Customer Service Workspace Review

I was working in the new Customer Service Workspace app, which got added to my instance as part of the 2020 Release Wave 2 (keep in mind this app is still in preview). I wrote a small piece on this app as part of my article Dynamics 365 – 2020 Release Wave 2 | Part 3 which you can read here or if you prefer watching a video you can do that here. In this article I am want to dive a little deeper in the app and the functionality that comes with it and how to turn some of these features on. There’s also been some additional features added, which I also will discuss in this article.

This app is one of two apps that has the ability to open multiple sessions on the right side of the screen. (Omnichannel is the other app that has this ability.) Unfortunately this is not something that we can turn on for other apps, but I am hoping this will become available in the future. (Fingers crossed!) To open a record as a session (which will become visible as a tab on the left hand side) the user has to hold down the shift key at the same time they click on the link to open the record. This will also load the productivity pane on the right hand of the screen. (NOTE: The productivity pane will only open when you open a record as a session, meaning holding down shift and clicking the link. If you open a record by just clicking on it, the productivity pane with smart assist will not load.)

Previously we only had ‘Knowledge article suggestions’ and ‘Similar case suggestions’ in the productivity pane (in smart assist), but I am excited to say that since 2020 release wave 2 there have been some enhancements! There are now two additional icons on the productivity pane. One is called ‘Agent Scripts’ and the other is the ‘Knowledge’ pane. This allows users to search for knowledge base articles. I noticed that when you click on the KB icon on the productivity pane, it automatically loads the case title in the search field. (This is something you can configure for the kb control on the case form, so I assume it also uses this configuration for the knowledge base pane in the productivity pane.) In order to turn the productivity pane on there are a few things you need to do:

Turn on Suggestions – Open the Customer Service Hub app and navigate to the Service Management area, then click on ‘Settings’ under ‘Analytics and Insights’. Under Premium AI capabilities you’ll see ‘Suggestions’. Click on ‘Manage’ and turn on similar case suggestions and knowledge base suggestions. You can chance the data mappings on the bottom of the page, but I wouldn’t recommend doing this.

Assign an App Profile – This is something that is relatively new. You can now create your own app profiles which will determine what type of experience the end user will have while they are using the app. For example a supervisor might not have access to the productivity pane, and an agent will. Look at this as an extra security layer that turns certain items in an app on or off. Keep in mind as of now these app profiles are only related to multisession types of apps like the Omnichannel and Customer Service Workspace apps. I wrote an article about this which you can read here.

Agent Experiences

A lot of these settings are located in the Customer Service Hub app in the ‘Service Management’ area. When you scroll down you’ll see the ‘Agent Experience’ area, with several items underneath it: Macros, Agent Scripts, Sessions, Application Tabs and Notifications. All of these items can be configured and associated to an app by an app profile mentioned above. Lets take a look at these items and how we can configure them.

Agent Scripts – If you are using Omnichannel for D365 Customer Service, you know that these already existed in that app. Now we have them in D365 Customer Service as well! Agent scripts can contain a series of steps (yes steps are a child entity related to the agent scripts) that tell customer service agents what they should do or say when talking to a customer as they are working on a case. We can add several steps to an agent script record. There are three different step types we can add to an agent script:

– Text > Written instructions I.E greet customer, check their contact info, etc.
– Macros > These are actions, I.E create records, update records, open KB search, etc. (More about Macros below)
– Script > This allows us to launch another agent script

We also need to identify the order for each step, this is how the agent will see the steps. First #1, then #2, etc. When an agent opens a script they will see that each step in the script has can icon associated to them which they can expand/click to open/execute. You can create multiple scrips, which then allows the customer service reps to pick the correct one. Just make sure you use good naming conventions for the scripts so the agents know what it’s for!

Macros – Think of a Macro like a short cut to certain actions. Customer Service Reps can click on a Macro from within an agent script and very quickly perform these actions. For example you can create a macro to open a new email message with a template preloaded in the message and with the customer name automatically populated in the email ‘To’ field. This will save the Customer Service Rep a lot of steps and therefore will improve productivity. When you create a new macro, the window that opens looks very much like a power automate flow. Unfortunately it doesn’t exactly work the same way. Instead of being able to use dynamic content, like you can in power automate, we need to work with slugs. Slugs hold data related to an active session which is similar to dynamic content. The main difference is that we can’t pick from a list of available fields like we can with PowerAutomate. (Of course you could also ‘hardcode’ inputs like I did with a KB search macro for ‘returns’ shown in the screenshot below.) Click here to learn more about macros

The slugs that are available for use in the Customer Service Workspace app are more limited than the ones you can use in Omnichannel for customer service. We only have access to the data in the active session (when a session opens this is considered to be the anchor tab, and the data on the form that loads is available to use with macros.) In order to use a slug in the Customer Service Workspace app you’ll need to type ${anchor.fieldname}.
I am using a session template that is related to the case entity, which means that I need to use my case field names in my slugs.

Example: I created a macro for an email to open and to have the case number and title automatically populated in the subject field of the email, by using slugs. I created a new macro and added the “open a new form to create a record” step. In the entity logical name I picked email.
When you click on ‘advanced options’ you’ll see two fields, ‘Attribute Name’ and ‘Attribute Value’. These represent the fields on the record you are creating. In the attribute name you will need to enter the sytem name of the field you want to populate. In the attribute value field you need to enter the slug. Since the case number system name is ‘ticketnumber’ this is what I used as the slug. I also wanted to add the actual case title, so I used the system name ‘title’ in the slug. Here are the two slugs I used to populate the subject of the email message: ${anchor.ticketnumber} – ${anchor.title}
To learn more about slugs take a look here.

Macro Run History

Just like with Power Automate Flows, you can review the run history for each macro by clicking on the ‘View run history’ link on the left side, under the macro description. When you open any of the runs you will be able to see detailed information on the run, like inputs, outputs, etc.

Session Templates – When you have created macros and agent scripts, you can tie them to a session template. A session template is not an entity form, it’s where we can configure several things related to the session, I.E tabs that will be loaded, during the session, the entity (or channel) related to the session (I.E cases), the session title (which is what will show as the name of the session tab on the left when a new session is opened). Session templates can be assigned to app profiles by using the the app profile manager. I wrote an article about that which you can access here.

Application Tabs – These are the horizontal tabs on top of the customer service workspace app. Application tabs can be used in conjunction with app profiles to auto load when a session starts. For each application tab we can configure whether or not the user has the ability to close the tab, this is called a anchor tab. There are 7 different page types you can choose from when creating an application tab:

• Entity List
• Entity Record
• Web Resource
• Control
• Dashboard
• Search
• Third Party Website

Notifications – Lastly there is a notification area where you can configure different types of notifications. I assume this is similar to the behavior in omnichannel, when a chat comes into a queue and an agent gets a notification where they can accept or reject the chat. Not sure yet how this will come into play in the customer service workspace app since we don’t have channels there (yet?) but hopefully something like that will be coming in the near future!

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