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Identify customers automatically

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Applies to: Dynamics 365 Contact Center—embedded, Dynamics 365 Contact Center—standalone, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Note

Case is applicable to Customer Service only.

You can assist customers better if you can automatically identify them and view their account and case details on the Active Conversation page. One of the ways is by setting up preconversation questions in the relevant chat widgets. The application uses the customer responses to search for details in the records and display the results. For an account or contact, the application performs a search on the Name, Email, or Phone Number fields. For an account, the Phone Number pertains to the Phone field of the Account Summary page; for a contact, the Phone Number pertains to the Mobile Number field of the Contact Summary page. For cases, the application performs a search on the Case Number field.

Note

The record search identifies records that have the active status code for contacts or accounts; if you use custom status codes, then record identification won't work.

For every incoming conversation request that an agent receives, a notification appears that includes contextual information for the request and customer details, if available. After the agent accepts the incoming notification, the Active Conversation page opens and shows the details of the identified customer and case. If the identified contact or account has one active case linked to it, then the case is automatically linked to the conversation. If the customer contacts the agent for a different case, the agent can manually change the linked case.

You can identify incoming voice calls if the phone number of the incoming call matches the number for a contact in the mobile phone or account phone field. If you want to use other phone number fields like home phone for customer identification, then contact Microsoft Support.

If the search results in more than one account, contact, or case, the record isn't linked to the conversation.

Important

Power Virtual Agents capabilities and features are now part of Microsoft Copilot Studio following significant investments in generative AI and enhanced integrations across Microsoft Copilot.

Some articles and screenshots might refer to Power Virtual Agents while we update documentation and training content.

Set up preconversation questions

Use the following question names to create preconversation questions. To know how to create preconversation questions and use them in a preconversation survey, see Configure a preconversation survey.

Entity Mapping Answer type
Account Question context key: Name
Attribute logical name: name

Question context key: Email
Attribute logical name: emailaddress1

Question context key: Phone
Attribute logical name: telephone1 (Business Phone field on the Account Summary page)		 Single line
Contact Question context key: Name
Attribute logical name: fullname

Question context key: Email
Attribute logical name: emailaddress1

Question context key: Phone
Attribute logical name: mobilephone (Mobile Phone field on the Contact Summary page)		 Single line
Incident Question context key: CaseNumber
Attribute logical name: ticketnumber		 Single line

Note

If you'd like other fields to be recognized for phone number lookup, perform the steps in Enable fields for identifying customers.

Use the setContextProvider API method

You can automatically identify records using custom context set using the setContextProvider API apart from preconversation answers. To programmatically set these values, see Manage custom context.

When a bot ends a customer conversation, the bot can link the case number to the conversation. The bot can create a new case number or obtain an existing one from the customer based on the customer name, email address, or telephone number.

If the bot needs to escalate the conversation to a human agent, then bot can link the customer and case number to the conversation so that when the human agent accepts the escalation request, all relevant information is available to the agent in the Active Conversation section. The escalation summary gives the human agent the background information about the escalation and enables quicker resolution of the customer issue.

To link the customer or case, set the values for the associated attributes, such as customer name and phone number. These attributes are searched for in the corresponding entities such as customer and case, and the result is linked to the conversation if a single matching record is found. The bot needs to set context parameters for the following that are also set when the customer is automatically identified when the conversation is transferred.

Entity to be linked Variable name to be set by bot Attribute for Dynamics 365 entity to match with corresponding variable name in bot
Account
  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone
  • name
  • emailaddress1
  • telephone1
Contact
  • Name
  • Email
  • Phone
  • name
  • emailaddress1
  • Business Phone
Case CaseNumber ticketnumber

For information about creating context variables for Azure and Copilot Studio bots, see Configure context variables for the bot.

Create and manage workstreams
Configure a Copilot Studio bot
Configure Azure bot
Context variables for bots
FetchXML reference