How to Prepare for D365 Customer Service latest Release Updates

Plan and Prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service with the latest Release Updates

In this blog, we share the latest updates from Microsoft to help you to plan and prepare for D365 Customer Service – with planned release dates from October 2023 through March 2024 and beyond – enabling you to transform your customer service experience.

D365 Customer Service Overview:

Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a part of the Digital Contact Centre Platform that helps provide best-in-class customer service through live customer engagements, agent collaboration, advanced telephony, and AI-based analytics.

Advanced routing, case management, knowledge management, assistive AI, and embedded Microsoft Teams capabilities maximise agent productivity, while simplified administration and integrated analytics optimise contact centre operations. Organisations can provide an omnichannel experience with chat, voice, social, and business messaging channels.

How to Prepare for D365 Customer Service latest Release Updates – In 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft focus on delivering the following capabilities:

• Copilot and AI innovation to enhance agent productivity
• Channel-based swarming with Microsoft Teams
• Nuance integration
• Voice channel enhancements

Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2023 release wave 2

Investment areas

Agent experiences – The agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Enhanced agent confidence is the key to improve customer satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Customer Service provides intuitive collaboration capabilities in a customisable workspace and elevates your agent’s effectiveness with productivity tools, enabling them to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across any channel.

In 2023 release wave 2, the following features are being introduced:

• Option to switch to dark mode in the Customer Service workspace app.
• Intuitive icons for call controls in the conversation panel.
• Display live chats and voice calls in the agent’s inbox.
• Ability to resize the communication panel and set the conversation control size for a channel in the Customer Service workspace app.
• Compose emails using an improved Outlook-like email experience.

Omnichannel – The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service enable organisations 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 centre.

In 2023 release wave 2, the following features are being introduced to help organisations deliver powerful and engaging customer service:

• Support OAuth 2.0 for enhanced authentication in live chat.
• Virtual desktop infrastructure support on Azure Virtual Desktop for the voice channel.
• Use VOIP for voice consult and transfer to Teams users.
• Support emergency calling in Canada and detect agent location.
• Support caller ID for outbound calls.
• Monitor operational telemetry through App Insights.
• General availability of integration of Nuance Gatekeeper with the voice channel.
• Improved and intuitive voice call dialler.

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.

Copilot and AI innovation – Copilot provides agents with AI-powered assistance to help them find resources that’ll help resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks so that agents can focus on delivering high-quality service to their customers. Copilot drafts contextual answers to queries in chat and email, in addition to providing an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history. Once enabled, this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions.

Administrator experiences – The 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 centre 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.

Unified routing – The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels, namely case, record, chat, digital messaging, and voice, to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and skills.

The routing service uses AI to automatically classify, route, and assign work items, and eliminates the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations. The various features like percent-based routing, overflow management, and routing to preferred agents help optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited agents. In 2023 release wave 2, the feature to route calls to agents who are idle for the longest period will be generally available.

How to Prepare for D365 Customer Service latest Release Updates – What’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Customer Service

In the General availability column, the feature will be delivered within the month listed. The delivery date can be any day within that month. Released features show the full date, including the date of release.

This check mark ( ) shows which features have been released for public preview or early access and for public preview, early access, and general availability.

Administrator experiences

An intuitive, modern administration experience is key to quickly setting up Dynamics 365 Customer Service and using its features.

Agent experiences

Enable agents to handle multiple interactions, switch among sessions without losing context, and use productivity tools to enhance workflows.

Copilot and AI innovation

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service consists of a range of next-generation AI capabilities that can expedite resolution of customer issues and increase satisfaction scores.

Omni-channel

Omnichannel engagement enables instant engagement and connectivity between agents and customers and gives supervisors real-time visibility into operational efficiency.

Teams integration

Provide your agents with seamless integrations between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams.

Unified routing

Intelligent work item classification and omnichannel routing capabilities enable the flexibility and automation of AI-enabled workflows.

* You are able to opt into some features as part of early access on July 31, 2023, including all mandatory changes that affect users. To learn more, go to Early access FAQ.

Description of Enabled for column values:

• Users, automatically: These features include changes to the user experience and are enabled automatically.
• Admins, makers, marketers, or analysts, automatically: These features are meant to be used by administrators, makers, marketers, or business analysts and are enabled automatically.
• Users by admins, makers, or analysts: These features must be enabled or configured by the administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users.

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