills-based routing are all brought together in a single package.

This feature is currently in invite-only private preview, with general availability planned as part of the April 2021 wave

Call intelligence

GA – August 2021

What is call intelligence, and why should you care?

The transcript of a call and an in-depth analysis of a particular call recording can help an organization better understand how the engagement with the customer progressed and present opportunities for agent training.

Through historical analytics, supervisors will be able to drill into a particular call to view more details. Each call will include voice-specific metrics such as talk-to-listen ratio, talking speed and more. Supervisors can also see the detailed sentiment throughout the call, shown alongside the transcript for further analysis. This view helps supervisors better understand how the call went and identify the areas to improve.

  • This capability leverages the call transcription and sentiment analysis to produce the following metrics:
  • Talking speed
  • Switches per hour
  • Pause before speaking
  • Longest customer monologue

Call Recording

GA – August 2021

Call Recording | MightyCall

Customer service agents typically need to review phone calls with customers. Call recording allows agents to record phone calls between agents and customers. This helps the organization to revisit the interaction to better understand the customer’s issues in his or her own words and increase the possibility of resolving the customer’s problems or questions. Call recordings are also helpful for training scenarios where an organization can share examples of great customer interactions among the team.

Call Transcription and Realtime Sentiment Analysis

GA – August 2021

Jog.ai | Supercharge Your Call Notes | Automated Call Recording and Transcription

Customer service agents often need to take notes while helping customers during a phone call. Call transcription converts a phone conversation into written words reducing the amount of notes an agent will need to take and helping with accessibility. Furthermore, sentiment analysis examines the conversation and identifies the general sentiment or “mood” of the customer like if they are slightly angry or very disappointed. Call transcription and sentiment analysis are both used by the system to proactively analyse cases and provide agents with suggestions to resolve the issue.

Call transcription converts a phone conversation into written words and stores them as plain text in real time as the call is in progress. Sentiment analysis, built on award winning AI, tags a sentiment on the top of a conversation, and is constantly updated as the conversation evolves.
Both call transcription and sentiment analysis are included out-of-the-box with no additional setup or configuration.

Consult and transfer

GA – August 2021

Voip Call Transfer - Voip Service - Voip Business | VoIP Business

Omnichannel for Customer Service offers customer service agents the ability to easily consult with and transfer calls to other customer service representatives and helps agents have a greater chance to resolve customer issues.

While on a call with a customer, an agent can put the customer on hold and consult with another agent or manager on an issue that requires specific expertise. issue perhaps one with specific expertise or a manager. Agents can also transfer the call to a specific customer service agent, which is also referred to as a warm transfer. In other scenarios, the agent can transfer the call to a queue from where it is routed to the best available agent based on rules configured by your business.

Direct outbound calling

GA – August 2021

Outbound Calling Strategy- the Best Way to Boost Communication

The ability of agents to contact customers via voice calling remains one of the most important customer interaction methods in Customer Service. Direct outbound calling enables agents to contact customers using our native fully integrated voice channel based on Azure Communication Services, where voice is just another channel for agents and supervisors.

Agents can contact customers using voice calling. Direct outbound calls can be initiated via click-to-call directly from phone number fields in the following:

  • Cases
  • Customer profiles
  • Call back activities
  • Ongoing chat conversations
  • Via a phone dialler

Outbound calls are displayed as conversations in conversation history contextually per case/customer and timelines. Supervisors can monitor outbound calls just like any other customer interaction.

This feature includes the following key highlights:

  • Fully integrated outbound voice channel without third party voice integration
  • Sample outbound voice channel configured automatically on voice channel provisioning.
  • Easy channel administration within the Omnichannel admin experience.
  • Outbound voice conversations are just another conversation type in Omnichannel.
  • Supervisors can monitor outbound calls from within the ongoing conversations dashboard like any other agent/customer interaction.

Embedded analytics for voice channel

GA – August 2021

How to Utilize Google Analytics to Improve Your Restaurant's Website

Traditional dashboards have limited interactive capabilities and provide a narrow view into the overall organization. With historical data, embedded analytics for voice channel empowers service managers to identify problem areas and opportunities to improve and provides rich slice and dice capabilities powered by Power BI.

Customer service managers or supervisors are responsible for managing the agents who work to resolve customer queries every day through phone channel. With this release, the embedded analytics provide trends over a period to understand how agents and queues are performing, so that service managers can take corrective measures, provide appropriate guidance to agents, and improve the customer support experience. Key Insights cards provide an “at a glance” view into notable trends on core metrics and topics that are important for a supervisor to investigate further in the comprehensive reports. Agent-focused views display core metrics to better understand the primary areas an agent worked in and identify opportunities for coaching.

  • With these views, supervisors can:
  • Monitor operational metrics, such as inbound calls, calls handled, abandon rate, average talk time, and average speed to answer calls, across channels, queues, agents, and topics
  • Monitor support quality through sentiment analysis across channels, queues, agents, and topics.

Intelligent voice via PVA and Azure Bot Framework

GA – August 2021

How Intelligent Voice Agents Can Replace Costly Contact Centers

With speech-enabled Power Virtual Agents, businesses can empower business users to build and update intelligent voice bots that use built-in natural language processing capabilities to engage conversationally with customers and provide personalized self-service always. Bots can be built once and deployed across messaging and voice channels for maximum efficiency and consistency. For more advanced scenarios, businesses can integrate bots built with the Microsoft Bot Framework to work on the voice channel.

With this feature, businesses have a familiar bot authoring experience for all customer service bots, across messaging and voice. Customers will enjoy with flexible, free-form service experiences, instead of inflexible menu trees. Bots can easily hand off the call to humans agents, with the conversation history and context gathered by the bot. This allows Omnichannel for Customer Service to route the customer from the bot to the best available live agent to provide a seamless, contextual hand off.
The key highlights of this feature include:

  • Enable Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Framework bots to provide intelligent voice bots on the voice channel
  • Support for built in dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) as a secondary means to interact with the bot
  • Transfer calls to human agents with full transcript and context
  • Use bots for post-call surveys

Modern Administration Experience for Omnichannel Voice (Number Management)

GA – August 2021

Typically, customer service organizations must manually integrate standalone telephony and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, which results in fragmented experiences and error-prone data integration. Administrators need to manage resources and phone numbers in the telephony provider’s app and manually bring over this information to the CRM solution. Very often, this setup process requires collaboration between business and IT administrators, adding delay to an already lengthy process. With the availability of Azure Communication Services, Omnichannel for Customer Service now offers native voice channel. This all-in-one solution empowers business administrators to independently deploy a telephony resource and acquire phone numbers in a few steps, offering a fast and consistent experience.

Until now, administrators created resources and managed phone numbers in a separate telephony application and then manually deployed the numbers in the CRM solution. The long-fragmented process is inconsistent and requires continuous maintenance to keep both applications in sync.
With the native voice channel, business administrators can deploy the telephony resource and acquire phone numbers without leaving the Omnichannel Administration app.

The key highlights of this feature include:

  • Telephony resource deployment using connection string or sign into Azure account.
  • Acquiring phone numbers of various types and plans.
  • Releasing phone numbers.

Modern Administration for Omnichannel SMS via ACS (Number Management)

GA – August 2021

Typically, customer service organizations must manually integrate standalone telephony and CRM solutions, resulting in fragmented experiences and error-prone manual data integration. Administrators need to manage resources and phone numbers in the telephony provider’s app and manually bring over this information to the CRM solution. Very often, this setup process requires collaboration between business and IT administrators, adding more delay to an already long process. With the availability of Azure Communication Services, Omnichannel for Customer Service now offers native new voice channel. This all-in-one solution empowers business administrators to independently deploy a telephony resource and acquire phone numbers in a few steps, offering a fast and consistent experience.

Until now, administrators created resources and managed phone numbers in a separate telephony application and then manually deployed the numbers in the CRM solution. The long-fragmented process is inconsistent and requires continuous maintenance to keep both applications in sync.
With the native voice channel, business administrators can deploy the telephony resource and acquire phone numbers without leaving the Omnichannel Administration app.

The key highlights of this feature include:

  • Telephony resource deployment using connection string or sign into Azure account.
  • Acquiring phone numbers of various types and plans.
  • Releasing phone numbers.

Supervisor monitoring and barge

GA – August 2021

Call Monitoring – Understanding this Tool in the Call Centre

Service managers are responsible for the overall quality of customer service and often need to observe customer service representatives while they are on the phone with customers. Omnichannel for Customer Service allows supervisors to listen in on phone conversations and join a conversation, if needed. This helps supervisors increase the likelihood of resolving customer issues, enforce proper business practices, and identify training opportunities.

When supervisors log into the application, they are provided a list of phone calls that are in progress. From the list, they can choose to join a call with the option to join anonymously as a hidden participant. If they want to intervene, they can join the call, referred to as “barging”, which then becomes a group call.

Topic Clustering for Voice

GA – August 2021

Topics are automatically generated using AI to organize similar issues into groups. By aggregating metrics from issues grouped into the same topic, organizations get a full view of KPIs and metric impact for each topic. For example, organizations can view the average handling time, sentiment, and CSAT for a specific topic, and whether the topic is a key driver for any of those metrics.

Topics, which represent semantically similar support issues, help organizations better identify and respond to issues their customers are facing. Correlating these topics along with core historical analytics makes it quick and easy for a supervisor to see common issues by volume, CSAT impact and new cases, helping to identify where they should invest their time.
In this release, the same capability will now be applied to voice channel, generating topics off of the transcript. This will help organizations better understand issues that customers face and their impact on core business metrics across the spectrum of engagement.

I’m really quite excited to see how the new Voice channel will be received, as I think it’s a great feature addition to the overall tools available. It will be interesting to see how clients may choose to use it over their existing voice channel setup.

I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!

Omnichannel – Wave 2 2020

Yesterday was an extremely exciting day, for a number of reason! The main reason (& the purpose of this article) is that the release notes for Wave 2 2020 dropped. This covers Dynamics 365 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2020wave2/) and Power Platform (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave2/). I’ve been quite eager to see (& talk about) some of the features that will be in it, so here goes!

Now there’s obviously a lot of different stuff in there, covering all of the different first party apps in Dynamics 365, as well as functionality for the different parts of the Power Platform. I’m going to focus on the Omnichannel features, as after all that’s what I (mostly) talk about 🙂

As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.

Agent suggestions for similar cases

Public preview – October 2020. No current date for GA release

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Customer service agents will usually use multiple resources to efficiently handle & resolve customer cases. When doing so, the ideal is to provided consistent responses across agents & sessions. Carrying this out can involve knowledge articles, involving other agents, or reviewing active/similar cases.

The aim is to therefore improve this to enable the agents to be more efficient. Items such as being able to identify other cases that similar actions have occurred will result in a much more empowered experience.

The key highlights for this new feature include:

  • AI driven case suggestions bases on the context & historical success rate
  • Secondary actions that can be taken, such as collaboration with an expert
  • Continuous improvement of the recommendation model through a comprehensive feedback mechanism

Embedding chats in mobile experience

GA – October 2020

Until now, the only way possible for customers to engage with Omnichannel customer support on mobile has been through a mobile browser. This hasn’t always been the best of experiences.

This feature allows business with mobile applications to provide customers the ability to engage with customer service directly within the mobile app. There are two options available for this across iOS & Android devices:

  • By embedding the Omnichannel chat widget into an iFrame, with minimal code customisation. The colour & logo can be set through the Omnichannel Administrator app. This method includes a sample app on AppSource with examples for common scenarios
  • Through the React Native Mobile SDK for Omnichannel for Customer Service. This will allow developers to build fully customised chat widgets in mobile apps

Persistent messaging for chat

GA – October 2020

One of the main challenges around chat is that when a conversation is closed, the history is accessible the the chat transcript. It’s not easily visible in the chat conversation history. Asynchronous messaging channels such as WhatsApp don’t have this ‘restriction’, as the chat history is directly available in the session.

If an agent needs to go look up the chat history, it can cause a delay in responding to the customer whilst it’s located, opened & read. This in turn can degrade the customer experience.

In this new feature, admins are able to enable persistent messaging, so that the customers previous conversation shows in the actual conversation window. This in turn allows the agent to have the full context of the customers previous engagement before responding.

Outbound messaging

Public preview – August 2020. GA October 2020

There are occasions when organisations need to proactively reach out to customers. This could be to notify them of a case update, regulatory information, upcoming appointments, etc. Being able to do this via the customers preferred method of communication is important in delivery best-of-class service

With this feature, organisations will be able to dynamically message their customers based on specific events through supported channels. This includes the following capabilities:

  • Creating message templates that can be adopted for outbound messages
  • Configure outbound messages based on specific events on any entity, & send messages when these events are triggered

The customer will now be able to respond back upon receiving one of the messages. This response will be treated like any other incoming conversation in Omnichannel. It will flow through the appropriate routing & work distributions, agent assignment, etc, and the agent will be able to respond back to the customer in real time

Post-conversation surveys using Forms Pro

Public preview – August 2020. GA – October 2020

Until now, there was no (easy) method for post-conversation surveys to be sent out to customers. Businesses wish to ensure that customer satisfaction is met, and often make use of such things. Custom Power Automate actions could be implemented, but this obviously takes additional time &/or resource to develop.

With this new feature, Omnichannel administrators can configure post conversations surveys using Forms Pro. These can be presented natively as part of the customer experience to provide feedback. There’s also support for sending offline surverys through one of the various enabled channels.

Real-time language translation of messages

Public preview – August 2020. GA – October 2020

Language Translator - Apps on Google Play

Customers would like to receive support in their native language. Businesses are not always able to do this, as it would require having staff who can communicate in different languages to their customers.

In this feature, real-time translation of messages is carried out between the customer & the support agent. It’s also available for the internal collaboration between agents. It’s enabled as a plug-in that exposes API’s to bring in 3rd party translation services, & also provides a native implementation through Azure Cognitive Services.

This is a feature that I can see being used heavily by not only multi-national organisations, but also by by smaller national-based organisations that have an international customer base

Agent personalisation of quick replies

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Agents spend a considerable amount of time engaging with customers. We already have quick responses within Omnichannel to save agents time in typing replies, & to deliver consistent replies.

However these can’t be personalised for individual agents to represent their identity. This new feature allows the pre-configured quick responses to be customised by agents to represent their styles. With this, they can then address communication scenarios in a manner that’s common & personal to them.

Agent personalisation of sound notifications

Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020

This feature enables agents to customise sound notifications for incoming conversations so that they can easily distinguish between different sessions. It will also allow them to
differentiate their sessions from others around them in a call centre setting.

Agent suggestions for knowledge

Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020

Agents typically use several different resources to efficiently resolve customer cases. These include knowledge articles, collaboration with other agents, and reviewing other cases. Up until now, this has all be done manually.

The new feature for this uses AI to proactively surface relevant knowledge articles, taking case context & previous history into account. It also includes a comprehensive feedback mechanism to continuously improve the recommendation model.

Experience designer for multi-session apps

Public preview – September 2020. GA – October 2020

The experience designer is an out-of-the-box solution that lets organisations create targeted app experiences, to be used by agents & supervisors. Administrators can select specific channels & tool to be used by these profiles, as an alternative to building & maintaining custom apps.

All in all, I think that there are some really helpful additions to the core Omnichannel product, aimed at making the customer & agent experiences more productive. I’m looking forward to getting hands on with these, and writing about them!

Omnichannel Desktop Notifications

I’m quite regularly asked various things about Omnichannel. One of the most regular questions goes along the following lines:

Are we able to show a desktop notification to our agents, when they’re not on the Omnichannel Customer Hub screen?

Let me explain what this is all about. When an agent is logged into the Omnichannel Agent Hub, and a new chat comes in, they get the following prompt on their screen:

They can then accept it (which will open up a new chat session), or reject it (which will send it back to the queue).

But if they’re not on the browser tab that Omnichannel Agent Hub is open in, they won’t see any notifications. At all! So they miss out on this, and the customer isn’t engaged with. This obviously is undesirable from a business perspective, as it could even result in losing the customer. So the answer, until now, has unfortunately been ‘No’.

Now in the past when this has come up, I’ve suggested that people take a look at either:

However in my experience these haven’t really been suitable for Omnichannel. This can be due to various reasons, including the client, the requirements, or the infrastructure itself. It’s always been a real annoyance to things, and something that I (& many others) wish would be in place. Several of us have given previous feedback to the product team that this would be really useful to have.

Companies want their agents to be as productive as possible, and this therefore results in a gap in their potential productivity.

Well, the amazing news is that the Product Team for Omnichannel have listened to the feedback given. Not only that, they’ve actually acted on it!

As part of Wave 1 2020 functionality, we now have Omnichannel desktop notifications! This can cover the following scenarios:

  • The Omnichannel agent has minimised the Omnichannel Agent Hub app
  • The Omnichannel agent is working on another tab of the browser
  • The Omnichannel agent is working in another browser window

So what does this actually look like? Well, it’s quite nice & neat to see:

Desktop notification

Very helpfully (in my opinion) it even tells you the browser that’s being used. Users can be running multiple browsers, and this helps as a reminder. If a user has multiple different browsers open, this can assist with working out which one has Omnichannel running in.

Now, there are several different actions that will happen, depending on the agent reaction to the notification:

  • If the agent clicks on the text (but not one of the buttons), it’ll open up the Omnichannel app, and show the agent the notification within the app. They can then choose to accept or reject it within the Omnichannel app
  • If the agent clicks the Accept button, the Omnichannel app will open up & be active, and the session with the customer will start
  • If the agent clicks the Reject button, the notification will go away, and the customer will be returned to the queue

Lets take a look again at the notification within the app itself:

There’s a ‘Wait time’ contained with it. If the wait time expires without the agent doing anything, the conversation is returned to the queue.

This value can be configured by the Omnichannel Administrator, to whichever setting fits the organisation. To do this, go to Notifications in the Omnichannel Administration Hub, open up the notification that you’re wanting to modify, and change the value shown below:

However, you’ll note on the desktop notification that there’s no ‘Wait time’ included on it. This is because the way that notification appears on the desktop doesn’t allow for it to be shown. That isn’t to say that it’s not applicable – the agent will still have the same amount of time to respond. If they don’t respond within this time, the desktop notification will disappear.

Now, there’s still something that the agent will need to do in order to have the desktop notifications to appear. They’ll need to give the browser permission to allow it to happen. The first time that it occurs, it’ll prompt the user as follows:

Allow desktop notification

When the user clicks ‘Accept’, it’ll save the setting, and the desktop notifications will be pushed through. Obviously if they don’t, the desktop notifications won’t appear!

There can be occasions when this still doesn’t work. The below items should help you troubleshoot any these, or similar situations:

One thing that’s also really useful to know is that all of this isn’t just for new customer conversations. The functionality for desktop notifications also covers:

  • Incoming chat conversation
  • Incoming SMS conversation
  • Conversation (work item) assignment
  • Conversation transfer
  • Conversation escalation
  • Conversation escalation from a bot

So really the whole gauntlet of agent interactions that they’d be doing on an on-going basis. Which of course is really helpful, and highly useful.

I’m really quite happy that this has come out as part of the Wave 1 2020 feature items. I’ll be continuing to go into depth around the other functionality that’s part of this release. For the moment, I’m also going to quietly wonder what the product team are going to include next – I’m sure it’ll be very helpful!

Wave 1 2020 – Search Behaviour Changes

Having applied the Wave 1 2020 release to several of my test environments, I was browsing around to see the new functionality within it, which is pretty good. However, there was something that I wasn’t expecting, which was a little startling to see! This is around the way that the search behaviour is now working within the system.

What am I talking about? Well, for years, users have asked me if they could search within a specific view. Ie if we had a view set up for ‘My accounts’, where the user is set as the account manager, it would show only the accounts where that condition applies. However when using the search functionality, the system would search & return ALL results that match the search criteria (eg if searching for ‘Apple’, it would return all accounts with the word ‘apple’ in them, regardless if the user was set up as the account manager or not).

Explaining this to users was probably the most complicated thing, in my experience (well, that, and having to then trawl through hundreds, if not thousands of records, where it’s a common word). But for the most part, they accepted it. OK – we all moved on.

Let’s see an example of this. The screenshot below shows an account that exists within one of my Sandbox environments (which has the Wave 1 2020 update applied to it):

I’m now going to search for it within the entity itself (more about Global Search at the end of this post):

Hold on – it’s not showing up! What is happening here – is the system OK???

Let me explain what’s happening. Previously (before the Wave 1 2020 update was applied) it would indeed show up in the search results.

But this has now changed! The system is now performing searches ONLY within the view that the user is using. The reason why it’s not showing up here? Well, it’s because I’m not set as the owner of the account – a different user is (and I’m using the ‘My Accounts’ view, as seen in the previous screenshot):

If I now change my view to ‘All Accounts’ and repeat the search again, the record now shows up:

I hadn’t come across this in my perusal of the release notes. On going back to it and digging deep, I found the mention here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2020wave1/microsoft-powerapps/improvements-quick-find-search-experience-grid.

Amusingly there’s actually even a little hint within the system for this. If you look at the entity search box, this is now the text that’s being displayed within it:

There’s also an additional feature as part of this – if you’ve prefiltered a view using column value, searching within the entity will RESPECT the pre-filtering!. OK – now this is indeed incredible:

My thoughts on this is that it’s going to be a double-edged sword. For years, we’ve been educating customers about how searching works, and now this has the potential to change things up.

Thankfully it’s actually possible to turn this off, and revert back to the way that searching has always worked – this is likely to be needed to be done quite a bit. To do this, go to Settings, Administration, System Settings, and change the value for Categorised Search to ‘Yes’ (it’s about 1/3 of the way down the page):

It would have been nice if Microsoft had made people more aware of this, in my opinion.

Please note that this only applies to searching within an entity itself. Global Search (for the moment) still uses the Quick Find view, and returns all results (regardless of filters).

Dynamics 365 Kanban Boards

One of the great features being released as part of Wave 1 2020 for Dynamics 365 is the ability to have Kanban boards in the system!

For those people who are unfamiliar with this functionality, “Kanban” is the Japanese word for “visual signal”. A kanban board helps make work visible using cards & columns to easily display data visually. This allows people to keep on top of things, rather than be distracted by lots of lists and data in different places.

Example of a generic kanban board:

When an item on a kanban board changes status (or whatever property the board groups by), it moves to the relevant column. This could be as simple as having PostIt notes on a wall somewhere and a member of the team physically moves it to a new column, or having a record value be updated and then it automatically moves in the view. Items can also be dragged/dropped to a new column in some systems, which then updates the status

I’ve used Pivotal Tracker for several projects that I’ve been working on over the years, which works exactly in this way.

One of the drawbacks with how data is displayed in Dynamics 365 is that the views are lists of records. You can add columns for fields that you want to reference (eg status), sort & filter on them, but visually it’s not very exciting. There’s the ability of course to have charts, graphs & Power BI objects (with the ability to drill down into these), but it’s still not the best of experiences in my opinion.

Well, that’s now no longer the case! You can now use the kanban board ability to display data more visually, as well as interacting with it (think drag/drop)

Caveat: At the moment, although you can add kanban to practically any entity, it’s actually only able to be used on Opportunity

So, the steps to enable it in your environment:

  • Go to https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/environments & select the environment you’re wanting to try it in
  • On the right side of the page, you’ll see the Wave 1 release (see screenshot below). Select the ‘Manage’ button, and confirm the upgrade (it’s not reversible FYI). Wait patiently for it to install (it can take several hours)
  • Once the installation is finished, refresh the environment, open the environment, click the cogwheel on the top right, and select ‘Advanced Settings’
  • Joyfully, this takes you to the old system settings menu, as this functionality hasn’t yet been moved into the configuration available at make.powerapps.com (yet!). Click the dropdown arrow next to Settings in the menu ribbon, and select Customisations
  • Open the solution up (remember, you should probably be doing this in a custom solution, rather than the default one!), expand entities, and find Opportunity. Click on it, and then click on the ‘Controls’ tab
  • You’ll see the option for ‘Add Control’. Click this, then scroll down the list until you see Kanban! Add it, and it’ll show up in the list of controls
  • Now, it’s VITAL that you save, and then publish the customisations.
  • Close all of this, and go to the Opportunity entity. Click the 3 dots to expand the menu on the menu bar, click to slide into the Show As menu, and then select Kanban (you can of course change the default view to use Kanban, if you so desire)
  • And BOOM! The screen layout will magically change, and you should now see the following sort of thing (assuming you have data for Opportunities, of course)
Image from Carl Cookson at linked365.home.blog/

Incidentally, there are actually two Kanban board views available for Opportunities. One of these groups by the record status, and the other groups by where records are within the Business Process Flow timeline (which is shown in the screenshot above). You can switch between these easily by selecting the option that you want on the screen.

Now, as I stated above, this is currently only available for Opportunity (and you need a Sales Enterprise or Sales Professional license to use it). However, I really think this is great functionality, and would hope that it’ll roll out to other parts of Dynamics 365, as well as being available for Power Apps built on the CDS.

How do I see this being valuable? Good question to ask! I think that initially it could be really valuable for customer service scenarios, especially tracking negative interactions with customers (ie where the customer isn’t happy with support and/or the resolution, or there’s a fault, etc).

The ability to display this data visually, with time filters as well, should bring things into focus quite quickly to see where a company can both improve its offering, as well as pick up any issues that are occurring. Obviously regular reporting and BI will still continue to play their crucial roles, but this is another piece of functionality being added to the overall ‘toolkit’ to help get things every better!

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

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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)

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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!