Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2022 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Overview of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2022 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2022 to March 2023. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Customer Service is an end-to-end service for customer support, spanning self- and assisted-service scenarios across multiple customer engagement channels. Customer Service provides comprehensive and efficient case routing and management for agents, a knowledge base where users can author and consume knowledge articles, and robust insights through AI suggestions and rich, embedded analytics. It also provides add-ons for omnichannel engagement through chat, social channels, and voice.
In 2022 release wave 2, our focus is on delivering the following capabilities:
- Enhanced omnichannel voice capabilities with support for voicemail, callback, and direct agent dialing.
- Enhanced unified routing with support for longest-idle routing, percentage-based routing, and preferred agent routing, with simplified skill management.
- Improved Microsoft Teams collaboration capabilities with customer support swarming to help agents resolve complex cases, and improvements to the embedded Teams chat and Teams meeting integration capabilities.
- Modernized agent experience with a new continuous view of previous conversations, enhanced multisession navigation, and AI-powered conversation summary.
- Improved extensibility of the out-of-the-box reports and ability for supervisors to view Power Virtual Agents analytics within their Omnichannel analytics dashboards.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2022 release wave 2
Investment areas
Unified routing
Traditionally, organizations use queue-based routing, where incoming service requests are routed to a relevant queue, and agents work on those service requests by picking them from the queue. Organizations can miss service-level agreements if agents pick the easier service requests and leave the higher-priority requests in the queue. To address this scenario, organizations either create custom workflows to periodically distribute service requests among their agents or have dedicated personnel to distribute the service requests equitably among agents while adhering to organizational and customer preferences. Both methods are inefficient, error-prone, and necessitate continuous queue supervision.
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels (cases, entities, chat, digital messages, and voice) to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and auto-skills matching. The new routing service uses AI to classify, route, and assign work items with full automation, eliminating the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations.
Teams integration
Provide your agents with best-in-class business process automation, collaboration, and communication with Microsoft Teams embedded in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Conversations in embedded Teams are linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience.
Agent experiences
Agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Enhancing employee confidence is the key to improving customer service satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides intuitive collaboration capabilities in a customizable workspace and elevates your team’s effectiveness with productivity tools required to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across any channel.
Administrator experiences
A modern administration experience provides a consistent setup experience that unifies the management of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, unified routing, and omnichannel activities. The Customer Service admin center app consolidates all administrator experiences that are relevant to customer support into a single app. It provides an intuitive and guided, wizard-like experience to enable rapid first-time and incremental setup.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel for Customer Service enables organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers via channels like live chat, SMS, voice, and social channels. By providing a seamless agent experience and valuable conversation insights across channels, omnichannel capabilities enable organizations to deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.
Omnichannel for Customer Service provides a modern, customizable, high-productivity app that offers contextual customer identification, real-time notification, integrated communication, and agent productivity tools like knowledge search, macros, and case creation to ensure agents are effective.
Supervisors get real-time and historical visibility and insights into the operational efficiency of agents and their use across various channels.
The enterprise-grade routing and work distribution engine allows customers to configure agent presence, availability, and routing rules, thus ensuring that agents are working on the most relevant engagements.
In 2022 release wave 2, we've kept our focus on customer satisfaction with features that allow your customers to record voicemails for agents and receive callbacks to avoid long wait times. Customers can now directly call agents with whom they have previously interacted. A seamless single sign-on experience between the live chat and Power Virtual Agents bot offers a secure interaction medium for your customers.
Supervisor experiences
Supervisor experience is targeted at customer service managers and analysts. The enhancements in 2022 release wave 2 empower them to get historical and near real-time insights on the performance of the contact center and options to improve contact center operational efficiency.
- Monitor support operations in near real time.
- Integrate bot analytics across Power Virtual Agents and Omnichannel for Customer Service.
- Use bookmarks for personalized views of historical analytics reports.
Knowledge management
Knowledge management plays a vital role in enabling organizations to deliver world-class customer care. Allowing the agents to create rich, high-quality knowledge resources and showing the right knowledge content across engagement modalities (including self-service, assisted service, and onsite service) expedites issue resolution and drives customer and agent satisfaction and productivity.
The ability to create, import, and share knowledge bases is a core capability of successful support delivery. With knowledge management, agents and supervisors can author knowledge articles from templates, add knowledge search providers from multiple sources (SharePoint, Microsoft search, and other Dynamics 365 organizations), and receive AI-triggered knowledge suggestions to speed up support delivery.
In 2022 release wave 2, we are enabling the knowledge article search filters and AI-suggested keywords and description for knowledge articles.
Service-level agreements
Service-level agreements (SLAs) enable businesses to track support policies and ensure that customers are supported as per their entitled support policy. Businesses use SLAs to govern support products that customers receive either as part of their purchase or as add-ons to their purchase. SLAs include policy details, such as how quickly a customer is entitled to receive support, how many support requests a customer can make, and how long after a purchase a customer can be supported as part of the agreement.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Customer Service below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Customer Service
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Customer Service. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Customer Service. |
| User community | Engage with Customer Service experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Customer Service. |