Within your customer service setting, long gone are the days of sitting in a call centre and taking all of your queries over the phone. The likelihood is that you’re now handling contact from many different angles and trying to deliver a consistently high level of service to your customers at the same time.

For Dynamics 365, there have long been solutions provided by Microsoft for handling contact via email, such as automatic case creation from emails and the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. But what about interactions via your website or social media pages? That’s where Omnichannel for Customer Service comes in.

What is Microsoft Omnichannel?

Omnichannel for Customer Service is an application for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It provides a single interface allowing your customer service agents to support your customers via:

• Live Chat (embed on your website, in your own web application, or in your Dynamics portal)
• Facebook
• Twitter
• SMS
• Microsoft Teams
• Custom Messaging Channels

What makes Omnichannel such a useful tool?

As well as providing a convenient way for your customers to access your support channels, Omnichannel has a range of features that will help guide both the customer through their support journey, and provide the agent with the tools they need to resolve queries efficiently.

• Queue Routing ensures the correct agent will handle each chat request. This is highly configurable based on where the request originated, the customer that is initiating the chat, the skillset of the agent, and the agent’s availability.

• Pre-Defined Messages allow both your agents to quickly respond to frequently asked questions, and ensure that you deliver a consistent response.
• Customer Information is presented to the agent when they pick up an incoming request if you place the widget behind authentication (such as your Dynamics portal or other web application), meaning that recent case history is instantly at their fingertips. Even if the customer doesn’t initiate an authenticated chat session, your agent can quickly link the chat to the correct customer during the session.
• Sentiment Analysis shows the satisfaction level of your customer throughout the chat session and is instantly updated if their sentiment changes at all.

• Knowledge Base Integration means that agents are able to quickly provide links to your KB articles. The Omnichannel application automatically suggests articles that are applicable to the incoming request.
• Agent Desktop Notifications mean that agents won’t miss any incoming chats, even if they’ve navigated to a different tab in their browser.

• Case Creation can be handled on the fly, so if the agent can’t resolve the issue there and then, a case can be quickly raised for the customer.
• Transcripts of the chat session are automatically saved within Dynamics allowing these to be retrieved during future support sessions.
• Pre-Chat Surveys can prompt the customer to provide vital information relating to the request, which is displayed to your agents once they accept the incoming chat.
• Proactive Chat allows you to automatically invite customers to a chat session if they are visiting a certain page, if they have been on the page for a defined amount of time, or if they have visited a page multiple times.

• Virtual Agents can be configured allowing a bot to handle the initial chat request. The chat then gets handed over to the agent once the necessary details have been gathered, meaning your agents can focus on delivering support rather than asking repetitive questions.
• PowerBI Dashboards allow you to monitor performance of your agents, so you can be sure you’re delivering the right level of service.*
  * requires separate PowerBI licenses

How does it integrate with Dynamics 365?

There are two options for using Omnichannel for Customer Service.

• Dynamics 365 app – For most organisations, we recommend the use of the dedicated Dynamics 365 Omnichannel app. This is just a separate area of your existing Dynamics 365 system where you can access all of the Omnichannel functionality.
• Unified Service Desk – If you already use the Unified Service Desk desktop application in your organisation, Omnichannel can be added to it. This way, your agents don’t need to switch between a browser window and their existing Unified Service Desk application in order to use Omnichannel.

There are two options for using Omnichannel for Customer Service.

• Dynamics 365 app – For most organisations, we recommend the use of the dedicated Dynamics 365 Omnichannel app. This is just a separate area of your existing Dynamics 365 system where you can access all of the Omnichannel functionality.
• Unified Service Desk – If you already use the Unified Service Desk desktop application in your organisation, Omnichannel can be added to it. This way, your agents don’t need to switch between a browser window and their existing Unified Service Desk application in order to use Omnichannel.