2021 Release Wave 2 | Part 2: Customer Service

We have arrived in August and that means that now have the ability to install the early release features of 2021 Release Wave 2 in a sandbox environment for testing! For the folks who are not familiar with Microsoft’s release cadence, Microsoft Power Platform and Customer Engagement apps (Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, etc.) deliver two major releases per year which occur in April and October. We have the ability to opt in for early access to try out and test some of these features. I am writing a series of articles on the new features in 2021 Release Wave 2, as I do for each major release. In this article I will discuss some of the most exciting new features and updates that are coming for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

Knowledge Management

There are a few improvements for users who create and maintain knowledge articles. When you use the business process flow to go through the author, review and publish stages, there is an update to the publish stage. When you finish the publish stage there won’t be the need to click the publish button, as the ‘publish’ pane will open on the side of the screen, making this experience a lot easier.
When you open a knowledge article, you’ll notice below the ‘Article Content’ section on the form there is a section with additional commands to refresh, see all records and attach files. Once you attach a file to the knowledge article you’ll notice a few command buttons are added: ‘Select’ and ‘Sort’. This is related to the attachments that were uploaded.

When agents utilize the knowledge search in Dynamics 365 Customer Service they’ll notice some updates to the result cards. Besides being able to see whether an article is internal or external, you’ll also notice that the colored status reason of the article (Published, Draft, etc) is no longer there. Yes you can still see the status reason of the article, but its no longer in the bright red color and the status reason has been moved to the bottom of the result card. I created a screenshot which you can view below to show you the difference between the ‘old’ version and what this will look like in release wave 2.

The last feature I wanted to mention regarding Knowledge Article in Dynamics 365 Customer Service is the automatic suggestion of an article description and keywords based on the title, content and existing keywords on the knowledge article. This feature is not in early release but is currently scheduled for public preview in October of 2021.

Collaboration using embedded Microsoft Teams

The Teams integration with Dynamics 365 will allow for the ability to chat with contacts from Dynamics 365, but will also give users access to internal resources such as customer service managers and support experts. Just like in Dynamics 365 Sales, users will have the ability to link and unlink Microsoft Teams chats to records, case records to be exact. Microsoft also mentions the ability to access recent Teams chat lists, but I am not sure what that entails. This feature show as public preview for August 2021 but it hasn’t been enabled in my instance as of yet.

Usability Improvements

There will be some usability improvements in the Customer Workspace and Omnichannel for Customer Service apps. If you’ve read any of the release notes for 2021 Release Wave 2 you know about the new side panes which is part of this release. Currently both the Customer Workspace and Omnichannel for Customer Service apps have a side pane called ‘productivity pane’. This pane will be migrated to the new side pane going forward. The simplified navigation that prior to this update needs to be enabled by a system admin will be enabled by default. For more information on the simplified navigation take a look here.

Case Management

According to the release notes, there will be a new control for the subject field on forms. This control will be available for out of the box forms but you will be able to add the control to custom forms. This feature is part of the early release so this is definitely something you can try out! In order to add the control to a form you’ll need to open the form in the legacy form editor and open the ‘Subject’ field on the form. When the field properties window opens, click on the control tab in the top of the window and add the ‘Selection TreeView control‘. Don’t forget to enable it for the web. Save and Publish your changes and the new control will be visible! I have to say I really like this new control! The search bar will allow users to search through the different hierarchies so users don’t have to expand each section to find the correct subject. Nice job Microsoft!

There are also a few updates to the universal resource scheduling experience in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Folks who are familiar with Dynamics 365 Field Service will appreciate this, as in this release the new schedule board (which we were able to use in Dynamics 365 Field Service) will be set as the default schedule board.

If there is a need to revert back to the legacy schedule board, users can toggle the slider on the top right of the screen to turn the new schedule board off. Customer Service will now also have access to requirement groups, which allows us to create several requirements under a requirement group and perform ‘team’ or ‘group’ scheduling (this means if we have a requirement for 4 resources, we can easily schedule them all at once.) When I tried this in my environment, it wasn’t working yet but I’m sure this will be fixed before this goes live in October.

Prior to this release service scheduling and IoT management were only available in the Customer Service Hub app of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. In this release these features will also be available in the Customer Workspace app. You’ll notice that the service calendar, service activities, IoT Alerts and customer assets are now available when you click on the ‘+’add tab button on the top of the screen. Keep in mind the service calendar is not the same as the schedule board…

External Data in Timeline

This is another feature that is scheduled for general availability in October of 2021. As you probably now, today all the data that is visible in the timeline control is data that lives in your Dynamics 365 Customer Service database. With this feature we will be able to show data outside of Dynamics 365 in the timeline. When you review the details of this feature, it says that there will be a new virtual data model which will allow admins to bring outside data into the timeline. I have no idea how this will work, but this is definitely a feature I will be keeping my eye on!
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