Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Contact Center in 2024 release wave 1

Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to the Dynamics 365 Contact Center documentation. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.

Important

The 2024 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2024 to September 2024. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Contact Center.

Overview

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is a Copilot-first, cloud-based contact center that brings unparalleled intelligence and improved customer experience to every engagement channel in a CRM solution of your choice. It enables organizations to engage customers in their channel of choice, deliver effortless self-service to improve containment powered by generative AI, accelerate agent-assisted service with embedded Copilot capabilities, and enable smoother operations for supervisors through a 360-degree view of each customer.

For 2024 release wave 1, we are focused on:

• Making the offering generally available.
• Enabling Copilot-based IVRs that leverage generative AI.
• Providing agent experiences that are stand-alone or can be embedded within a CRM solution of your choice.
• Providing extensibility for out-of-the-box integrations with Salesforce.

Investment areas

Agent experiences
The agent experience is at the heart of Dynamics 365 Contact Center and enhancing agent confidence is the key to improving customer satisfaction. Dynamics 365 Contact Center provides a powerful agent desktop, with infused generative AI, seamless collaboration capabilities, and productivity tools in a customizable workspace. Its features boost agent effectiveness, enabling them to deliver personalized customer experiences across any channel.

Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot transforms the service experience with generative AI. Agents are more productive and deliver a better service experience with Copilot helping them find resources to resolve issues faster, handle cases more efficiently, and automate time-consuming tasks. Copilot harvests knowledge from internal and external sources to draft contextual answers to questions in email and chat conversations. Agents can ask Copilot questions as they research for a case, and can use Copilot to generate case and conversation summaries in a single click.

Extensibility
For a greater reach, use extensibility to integrate the features in Dynamics 365 Contact Center with non-Microsoft CRM solutions using client-side and server-side integrations. Interoperability helps businesses adopt new offerings without disrupting their existing setups.

Omnichannel customer experiences
The omnichannel capabilities in Dynamics 365 Contact Center enable organizations to instantly connect and engage with their customers via channels like live chat, SMS, voice, Microsoft Teams, and social channels. By providing a seamless agent experience and valuable conversation insights across channels, the omnichannel features enable organizations to deliver a true, all-in-one contact center.

Supervisor experiences
The supervisor experience is targeted at customer service managers and analysts. Availability of key operational metrics allows supervisors to continuously monitor contact center operations and make course corrections. For example, supervisors can intervene when customer sentiment becomes negative and improve agent staffing to optimize productivity, thereby keeping service levels high.

Supervisors can also use the extensibility feature and customize data models to add metrics and report on custom entities to improve contact center efficiency.

Unified routing
The intelligent routing service in Dynamics 365 Contact Center uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels, namely 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 Contact Center 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 Dynamics 365 Contact Center

Helpful links	Description
Release plan	View all capabilities included in the release.
Licensing	Improve your understanding of how to license Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
Product documentation	Find documentation for Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
User community	Engage with Dynamics 365 Contact Center experts and peers in the community.
Upcoming events	Find and register for in-person and online events.
Product trials	Get started with Dynamics 365 Contact Center.