2024 Wave 1 Release Notes: D365 Customer Service

As you all know, the release notes were published not too long ago. As I do every year, I have been writing several articles about the functionality that is part of the 2024 Wave 1 notes for Dynamics 365 CX! In the first article I wrote in this series, I discussed everything exciting and new that is coming for Dynamics 365 Sales, followed by an article about the new SKU called Microsoft Copilot for Sales, which you can read here if you missed it.
In today’s article I will walk through the features for Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and there are quite a few, so let’s get started!

Forecast case volumes daily and at 15-minute intervals

We’ve had the forecasting for cases for a while now, but in this release wave the forecasting becomes more granular as case forecasting can now be done at 15-minute intervals, based on historical data. If you’re not sure what this feature does, let me explain. It’s always hard for customer service organizations to estimate the volume of cases and/or customer conversations. This feature will look at past data to compile an estimate of cases and conversations. You can find more information here.

Create multiple cases from email sent to multiple boxes

Honestly, I am not sure if this feature is a good one. I would think we don’t want to create duplicate cases for the same issue a customer has, but it seems this feature allows for exactly that! With this feature multiple cases can be created if an email is sent to multiple mailboxes. (I assume you will have to have case creation from an email configured) For example, when a customer submits an email to your support mailbox 1 and also to support mailbox 2, (whether that is by cc’ing, bcc’ing or adding the second mailbox in the ‘to’ field) one case will be created for each mailbox the email arrived in. I hope this is something that admins can disable..

Use enhanced attachment experience while composing email

Now this one I really like! You are probably wondering what the enhanced experience entails, so let me explain it to you. This experience will provide users with several outlook-like features. Things like dragging and dropping attachments to an email, and being able to do this prior to the email being saved, copying attachments from one email to another, downloading emails and deleting them in bulk, and exporting attachments details to an excel document. On top of that, users will be able to see the size of an attachment, they will be able to toggle between tile and grid views and they will get a reminder to add an attachment if they mentioned it in an email. (You might have seen this type of behavior in outlook as well.) These updates might sound minor, but I believe these types of enhancements make agents a lot more productive in the long run!

Check configuration health in admin center

This feature was added to Dynamics 365 Customer Service in last year’s release wave, and I have to be honest, I totally missed it! According to the docs site, Microsoft released the ‘Contact Center Health Check’, which allows the admin to do a health check of the system to see if there are any problems with any of the configurations. This health check runs in the background, but you can also run the health check manually from the home page in Customer Service Admin Center. You’ll notice the contact center health section showing any errors, warnings, and suggestions. You’ll also see the button to run the health check manually. In this wave, there are more things that will be checked when the health check is run. To learn more about the different checks and their rules take a look here.

Copilot Features

Validate Copilot responses faster with more transparency

This enhancement of Copilot will give agents a better understanding where and how Copilot found answers to questions. Remember, Copilot is an assistant and therefore agents still need to check and validate the information that Copilot suggests. Because of this transparency agent will be able to validate information provided by Copilot much quicker and make them more productive. I think we will see more of these types of enhancements all over the Copilot space for all apps.

Get relevant results with filters for Copilot

Organizations can have a ton of knowledge materials accumulated over the years. Think about how many different knowledge articles Microsoft must have internally! Articles for all the different lines of businesses! It must take Copilot a while to dig through all the content and find the most relevant knowledge content when an agent is working on a case! Wouldn’t it be easier to filter out the articles that are not relevant? For example, if an agent is working on cases related to gaming systems, he or she probably doesn’t need Copilot to search through articles related to CRM or ERP systems right? This feature helps by allowing filtering on knowledge content based on the line of business the agent works in. This feature will be in public preview in April, so I can’t wait to try this out!

Get automatic prompts from Copilot

If your organization is using Copilot in the Sales Hub, then you’ve seen the concept of prompts before. The automatic prompts mentioned here, give agents suggestions on other things Copilot can help them with, which can be helpful if the agent is not aware of all the ways Copilot can assist them.

Omnichannel

Dialer Enhancements and Updates

There are a few updates to the dialer in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the first one is enhancements in transfers to external numbers. With this enhancement, when an agent transfers a call to an external phone number, this can now be done in one step. Once they transfer the call, the agent will be immediately disconnected from the call, and any recording or transcribing will stop. Another feature related to transferring calls is the ability to transfer a call to a Microsoft Teams user through VOIP. I think this is a very big deal as this means that now agents can transfer calls to users who don’t have a Microsoft Teams phone number! This will be a much cheaper options for Dynamics365 Customer Service customers!
The other enhancement is for outbound dialing. Agents will now be able to search for a contact or account row from within the outbound dialer. They will also be able to open the conversation or customer row from the call history in the dialer.
Another feature related to the dialer is the ability for agents to test their microphone and speakers/headsets before (and during) calls. This will be done by placing a test call to confirm everything is working as expected. Lastly, in this release admins can enable feedback and ratings regarding the quality of calls in the application. (This is very similar to when Microsoft Teams asks you about the quality of a call after hanging up.) Configuration options are to have these ratings/feedback to show up once every 100 calls and/or for a specific time period.

Use skills to find agents for consult, transfer scenarios

This feature is a great one, because it will allow agents to find other agents based on skills. The scenario here could be that a call or chat needs to be escalated to a different agent or an agent needs to consult with someone, maybe because the agent who answered the call doesn’t have the correct skillset to help the customer. This feature will allow agents to filter and search for other agents based on skills that are configured in the application. This will make it a lot easier for agents to find the correct person to escalate conversations to.

Mask sensitive data and prevent unauthorized access

This feature will help protect customer data as it will allow administrators to configure rules to handle sensitive data in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. I am assuming these rules will not only mask data in forms and fields but will also be applied to data storage sessions for IVR and agents. Unfortunately, the release notes don’t list any details of how this will be handled, so I guess we will have to wait until this goes into public preview, which is currently slated for April of this year.

Improve productivity by converting voicemail to case

This is another huge one! I haven’t played around with voicemails in Dynamics 365 Customer Service yet, but the ability for the system to convert a voicemail message to a case sounds amazing! This is a feature that will need to be enabled by administrators. Agents will see a button on the command bar of the voicemail message to convert the message into a case.

Unified Routing

There are a total of 3 features that are part of Unified Routing which I will discuss in this article. The first one is the ability to configure up to 200 route-to-queue rules in a workstream. This is important as previously we were only able to configure 100 of these. With this feature that number is now doubled.
The ability to Use overflow for lengthy wait times for work items is another feature that is super important. Call centers often deal with sudden spikes of customer inquiries, so overflow handling is a necessity. Previously we were able to enable the overflow feature, and setup conditions and actions, but these were very limited. On top of that, we were only able to configure rules that would run before work items were queued. With this enhancement admins can configure conditions and actions before and after work items are queued and they will be able to enter conditions when wait times are exceeded by a certain number of minutes!

A feature that goes hand-in-hand with sudden spikes of customer conversations is for the application to immediately sync changes that are made to queue memberships. Today if we add an agent or remove an agent to a queue, we have to wait 15 minutes for the update/change to sync to the application. With this enhancement, those types of updates will be immediate. I am hoping other functionality will be added so that all changes will immediately sync vs having to wait!
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