Customer Service Admin Center App: Quick Setups

I wrote a high level overview on this app in early March as part of my series on 2022 Release Wave 1, at which time this app was still in preview. If you haven’t heard about this app, this is a new app that is part of this release, which consolidates the administrative experience from different apps into one. This will make it a lot easier to configure Dynamics 365 Customer service. If you haven’t read the article but are interested to learn more I would suggest taking a look, you can access the article here. This app has been generally available since early this month, which means you can start using it to administer Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Since the preview there have been some updates to the app, which I am going to cover in this article.

The first thing I noticed is that the home page has been updated and has more details on it. In the preview there were only a few settings that showed up here, but now we have more information on the page. On the top of the home page you’ll notice a section called ‘Quick Setups(preview)’which I will discuss later in this article. Below that you’ll notice the ‘Advanced Configuration’ section which allow you to navigate so agent productivity feature setups like Macros, Email Templates, SLA’s and Article Templates. Below the Advanced Configuration section you’ll notice the ‘Overview’ section, which we were already familiar with from the preview. Clicking any of the buttons below the ‘Overview’ section takes you to the overview page of the selected item. You can see on the sitemap exactly where you land when clicking any of those buttons.

What is quick setup?

The Quick Setups (preview) is a feature that system administrators can use to track the of setup certain channels in the environment. This feature provides them with the all the necessary steps that need to be completed to configure a channel in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. This reminds me of a feature that I built for one of my former customers, where I created a dialog (do you all remember workflow dialogs?!) that system admins would run on a user record. They would answer questions and based on their answer the dialog would spit out everything that needed to be configured and setup for the user (security roles, teams, field security profiles etc.) in order to get the correct access levels. The functionality for quick setup seems to work similar to the experience I just described to you. We can create ‘quick setup’ records for channels in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. During the process of creating a quick setup record, you’ll need to select for which channel you are targeting to setup/configure. Once you pick a channel, you’ll see a summary of steps that need to be configured to get the channel working in the environment. Other admins can then access the record and see what has been done (and what still needs to be done if anything) to get the channel setup and working. I like it! Obviously you’ll only have the ability to select channels that you can configure in the app, for example, if you don’t have voice channel then this option will be grayed out. Now let’s create a ‘Quick Setup’ record in Dynamics 365 and show you how this works!

Creating a quick setup record

When you enter the quick setup area you’ll notice there are no quick setup records available yet. You can create one by clicking on ‘Start New’, which will launch a new window in Dynamics 365.

In the name field you can enter the name of the setup you’re configuring here. In this example I am going to create a setup record for setting up an email channel so I will call this setup ‘Email Channel Setup’. When I click on the ‘next’ button I am taken to the ‘Choose a channel’ step. You can see that I have two different channels I can pick from; Email and Case. I don’t have Omnichannel installed in this environment, which means I have no access to chat and voice channels, so those options show as greyed out and I am unable to choose any of them. You can only select one channel at a time, which you can do by clicking on the channel type icon you can to use for this setup.

After you choose a channel you’ll notice the next button appear on the bottom of the screen. When you click this button you’ll be taken to a summary screen. If you need to make any changes to the name of the quick setup or the channel type you can do this in this screen by clicking edit next to the step you want to change/update. After you review the summary and make any changes needed, you can click ‘Continue Setup’ to navigate to the next screen, and here is where it where the magic happens!

After clicking ‘Continue setup’ you’ll notice a new screen with steps on the left side of the screen and details regarding the step on the right side of the page. As you probably have noticed, this quick setup record for email setup is now showing all the steps that are needed to completed to successfully configure the email channel in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. From adding users and adding security roles to creating mailboxes, queues and everything else! No more searching online for the steps that need to be taken in order to set this up! NOTE: You’ll notice that some steps have child steps which you can view by clicking on the step which will expand the child steps.

You’ll go through all steps and click ‘Next’ when the step is completed. You’ll notice that you can see the progress on the left side, where a green checkmark is shown next to each step that has been completed. Note that there are certain steps where you will be creating records, (like queues, automatic record creation rules, routing rules etc.) directly from this setup screen, so you don’t have to navigate away from the quick setup page.
Once you click ‘Save and Close’ in the bottom right corner of the screen the quick setup record will be closed and the progress is saved. When navigating back to the Quick Setups screen, you’ll see a list of all Quick Setups and their status. Admins can open the record(s) and continue the setup at any time. I hope you found this article informative! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!