Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Contact Center in 2025 release wave 1

Important

The 2025 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2025 to September 2025. 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 system 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 assisted service with embedded Copilot capabilities, and enable smoother operations for supervisors through a 360-degree view of each customer.

For 2025 release wave 1, we are focused on progressing our agentic, omnichannel, self-service, and extensibility capabilities.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Contact Center 2025 release wave 1

Investment areas

Copilot and AI innovation
Copilot transforms the service experience with generative AI. Service representatives 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. Service representatives can ask Copilot questions as they research 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.

IVR capabilities
Conversational IVRs (interactive voice responses) enable enterprises to increase containment, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce cost by letting customers self-serve using their voice. Dynamics 365 Contact Center IVRs are powered by Microsoft Copilot Studio.

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

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

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.

Teams integration
Use Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Microsoft Teams together to provide your service representatives and customers with a cohesive environment where they can seamlessly collaborate with each other.

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 service representatives. 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 service representatives help optimize the routing of work items to the best-suited service representatives.

Workforce engagement management
Workforce engagement management (WEM) is a comprehensive approach to managing and optimizing employee performance, engagement, and productivity in customer service and contact center environments. WEM typically includes tools and practices focused on:

• Scheduling and forecasting: Ensuring that the right number of service representatives is available at the right times to meet service demand, while avoiding overstaffing or understaffing.
• Performance management: Setting performance metrics, tracking service representative productivity, and providing feedback to improve service quality.
• Quality management: Monitoring and assessing interactions to maintain high service standards and compliance.
• Employee engagement: Encouraging service representative engagement through feedback, recognition, and tools that help service representatives understand their impact on business goals.
• Training and development: Providing targeted training resources to improve skills, address performance gaps, and support career development.

WEM is designed to enhance customer experiences, optimize workforce efficiency, and increase service representative satisfaction, ultimately improving overall service effectiveness.

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.