Deploy a self-service portal for Customer Service
When your business is growing, rather than employing extra staff in call centers, you could use Power Pages to add self-service capabilities to your website. These capabilities will allow your customers to search knowledge articles, engage with other customers, find answers, and create support cases when needed (that go directly into Dynamics 365 Customer Service). Moreover, you can complete all these tasks without a single interaction from your resources.
Portal templates
Portal templates are preconfigured portal solutions that are available to help accelerate deployment. Power Pages are customizable, but a portal template will provide a preconfigured environment that is immediately suitable for specific scenarios.
Each portal template includes a particular set of features that are designed to accelerate solution development that targets the selected audience.
A customer self-service portal enables customers to access self-service knowledge, support resources, view the progress of their cases, and provide feedback.
Provision a customer self-service portal
The high-level steps to provision a self-service portal are:
Go to the Power Apps maker portal.
Select your Dynamics 365 Customer Service environment by using the environment selector in the upper-right corner.
On the left pane, select + Create.
Scroll down to the Start from template section.
In the search box on the right side of the screen, enter Portal.
Select the Customer self-service template.
Provide a name and unique address (URL) for the portal.
Select the language.
Select Create to start the portal provisioning process.
The provisioning process takes around 45 minutes. After portal provisioning has completed, the portal will appear in the list as an app of type Portal.
Important
You can provision only one Power Apps portal for each Dataverse environment.
Customer self-service portal
The Customer self-service portal provides the following methods for customers to resolve their own issues:
Knowledge articles
Forums
Support cases
Knowledge articles
An effective way to maximize the use of helpful content is the ability to search for and display knowledge articles on a Power Apps portal. This feature uses the Dynamics 365 Customer Service knowledge articles (used for internal customer service management) and provides a mechanism to display articles on a Power Apps portal.
An organization can determine which of its existing knowledge articles should be shown on the portal by setting the Internal flag and by associating the knowledge article to the appropriate categories.
A portal visitor will be able to navigate through the category structure to locate a specific knowledge article or by using the keyword search features of the portal.
When entering a support case, the portal user might be redirected to browse potentially related knowledge articles to provide a more immediate response to a question and also reduce the case load of the support organization.
An organization that provides online customer support will benefit from publishing knowledge articles on the portal in the following ways:
Reduction in the number of logged cases because customers might find the answers and information that they need in existing knowledge articles.
Improved customer service and satisfaction because customers are able to find information before needing to open a support ticket.
Forums
Forums allow members of a particular community with common interests to post questions, start discussions, or ask for help. An organization will choose forums as a way for their community to interact with each other by asking questions, starting discussions, or by looking for help.
Having an active and engaging forum will strengthen a particular community and potentially alleviate customer and community support resources.
Organizations can have their support staff monitor and actively participate in forums. Support staff, along with other community members, would answer questions and provide information that will help resolve the customer's issues and provide a public archive of the solution for others who might encounter the same issue in the future.
Support cases
The Dynamics 365 Customer Service Case functionality is displayed in Microsoft Power Pages with the Customer self-service portal template.
An organization can allow customers to sign in to the portal and begin the support process by first determining whether the particular question or issue can be resolved with existing information in forum posts or knowledge articles.
If the provided information is not sufficient to resolve the issue, the customer can create a new support case through the portal. This action will create a corresponding case record in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The case can be assigned to a particular support representative or team that is following the same business processes that are defined for using the Customer Service Hub.
The support representative can follow existing processes and procedures to resolve the case, such as referring to a knowledge article or providing steps to resolve the issue by using traditional support channels (phone or email). The support representative can also associate a portal comment activity record to the case, which is visible on the case timeline in Dynamics 365 and the portal. Additional configuration by using Dataverse workflow and email integration will allow the customer to be notified of updates to the case with a hyperlink to the portal.
A key benefit of support cases is that customers who want to submit a ticket are presented with options to review existing knowledge articles and forum posts because these items might help resolve the customer's question in a faster manner.