Introduction
The Dynamics 365 core Customer Service solution allows organizations to manage and resolve issues that customers are encountering. In a traditional scenario, you would perform case management by using the core components of Customer Service.
A case typically represents a situation or incident that is reported by a customer and requires resolution. From a customer service standpoint, these situations or incidents could represent any number of potential items.
Common examples of customer situations or incidents include:
Questions - A specific question that a customer has about a product or service. For example, a customer might contact a support representative to ask for specific information about their insurance policy such as deductible or benefit amounts.
Requests - A specific request that a customer has such as a request for more information or some type of action. For example, a customer might contact an organization to request that someone perform an in-person property inspection.
Issue - A problem that a customer is having that needs to be resolved such as a warranty claim, billing dispute, or a flaw in a product. For example, a customer might contact a support center because of a billing error on their mobile data plan.
Dynamics 365 for Customer Service contains several components that work together to provide an end-to-end case management solution. These components help identify cases and help with routing the case to the most appropriate representative to provide guidance and resolve the issue.
Some of the most commonly used components include:
Cases - Represent a single incident of service or anything in the context of a customer interaction that requires some type of resolution or answer. A customer might have multiple cases associated with them at any time.
Activities - Typically represent interactions with a customer. A single case might have phone calls, or one case might have multiple activities associated with it. For example, a representative might place multiple phones calls to a customer while working to resolve their issue.
Entitlements - Are used to specify the number of support services that a customer is entitled to. Think of entitlements as support contracts.
Knowledge articles - The knowledge base is a repository of informational articles that are used to help customer service representatives resolve cases.
Queues - A place to organize and store activities and cases that are waiting to be processed.
To enhance an overall customer service solution, organizations can use Omnichannel for Customer Service to extend the support that they offer to their customers to include other channels such as SMS, live chat, or social media. Through unified queues and unified routing (table routing), organizations can adopt Omnichannel for Customer Service at a minimal cost to them.
Unified queues
Omnichannel for Customer Service uses the existing queues that are available in the Customer Service Hub for routing and distributing conversations (work items). Existing queues can be enabled for Omnichannel for Customer Service to provide automatic work distribution, which reduces the effort that is required to configure new queues. For example, if existing queues have been created for routing cases based on a customer's service level tier such as Gold, Silver, or Bronze, representatives don't need to recreate or define new queues. Those existing queues can be used with minimal extra configuration required.
Unified routing for cases
With Omnichannel for Customer Service, cases can be routed to the best available representatives based on multiple factors, including the representative's available capacity and their presence. Automatic distribution of cases seamlessly integrates with Dynamics 365 Customer Service case routing. In scenarios where an organization has a mix of Omnichannel for Customer Service representatives and Customer Service Hub representatives, it can have a unified and single view of routing rules for all the cases.
For example, routing rules that are based on a case's priority can automatically distribute high priority cases to the Omnichannel representatives, while low-priority cases can remain in the queues for Customer Service Hub representatives to pick manually.
Omnichannel administrators need to define what this process looks like and how it's handled by performing the following steps:
Identify which cases should be distributed automatically to Omnichannel representatives.
Define the routing rules to send cases to queues that are enabled for automatic distribution.
Add Omnichannel representatives to those automatic distribution enabled queues.
When employees in an organization are already using case routing in the Customer Service Hub, they automatically distribute cases based on their existing routing rules by turning on Enable automatic distribution.
Conversation routing
Along with cases, unified queue extends to other conversations (work items) that originate from channels like Chat, SMS, Social, or Teams. After a case is routed, the work distribution system will automatically distribute and assign conversations to the best available representatives based on their capacity and presence. This approach results in a unified work profile that representatives handle across channels. With the routing feature, you can automate the workflow assignment across channels and assign the conversations.