Nuance plus third-party contact center service provider and Dynamics 365 Customer Service

  • Article

In this architecture, a third-party Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) provider supplies the core contact center functionality. They integrate with Nuance for the voice channel and provide their own support for digital messaging channels. This architecture is intended for contact centers with sophisticated needs in the voice channel that are best served by Nuance Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Nuance Gatekeeper can be added for biometric authentication.

Self-service activities in the voice channel are enabled by Nuance IVR. Self-service activities in the messaging channels are enabled by the third-party CCaaS provider.

There is a unified experience in Dynamics 365 Customer Service for agents that integrates the third-party CCaaS provider's functionality using the Channel Integration Framework. Supervisors use Dynamics 365 Customer Service and any supervisor functions provided by the third-party CCaaS provider. Engaging other employees using Microsoft Teams can be accomplished using Microsoft's Context IQ approach and via features provided by the third-party CCaaS provider.

Potential use cases include the following examples:

  • Retailers providing online sales and support

  • Healthcare providers offering support for patient questions

  • Financial Services companies providing help and advice for banking, investments, mortgages, and so on

  • Internally facing help desks for employees

  • Customers with especially sophisticated IVR needs

  • Customers with concerns about fraud prevention

Architecture

The following diagram illustrates the architecture. Choose the magnifier icon for a more detailed view.

Architecture with an external CCaaS provider and Nuance and Dynamics 365.

Dataflow

  1. Customers engage via the digital messaging channel of their choice. Support for Microsoft Teams as a channel for internally facing contact centers, such as employee help desks, depends on the third-party CCaaS provider's capabilities.

  2. Customers engaging via the voice channel will interact with a Nuance IVR, potentially with added biometric authentication through Nuance Gatekeeper.

  3. Integration between Nuance and the third-party CCaaS provider will vary based on the individual provider's implementation/configuration.

  4. The Channel Integration Framework, provided by Microsoft, enables third-party CCaaS providers to integrate into Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

  5. Agents use the customer service workspace within Dynamics 365 Customer Service and tools provided by the third-party CCaaS provider.

  6. Both the agent experience and the supervisor experience are built upon and integrated with the Power Platform. Dataverse stores all core data and events to for the customer data platform. However, other data is likely to reside in other data stores used by the third-party CCaaS provider.

  7. Supervisors interact with the built-in capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service, including insights, forecasting, and scheduling. Other supervisor and admin tools provided by the third-party CCaaS provider will also be used.

  8. Using Context IQ, Teams collaboration is enabled between Dynamics users and Teams users, including the ability to collaborate one-on-one or via swarms. Other features provided by the third-party CCaaS provider may also be used to integrate with Microsoft Teams.

Components

Assumptions

In all Digital Contact Center Platform architectures, wherever possible, we assume that all or most solution components use the core capabilities of Microsoft Azure, including, but not limited to, compute, storage, identity, security, management, and compliance.