D365 Customer Service: Dialer Enhancements

The 2024 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 brought us some awesome features for the Dynamics 365 CX apps. So far, this release packed a lot of cool and innovative stuff to make all of the different apps work better. In this article, I will discuss the new improvements that have been made to the dialer inside of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. If you’re not sure what the dialer is in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, let me explain it to you. The dialer enables agents to make and receive phone calls from within the Customer Service Workspace app in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The dialer also supports features such as call recording, call transfer, call hold, etc. Now let’s take a look at the two new features that are part of this preview!

What are the new features?

There are two major features that I want to discuss in this article. The first feature allows agents to search for contacts and/or accounts directly from within the dialer. This will make it a lot easier to quickly call someone, as agents won’t need to know the contact or account’s phone number from the top of their head. They can just start to type the name of the contact or account they want to call in the dialer. The second feature allows agents to open a contact or account record directly from within the dialer. It’s important to understand that both features are currently in preview and are looking to become generally available in October of this year.

Enable the features

Just like any preview feature, in order to try out these preview features, you’ll need to enable them first. You can do this by navigating to make.powerapps.com and selecting the environment you want to enable these features for. From there you’ll need to open the default solution and search for ‘settings definition’ (the rows, not the table) on the left side of the screen. Click on the setting definition below settings to see all the rows. There is one setting for each feature I mentioned above. To enable the feature that allows agents to open a contact or account record from within the dialer, you’ll need to find the ‘Enhanced outbound dialer April 2024 improvements‘ setting. Click on the three dots on the right side of the setting and select ‘Edit’. This will open a side pane on the right side of the screen where the setting environment value can be changed. Scroll down and click on the ‘+New environment value’ and set the field to ‘yes’.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button on the bottom. If you also want to enable the ability for agents to search for contact and account records from within the dialer, you will need to repeat the same process for the ‘Enhanced outbound dialer contact search experience‘ setting definition. Once both settings have been enabled, you can open the Customer Service Workspace app to test the functionality of these features. To disable the settings, you will need to go back to the setting definition and set the Setting environment value back to ‘No’.

Search for contact/account records in the dialer

Now let’s go into the details on how each of these features work! I’ll start with the ability to search for contact and/or account rows from within the dialer. When you open the dialer, you’ll notice on top of the screen a ‘Country/Region’ choice field, and a text field on the right side of it with the phrase ‘Type name/Number’ prepopulated. Agents can search for a name by typing the name of the contact or account in the text box. You’ll notice that the search starts after two characters are entered. NOTE: To change this setting, you need to navigate to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com > environments. Select the environment for which you want to change the setting. Click Settings > Behaviors (under products). Under ‘Lookup Behavior’ set the ‘Minimum number of characters to trigger typeahead search‘ to 1,2 or 3.

Keep in mind that the search in the dialer uses Dataverse search to find contacts and accounts, so to use this, Dataverse search needs to be enabled. When the system searches for contacts, only the first and last name columns get searched, and for accounts the account name column gets searched. The search function seems to use the ‘contains’ function, which means that any account name or contact first or last name that contains the text that is entered as a search query will show up under the results. For example if I enter ‘Datum’, I will see the ‘Datum Corp’ account, but I will also see the ‘A. Datum Integration’ account.
The search results will show below where the query is entered, and for contacts mobile and business phone numbers are shown in the search results. You’ll notice you can view all the results, or you can click on the contacts or accounts button to only see records from that table. When the agent selects the contact or account they want to call, the phone number is populated and the name of the related record shows below with a green checkmark next to it. Clicking the ‘Call’ button will initiate the phone call.

Open Account or Contact records from Dialer

Agents can now open a contact or account record directly from within the dialer, this will save agents some steps and will allow them to be more productive. An agent can open the dialer by clicking on the phone icon on the top bar of the screen. This will load the dialer in the side pane at the right of the screen.

The agent will see a list of recent calls. If any of the recent calls are related to a contact or account row in Dynamics 365 then the name of the row shows on the left side of the phone number. Agents can simply click on the contact or account name and the row will be opened as a tab in a new session. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t work hand in hand with the previous feature, which is something I would have liked to have seen: the ability to first search for a contact or an account, and then being able to open any of the records that show under the search results. Maybe this will come in a later version! I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!