Microsoft recently announced the first phase of their release plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform for 2023. A group of improved capabilities will be made available between April 2023 and September 2023. Hundreds of changes and improvements are included in this year’s first wave release, highlighting Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to assisting with digital transformation. In order to better help you understand what’s coming in this Wave, we’ve looked into new features and selected the ones we think your organisation would benefit from the most. In a series of blogs, these capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, and The Power Platform will be comprehensively explored. The latest features in Sales were addressed in our most recent blog post which you can view here; next up is Customer Service.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a powerful customer service automation solution that streamlines case and knowledge management, enables personalised service with a 360-degree customer view, and provides visibility into service users’ performance with dashboards and reports. The Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2023 Wave 1 release comes with a number of interesting new features and upgrades that are all meant to improve the user experience, increase productivity, and help organisations achieve their goals. The following are some of those essential qualities that we have chosen as the most interesting updates:
- Partial Survey Responses
It’s rather common for survey takers to respond to a few questions before closing their web browsers without submitting the survey. This causes a significant loss of insightful user feedback. Partial responses can now be recorded thanks to this functionality.
Survey owners will be able to collect replies and insights even from surveys that are only partially completed thanks to this functionality. It offers the capacity to:
- Define survey settings to turn on the partial survey capability.
- Specify the number of days after which the partial responses should be recorded. By default, the value is set at 28, but can be modified to be set between 1 and 28 days.
- Enhanced Case form
Your organisation has the option to add numerous attachments or make brief notes when creating a case thanks to this functionality. But this feature offers more than that. Users may review and amend customer details without switching tabs while generating or updating a case thanks to the contextual customer data with previous cases and previous customer interactions that appears as a right-side panel. This prevents case duplication.
In a nutshell this feature enables its users to perform their daily case management operations with less effort and increases productivity. Feature highlights also include:
- Find info quickly and manage cases by leveraging streamlined case form.
- Add key information to the case quickly without losing sight of customer details, past cases, and previous interactions. This avoids case duplication.
- Provide updates on existing customer cases without interrupting the case creation flow or switching tabs.
- Take notes during case creation.
- Upload multiple attachments directly to the case.
- Access all the attachments related to a case in a consolidated view.
- New email template designer
One of the key components of Customer Service is the advanced digital content designer, which will be accessible for designing and styling templates. It has sophisticated layouts that can adjust to any screen size and are responsive. When building email templates, users may quickly include components like images, text, buttons, or dividers.
- Knowledge articles as favourites
Users can quickly resolve customer issues by referring to knowledge articles. Now that articles can be added to or removed from a Favourites list, you can find content faster. Favourite articles can be viewed in all of the independent knowledge search control, the knowledge search control that is based on an app side panel, and the knowledge search control that is integrated in a form.
- Teams Chat Improvements
With the suite of Teams collaboration features, not only can you start a chat with customers who are connected to a Dynamics 365 record, but now you can also keep them informed when things on the record change. For example, if there’s a chat connected to a case, when the priority of the case is changed, all of the chat participants will be notified. This will reduce the overhead on users whilst saving time without any manual effort.
The Wave 1 2023 Release of Dynamics 365 Customer Service has included a plethora of amazing new capabilities. Keep an eye out for the next two blogs in this series which will analyse Microsoft Dynamics 365’s Wave 1 aims for the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Marketing.