Over the course of the past few months, Microsoft has introduced a number of changes to its Customer Service platform. As part of the Dynamics 365 suite of enterprise resource planning services, it has received quite a few productivity-enhancement updates. Near the end of last year, for example, Facebook Messenger capabilities were added to the application to help service teams better assist their customers.
Today, Microsoft has published a round-up of the recent updates that brought several capabilities to general availability. The different sections in this round-up correspond to various components the tech giant believes hold significance with respect to Customer Service's core initiatives.
For starters, these are the customer-centric features that reached GA in December:
- Facebook Messenger. Allow customers to connect with you asynchronously through a channel they’re already familiar with. With the deployment of Facebook Messenger, organizations give customers the control to communicate when and where they want.
- Proactive chat. Organizations can invite online customers to chat based on custom criteria such as specific browsing patterns on the website and control the chat experience using personalized trigger messages and rules. When the customer accepts the invitation, the agent receives a notification and starts conversing.
- Microsoft Power Virtual Agents integration. Organizations can automate routine conversations by routing incoming chat requests to AI-powered virtual agents created with Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. Organizations can enable seamless escalation of conversations from the Virtual Agent to a human agent while providing complete conversation context to human agents.
Interested parties can find out more about what to expect in this regard in the coming months by going over the release notes for future plans here.
Moving on, the following capabilities that were aimed towards increasing agent productivity and efficiency were released at the beginning of this year:
- Agent scripts. Organizations can save time and ensure continuity by configuring scripts that provide step-by-step guidance to agents. Steps can be configured and automated based on session types, for example, chat or phone calls.
- Smart assist. Build and deploy a chatbot that provides real-time recommendations to agents during a conversation based on contextual queues to help agents resolve cases faster.
- Skills-based routing. Improve the efficiency of automatic work distribution by directly routing conversations to the right agent based on their individual skills and proficiencies.
- Macros. Empower agents to identify and automate repetitive tasks with a single click. Add macros to agent scripts, smart assist, or other productivity features to automate tasks like resolving a case after updating a field, assigning it to a different user after capturing notes or sending an acknowledgment email with contextual data from the session.
To complete the round-up, a couple of features that are aimed at driving a better customer/agent connectivity experience and were rolled out in January have been mentioned. The first of these is self-service history, through which agents can view real-time customer navigation history to gain a better understanding of how to guide them. The other capability is sentiment analysis, which offers a variety of sentiment indicators with accessibility features to ensure a better overall customer experience.
Microsoft has plenty more features lined up for a general release in April; you can find out more about these here if you are interested.
