Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Customer Service in 2023 release wave 1

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, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.

Important

The 2023 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2023 to September 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 a part of the Digital Contact Center Platform that provides 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 maximize agent productivity, while simplified administration and integrated analytics optimize contact center operations. Organizations can provide an omnichannel experience with chat, voice, social, and business messaging channels.

In 2023 release wave 1, our focus is on delivering the following capabilities:

• Enhanced case creation
• Channel-based swarming with Microsoft Teams
• Availability of the voice channel in more regions
• Robust real-time analytics
• Customizable data models for analytics reports

Updates to Dynamics 365 Customer Service 2023 release wave 1

Investment areas

Agent experiences
Agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Enhanced 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 the productivity tools required to deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across any channel.

In 2023 release wave 1, the following features are aimed at further empowering agents to deliver quality services:

• Create and manage cases efficiently with enhanced case form.
• Try case management enhancements.
• Try enhancements to the email template selection experience.
• Enhancements to the email template creation experience.
• Enhanced Customer Service workspace layout.
• Enhanced conversation auto-summarization experience.
• Accelerate time to resolution with AI-suggested replies.
• Mark knowledge articles as favorite.
• Forecast case volumes daily and at 15-minute intervals.
• Forecast agent demand to handle customer conversations daily and at 15-minute intervals.

Omnichannel
Omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Service enable 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.

In 2023 release wave 1, the following features will help deliver a more secure, robust, and efficient service experience.

• Integrate Nuance Gatekeeper to reduce fraud and improve trust.
• Integrate Nuance interactive voice response (IVR) system to provide continuous self-service to your customers.
• Enable your customers to request a callback from agents and help them avoid waiting in queues to speak to agents.
• Enable Customer Service workspace to be available by default for security roles in Omnichannel for Customer Service.

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 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.

In 2023 release wave 1, the following features will help improve operational efficiency of the contact centers:

• Allow customization of data models for historical analytics reports.
• Integrate and use external knowledge sources in knowledge management search.

Supervisor experiences
The supervisor experience is targeted at customer service managers and analysts. The key operational metrics allow supervisors to continuously monitor and do course corrections like intervene if customer sentiment becomes negative, improve agent staffing to optimize productivity, and help keep service levels high.

The enhancements in 2023 release wave 1 will empower supervisors to get historical and near real-time insights on the performance of the contact center. If you find that your supervisors need additional metrics to improve your contact center efficiency, you can now customize the data models to add new metrics and report on custom entities.

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, and provides an interactive chat experience over knowledge bases and case history. Once enabled, this AI-powered expertise is always available to answer questions.

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.

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.

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:

Check out the release plan

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.