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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
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